The Game Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Arttists
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Thus, I find it necessary to employ
an old literary device. . . THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY. IT REALLY HAPPENED. Men will deny it, Women will doubt it. But I present it to you here, Naked, vulnerable, and disturbingly real. I beg you for your forgiveness in advance. D O N ' T H A T E T H E PLAYER . . . H A T E T H E G A M E . C O N T STEP 1 SELECT A TARGET 1 STEP 2 APPROACH AND OPEN 13 STEP 3 DEMONSTRATE VALUE 51 STEP 4 DISARM THE OBSTACLES 107 STEP 5 ISOLATE THE TARGET 147 STEP 6 CREATE AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION 207 E N T S STEP 7 EXTRACT TO A SEDUCTION LOCATION 243 STEP 8 PUMP BUYING TEMPERATURE 265 STEP 9 MAKE A PHYSICAL CONNECTION 319 STEP 10 BLAST LAST-MINUTE RESISTANCE 345 STEP 1 1 MANAGE EXPECTATIONS 387 GLOSSARY 439 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 451 STEP 1 SELECT A TARGET MEN WEREN'T REALLY THE ENEMY— THEY WERE FELLOW V I C T I M S SUFFERING FROM A N O U T M O D E D MASCULINE MYSTIQUE THAT MADE T H E M FEEL UNNECESSARILY INADEQUATE W H E N THERE WERE NO BEARS TO KILL. — B E T T Y F R I E D A N The Feminine Mystique MEET MYSTERY The house was a disaster. Doors were split and smashed off their hinges; walls were dented in the shape of fists, phones, and flowerpots; Herbal was hiding in a hotel room scared for his life; and Mystery was collapsed on the living room carpet cry- ing. He'd been crying for two days straight. This wasn't a normal kind of crying. Ordinary tears are understand- able. But Mystery was beyond understanding. He was out of control. For a week, he'd been vacillating between periods of extreme anger and violence, and jags of fitful, cathartic sobbing. And now he was threatening to kill himself. There were five of us living in the house: Herbal, Mystery, Papa, Play- boy, and me. Boys and men came from every corner of the globe to shake our hands, take photos with us, learn from us, be us. They called me Style. It was a name I had earned. We never used our real names—only our aliases. Even our mansion, like the others we had spawned everywhere from San Francisco to Sydney, had a nickname. It was Project Hollywood. And Project Hollywood was in shambles. The sofas and dozens of throw pillows lining the floor of the sunken living room were fetid and discolored with the sweat of men and the juices of women. The white carpet had gone gray from the constant traffic of young, perfumed humanity herded in off Sunset Boulevard every night. Cigarette butts and used condoms floated grimly in the Jacuzzi. And Mys- tery's rampage during the last few days had left the rest of the place totaled and the residents petrified. He was six foot five and hysterical. "I can't tell you what this feels like," he choked out between sobs. His whole body spasmed. "I don't know what I'm going to do, but it will not be rational." 4 He reached up from the floor and punched the stained red upholstery of the sofa as the siren-wail of his despondency grew louder, filling the room with the sound of a grown male who has lost every characteristic that separates man from infant from animal. He wore a gold silk robe that was several sizes too small, exposing his scabbed knees. The ends of the sash just barely met to form a knot and the curtains of the robe hung half a foot apart, revealing a pale, hairless chest and, below it, saggy gray Calvin Klein boxer shorts. The only other item of clothing on his trembling body was a winter cap pulled tight over his skull. It was June in Los Angeles. "This living thing." He was speaking again. "It's so pointless." He turned and looked at me through wet, red eyes. "It's Tic Tac Toe. There's no way you can win. So the best thing to do is not to play it." There was no one else in the house. I would have to deal with this. He needed to be sedated before he snapped out of tears and back into anger. Each cycle of emotions grew worse, and this time I was afraid he'd do some- thing that couldn't be undone. I couldn't let Mystery die on my watch. He was more than just a friend; he was a mentor. He'd changed my life, as he had the lives of thousands of others just like me. I needed to get him Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, anything. I grabbed my phone book and scanned the pages for people most likely to have pills—people like guys in rock bands, women who'd just had plastic surgery, former child actors. But everyone I called wasn't home, didn't have any drugs, or claimed not to have any drugs because they didn't want to share. There was only one person left to call: the woman who had triggered Mystery's downward spiral. She was a party girl; she must have something. Katya, a petite Russian blonde with a Smurfette voice and the energy of a Pomeranian puppy, was at the front door in ten minutes with a Xanax and a worried look on her face. "Do not come in," I warned her. "He'll probably kill you." Not that she didn't entirely deserve it, of course. Or so I thought at the time. I gave Mystery the pill and a glass of water, and waited until the sobs slowed to a sniffle. Then I helped him into a pair of black boots, jeans, and a gray T-shirt. He was docile now, like a big baby. "I'm taking you to get some help," I told him. I walked him outside to my old rusty Corvette and stuffed him into the 5 tiny front seat. Every now and then, I'd see a tremor of anger flash across his face or tears roll out of his eyes. I hoped he'd remain calm long enough for me to help him. "I want to learn martial arts," he said docilely, "so when I want to kill someone, I can do something about it." I stepped on the accelerator. Our destination was the Hollywood Mental Health Center on Vine Street. It was an ugly slab of concrete surrounded day and night by home- less men who screamed at lampposts, transvestites who lived out of shop- ping carts, and other remaindered human beings who set up camp where free social services could be found. Mystery, I realized, was one of them. He just happened to have charisma and talent, which drew others to him and prevented him from ever being left alone in the world. He possessed two traits I'd noticed in nearly every rock star I'd ever interviewed: a crazy, driven gleam in his eyes and an absolute inability to do anything for himself. I brought him into the lobby, signed him in, and together we waited for a turn with one of the counselors. He sat in a cheap black plastic chair, star- ing catatonically at the institutional blue walls. An hour passed. He began to fidget. Two hours passed. His brow furrowed; his face clouded. Three hours passed. The tears started. Four hours passed. He bolted out of his chair and ran out of the wait- ing room and through the front door of the building. He walked briskly, like a man who knew where he was going, although Project Hollywood was three miles away. I chased him across the street and caught up to him outside a mini-mall. I took his arm and turned him around, baby talking him back into the waiting room. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty. He was up and out again. I ran after him. Two social workers stood uselessly in the lobby. "Stop him! "I yelled. "We can't," one of them said. "He's left the premises." "So you're just going to let a suicidal man walk out of here?" I couldn't waste time arguing. "Just have a therapist ready to see him if I get him back here." I ran out the door and looked to my right. He wasn't there. I looked 6 left. Nothing. I ran north to Fountain Avenue, spotted him around the cor- ner, and dragged him back again. When we arrived, the social workers led him down a long, dark hallway and into a claustrophobic cubicle with a sheet-vinyl floor. The therapist sat behind a desk, running a finger through a black tangle in her hair. She was a slim Asian woman in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, dark red lip- stick, and a pinstriped pantsuit. Mystery slumped in a chair across from her. "So how are you feeling today?" she asked, forcing a smile. "I'm feeling," Mystery said, "like there's no point to anything." He burst into tears. "I'm listening," she said, scrawling a note on her pad. The case was probably already closed for her. "So I'm removing myself from the gene pool," he sobbed. She looked at him with feigned sympathy as he continued. To her, he was just one of a dozen nutjobs she saw a day. All she needed to figure out was whether he required medication or institutionalization. "I can't go on," Mystery went on. "It's futile." With a rote gesture, she reached into a drawer, pulled out a small pack- age of tissues, and handed it to him. As Mystery reached for the package, he looked up and met her eyes for the first time. He froze and stared at her silently. She was surprisingly cute for a clinic like this. A flicker of animation flashed across Mystery's face, then died. "If I had met you in another time and another place," he said, crumpling a tissue in his hands, "things would have been different." His body, normally proud and erect, curved like soggy macaroni in his chair. He stared glumly at the floor as he spoke. "I know exactly what to say and what to do to make you attracted to me," he continued. "It's all in my head. Every rule. Every step. Every word. I just can't... do it right now." She nodded mechanically. "You should see me when I'm not like this," he continued slowly, snif- fling. "I've dated some of the most beautiful women in the world. Another place, another time, and I would have made you mine." "Yes," she said, patronizing him. "I'm sure you would have." She didn't know. How could she? But this sobbing giant with the crumpled tissue in his hands was the greatest pickup artist in the world. That was not a matter of opinion, but fact. I'd met scores of the self- 7 proclaimed best in the previous two years, and Mystery could out-game them all. It was his hobby, his passion, his calling. There was only one person alive who could possibly compete with him. And that man was sitting in front of her also. From a formless lump of nerd, Mystery had molded me into a superstar. Together, we had ruled the world of seduction. We had pulled off spectacular pickups before the disbe- lieving eyes of our students and disciples in Los Angeles, New York, Mon- treal, London, Melbourne, Belgrade, Odessa, and beyond. And now we were in a madhouse. MEET STYLE I am far from attractive. My nose is too large for my face and, while not hooked, has a bump in the ridge. Though I am not bald, to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement. There are just wispy Rogaine- enhanced growths covering the top of my head like tumbleweeds. In my opinion, my eyes are small and beady, though they do have a lively glimmer, which is doomed to remain my secret because no one can see it behind my glasses. I have indentations on either side of my forehead, which I like and believe add character to my face, though I've never actually been compli- mented on them. I am shorter than I'd like to be and so skinny that I look malnourished to most people, no matter how much I eat. When I look down at my pale, slouched body, I wonder why any woman would want to sleep next to it, let alone embrace it. So, for me, meeting girls takes work. I'm not the kind of guy women giggle over at a bar or want to take home when they're feeling drunk and crazy. I can't offer them a piece of my fame and bragging rights like a rock star or cocaine and a mansion like so many other men in Los An- geles. All I have is my mind, and nobody can see that. You may notice that I haven't mentioned my personality. This is be- cause my personality has completely changed. Or, to put it more accurately, I completely changed my personality. I invented Style, my alter ego. And in the course of two years, Style became more popular than I ever was— especially with women. It was never my intention to change my personality or walk through the world under an assumed identity. In fact, I was happy with myself and my life. That is, until an innocent phone call (it always starts with an innocent phone call) led me on a journey into one of the oddest and most exciting un- derground communities that, in more than a dozen years of journalism, I have ever come across. The call was from Jeremie Ruby-Strauss (no relation), a book editor who had stumbled across a document on the Internet called 9 the lay guide, short for The How-to-Lay-Girls Guide. Compressed into 150 siz- zling pages, he said, was the collected wisdom of dozens of pickup artists who have been exchanging their knowledge in newsgroups for nearly a de- cade, secretly working to turn the art of seduction into an exact science. The information needed to be rewritten and organized into a coherent how-to book, and he thought I was the man to do it. I wasn't so sure. I want to write literature, not give advice to horny ado- lescents. But, of course, I told him it wouldn't hurt to take a look at it. The moment I started reading, my life changed. More than any other book or document—be it the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or The Joy of Cooking—the lay guide opened my eyes. And not necessarily because of the information in it, but because of the path it sent me hurtling down. When I look back on my teenage years, I have one major regret, and it has nothing to do with not studying hard enough, not being nice to my mother, or crashing my father's car into a public bus. It is simply that I didn't fool around with enough girls. I am a deep man—I reread James Joyce's Ulysses every three years for fun. I consider myself reasonably intu- itive. I am at the core a good person, and I try to avoid hurting others. But I can't seem to evolve to the next state of being because I spend far too much time thinking about women. And I know I'm not alone. When I first met Hugh Hefner, he was seventy-three. He had slept with over a thousand of the most beautiful women in the world, by his own account, but all he wanted to talk about were his three girlfriends—Mandy, Brandy, and Sandy. And how, thanks to Viagra, he could keep them all satisfied (though his money probably satis- fied them enough). If he ever wanted to sleep with somebody else, he said, the rule was that they'd all do it together. So what I gathered from the con- versation was that here was a guy who's had all the sex he wanted his whole life and, at seventy-three, he's still chasing tail. When does it stop? If Hugh Hefner isn't over it yet, when am I going to be? If the lay guide had never crossed my path, I, like most men, would never have evolved in my thinking about the opposite sex. In fact, I probably started off worse than most men. In my preteen years, there were no games of doctor, no girls who charged a dollar to look up their skirts, no tickling classmates in places I wasn't supposed to touch. I spent most of teenage life grounded, so when my sole adolescent sexual opportunity arose—a drunken freshman girl called and offered me a blow job—I was forced to decline, or else suffer my mother's wrath. In college I began to find myself: the things I was interested 10 in, the personality I'd always been too shy to express, the group of friends who would expand my mind with drugs and conversation (in that order). But I never became comfortable around women: They intimidated me. In four years of college, I did not sleep with a single woman on campus. After school I took a job at the New York Times as a cultural reporter, where I began to build confidence in myself and my opinions. Eventually, I gained access to a privileged world where no rules applied: I went on the road with Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue to write books with them. In all that time, with all those backstage passes, I didn't get so much as a single kiss from anyone except Tommy Lee. After that, I pretty much gave up hope. Some guys had it; other guys didn't. I clearly didn't. The problem wasn't that I'd never been laid. It was that the few times I did get lucky, I'd turn a one-night stand into a two-year stand because I didn't know when it was going to happen again. The layguide had an acronym for people like me: AFC—average frustrated chump. I was an AFC. Not like Dustin. I met Dustin the year I graduated from college. He was friends with a classmate of mine named Marko, a faux-aristocratic Serbian who had been my companion in girllessness since nursery school, thanks largely to his head, which was shaped like a watermelon. Dustin wasn't any taller, richer, more famous, or better looking than either of us. But he did possess one quality we didn't: He attracted women. When Marko first introduced me to him, I was unimpressed. He was short and swarthy with long curly brown hair and a cheesy button-down gigolo shirt with too many buttons undone. That night, we went to a Chicago club called Drink. As we checked our coats, Dustin asked, "Do you know if there are any dark corners in here?" I asked him what he needed dark corners for, and he replied that they were good places to take girls. I raised my eyebrows skeptically. Minutes af- ter entering the bar, however, he made eye contact with a shy-looking girl who was talking with a friend. Without a word, Dustin walked away. The girl followed him—straight to a dark corner. When they finished kissing and groping, they parted wordlessly, without an obligatory exchange of phone numbers or even a sheepish see-you-later. Dustin repeated this seemingly miraculous feat four times that night. A new world opened up before my eyes. I grilled him for hours, trying to determine what sort of magical powers he possessed. Dustin was what they call a natural. He had lost his virginity 11 at age eleven, when the fifteen-year-old daughter of a neighbor used him as a sexual experiment, and he had been fucking nonstop since. One night, I took him to a party on a boat anchored in New York's Hudson River. When a sultry brown-haired, doe-eyed girl walked by, he turned to me and said, " She's just your type." I denied it and stared at the floor, as usual. I was afraid he'd try to make me talk to her, which he soon did. When she walked past again, he asked her, "Do you know Neil?" It was a stupid icebreaker, but it didn't matter now that the ice was bro- ken. I stammered out a few words, until Dustin took over and rescued me. We met her and her boyfriend at a bar afterward. They had just moved in to- gether. Her boyfriend was taking their dog for a walk. After a few drinks, he took the dog home, leaving the girl, Paula, with us. Dustin suggested going back to my place to cook a late-night snack, so we walked to my tiny East Village apartment and, instead, collapsed on the bed, with Dustin on one side of Paula and me on the other. When Dustin started kissing her left cheek, he signaled me to do the same on her right cheek. Then, in synchronicity, we moved down her body to her neck and her breasts. Though I was surprised by Paula's quiet compliance, for Dustin this seemed to be business as usual. He turned to me and asked if I had a condom. I found one for him. He pulled off her pants and moved into her while I continued lapping uselessly at her right breast. That was Dustin's gift, his power: giving women the fantasy they never thought they'd experience. Afterward, Paula called me constantly. She wanted to talk about the experience all the time, to rationalize it, because she couldn't believe what she had done. That's how it always worked with Dustin: He got the girl; I got the guilt. I chalked this up to a simple difference of personality. Dustin had a natural charm and animal instinct that I just didn't. Or at least that's what I thought, until I read the layguide and explored the newsgroups and web- sites it recommended. What I discovered was an entire community filled with Dustins—men who claimed to have found the combination to unlock a woman's heart and legs—along with thousands of others like myself, try- ing to learn their secrets. The difference was that these men had broken down their methods to a specific set of rules that anybody could apply. And each self-proclaimed pickup artist had his own set of rules. There was Mystery, a magician; Ross Jeffries, a hypnotist; Rick H., a mil- lionaire entrepreneur; David DeAngelo, a real estate agent; Juggler, a stand- 12 up comedian; David X, a construction worker; and Steve P., a seductionist so powerful that women actually pay to learn how to give him better head. Put them on South Beach in Miami and any number of better-looking, muscle- bound bullies will be kicking sand in their pale, emaciated faces. But put them in a Starbucks or Whiskey Bar, and they'll be taking turns making out with that bully's girlfriend as soon as his back is turned. Once I discovered their world, the first thing that changed was my vo- cabulary. Terms like AFC, PUA (pickup artist), sarging (picking up women), and HB (hot babe) 1 entered my permanent lexicon. Then my daily rituals changed as I became addicted to the online locker room these pickup artists had created. Whenever I returned home from meeting or going out with a woman, I sat down at my computer and posted my questions of the night on the newsgroups. "What do I do if she says she has a boyfriend?"; "If she eats garlic during dinner, does it mean she isn't planning on kissing me?"; "Is it a good or a bad sign when a girl puts on lipstick in front of me?" And online characters like Candor, Gunwitch, and Formhandle began replying to my questions. (The answers, in order: use a boyfriend-destroyer pattern; you're overanalyzing this; neither.) Soon I realized this was not just an Internet phenomenon but a way of life. There were cults of wanna-be se- ductionists in dozens of cities—from Los Angeles to London to Zagreb to Bombay—who met weekly in what they called lairs to discuss tactics and strategies before going out en masse to meet women. In the guise of Jeremie Ruby-Strauss and the Internet, God had given me a second chance. It wasn't too late to be Dustin, to become what every woman wants—not what she says she wants, but what she really wants, deep inside, beyond her social programming, where her fantasies and day- dreams lie. But I couldn't do it on my own. Talking to guys online was not going to be enough to change a lifetime of failure. I had to meet the faces behind the screen names, watch them in the field, find out who they were and what made them tick. I made it my mission—my full-time job and obsession—to hunt down the greatest pickup artists in the world and beg for shelter un- der their wings. And so began the strangest two years of my life. A glossary has been provided on page 439 with detailed explanations of these and other terms used by the seduction community. STEP 2 APPROACH AND OPEN THE FIRST PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US, MEN AND W O M E N , IS NOT TO LEARN, BUT TO UNLEARN. — G L O R I A S T E I N E M , Yüklə 2,79 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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