Notesale: Turn your study into money

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ALSO BY NEIL STRAUSS

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
WITH MARILYN MANSON

The Dirt

THE GAME

PENETRATING THE SECRET
SOCIETY OF PICKUP ARTISTS

WITH MOTLEY CRUE

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star
WITH JENNA JAMESON

Don't Try This at Home
WITH DAVE NAVARRO

Neil Strauss
ReganBooks
An Imprint ofHarperCollinsPublishers

Cover silhouettes are from the following fonts: Darrian's Sexy Silhouettes by © Darrian
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All Rights
Reserved
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Used by Permission
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THE GAME
COPYRIGHT © 2 0 0 5 BY N E I L STRAUSS
...
Printed in the United States of America
...
For information, address
HarperCollins Publishers Inc
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HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational,
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ISBN 0-06-055473-8
05 06 07 08 09 QWK 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to the thousands of people I talked to in
bars, clubs, malls, airports, grocery stores, subways,
and elevators over the last two vears
...
I was being sincere
...
You were different
...

AND NOW I AM EKING OUT MY DAYS
IN MY CORNER, TAUNTING MYSELF
WITH THE BITTER AND ENTIRELY
USELESS CONSOLATION THAT AN
INTELLIGENT MAN CANNOT SERIOUSLY
BECOME ANYTHING; THAT ONLY
A FOOL CAN BECOME SOMETHING
...


THE
FOLLOWING
IS A TRUE
STORY
...

Men will deny it,
Women will doubt it
...

I beg you for your forgiveness in advance
...

HATE THE GAME
...


— BETTY FRIEDAN
The Feminine Mystique

The house was a disaster
...
He'd been crying for two days straight
...
Ordinary tears are understand¬
able
...
He was out of control
...
And now he was threatening to kill
himself
...
Boys and men came from every corner of the globe to shake
our hands, take photos with us, learn from us, be us
...
It
was a name I had earned
...
Even our mansion, like
the others we had spawned everywhere from San Francisco to Sydney, had
a nickname
...
And Project Hollywood was in
shambles
...
The white carpet had gone gray from the constant traffic of
young, perfumed humanity herded in off Sunset Boulevard every night
...
And Mys¬
tery's rampage during the last few days had left the rest of the place totaled
and the residents petrified
...

"I can't tell you what this feels like," he choked out between sobs
...
"I don't know what I'm going to do, but it will not be
rational
...

He wore a gold silk robe that was several sizes too small, exposing his
scabbed knees
...
The only other item of
clothing on his trembling body was a winter cap pulled tight over his skull
...

"This living thing
...
"It's so pointless
...
"It's Tic Tac Toe
...
So the best thing to do is not to play it
...
I would have to deal with this
...

Each cycle of emotions grew worse, and this time I was afraid he'd do some¬
thing that couldn't be undone
...
He was more than just a friend;
he was a mentor
...
I needed to get him Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, anything
...
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
...
She was a party girl; she must have something
...

"Do not come in," I warned her
...
" Not that she
didn't entirely deserve it, of course
...

I gave Mystery the pill and a glass of water, and waited until the sobs
slowed to a sniffle
...
He was docile now, like a big baby
...

I walked him outside to my old rusty Corvette and stuffed him into the

tiny front seat
...
I hoped he'd remain calm long enough for
me to help him
...
"
I stepped on the accelerator
...
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
...
He just happened to have
charisma and talent, which drew others to him and prevented him from
ever being left alone in the world
...

I brought him into the lobby, signed him in, and together we waited for
a turn with one of the counselors
...

An hour passed
...

Two hours passed
...

Three hours passed
...

Four hours passed
...

He walked briskly, like a man who knew where he was going, although
Project Hollywood was three miles away
...
I took his arm and turned him
around, baby talking him back into the waiting room
...
Ten minutes
...
Thirty
...

I ran after him
...

"Stop him!" I yelled
...
"He's left the premises
...
"Just have a therapist ready to see him if I get him back
here
...
He wasn't there
...
Nothing
...

When we arrived, the social workers led him down a long, dark hallway
and into a claustrophobic cubicle with a sheet-vinyl floor
...
She was
a slim Asian woman in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, dark red lip¬
stick, and a pinstriped pantsuit
...

"So how are you feeling today?" she asked, forcing a smile
...
" He burst
into tears
...
The case was
probably already closed for her
...

She looked at him with feigned sympathy as he continued
...
All she needed to figure out
was whether he required medication or institutionalization
...
"It's futile
...
As Mystery reached for the package, he
looked up and met her eyes for the first time
...
She was surprisingly cute for a clinic like this
...
"If I had
met you in another time and another place," he said, crumpling a tissue in
his hands, "things would have been different
...
He stared glumly at the floor as he spoke
...
"It's all in my
head
...
Every step
...
I just can't
...
"
She nodded mechanically
...
"I've dated some of the most beautiful women in the world
...
"
"Yes," she said, patronizing him
...
"
She didn't know
...

That was not a matter of opinion, but fact
...
It was his hobby, his passion, his calling
...

And that man was sitting in front of her also
...
Together, we had ruled the
world of seduction
...

