Eastbound and Down (Pt. 2: No Place Like Home)

When 2011 began, I was enjoying the idea of letting my roots grow deeper in Southern California. After breaking up with my girlfriend in 2010, and consequently having no home base for most of the year, I had begun to establish a new life for myself, in a new apartment in Santa Monica. I had unpacked the boxes of records that had been sitting for months in storage, hung art on the walls and got a new bed.

My PokerStars Team Online deal began, and after spending a lot of time on the road in 2010, I was really looking forward to enjoying my time at home, working hard and putting in a lot of hours online. I improved my work station by buying an antique wood desk and a new computer setup featuring a monolithic 30" monitor. I also bought a stand-up paddle board, and was hoping to achieve a previously unreached level of balance with a new oceanic hobby.

Then Black Friday hit and PokerStars withdrew from the US market, which meant all the things I had happily and purposefully accumulated in order to relaunch my existence now just seemed to stare at me mockingly. The 30" monitor became a Twitter and instant messenger station and the enormous paddle board propped against the wall in my kitchen now represented another instance of frivolous ambition. I could not work from home, and I was too emotionally paralyzed to pack up and leave, as I now wish I had done in May.

When I finally reckoned with my situation, it was time to box up my records again and rent another storage space, this time big enough to stash the desk in addition to the boxes and bags filled with my belongings. I sold the paddle board for a fraction of what I paid for it a couple months before and sent my computer to Vancouver via UPS at an absurd cost (I was overcharged for shipping by Box Brothers). I  parked my car in a beach lot and packed a couple of bags for Vancouver and got on a plane. 

Daenerys Targaryen: "What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?"
Jorah: "Home."

Separating myself from Santa Monica, a city I am fully in love with, was difficult in a way that is hard to explain. I'm almost amazed that I managed to do it. I don't require much from a home, but whatever I needed, I had found in Los Angeles. It takes years to get to know a city in any thorough way, and after six years on the West Coast, I felt very comfortable with the lifestyle and familiar with the landscape. I loved riding my bike along the beach, I knew where to get a good burger at 10PM, and, more significantly, two of my closest friends moved to Santa Monica recently. (They are still there, playing live poker primarily.) I also started communicating with my longtime girlfriend/ex-girlfriend again, around the time it became clear that I would probably be leaving the country to continue my poker career.


***

After dealing with the anguish over leaving California, it was relatively easy to part with Vancouver, although I was actually enjoying enough aspects of the situation to want to make it work.

The balcony, as previously discussed, was horrifying, but I liked stepping out onto it during synchronized breaks, looking at the boats coming into the harbour, and telling David, "yep, I see some big ships coming in." We had a number of running jokes, were well fed, and the roommate relationship was surprisingly effective and happy all around. The dishes never piled up and there was usually music or some form of entertainment in the background.

Yet, when the shit hit the fan, it seemed almost appropriate and at least vaguely amusing. It was certainly a relief to get rid of the apartment, even if now it meant more expenses, like breaking our lease. I rented a car in order to transport my belongings and my computer back. Actually, two cars, since I was only able to get a one-way rental from Vancouver to Seattle and then had to rent a different car to go from Seattle to Los Angeles. I decided to do it this way because I could not stomach the idea of paying hundreds of dollars to ship the equipment once again, and because I really love driving through America, especially the Pacific Northwest and West Coast.

 ***

The only reason I didn't drive up to Vancouver in the first place was because I thought I would have a harder time crossing the border. Canadian immigration is at least a little bit tricky. As an American, you are allowed to stay in Canada for six months out of a year, but they seem eager to deny your entry for a variety of reasons.

One reason you might get denied is if you can't demonstrate sufficient ties to the US. The fact that your friends and family and your storage unit exist in the US might not be enough, there's still a chance the border official will think you are planning to illegally stay in the country longer than six months. They might arrive at a similar conclusion if you can't demonstrate that you have enough money in your bank account to support yourself.  Then there's the fact that you aren't allowed to work in Canada. Even in a case such as online poker, where your work has zero impact on the native jobs economy, you are not likely to be allowed into the country if you tell them you are going to "rent a place for six months and work from home."

They say the best thing to tell the customs official is the truth--but if you ask me, it better be the truth that they want to hear. When asked what I was doing there, I told them I was visiting a friend. When asked what I did for a living, I told them I was a writer who wrote about gambling. It was the version of the truth I thought they wanted to hear.

Returning to the US by road, with most of the essential components of my life filling a rental SUV, I felt somewhat liberated, at least for the opportunity to not paint a false picture at a border crossing. The US Customs official looked at the sticker on the box in the backseat of my car and said, "Why does it say 'alert?'"

"Oh," I said, "that's from the packaging for the computer stuff. The shipping guys put it on there."

"What were you doing in Canada?" she asked.

"I was playing online poker for three weeks."

"Why did you go to Canada to play online poker?"

"Well, there was legislation passed in the US that made it impossible for me to continue to play here anymore."

"Really?" The border official had never heard of Black Friday. "Why don't you just play at casinos locally?"

"Well," I said, "that's an option, some of my friends are doing it, but I am better at poker online."

"Did you win money?" she asked.

"Yeah I did allright," I told her.

"Did you win more than $10,000?"

"Nah," I said. Here, I felt compelled to lie. I certainly wasn't transporting more than $10,000 and I didn't see how it was any of her business how well I did in MTTs last month. That information is between me and a different branch of the government.

