The Upgrade

by Paul Carr

  401

  I called Michael. It went straight to voicemail; either his meeting had run very late, or he had decided to crash early too. Lightweights, both of them.

  Ah well, I’d just find a bar, text him the address and see if he turned up. I walked the length of the street—something unheard of in LA—but could only find one place that looked like a bar; literally a hole in the wall with an old Mexican man selling beer to patrons sitting on plastic stools.

  I decided instead to rely on the old taxi driver recommendation trick. I hailed the next cab that passed and hopped in the back. The clock on the dashboard said 11 p.m.

  “Hi, I’m looking for somewhere to get a drink—something not too touristy. Where do people go around here?”

  The cab driver looked at me through the rear-view mirror. “What you like? You like girls?”

  “Not if I have to pay for them. I just want a bar that stays open late.”

  “Everywhere shuts at two a.m.—California licensing laws. But I know a good place.”

  We drove for ten minutes, although I couldn’t say in what direction. I was too busy looking at TripAdvisor on my phone, hoping to find a better hotel for the next night. At one point we turned onto the freeway, which worried me slightly—either that I was being kidnapped or that his “good place” was in a different state—but before long we were back on a residential street, pulling up outside what seemed to be a closed bar. Just a black door and a window containing a broken neon light spelling out the word Coors.

  “Here?”

  “Here!” I paid the driver—$20 including the tip—and pushed open the black door.

  The bar was empty—just me, a super-cute blonde girl cleaning glasses and one other guy, wearing a faded blue t-shirt and a beanie hat, sitting at the far end of the bar. I sat at the other end—near the door—and ordered a rum and Diet Coke. I’d just have one drink then I’d text Michael.

  The cute bartender came back with my drink. “Six dollars.” I gave her a ten and slid my change back across the bar as a tip. She picked it up and dropped it in a tip jar, at which point the guy at the other end of the bar drummed his hands, hard, against the bar. A sort of mini-drum roll—like he was celebrating my having left a four-dollar tip. Weird.

  I finished my first drink inadvisably fast. I was thirsty, and tired. I ordered another, and then another. Every time I ordered, and left the obligatory tip, the guy in the beanie did his little celebratory drum roll. It wasn’t so much annoying as incongruous. Why the drumming? Why only when I tipped? And why wasn’t the girl behind the bar telling him to stop being so fucking annoying? Judging by the attention he was paying her, the guy in the beanie hat would do anything the cute blonde girl told him to do.

  I ordered another one-drink round—I still hadn’t texted Michael—and headed down the bar.

  “Hey, man,” said the drummer as I sat down beside him.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’m Paul.”

  “Matt.” He raised his glass.

  “Hi, Matt. Sorry to bother you but I have a theory I wanted to run past you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, I was sitting down there listening to you drumming on the bar every time I leave tip and I thought—Hmmm; that guy is being really fucking annoying. And …”

  Matt leaned in closer.

  “And?” He had looked smaller from the other end of the bar. And less likely to punch me in the face. But I was six drinks in, so I pressed on.

  “… And … well…I thought to myself, the only way anyone could get away with being that annoying without being asked to stop is if either a) he owns the bar, or b) he’s sleeping with the bartender.”

  Matt didn’t say a word. He just stared at me, and then looked over at the blonde girl who had stopped cleaning the glasses. She looked horrified. Had I really said that? Matt leaned in even closer, and then put his arm around my shoulder. With his free hand he picked up my empty glass. Uh-oh.

  “Where you from, Paul?”

  “London,” I said. I figured he didn’t want to hear my whole hotel living story. Not right before he glassed me in the face.

  “Well, Paul from London … as it happens you’re right on both counts. This is my bar and that,”—he pointed my glass towards the blonde girl who had turned a bright shade of red—“is my bartender. Didn’t mean to annoy you, man; just messing around; let me get you another drink.”

