The manuscript was due in December—nine months’ time—and, if I had any hope of making that deadline, I’d have to stop traveling for a while and actually focus on pulling together something resembling a narrative.
I also still had to write my weekly column, promote the previous book and continue blogging adventures often enough to keep everyone interested in me.
San Francisco seemed like the perfect place to achieve all of those things.
1301
There comes a point after making any irreversible life decision—usually a couple of weeks in—where one of two things hits you.
Either a feeling of euphoric disbelief that you didn’t make the decision sooner, or a gut-wrenching realization that you’ve made such a gargantuan error that no number of mitigating factors will ever douse the flames of regret tearing through your brain. You’re on a road to heaven or hell, but either way there’s no turning back.
My own moment of realization came halfway through my first month in my new home, at a little under 90 mph, with Rob Dougan’s “Clubbed to Death” cranked up to eleven, just after Scott and I had pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway in our (borrowed) convertible Porsche Boxster. We’d just had brunch at Buck’s in Woodside and were heading down the coast for no reason other than to enjoy the clear skies and the view.
That was how I spent my weekends now. Glancing down at the date on my phone, it suddenly occurred to me that a year ago—very nearly to the day—I was on this exact same road, driving an equally convertible 1971 Dodge Challenger from LA to San Diego for ETech. And I couldn’t believe it had taken me twelve whole months to decide to move here.
As the weeks passed and I became more settled in my new home, I kept expecting the novelty to wear off. But that didn’t show any signs of happening. There was literally nothing about the move that I regretted; in fact, the only downside was that, just two weeks after being a California resident, I’d gone from being a hard-drinking cynical Brit to a hard-drinking sunny and optimistic expat.
Even something as mundane as opening an American bank account filled me with joy—to the point where I was in danger of turning into one of those writers who moved to the US and spent the rest of
his career churning out trite nonsense about the differences between “them” and “us.”
Indeed, every day brought at least one such trite observation, which I dutifully wrote down in my notebook, ready to be deployed in a forthcoming column. Or book …
Trite Observations about America, from the Point of View of a British Expat
• At some point in America’s linguistic development they apparently decided that herbs should be pronounced as “erbs” and fillet as “fill-ay,” like French people do. To compensate for this, they call a cafetière a “French press” and a croissant a “crescent roll.”
• There is nothing funnier than hearing an American order a Cockburn’s after dinner.
• Each hour of American television can be broken down as follows: 10 minutes of commercials for junk food, 10 minutes of commercials for prescription medication (which can be further broken down into one minute of benefits, nine of side effects), 10 minutes of commercials for lawyers who can help you claw back money to pay for more junk food and medication, 13 minutes of an announcer telling you what you are currently watching, 13 minutes of an announcer telling you what’s “up next,” two minutes of cop show reruns, two minutes of a family-based cartoon series.
• Seeing advertising banners on the international version of the BBC website is like seeing your dad giving Satan a reach around.
• Opening a bank account in this country—even if you’re not a citizen—is a joy. Ten minutes, two forms of ID, in and out. And when you walk through the door, a nice lady says hello to you. This is very unsettling.
• They also set up Internet banking and your ATM pin while you wait. To someone used to the UK banking system, this is like witnessing magic.
• If anyone’s looking for all the chrome, it’s on the fire engines.
• Apparently there is a newspaper in the world called
The London Times
(back home it’s just “
The Times
”).
• And tea can be served with cream.
• Tea served with cream tastes like a baby has been sick in it.
• Perhaps in response to the fact that I keep giving cab drivers $50 bills instead of $5s, the US Treasury has slowly started to add tiny flashes of color to distinguish between different denominations of bill. At the current rate, money will be full-color by 2096, like the world’s longest remake of
Pleasantville
.
• For some reason, when San Francisco shopkeepers or bartenders hear a British accent, they feel the need to use the word “cheers” instead of “thanks.” This sounds as odd as a Brit using “bucks” as slang for dollars or an Australian speaking French.
• Cab drivers in San Francisco have no idea where anything is. If you asked one to drive you to one end of the road and back again, you’d still have to tell him the cross street.
• But even if you made that journey back and forth till the end of time, it would still cost you less than taking a black cab one block back in London.
• American service is astonishing. You could give a Labrador puppy a hand job with a Prozac glove and it still wouldn’t be as pleased to see you as the staff of the Leland teashop on Bush Street.
• There are more than 80,000 kinds of American toast, seven hundred ways to cook an American egg but only one way to make American bacon. And it isn’t pretty.
• In restaurants, it is impossible to finish a glass of water before it’s refilled. The state of California is permanently in the grip of a
water shortage. No one seems to have connected these facts.
• Free universal healthcare is tantamount to communism. Free soft drink refills are a basic human right.
• Newcastle Brown Ale is a delicacy.
• Adoption of new technology here is highly selective. Minicab drivers have Priuses, hookers accept PayPal but the idea of a three-pin plug is only just beginning to catch on.
• The
Onion
newspaper’s headlines are brilliantly satirical, but the body of its editorial often stretches the joke into unfunniness. The Fox News Channel does the exact opposite. Both are still wonderful.
• Thanks to
Frost/Nixon
, when you mention David Frost to an American, they picture Tony Blair doing an impression of Austin Powers.
• “Double the tax” sounds simple in theory but only natural-born Americans will ever understand the rules of tipping.
• See also: American football.
Another huge difference between Britain and America is their attitude to drinking. Of course, this was hardly news to me but there was something about actually moving to the place that really drove it home.
During the time I was applying for the visa, I’d started to pay attention to Robert and Sarah’s concern about my drinking, and had made a concerted effort to cut down.
But now that I’d actually made it to San Francisco, my intake had started to ramp up again. Part of this was cockiness—getting the visa despite my record made me feel invincible—but there was also a practical reason: to get enough material to a write the column each week without leaving San Francisco I’d had to throw myself wholeheartedly into the party scene.
Every night was the same: I’d grab my notebook and head to
whichever of the town’s maybe five big venues was hosting the best party to promote some dot-com company or other. Then I’d avail myself of the free bar while talking to partygoers and taking notes of anything amusing they might say.
The parties would generally wind down about eleven, and it was at this point that the difference between Brits and Americans would make itself most apparent. In London, 11 p.m. is the time when my friends and I would head onto a late bar or a club to continue drinking, basically until one or more of us fell over.
We’d do this six or seven nights a week: I tended to hang out with journalists and entrepreneurs; groups of people who can set their own hours and so are unafraid of hangovers on a school night.
In San Francisco I was partying with entrepreneurs and journalists too, but, for reasons I couldn’t understand, come 11 p.m. they’d go home. Some of them were still so sober that they’d actually drive; in fact many would drive even if they weren’t sober—Californians obsess over Pilates and frown at the notion of eating carbs but their attitude to drink driving is straight out of the 1970s.
Occasionally I’d be able to convince someone to stay out for a late drink—but, even then, California’s licensing laws meant that even the late bars were closed by two.
My solution to this problem was twofold. First of all, I would start drinking early. This was the easiest fix, but it also meant that by the time the parties got started, I was already drunk. I was quickly getting a reputation as the drunk British writer at every party, a reputation I did absolutely nothing to counter as it only drew more attention to me, and by extension the columns that I was writing.
Wherever I went in the world, people still gave me a pass for my appalling behavior on the basis that I was a journalist—in America they gave me a second pass because they assumed that being a drunken idiot was just how British people behaved.
My second trick was to hang out more with Brits, which in San Francisco isn’t particularly difficult to arrange. Every week at least one entrepreneur from London would make the pilgrimage across the Atlantic either to meet their Silicon Valley counterparts or to beg for money from one of the valley’s super-rich venture capitalists.
And, of course, for those who read my
Guardian
column, I was the first person they’d email or call. Could they take me for a drink to tell me about their company? Of course they could; and what started as one drink always ended as an all-day binge.
Life was good, work was good and the drinks were free.
1302
April.
If my liver had fists, it would have been pounding them on the mat and begging for mercy.
I was covered in strange bruises, I had no idea what day it was—and in about half an hour I was heading out again to yet another party.
I hurt.
Webmission week had rolled around again, and the Brits had invaded San Francisco in their dozens. My last vivid memory from the previous evening was watching a British entrepreneur—who should probably remain nameless—standing on a bar, pouring tequila into the gaping mouth of a journalist from the
Daily Telegraph
newspaper.
Meanwhile, across the bar, another entrepreneur—who should definitely remain nameless—was making plans to take one of the female bartenders home, as his friend failed to gain support for a belching competition.
An hour or so later, with the Brits having drunk the bar dry, we decided to move things onto the Beauty Bar on Mission Street, but not
before someone handed me a black bag containing something heavy.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“A wooden duck.”
“Why have you put a wooden duck in a black bag?”
“Because otherwise they’ll realize we’re stealing it.”
I blacked out shortly afterwards. I woke up the next morning at Kelly’s house. Kelly was one of the few American girls who drank almost—at least half—as much as I did, and so was less put off by my drunken behavior than most. But still I could tell that even she was starting to tire of the constant hangovers and drinking with Brits until the sun came up. It was only a matter of time before she came to her senses.
I’d become increasingly aware that my American friends had started to give me a wide berth since I’d move to San Francisco. I’d seen Eris and her boyfriend maybe once or twice since arriving—both times it was at a party and I was drunk. We would make vague plans to catch up, but she was always busy, usually with work. Scott was busy with his new company and so had dropped off the social scene, at least as far as I was concerned.
The person, though, who had made her wide berth the most obvious was Sarah.
Before I moved, we’d virtually become best friends—emailing most days about book woes, speaking on the phone as often as international calling rates would allow. It was nice for us both to have a friend who could critique our writing and to whom we could vent about editors and publishers.
It was Sarah who said that if I ever decided to move to San Francisco she’d be happy to introduce me to people in “the Valley,” and generally help me make a start in building a network of professional contacts to rival the one I had in London.
At the start of the year she’d accepted a job at TechCrunch—
organizers of the TechCrunch 50 conference—as editor at large, further increasing her professional profile. We’d had lunch a few times during my first weeks in town, but she too had since become increasingly “busy” and the few times we’d run into each other at parties—usually while I was drunk—she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t have time to talk.
Frankly, I felt patronized: like I was some errant child who had let her down. I mean, yes, she had a point—in a few months I was going to turn thirty and I should probably be giving more serious thought to my health and my career—but I was also being paid handsomely for writing about being a drunk expat curiosity in San Francisco; the party invitations were showing no signs of drying up, and in a few months I’d finish writing my book about living in hotels and—well—being a drunk curiosity.
Be as disapproving as you like, I thought, but, as jobs go, mine isn’t a bad one.
1303
May.
Seven months until my book deadline, and I was a little behind schedule.
It wasn’t my fault, of course; I’d spent the previous two and a bit months getting used to my new town; slipping into the social scene, making new friends, arguing with Kelly, that kind of thing.