Finally, before letting me back into my country, she said, smiling, "And they let you in with all that stuff?"

***

It felt strangely, incredibly good to be back in the United States. There is a feeling I get when I am in America that I just don't think anywhere else can offer. The landscape offers me solace. I feel a relation to the people that can't be manufactured elsewhere. I appreciate the diversity and the way Americans interact with each other. Although I severely dislike the way our government works, our government isn't our country.

It's a duality I can't easily resolve. I was forced to leave the country to maintain my livelihood, and I still have to pay my taxes. There seems to be no rationality in the way our country is governed, it's very frustrating, yet I can't give up on America, it will forever be the only place that truly feels like "home" to me.

***

When the story resumes, I'll be on my way to the Baja peninsula.

Eastbound and Down (Pt. 1: Hello/Goodbye Canada)

Since the last time I wrote about Black Friday and my future in online poker, I have not only relocated, but done it twice--first  to Vancouver, BC, Canada and now to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, a town in the northern part of the Baja California peninsula.

My journey to establish myself in another country still feels so bizarre that I don't know how to most concisely tell it. I should start by apologizing for not updating this blog along the way, but the steady movement associated with bouncing up and down North America, along with the necessity of spending 50+ hours a week in front of my computer playing poker (the reason I moved to begin with), has made it hard to sort out my thoughts.

I went to Canada with my friend David, an online poker player in his 20s, who had also been living in Los Angeles when Black Friday took place. After the WSOP, we began looking for a place in Vancouver, but we were both still engulfed in a post-Black Friday hazy depression, and as a result our decision making ability was not in peak form. We clumsily rushed to sign a lease in a high-rise apartment in the Yaletown area of downtown Vancouver. Somehow, I overlooked two critical things I knew about myself--first, that I don't particularly like downtown, big city living, and second, that I abhor living in high-rise apartments. I managed to forget how unhappy I was when I spent a summer at the WSOP living in the Panorama Towers in Vegas.

Living 28 floors above the ground--in an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a tiny slab of outdoor space for a "balcony" that compels you to contemplate the ease of jumping each time you step out onto it--feels completely unnatural to me and fairly scary. The apartment was bright, hot, and very loud, with a steady stream of construction noises filling the room during the day and the gamut of city sounds--sirens, dogs barking, drunk people yelling--at night. The ironic thing about living that high up in the sky is that it's actually far less quiet than living closer to the ground.

Despite the suboptimal apartment situation, and the residual and ongoing stress of uprooting our lives to come to a new country, we got ourselves set up relatively efficiently over the course of a week, getting most of what we needed for our apartment and office (chairs, a desk, bedding, coffee machine) and evertyhing we needed to get our PokerStars accounts re-opened--basically getting a bank account and utility bills in our names in addition to the lease. It was important to me to get set up before the WCOOP began in the first week of September, and I did, with a few days to dip my foot in the water and get back into the online poker groove.

Although I thoroughly detested our apartment and workspace, I was fortunate to have a very good month playing tournaments on PokerStars, winning a WCOOP event and generally easing back into the daily poker grind. David, on the other hand, could not "get it going." I consider him a better player than me for all intents and purposes, but it seemed he was not running good in the spots where it mattered, and while I was seeing steady chunks of profit, he slowly and steadily bled funds.

David was also focused on trying to arrange a more long-term plan for Canada, which added to his immediate stress level but promised to lend him more stability eventually. Whereas I was planning to stay only up to six months and then reevaluate my options (visitors may only stay in Canada six months without a visa), David had applied to school in Vancouver and was planning to get his student visa, have the contents of his storage pod delivered and establish a home for himself in Canada. He was even going on dates and had sorta kinda acquired a girlfriend.

On the Friday afternoon before the WCOOP main event, David left the apartment to drive to the border, where he expected to get his student visa and the come back to the apartment. He was under the impression that it would be no problem, since he had his school application and other documents in order. A few hours after he left the apartment, I got a text from David, saying they weren't letting him back in the country. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. Without getting too much into the details of his personal business, the customs official would not let him into the country three months before school started, because he could not demonstrate ties to the US. They told him to try again a week or so before school started. They knew David had his belongings in our apartment and eventually gave him 48 hours to retrieve them.

At this point, it seemed my best option was to move on, too. I had planned a visit back to LA after the WCOOP and did not want to risk the possibility that I would be denied re-entry into Canada when I came back the next week, with all my stuff stranded in a downtown apartment and no roommate to pack it up and send it back to me.

I liked Vancouver a lot as a city, and I was looking forward to making it work for the winter (I didn't even mind the overcast weather that was becoming prevalent towards the end of September), but our Canadian adventure was riddled with problems, and if I hadn't had a good month on the "virtual felt," I would consider it an unmitigated disaster. I played through the weekend, finishing strong with a profitable final Sunday of WCOOP. Then I packed up my computer, arranged for a rental car from Vancouver to Seattle and another from Seattle to Los Angeles. It was time to regroup and move on.

If the story reads disjointed and incomplete, that's because it's basically how it was. We went through a lot of expense and effort to establish ourselves in Canada, yet it never felt like a fully realized situation. When it all fell apart, it almost seemed like a fitting conclusion.


***


In the next installment: driving through the Pacific Northwest back to California in a stuffed rental car, discovering Rosarito and establishing a new apartment in Mexico.