  We drank another round—rum for me, whiskey for him—and then moved onto shots of tequila, as only seemed proper. I told Matt that I was a writer and that I was planning to live life on the road, moving from hotel to hotel, blagging my way into parties and generally living like a king for the same as I was spending languishing in London. Then I explained to Matt what “blagging” means.

  “Blagging. I like that. Well, Paul, I might be able to help you out there.”

  He walked behind the bar like—well, like he owned the place—and grabbed a handful of bills from the register and a bunch of car keys lying next to it. Then he kissed his girlfriend goodbye—for just long enough to make me feel uncomfortable—and headed to the door.

  “Follow me.”

  Follow him? Some guy I’d just met in a bar in LA who had picked up his car keys despite drinking more than me? Sure. OK. There were only two cars in the parking lot: a busted-up gold Toyota and a gray Aston Martin DB7. The alarm on the DB7 blipped, the lights flashed and the doors unlocked. No way. The DB7 is one of my top three dream cars after the DB5 and the Vanquish. All Aston Martins, obviously. Never trust a man whose top three cars aren’t all Aston Martins.

  I explained my Aston Martin theory to Matt. I was drunk, and apparently starting to ramble.

  “You wanna drive it?”

  “Oh please.”

  “I’m serious. If you’re really a writer, I want to make sure I make it into your next book.”

  For a moment I really considered taking the keys. But two decades of British drink-driving ads had had their desired effect and I realized that driving on the wrong side of the road, in a foreign country, while borderline wasted would probably be a bad idea. There was also the matter of the sweepstake.

  “No, thanks, I’m happy in the passenger seat.”

  As Matt drove, down some boulevard or other, past restaurants and bars and clubs and palm trees and beautiful people going about their late-night business, I sobered up just enough to realize how well my new plan was going. I’d been in town less than a day and I’d already scored a liver full of drink, a ride in a DB7 and a new LA friend. Life was good, the fact that I was probably going to end the night drugged, raped and buried in a shallow ditch notwithstanding. We pulled up outside our destination: a much cooler bar this time—no Coors sign in the window—with huge oak doors guarded by two over-inflated male models in matching Gucci suits.

  Matt got out of the car and handed his keys to one of them, who greeted his boss like an old friend: a beaming smile and a powerful man-hug.

  “Hey, Paul” said Matt, “come meet my best employee, Tobias.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tobias,” I said. Matt put his arm around my shoulder again. “Paul is my new friend from England. He’s a writer and I’m trying to make sure I’m in his next book. Remember his face—for as long as he’s in town, Paul and his friends never pay for a drink, OK?”

  “Sure thing, boss” said the bouncer, opening the door for us.

  “So how many bars do you own?” I asked.

  “Too many for one night.”

  Inside was rammed. Wall-to-wall guys in tailored black suits with crisp white shirts and women dressed like they were heading to the Oscars. Wait—was it actually Oscar night? No, that was the previous week; I suppose these people didn’t need an excuse to dress like movie stars. Matt was working the room—hugging men and kissing women on the cheek—so I headed to the bar.

  “A rum and Diet Coke, please.”

  “Coming up.” I took out my wallet. The bartender looked toward the door, where
Tobias was standing. Tobias shook his head; the bartender nodded in reply.

  “That’s fine, sir. On the house.”

  Shit, I guess Matt wasn’t kidding about drinking for free. And not just me: “Paul and his friends never pay for a drink”—just wait till I told Michael and Michelle; they’ll shit themselves. This is the blagger’s holy grail.

  The rum was strong and the Diet Coke was weak, and before long I was seriously wasted. So much so that I’d been talking to the girl for about ten minutes before I focused on what we were actually saying. Where had she come from, anyway? I seemed to remember that she’d come over and sat down on the stool next to mine—or possibly I’d met her on my way back from the toilet and convinced her to join me at a table. I really couldn’t remember for certain, what with the room spinning the way it was.

