On the Road with Carlos, Part 2: Hoodies and Duffels

After the boys went to sleep, Carlos and I stayed up well into in the night talking with my cousin. As I suspected, he and Carlos hit it off well. Both share a desire to live frugally and thereby give themselves the economic freedom to live somewhat unconventional lives. I got quite the nitcast inferiority complex listening to these two swap ideas.

My cousin was especially interested to bounce ideas about how to educate his children off of Carlos, who taught middle school for several years. Carlos confirmed some of his concerns about the American educational system and agreed that a couple of families pooling their resources to hire a private tutor for their children could be a viable solution.

The next morning Carlos slept through breakfast, a screaming baby, and the two older boys fighting with their mother as she tried to get them dressed and out the door before the oldest was late for school. I accompanied them on their walk, and Carlos said it was the sudden quiet in the house that finally woke him.

We lingered for about two hours, reading comic books and playing card games with Ollie. No poker, but when we played Go Fish, he consistently recognized that the player who held more cards was more likely to have the card he was looking for, so he’s well on his way to making +EV decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

My cousin’s wife lent Carlos, who was woefully ill-prepared for the mid-Atlantic cold snap, a hat, coat, and gloves. Then he and I packed up the car and hit the road.

Carlos told me he had a great time with my family, which I was glad to hear. I knew he and my cousin would hit it off, but I was glad that he enjoyed playing with the boys as well. It was something I was going to do either way, but I was anxious about whether he would be bored or uncomfortable or anything like that.

I was also a little worried about how comfortable he would feel in my cousin’s town, a small place in rural Maryland with a population in the low four figures. I couldn’t remember ever seeing any black people in the town, and as we drove through, I was hyper-conscious of all the white men in camouflage hats. I convinced myself I was just being a bigoted urbanite, though, assuming that a rural town with a largely white population would necessarily be full of racist hillbillies. The few people we met seemed perfectly nice and at ease around us.

About two hours into our drive, my cousin’s wife called, nearly hysterical with laughter. Apparently a local bank had been robbed not long after we left town, and one of her neighbors had called her to report seeing two young men in hoodies carrying duffel bags through her backyard. It was Carlos who pointed out just how suspicious we would have seemed if searched, since we were in fact carrying large amounts of cash to the casino. To be fair, no one mentioned race, so maybe I’m still reading too much into it.

Other than that, it was an uneventful drive. We mostly listened to the WTF with Marc Maron podcast – the Kevin Hart interview is hysterical and his story about letting early success go to your head should be required listening for any young poker player.

I misremembered which cheap hotel outside of town I’d booked for the night, but once we got that sorted out things went smoothly. I wanted to be fresh for the next day’s tournament, so instead of playing poker we drove down to the boardwalk. This is Carlos’ first trip to Atlantic City, and I’d never been to the boardwalk. A late-fall evening probably isn’t the best time to see it, but we were both underwhelmed. It didn’t feel especially dangerous to me, but maybe the sight of two young men in hoodies was enough to scare off the muggers.