The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations Read Online Free Page B

owned by the end of the month, Stuart seemed satisfied that I wasn’t planning to rape and murder him. He picked up the guitar, handling it like a doctor might pick up a donated kidney—confidently but respectfully.

    Five minutes of tweaking and plucking and tuning later, he cranked up the volume on the amp, paused for some dramatic effect … and then … blaaaaaaaaaang … the first chord that my hat stand had ever played. I don’t know anything about music, but I know when I hear someone playing the shit out of a guitar. And Stuart played the shit out of the guitar.
    “Wow,” I said when he was finished. “I didn’t know it could do that. Maybe I’ll hold onto it after all.” Stuart looked horrified. It was a trap!
    “I’m kidding—I’m just glad someone is going to get some use out of it finally. Hey, you don’t by any chance want a free flat screen television do you?”
    “What—for nothing?”
    “Yeah. Help yourself, it’s by the door.”
    I’m not sure if Stuart learned anything that day about the value of money, but I certainly did. After waving him and his mom off with the last of my possessions, I went to the kitchen drawer where I’d been keeping the proceeds. I slid the drawer from its runners, tipped the contents—a small pile of notes and a few coins—onto the worktop and started counting. Ten seconds later, I finished counting. My entire life was worth £540. I laughed.
    I laughed partly because it was such a tragically small amount of money for almost everything that I’d spent nearly three decades acquiring. But I also laughed because £540 was precisely the cost—including tax and booking fees—of my plane ticket to New York. Fate had given my plan its stamp of approval. It was time to go.

Chapter 200
    Naked Brunch
    W ednesday, February 20, 2008 . Virgin Atlantic flight VS045 from Heathrow to JFK. I remember it vividly.
    I arrived at the airport with less than an hour to spare, dropped off the suitcase containing my entire life, and headed toward security.
    I’ve never understood the “arrive two hours before your flight” thing, especially if you’ve checked in online—but even so, given that my flight was due to take off at 2 p.m. and it was now half past one, I was cutting it a little fine.
    Luckily there was only the merest hint of a line at security and, after the usual dicking around with shoes and belts and laptops, I was walking—maybe jogging slightly—down the jetway onto the plane.
    “Paul!”
    I almost never turn around when I hear my name shouted in public. The odds just aren’t in favor of reacting; nine times out of ten, you end up waving, through reflex, to a total stranger.
    But then came a jab from behind; right in the spine. I reacted to that. It was my friend Zoe, out of breath, having clearly made it to the airport even later than I had.
    “Hey! What are you doing here?” I asked idiotically, given that we were on a jetway, a few feet from the door of a plane, and Zoe was also dragging a suitcase.
    “Well, obviously you’re flying to New York. But why?”
    “Oh, just some interviews, publisher meeting—they’ve arranged a reading, I think; usual bullshit. You?”
    “Long story. Sort of an extended working vacation.”
    “Really?” asked Zoe. “You got the I or the O?”
    For some reason, my friends love to talk about visas—partly, I
think, because they can never quite believe any country has been stupid enough to give them one. Zoe was traveling under the I Visa—granting “representatives of the foreign media” access to America for anything up to five years.
    For reasons that probably have nothing to do with freedom of the press, journalists are the only people not eligible to enter the US for professional reasons under the Visa Waiver Program. Many have tried, hoping they could just lie their way through immigration; most succeed but several have ended up in handcuffs, a holding cell and then back on the next plane home.
    If I was