** spoiler alert ** This book confused me to no end. Say you're a crack addict, with $5,000 left in your bank account, and a $1,000 per day habit. You decide a good use of your money is to spend $500 a night to stay at the Soho Grand Hotel for four days. When this overpriced boutique hotel rejects you because you look like a junky, do you decide to try a less exacting establishment? Of course not. You instead go shopping in Soho for an expensive cashmere sweater, and stop by a leather store and actually pay someone to punch new holes in your belt, to hold up your jeans that you are now swimming in. With this more respectable look, you are now ready for the Hotel Gansevort.

By the way, you could be living rent free in your boyfriend's apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, which your boyfriend's grandmother paid cash for, but for reasons unknown said grandmother chooses not to live in, but instead stays uptown at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel.