The Game Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Arttists
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[Doorbell rings]
STYLE: Who is it? VOICE ON INTERCOM Hi, this is Tyler Durden. I'm here for Mystery. I'm a fan of his posts, and I want to see if l can meet him. STYLE: It's probably not a good time right now. VOICE ON INTERCOM But I came all the way from Kingston. STYLE: Sorry, man. He can't see anyone. He's, um, sick. I left Mystery in his room, went to the kitchen, and dialed information for his parents' number. His real-world name was Erik von Markovik, but that was just another illusion. He'd legally changed it from his birth name, Erik Horvat-Markovic. The phone rang once, twice, a third time. A man picked up. His voice was gruff, his manner curt. It was Mystery's father. "Hi, I'm friends with your son, Erik." "Who are you?" "I'm Neil, Erik's friend. And I wanted to ..." "Don't call here again!" he barked. "But he needs ..." Click. The asshole hung up. There was only one other person I could call. I returned to Mystery's room. He was washing a pill down with a glass of water. His face was red and twisted, as if he were crying invisible tears. "What did you just take?" I asked. "Some sleeping pills," he said. "How many?" Fuck. I was going to have to call an ambulance. "Two." "Why'd you take them?" "When I'm awake, life sucks. It's futile. When I'm asleep, I dream." He was starting to sound like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. "I dreamed last night that I was in a flying DeLorean. Like the one in Back to the Future. And there were all these wires around us. I was with my sister. And she was driving. We went above the wires. And I saw my life below them." "Listen," I said. "I need Patricia's phone number." The tears came now. He looked like a big baby. A big baby who was about to kill himself. "Can you tell me Patricia's phone number?" I asked again slowly, gen- tly, as if speaking to a child. He gave it to me—slowly, gently, like a child. I hoped that Patricia wouldn't hang up on me, that she hadn't cut Mys- tery out of her life entirely, that she'd have a solution. She answered on the first ring. As a girlfriend, she had been taken for granted by Mystery. But in reality she was part of an invisible support sys- tem. Her stabilizing effect wasn't noticed until she was gone. Patricia's voice was a little masculine, with a light Romanian accent. She didn't seem overly intelligent, but she cared about Mystery. There was compassion and concern in her voice. "He's tried to kill himself before," she said. "The best thing you can do is call his mother or his sister. They'll probably put him in an institution." "Forever?" "No, just until he gets through it." The door to Mystery's room swung open. Mystery emerged. He walked past me toward the door. "Hey!" I yelled at him. "Where are you going?" He turned back for a moment and looked at me through blank, emo- tionless eyes. "Good knowing you, buddy," he said, then turned away. "Where are you going?" I repeated. "I'm going to shoot my father and then kill myself were his last words as he opened the front door to the house and closed it gently behind him. I chased after Mystery. He was descending the stairs slowly, as if sleepwalk- ing. I shot ahead of him and barred the lobby door in front of him. "Hey." I tugged at his sleeve. "Let's go back upstairs. I talked to your sis- ter. She's coming to get you. Just wait a couple more minutes." He hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to trust me or not. He was so docile, he didn't seem like he would hurt a fly. I shooed him up- stairs with gentle whispers of encouragement. As he turned and walked, I called his family again. "He'll be okay," I thought, "as long as his father doesn't answer." His mother answered. She said she'd be there within a half hour. Mystery sat on a futon in his kitchen and waited. The sleeping pills must have kicked in. He stared at the wall and mumbled strands of evolu- tionary philosophy, memetics, and game theory. The conclusion of his mutterings was always the same: the words "futile" or "fubar." His mother arrived with his sister in tow. The moment they saw him, they went ashen. "I had no idea it had gotten this serious," Martina said. She packed him a suitcase while his mother brought him downstairs. He followed passively, dead to the world. They left the building and headed toward a car that would soon take him to the psychiatric ward of the Humber River Regional Hospital. As Mystery's mother opened the door for him, a four-set of girls poured out of an SUV parked in front of them. For a moment, a spark of life flickered in Mystery's eyes. I watched him, hoping to hear him say those six magical words: "Is this your set or mine?" Then I'd know everything would be okay. But his eyes went dead again. His mother helped lower him into the car. She picked up his legs and moved them inside, then slammed the door shut. I saw him through the glass, the smiling blonde four-set reflected against his face. His complexion was pale and bloodless. He stared blankly 202 ahead, his mouth closed, his jaw set, his sharp labret piercing angrily glint- ing in the cold afternoon light. The girls were looking at the menu of a sushi restaurant. They giggled. It was a beautiful sound. It was the sound of life. I hoped Mystery could hear it. Mystery's breakdown triggered a crisis of faith and self-examination in the community. We were all submerged so deep in the game that it was fucking with our lives. Papa was failing out of school. A San Francisco PUA named Adonis had