  But however it had happened, I suddenly wasn’t at the bar any more but was sitting in a booth in the corner, still talking to her: this brown-haired supermodel in a bright green dress. There was a bottle of champagne in a bucket next to us and two glasses on the table. I wasn’t sure if I’d ordered it or not. I’m pretty certain I hadn’t paid for it. Across the bar, the bouncer was shouting for closing time.

  “Shit,” I said, “I guess it’s time to go.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said the girl. “Matt says we’re cool.”

  And so we were. After the last of the paying customers had been ushered into the night, the doors were closed and the lock-in began. There were maybe a dozen of us—Matt’s friends, old and new—and the drinks kept coming. More time passed, more drinks and suddenly I’m in a different room. It’s a disabled toilet, I think—there are handles on the wall and a long red pull-cord hanging from the roof. And the brunette in the green dress. Except now she’s only in the bottom half of the green dress and she’s pressing me against the tile wall, and we’re kissing. And …

  402

  I wake up with absolutely no idea where I am. At least this time I’m in bed rather than in a hotel room corridor. And I’m not naked; in fact, I’m still wearing all of my clothes. There’s someone else in the room; a television is on. I blink and the world starts to come into focus—the faded top sheet, the clatter of the ancient air conditioning. I’m back at the motel. How the hell did I get home?

  “Good morning, drunkard.”

  Michelle.

  “Jesus Christ. What the hell time did I get in last night?”

  “This morning, actually, about six. You insisted I wake up so you could tell me about some girl called Chloe.” “Chloe?” I thought for a moment. “Did I mention a green dress?”

  “Yes, you wouldn’t shut up about her bloody green dress—and some nonsense in a disabled toilet. Honestly, you can’t just go around fucking girls in disabled toilets.”

  “Actually, I can. I think. Did I tell you about the drinks?”

  “What about them?”

  I sat up in bed. It was all coming back. “That’s why I was out till six,” I explained excitedly. “I met the owner of a bar and we had this ridiculous lock-in. But before we did, he told the bouncer that me and you and Michael can drink for free while we’re in town.” I acted out the whole scene with bouncer and the hug and the “this is my friend Paul.”

  When I’d finished, Michelle just stared at me. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I am emphatically shitting you not.”

  “That’s amazing. Where is this bar?”

  Uh.

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “What do you mean you have no idea? We have free drinks in not one but two bars in LA and you can’t remember where they are? How drunk were you?”

  “I think I had sex with a girl in a disabled toilet. How drunk do you have to be for that to happen? I think pretty drunk.”

  But it was fine; this wasn’t my first time having to retrace my steps after a night out—and I had a foolproof plan. My jacket was still lying on the floor, where I’d apparently thrown it when I came in. I jumped out of bed and started rifling through the pockets, looking for a telltale slip of white paper. My usual trick when I can’t remember what I did the night before: check my receipts—a time-stamped paper trail of shame.

  But then I stopped. The realization kicked in at the exact same time as the hangover. I didn’t have any receipts. Of course I didn’t. In the first bar I’d used cash—and after that I hadn’t paid for a single drink all night; that was the whole point. Somewhere in Los Angeles there was an open bar and a girl with a green dress, both with my name on them. And I had no way of finding either of them again.

  “Ha! Brilliant,” I said. “Just perfectly brilliant.” I turned over and slept until dinnertime.

  403

  “So what happened to you last night?”

  When we met for dinner at the Geisha House on Hollywood Boulevard, Michael had some explaining to do. If he had answered his phone, he’d have been with me at the bar the previous night and could have helped me retrace my steps today.

  “Sorry, mate, I had a date.”

  “With who?”

  “Just a girl I met before I flew to meet you guys in Vegas. Veronica—she’s a video game designer. And, anyway, from what Michelle told me this morning, you didn’t need any help from me, you stud. Tell me, though, what was it like having sex with someone in a wheelchair?”

  “We’ve been through this, Michael. The girl wasn’t disabled. The toilet was disabled. She was …”

  “Able?” said Michael. “Sounds like it.”

  “Ho ho. So what’s the plan tomorrow? Drive down to San Diego in the morning? I need to call the car rental people and renew the car.”

