The Game Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Arttists
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"I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj," he said. "I like him better
than Sri Ramana Maharshi. His teachings are more modern and easier to read." "Wow—impressive." I didn't know what else to say; I wasn't particularly familiar with Indian Vedanta writing. "Yeah, I'm starting to realize there's more to life than just girls. All of this stuff"—he gestured up the hill to Project Hollywood—"means nothing. Everything means nothing." I half-expected him to burst out in laughter at any moment and start talking about his penis, like the old days. "So you're over sarging then?" I asked. "Yeah, I was obsessed with it, but when I read your post about social ro- bots, I realized I was becoming one. So I'm moving out." "Are you heading back to your parents' house or getting your own place?" "Neither," he said. "I'm going to India." "That's amazing. For what?" When Extramask had come into the com- munity, he was one of the most sheltered people I'd ever met. He'd never even been on a plane before. "I want to figure out who I am. There's an ashram near Chennai called Sri Ramanasramam, and I want to stay there." "For how long?" "Six months or a year, or possibly forever. I really don't know. I'm just kind of rolling with it." I was surprised but not shocked. Extramask's sudden transformation 361 from pickup artist to spiritual seeker reminded me of Dustin. Some people spend their lives trying to fill a hole in their soul. When women don't ab- sorb that emptiness, they look to something bigger: God. I wondered where Dustin and Extramask would turn afterward, when they discovered that even God wasn't big enough to plug the hole inside. "Well, man, good luck on your journey. I wish I could say that I was go- ing to miss you, but we've hardly even talked to each other for half a year now. It's been a little strange." "Yeah," he said. "That's my fault." He paused, and his lips forced them- selves into a curvy smile. For a moment, the old Extramask was back. "I used to be an insecure bitch," he said. "So was I," I told him. By the time I got back to the house, the TV producers from Britain had arrived, along with a prospective manager for Courtney and a stylist. "I can't work with her anymore," the stylist said when it became clear that Courtney wouldn't be showing up in time for the shoot. "Ever since she's been doing drugs, she's become a nightmare to deal with." We hadn't seen any evidence of drugs in the house, but considering Courtney's erratic behavior, perhaps Project Hollywood hadn't kept her away from them as she had hoped. I felt bad for her. She was allowing the problems of the house to distract her from the real-life issues she should have been dealing with. Perhaps we all were. I awoke that night to see Courtney standing at the foot of my bed with a Prada shoe in her hand. "Let's redecorate the house," she said excitedly. "This will be our hammer." I looked at the clock. It was 2:20 A.M. "Do you have any nails or tacks?" she asked. Without waiting for an an- swer, she ran downstairs and returned with a box of nails, a framed painting for my wall, a throw pillow for my bed, and a smashed pink box that looked like an old Valentine's Day present. "This is the heart-shaped box," she said. "I want you to have it." She picked up my guitar, sat on the edge of my bed, and played my fa- vorite country song, "Long Black Veil." "I'm going to a friend's birthday party tomorrow night at Forbidden City," she said, dropping the guitar to the floor. "I want you to come too. It'll be good for us to get out of the house together." 362 "I'll tell you what. I'll meet you there." I knew how long she could take to get ready. "Okay. I'll go with Lisa." "Speaking of Lisa," I said. "There were a bunch of people waiting for you here today and you were nowhere to be found. I think they're pretty upset." Her face clouded, her lips puckered, and tears dripped from her eyes. "I'm going to get help," she said. "I promise." I wore a white blazer over a black shirt emblazoned with a scrolling bank of LCD lights that could be programmed with a message. I input the words "Kill me." I hadn't been out sarging in at least a month and wanted the at- tention. My expectations for Courtney showing up to Forbidden City were low, so I brought Herbal along as a wing. We had recently flown to Houston together to pick up the Project Hol- lywood limousine, a 1998 ten-passenger stretch Cadillac Herbal had found on eBay. Flush with the success of that scheme, Herbal had, against our bet- ter judgment, put down a deposit to buy a wallaby at an exotic pets website. On the way to the party, we argued about the practicality and humanity of having a baby marsupial in the house. "They make the best pets," he insisted. "They're like house-trained kan- garoos. They sleep with you, they bathe with you, and you can take them for walks by holding their tail." The last thing we needed was a wallaby in the mix at Project Holly- wood. The only bright side to the fiasco was that it made for a great opener. We ran around the party asking everyone for their opinion on having walla- bies as pets. Between the opener and my shirt, within a half hour we were surrounded by women. It felt good to flex our skills again. We'd been so ab- sorbed by the drama of the house that we had forgotten the reason we'd moved there in the first place. As a tall, stoop-shouldered girl who claimed to be a model pawed at my shirt, I saw a mane of bleached-blonde hair sticking up out of the crowd. I looked closer. Though she was on the other side of the room, she seemed to glow. Her jaw was set, her face was chiseled, her eyes smoldered beneath a half-shell of heavy blue eye shadow. It was Courtney's guitarist, Lisa. Next to her, all the wanna-be models and actresses I had been talking to seemed insignificant. She dwarfed them with her style and poise. I excused myself and ran up to her. "Where's Courtney?" I asked. "She was taking too long to get ready. So I came alone." 364 "I respect a person who isn't afraid to show up at a party alone." "I am the party," she said, without blinking or smiling. I think she was serious. For the entire night, Lisa and I sat side-by-side in a chair, the most pea- cocked couple in the room. The party seemed to come to us, as if we exerted some sort of gravitational pull together. The couches around us soon filled with models, comedians, reality TV has-beens, and Dennis Rodman. When the various women I had talked to during the night came by to flirt, Lisa and I drew on their arms with pens or fed them shots of Hypnotiq or gave them intelligence tests that they usually failed. This is what the PUAs call creating an "our world" conspiracy. We were in our own little bubble, where we were king and queen, and everyone else was our plaything for the night. When a phalanx of paparazzi started taking pictures of Dennis Rod- man, who was standing nearby, I looked at Lisa's face, illuminated by the flashbulbs. And out of nowhere, my heart awoke from its torpor and body- checked my chest. When the party broke up, Lisa put her arm around me and asked, "Will you take me home? I'm too drunk to drive." My heart slammed again, and then settled into a fast, arrhythmic throb. She may have been too drunk to drive, but I was too nervous to drive. Without waiting for a response, she dropped the keys to her Mercedes into my hand. I called to Herbal and asked him to drive my car home. "I can't believe it," I told him. "It's on!" But it wasn't on. I drove Lisa back to her place. I recognized the building: It was directly across the street from the Hollywood Mental Health Center where I had taken Mystery. When we arrived, she went to the bathroom. I lay down on her bed and tried to look relaxed. Lisa padded out of the bathroom, looked at me, and then said, with a withering look, "Don't think anything's going to happen between us." Damnit, I'm Style. You have to love me. I'm an mPUA. She changed, and we drove to my house to look for Courtney. All we found there, however, was Tyler Durden leading ten men in the living room through some sort of exercise that involved running around the couches, yelling loudly, and giving each other high fives. Tyler had been experiment- ing lately with a technique of physically pumping up his students' mood for a night out meeting women. He believed that whether or not they actually performed better, the shot of adrenaline and camaraderie would make 365 them think they had fun, and thus give Real Social Dynamics good reviews in the seduction newsgroups. It was becoming a competitive industry. Courtney seemed to have disappeared again. Maybe she'd been serious the other night and really was getting help, or maybe she was off getting into more trouble. I took Lisa up to my room, lit some candles, put Cesaria Evora in the CD player, and went to my closet. "Let's have some fun," I told her. I pulled out a garbage bag full of old Halloween costumes: masks, wigs, hats. We tried them all on, taking photos with my digital camera. I was go- ing to attempt the digital photo routine. We took a photo smiling, then serious. For the third photo, the roman- tic pose, we gazed at each other. Her eyes seemed so happy. Behind that tough exterior was vulnerability and tenderness. I held her eye contact and moved toward her for the kiss, holding the camera in front of us to capture it. "I'm not kissing you," she barked. The words scalded my face like hot coffee. There was no girl I couldn't kiss within half an hour of meeting her. What was her problem? I froze her out and tried again. Nothing. It is in these moments that, as a PUA, you start to question the work you've done on yourself You begin to worry that maybe she sees the real you, the one who existed before the silly nickname, the one who wrote po- ems about this exact situation in high school. I delivered a moving, impassioned performance of the evolution phase-shift routine. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a thousand PUAs applauding. "I'm not biting you," she said. I wasn't through. I told her the most beautiful love story ever written: "On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" by Haruki Murakami. It is about a man and a woman who are soul mates. But when they doubt their connection for a moment and decide not to act on it, they lose each other forever. She was ice cold. I tried a hardcore freeze-out: I blew out the candles, stopped the music, turned on the lights, and checked my e-mail. She climbed into my bed, curled up under the covers, and went to sleep. Finally I joined her, and we slept on opposite sides of the bed. 366 I still had one trick left: going caveman. In the morning, without a word, I started massaging her leg, working my hand slowly up her thigh. If I could just turn her on physically, her logic would disengage and she would no doubt submit. My intention wasn't to use Lisa for sex. I knew I wanted to see her again, no matter what happened. I just wanted to get the whole sex thing over with so we could be normal together. She wouldn't be trying to keep anything from me; I wouldn't be trying to get something from her. I always hated the idea that sex is something a woman gives and a man takes. It is something that should be shared. But Lisa wasn't sharing. As I began to rub the warm crease where her thigh meets her pelvis, her voice rang shrill in the air like an alarm clock. "What are you doing?" She smacked my hand away. We had breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner. We talked about Courtney and the PUAs and my writing and her music and our lives, and all kinds of other things that I can't remember but must have been fascinating because hours passed in the blink of an eye. She was my age; she liked all the same bands I did; she said something intelligent every time she opened her mouth; she laughed at my jokes that were funny and made fun of the ones that weren't. She spent another night with me. Nothing happened. I had met my match. After breakfast, I stood on the front stoop and watched Lisa leave. She walked uphill, climbed into her Mercedes, lowered the convertible top, and pulled away. I turned around to climb the stairs. I didn't want to glance back. I wanted to look cool, and not give her any more IOIs. "Hey, come here," she yelled from her car. I shook my head no. She was ruining my exit. "No, seriously, come here. It's important." I sighed and walked back down to her car. "I'm really sorry, don't be up- set," she said. "But I think I might have accidentally dented your limo when I was pulling out." My body went cold. It was our newest and most expensive possession. "Just kidding," she said, stepping on the accelerator and leaving me in the dust with a wave. I saw her blonde hair streaming over the side of the car as she turned down Sunset, blasting the Clash. I had been played by her—again. I told Mystery about my frustration with Lisa as we sat in the hot tub one night. I'd turned to him so often in the past for advice on women, and he'd rarely steered me wrong. Though relationship management was clearly not his forte, he was flawless when it came to blasting through last- minute resistance. "Start stroking yourself," he said. "Now? Here?" "No, next time you're in bed together, just take your cock out and start stroking it." "Then what?" "Then you take her hand and put it on your balls. And she'll start giv- ing you a hand job." "Are you serious?" "Yes. Then you put your finger on your dick and put a little precum on it, and put your finger in her mouth." "No way. This is like that bad joke advice you see in movies, where the friend does it and the girl freaks out and the guy who gave the advice goes, 'I thought you knew I was kidding.'" "I'm totally serious. You've practically had sex after that." Three days later, after the bars closed at 2:00 AM, Lisa dropped by my house with Sam, Courtney's drummer. She was wasted. We climbed into bed and babbled to each other for hours. "I don't know what my problem is," she slurred. "I never want to leave your room. I could just listen to you talk forever." She rolled toward me. "Forget I said that," she snapped. "I didn't mean it. Alcohol is like a truth serum." Now was my chance. Mystery's words ran through my head, and I con- sidered the pros and cons of stroking myself and placing her hand on me. I couldn't do it. Not because I was scared, but because there was no way it was going to work. Lisa would have laughed in my face and said some- thing cutting like, "You might as well touch yourself, because I'm certainly 368 not about to." Then she would have told all her friends about the cheesy guy who started rubbing his dick in front of her. Mystery wasn't always right. So we spent another platonic night together. It was driving me crazy. I knew she liked me. Yet she wouldn't get intimate. I was teetering on the border of being LJBF'ed. Maybe I just wasn't her type. I imagined her with tattooed, muscle- bound, leather-jacketed Danzig types, not scrawny metrosexual guys who had to take pickup workshops. She was killing me. For the first time since I'd learned the word one-itis, I had it. And I knew that I was doomed. No one ever gets his one-itis. He gets too clingy and needy and blows it. And, sure enough, I blew it. The next night, Lisa left town to play a festival in Atlanta with Court- ney. She called three times while she was gone. "Are you free for dinner when I get back?" she asked. "I don't know," I told her. "It depends on whether you can behave your- self or not." "Fine, then," she said. "If you're going to be like that, I don't need to go." I was just trying to tease her and bust her balls, like David DeAngelo had taught me. And in doing so, I had destroyed the moment. I sounded like an asshole. "Don't be a troublemaker," I said. It was time to be straightforward. "I want to see you when you're back. I'm leaving town for two weeks, so it will be our last chance to hang out." In the background, I could hear Sam speaking. "You're talking to him like he's your boyfriend," she told Lisa. "Maybe I want him to be my boyfriend," Lisa said to her. So I hadn't been LJBF'ed. I couldn't wait for her to come back. I wanted her to be my girlfriend too. I spent the entire day of Lisa's return plotting the perfect seduction. I would pick her up from the airport in the limo. Herbal would drive, and I would wait for her in the backseat. Then I'd take her to the Whiskey Bar at the Sunset Marquis Hotel—walking distance from Project Hollywood. Because women don't respect guys who pay for them but at the same time are turned off by guys who are cheap, I went to the Whiskey Bar ahead of time, gave the manager $100, and told him to make sure whatever we or- dered was on the house. Afterward, I planned to take her home. On my 3E9 computer, I wrote down all the patterns and routines I would use to combat her LMR. Now that I knew she liked me, I had the confidence to push this thing to the end. If she still resisted, then she clearly had intimacy issues and I'd have to be the one to LJBF her. Her flight was scheduled to arrive at 6:30 P.M. As Herbal drove the limo past the Delta terminal looking for her, I mixed Cosmopolitans at the bar in the back of the car. When the flight arrived, however, she wasn't on it. I was confused, but not disappointed—yet. A PUA must be willing to change or abandon any plan when confronted with the chaos and chance of reality. So Herbal drove me home, and I left a message for Lisa. When she didn't call back, I left another message and then waited all night in vain to hear from her. At five o'clock that morning, I was awakened by my cell phone ringing. "Sorry to wake you up, but I need to talk to someone." The voice on the other end was a man's. The accent was Australian. It was Sweater. Since I'd last seen Sweater, he had left the community and gotten mar- ried. I thought about him often. Every time someone asked if guys in the community were learning these skills just to have sex with as many women as possible, I pointed to Sweater as an example of someone who had gotten into the game for all the right reasons. "I tried to kill myself today," he said. "What happened?" "My wife is expecting our first baby in ten days, and I'm miserable. I do everything for her, but it's not enough. She's driven me away from my friends. My business partner is leaving me. She spends all my money and all she does is complain." He paused to choke back his tears. "And now that she's having this baby, I'm trapped." "But you were in love with her. How can she just change?" "No. The problem is that I changed. It was too hard to be that person who Mystery and David DeAngelo taught us to be. That person wasn't a good guy. And that's not the kind of person I wanted to be. I like doing nice things for people. So I got her whatever she wanted. I sent her flowers three times a week. I tried it her way, but it didn't work." I'd never heard grown men cry as much as I had in the last two years. "I sat in the garage today with the motor running and the windows up," he 37D continued. "I haven't thought of suicide since 1986. But I just got to the point where I was like, 'Fuck.' I didn't see any purpose in living." Sweater didn't need to be saved. He just wanted a friend to talk to. He had pretended to be someone he wasn't just to seduce a woman, and now he was suffering the consequences. "When I first got in the community, I wrote down everything I wanted," he said. "And now I'm living the life I imagined. I have the money, the big house, and the beautiful girl. But I wasn't specific enough about the beauti- ful girl. I never wrote that she had to treat me with respect and kindness." Later that morning, Courtney returned to the house. I could hear her screaming at Gabby in the living room. I walked downstairs to discover Courtney carrying Cabby's bags out of the house, and I found myself saying the same three words that seemed to come out of my mouth every time I entered the living room: "What's going on?" "Gabby got into a fight with Mystery, and she's moving out," Courtney said. "So I'm helping her." Courtney could barely conceal her smile. "Did the rest of the band get back from Atlanta yet?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "Yeah. They came home on an earlier flight." I turned away quickly. I knew if I said anything in response, my voice would betray my disappointment. After Gabby left, Courtney threw a bundle of sage on the coffee table. "Let's clear the air in here," she said. Then she skipped off to the kitchen, ex- plaining, "We need some rice for good fortune." Unable to locate any rice, she returned with a package of jambalaya mix and a bowl of water. She poured the jambalaya mix into the water, planted the sage in the middle of it, and then ran to her room. She emerged carrying a blue-and-white-checkered flannel shirt. "This will work," she said. "It's one of Kurt's shirts. I only have three of them left." She carefully arranged the shirt underneath the table, safe from harm, so that it could bring good energy to the house. After lighting the sage, she sat Mystery, Herbal, and me down next to her makeshift altar, and we joined hands. Her grip was bone-crushing. "Thank you God for this day and all that you have given us," she 371 prayed. "We ask that you clear the energy of this house of all evil. Please bring peace and harmony and friendship under this roof. No more tears! And help me win my court case in New York and help clear up all my other problems. I will work with you, God. I really will. Give me strength. Amen." "Amen," we repeated. The next day, a driver came and whisked Courtney to the airport to go to New York. There, her prayers for herself would eventually be answered, but the atmosphere in the house would only grow darker in her absence. Courtney and Gabby, it soon became clear, weren't the cause of any prob- lems: They had merely been the symptoms of something much larger that was eating away at our lives. That afternoon, Lisa left me a short voice mail. "Hi, it's Lisa. I'm back. We took an earlier flight." That was it. No apology, no tenderness, no mention of the plans she had completely blown off. I called her back, but she didn't answer. "I'm leaving town in a few hours to go to Miami with Vision," I told her voice mail. "I would really love to talk to you before I leave." It was an AFC message, and I never heard back from her. I checked my voice mail every day while I was away. Nothing. I wasn't a plower, like Tyler Durden. If she were interested, she would have called. I'd been blown off. And by the first woman I had felt something for in a while. I figured she'd probably started dating someone else, some- one who had been able to break through her LMR. First I was angry at her, then I was angry at myself, and then I was just sad. The PUAs had always advised that the best way to get over a one-itis is to fuck a dozen other girls. So I went on a rampage. I didn't want to end up like Sweater, anyway. I had almost let myself get caught. I went sarging every night in Miami, with more fire, drive, and success than I'd ever had. I've never been a fan of one-night stands. Once you've gotten that close to someone, why throw it away afterward? I'm more a fan of ten-night stands: ten nights of great sex, each one