been fired from his advertising job when they discovered how much time he'd been spending on Mystery's Lounge. And my writing had come to a near-standstill. Even Vision had become so addicted to the seduction news- groups that he gave his DSL cable to his roommate and ordered, "Don't give these back to me for two weeks." Meanwhile, the community was growing exponentially. More and more newbies were flocking to the boards. They were young kids—some of them still in high school—and they looked to us PUAs for advice on not just seduction and socializing but everything. They wanted to know what col- lege to apply to; if they should stop taking prescribed psychiatric medica- tion; if they should masturbate, wear condoms, do drugs, run away from home. They wanted to know what to read, think, and do to be like us. One of those lost souls was a short, well-muscled Lebanese student in his early twenties known as Prizer. He was from El Paso and had never even kissed a girl. He wanted advice on how to get comfortable around women, so we told him that first he needed to make female friends. And, second, he needed to experience sex, and not be too picky about a partner. He took us a little too literally. Witness a few choice excerpts from his field reports: MSN GROUP Mystery's Lounge SUBJECT: Field Report—Losing My Virginity in Juarez AUTHOR: Prizer I decided to see how it actually felt to have sex, so I crossed the border to Juarez Since she was a hooker, I guess its not technically a pickup. But I think this will help my game because I'll be less desperate I had trouble keeping 204 hard, except I got excited when I was going down on her and doing sixty- nine. It was my first time for all of that. Now that I'm not a virgin, do you think girls will find me more attractive? MSN GROUP Mystery's Lounge SUBJECT: Field Report—Another Night in Juarez AUTHOR: Prizer I had sex again in Juarez. This makes four hookers for me now. She even swal- lowed my cum, but I still haven't been able to ejaculate during intercourse. Is this normal? Anyway, what I did this time to help my game is I pretended like she was my girlfriend. But when I wanted to eat her ass out, she charged me an extra five bucks. That was lame Anyway, I'm writing this report because I'm thinking that it might improve my sarging more if I spend my money on hookers in Juarez for maybe six months instead of on workshops and e-books and shit. Its much more direct. Do you think that having more sex can raise your game and your confidence level? After everyone in the community chastised Prizer for posting field re- ports about prostitutes, he was the first to turn to me for help. Then came a note from Cityprc in Rhode Island. Then came pleas from a dozen others I'd never met. They were all offering me money to teach them seduction. They wanted to fly in; they wanted to fly me out; they were willing to pay any price just to watch a real PUA in action. With Mystery confined to the psychiatric wing of Humber Hospital and Juggler so deep in his LTR that he had taken down his website, the students were hungry. And somehow I had become their new guru. All those posts where I'd explained my routines and discussed my nights out hadn't just been a way of learning and sharing; they'd also been a form of advertising. But seduction is a dark art. Its secrets come with a price and we were all paying it, whether in sanity, school, work, time, money, health, morality, or loss of self. We may have been supermen in the club, but on the inside we were rotting. "I was modeling myself after you and Mystery," Papa said when I called to check on him. "I need to be me. I have so much potential for success, and I'm blowing it all. I used to be a straight A student." 205 He planned to go cold turkey on seduction and, for starters, cancel the seminars he'd already signed up for. "I'll also stop calling HBs until I get my life in order," he said. "If they call me, I'll tell them I need to get my life straight before I sarge them. I choose life. I will not be game." "You have to treat school and studying like you treat seduction." "Yes," he said, as if he'd just had an epiphany. "I will make school wings. I will make study pivots. I will fuck-close my tests." "That may be taking it a little too far. But, um, good for you." "I feel free," he said. "Whoa." And I'd like to say that's how we all felt, that we all realized we'd be- come too consumed and came to our senses, that we put our lives in bal- ance and got our priorities straight, that we relegated seduction to a glorified hobby. But there is a concept in hypnosis called fractionation. And it states that if a person under hypnosis is brought out of trance and then put back under, the trance will be even deeper and more powerful. And so it was with seduction. We all came out of it for a moment—we opened our eyes and saw the light of the real world. But then we went back under, deeper than we ever were before—and to an extent beyond what any of us could have imagined. STEP 6 CREATE AN EMOTIONAL PEOPLE USED TO LOOK OUT ON T H E P L A Y G R O U N D AND SAY THAT THE BOYS W E R E P L A Y I N G S O C C E R A N D T H E G I R L S W E R E D O I N G N O T H I N G . B U T T H E G I R L S W E R E N ' T D O I N G N O T H I N G — T H E Y W E R E T A L K I N G . T H E Y W E R E T A L K I N G A B O U T T H E W O R L D T O O N E A N O T H E R . A N D T H E Y B E C A M E VERY E X P E R T A B O U T THAT IN A WAY THE BOYS D I D N O T . CAROL G I L L I G A N , Yüklə 2,79 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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