  “Actually,” said Michael, “can you just return it? I’ve made other plans.”

  Michael’s “other plans,” as he explained, had come while he was preparing for his hot date the previous night. He’d switched on the TV in his hotel room and had caught part of Vanishing Point, the 1971 movie in which Barry Newman is hired to deliver a car from Colorado to San Francisco. It’s a great movie: filled with car chases and cops and a naked woman on a motorcycle. It’s also a movie in which the car—a 1970 Dodge Challenger—is indisputably the star.

  “You’re not seriously telling me you rented us a 1970 Challenger?”

  “Of course not,” said Michael. “I asked at the rental place but apparently Tarantino bought most of them to trash in Grindhouse. They’re pretty rare now.”

  I was disappointed, of course. Even after the DB7 the night before, a 1970 Challenger would be amazing. Especially if I’d actually been sober enough to drive this time.

  “Yeah, sorry to disappoint,” said Michael, removing his iPhone from his pocket and flipping to the photo album application. Pausing for dramatic effect, he slid the phone across the table just in time for the accelerometer to flip the picture from portrait to landscape.

  “This is the best I could do.”

  Holy shit.

  “You’re. Kidding. Me. Where did you find that?”

  “Beverly Hills Luxury Car Rental,” he said. “Called them this morning. They didn’t have a 1970 Challenger, just a 1971—would that do?”

  404

  Michelle and I drove to the airport the next morning to return the Mustang.

  As we headed to meet Michael at his hotel, I was literally bouncing on the back seat of the cab with excitement: not only were we renting the Challenger, but Michael had agreed to pay all of the costs, on the basis that I’d paid for the Mustang and he was the one obsessed with Vanishing Point. I’d happily agreed, especially given that Beverly Hills Luxury Car Rental was charging us a grand a day for two days, plus an additional full day’s rental for them to come to San Diego and collect it—plus a five grand deposit in case we trashed it.

  “I get why Michael feels obliged to pay,” I said to Michelle as we neared the hotel, “I just can’t understand why he’s letting me drive. Who pays all that money and then lets someone else drive?”

  It was only as we pull
ed up at the hotel and saw the beautiful hunk of purple steel, roof down and classic American rock pouring out of the retrofitted CD player that everything fell into place. There, sitting in the back seat next to a gigantic suitcase, was a pretty girl who couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one.

  “Aha!” I said, “you must be Veronica.”

  405

  The fact that Michael hadn’t told us he had invited Veronica along on the next leg of the road trip didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was behind the wheel of a nearly forty-year-old classic car, with an engine that purred like a grizzly bear receiving a hot stone massage. Veronica seemed like a nice girl—smart for her frighteningly young age, and really pretty—and as long as she and Michael were happy squashed in the back seat with all the luggage, then the more the merrier.

  I glanced back as we pulled onto I-5. They seemed happy enough. One thing that did bother me, though, was that Veronica kept talking about things we were going to do “when we get back to LA.” I’d ignored it the first couple of times, assuming Michael and she had made plans, but when she referred to “the drive being even quicker on the way back,” my suspicion was confirmed. Michael had convinced this poor girl to drive down the coast with us—hundreds of miles from her home—without telling her it was a one-way trip.

  How the hell was she going to get home? Christ, she probably still lived with her parents. I looked over at Michelle in the passenger seat. She looked back. We were obviously both thinking the same thing. Ah well, those logistics were Michael’s problem not ours.

  A guy passing in his truck sounded his horn. He was pointing at the car, giving it—and us—a thumbs-up, “Nice,” he mouthed through the window.

  “Thanks,” I mouthed in return.

  Michelle turned up Huey Lewis and the News and we carried on south.

  406

  We decided to break the journey with a stopover in Laguna Beach, for no other reason than we’d all watched the reality show of the same name and it looked dreadful. All beach bunny bimbos and fake breasts and guys wearing backwards baseball caps and shell necklaces. “Douche central,” Veronica had called it.