getting steamier, wilder, and more experimental as two people grow more comfortable to- gether and learn what turns each other on. So after I slept with each woman, I mixed and matched them like jellybeans. It was my reality. The girls I was most looking forward to getting together were Jessica, a tattoo-covered twenty-one-year-old I'd slept with a few times in Los Angeles, and another Jessica, who I'd met at Crobar. She was also twenty-one, but the exact opposite of Jessica I. She was innocent looking, with a touch of baby fat. I knew they both liked porn, so I thought things might get interesting. After a drink at the hotel bar, I brought them up to my room for a rune 373 reading and then left them alone for a few minutes to get acquainted. When I returned, I showed them home movies on my laptop and then began the trusty dual-induction massage. It was all just a routine now, like the jealous girlfriend opener or the best friends test. And it worked just as consistently. Once the girls' lips touched, they transformed from strangers to lovers. It shocked me every time to see two women get intimate so quickly in such an unusual situation. The night was as nasty as I'd anticipated. We tried every position we could twist into, some more successfully than others. When Jessica I asked me to come in her mouth, I obliged. She spit the wad into Jessica II's mouth, and they started making out passionately. It was the sexiest mo- ment of my entire life. But afterward I felt empty and alone. I didn't care about them. All I re- ally had was a memory and a story. Every girl in my life could disappear and never call me again, and I wouldn't have cared. All the ten-night stands and threesomes in the world wouldn't be enough to get me over my one-itis. The PUAs were wrong. Male sexuality may seem on the surface like it runs rampant in society— there are strip clubs, porn websites, Maxim-style magazines, and titillating advertisements everywhere. But, despite all this, true male desire is often kept repressed. Men think about sex more than they will ever let women, or even each other, know. Teachers think about fucking their students, fathers think about fucking their daughter's friends, doctors think about fucking their patients. And right now, for every woman with even an iota of sex appeal, there's probably a man somewhere in the world who's touching himself and thinking about what it would be like to fuck her. She may not even know him: He may be that businessman who walked past her in the street or the college student who sat across from her on the subway. And any man who tells a woman otherwise is most likely doing so because he's trying to get in her pants, or the pants of someone else within earshot. The great lie of modern dating is that in order to sleep with a woman, a man must pretend initially as if he doesn't want to. Most appalling to women is the male obsession with strippers, porn stars, and teenage girls. It is abhorrent because it threatens a woman's real- ity. If all men really desire a woman like that, then where does that leave her marriage and happily-ever-after fantasies? She's doomed to live them with a man who really wants that Victoria's Secret model or the neighbor's daugh- ter or that dominatrix in the videos he hides in his closet. As a woman ages, an eighteen-year-old girl will always be eighteen. Love is dashed on the rocks in the face of the possibility that a man doesn't want a person but a body. Fortunately, this is not the entire story. Men are visual thinkers; thus we're often deceived by our eyes. But the truth is that the fantasy is often better than the reality. I had just learned that lesson. Most men eventually learn that lesson. Mystery may have thought he wanted to live with two girls who love each other as much as they love him, but chances are they'd get on his nerves, team up against him, and eventually make him just as miserable as he'd been with Katya. 375 Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it. This is the one reason why men tend to fear commitment—and sometimes, as in Mystery's case, even rebel against it by endeavoring to bring out the worst in a woman. While I was in Miami, Katya returned. I dreaded the day and the terror it would unleash in the house. But Mystery was looking forward to it like a birthday. He had it all planned out. Because I was away, I have reconstructed the story of the disaster that ensued from the accounts of those involved. Project Hollywood had reached a new nadir. MYSTERY: I met a nineteen-year-old hottie named Jen at an after- Yüklə 2,79 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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