He showed me the account on PokerStars, where I thought he had been playing. PokerStars, European bank, American bank.”
Though thin and pale, he was a lean, handsome young man, his gaze blue and intense. He had been watching poker videos and movies. To my shock, he insisted that, all this time, he had not been playing poker. I informed him that if he wanted to return to college, he would have to ice the poker playing or else pay for his own tuition from his winnings. Given his new lifestyle, which did not seem to include daylight, I could not see how he would make it as a scholar-athlete in the fall. Dan had not had the most successful freshman year at college, where he played Division 1 tennis and attended classes only when he had incentive to do so. Five days after I installed the block, he had somehow managed to rid himself of it. On this understanding, Dan came back home. I had researched such programs, which apparently no one could remove for the duration of the contract. He cut off Internet access at his home.ĭan spent part of a night on a park bench before he agreed at last to my putting a gambling block on his computer. Thirty-six hours after Dan arrived, his dad called me.
When I booted him out, he went at first to his father, who had disparaged my concerns over Dan’s Internet poker playing. He refused counseling, either for himself or with the family.įrom Dan’s point of view, the problem was my futile and suffocating attempt to control him - insisting that he get a job, that he conform to my idea of a sleep schedule, that he feign a family bond he did not feel. Dan spent some of his time with a shrinking number of his former high-school friends. The stench of his room, with its unwashed clothes spilled out from his suitcase onto the floor, filled the upstairs even when the door was shut, which was most of the time. He rarely ate with us, and he didn’t relate to his older brother or to my partner, Donald, who had been living with us for two years, or participate in any way with the family. He stayed up nearly all night, sometimes heading for bed just as the rest of the family was rising. From my point of view, my son’s recalcitrance lay at the heart of the problem. Fairly quickly, Dan incurred the loss of car privileges, the loss of Internet privileges and the loss of the privilege of living in my home. The new house rules called on all those who lived in the house to have some sort of activity or employment in the world they set quiet hours for weeknights they prescribed consequences for abusive behavior. Anticipating Dan’s return from college, I set up “house rules” that I hoped would improve on the previous summer, when the fragile family life I had pieced together since my divorce four years before was on the verge of breaking apart. But driven by the urgency of the moment, I pressed on. I had never invaded someone’s virtual space like this before, never stolen a password, never found myself on such forbidden ground.
#Full tilt poker login screen full#
To my surprise, the window on the screen read, “We have sent your new password to the e-mail address on record.” I re-entered Dan’s e-mail account, fetched the new password and entered it into the Full Tilt log-in window.īy now, my fingers were trembling. I simply returned to Full Tilt, entered the screen name from the e-mail and clicked “Forgot my password.” I expected the program to ask me the name of my favorite rock band, at which point my foray into the role of Internet spy would cease. Most prevalent were e-mail messages from Full Tilt Poker, addressed to a screen name I did not recognize. I clicked “Enter.” There before me were all the e-mail messages from university officials, from his tennis coach, from teachers. Weeks before, he read his e-mail via my computer and asked Firefox to save the password. Full Tilt Poker, unsurprisingly, rejected the name.įollowing the plan I outlined as I lay awake in the wee hours, I opened up Dan’s college e-mail account. Once the program was open, I tried to log on with the screen name my 18-year-old son, Dan, had shown me on a different site called PokerStars. There, I booted up Firefox and accessed an online card room, Full Tilt Poker, from which I downloaded a program to play Texas Hold ’Em and other games. I headed downstairs to make coffee and settle at my computer. Just past dawn one morning last August, I pulled myself from bed, bleary from ragged sleep.
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