And now we were in a madhouse
...
My nose is too large for my face and, while not
hooked, has a bump in the ridge
...
There are just wispy Rogaineenhanced growths covering the top of my head like tumbleweeds
...
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
...
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
...
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
...
All I have is my mind, and nobody can see that
...
This is be¬
cause my personality has completely changed
...
I invented Style, my alter ego
...

It was never my intention to change my personality or walk through the
world under an assumed identity
...
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
...
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
...

I wasn't so sure
...
But, of course, I told him it wouldn't hurt to take a look at it
...
More than any other
book or document—be it the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or The Joy of
Cooking—the layguide opened my eyes
...

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
...
I am a deep man—I reread James
Joyce's Ulysses every three years for fun
...
I am at the core a good person, and I try to avoid hurting others
...

And I know I'm not alone
...
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
...
If he ever wanted to sleep with somebody else, he said,
the rule was that they'd all do it together
...
When does it stop? If Hugh
Hefner isn't over it yet, when am I going to be?
If the layguide had never crossed my path, I, like most men, would never
have evolved in my thinking about the opposite sex
...
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
...
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)
...
In four
years of college, I did not sleep with a single woman on campus
...
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
...
After that, I pretty much gave up
hope
...
I clearly didn't
...
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
...
But he did possess one
quality we didn't: He attracted women
...
One night, I
took him to a party on a boat anchored in New York's Hudson River
...
"
I denied it and stared at the floor, as usual
...

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
...

We met her and her boyfriend at a bar afterward
...
Her boyfriend was taking their dog for a walk
...

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
...
Then, in synchronicity, we moved down her body to her neck and her
breasts
...
He turned to me and asked if I had a
condom
...
He pulled off her pants and moved into her
while I continued lapping uselessly at her right breast
...
He was
short and swarthy with long curly brown hair and a cheesy button-down
gigolo shirt with too many buttons undone
...
As we checked our coats, Dustin asked, "Do you
know if there are any dark corners in here?"

That was Dustin's gift, his power: giving women the fantasy they never
thought they'd experience
...
She
wanted to talk about the experience all the time, to rationalize it, because
she couldn't believe what she had done
...


I asked him what he needed dark corners for, and he replied that they
were good places to take girls
...
Minutes af¬
ter entering the bar, however, he made eye contact with a shy-looking girl
who was talking with a friend
...
The
girl followed him—straight to a dark corner
...

Dustin repeated this seemingly miraculous feat four times that night
...

I grilled him for hours, trying to determine what sort of magical powers
he possessed
...
He had lost his virginity

I chalked this up to a simple difference of personality
...
Or at least that's what
I thought, until I read the layguide and explored the newsgroups and web¬
sites it recommended
...
The difference was that these men had broken
down their methods to a specific set of rules that anybody could apply
...

There was Mystery, a magician; Ross Jeffries, a hypnotist; Rick H
...
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
...
I was an AFC
...


12

up comedian; David X, a construction worker; and Steve P
...
Put
them on South Beach in Miami and any number of better-looking, musclebound bullies will be kicking sand in their pale, emaciated faces
...

Once I discovered their world, the first thing that changed was my vo¬
cabulary
...
Then my daily rituals
changed as I became addicted to the online locker room these pickup artists
had created
...
"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
...
) Soon I realized this was not just
an Internet phenomenon but a way of life
...

In the guise of Jeremie Ruby-Strauss and the Internet, God had given
me a second chance
...

But I couldn't do it on my own
...
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
...

And so began the strangest two years of my life
...


STEP 2

APPROACH
AND OPEN

THE FIRST PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US,
MEN AND WOMEN, IS NOT TO LEARN,
BUT TO UNLEARN
...
It was not the proudest moment of
my life
...
I wanted to look my best; this would be my
first time hanging out with a real pickup artist
...
He was
the most worshipped pickup artist in the community, a powerhouse who
spit out long, detailed posts that read like algorithms of how to manipu¬
late social situations to meet and attract women
...
For
four years, he had been offering free advice in seduction newsgroups
...
The first workshop will be in Los Ange¬
les from Wednesday evening, October 10, through Saturday night
...
S
...
By the end of Basic
Training, you will have approached close to fifty women
...
To do so is to acknowledge defeat, inferiority, and inadequacy
...

Those who ask for help are often those who have failed to do something for
themselves
...

Clicking send on my e-mail to Mystery was one of the hardest things
I'd ever done
...
So I kept my intentions secret, dodging social plans by
telling people that I was going to be showing an old friend around town all
weekend
...

In my e-mail to Mystery, I didn't tell him my last name or my occupa¬
tion
...
I
wanted to move through this subculture anonymously, without either an
advantage or extra pressure because of my credentials
...
This was, far and
away, the most pathetic thing I'd ever done in my life
...
Mystery and the other students would be there to bear witness to
my shame, my secret, my inadequacy
...
Half of life then was out of order
...


A week after sending the e-mail, I walked into the lobby of the Hollywood
Roosevelt Hotel
...
My pockets bulged with the
supplies Mystery had instructed every student to bring: a pen, a notepad, a
pack of gum, and condoms
...
He was seated regally in a Victorian arm¬
chair, with a smug, I-just-bench-pressed-the-world smile on his face
...
He wasn't nec¬
essarily attractive, but he was charismatic—tall and thin, with long chest¬
nut hair, high cheekbones, and a bloodless pallor
...

Next to him was a shorter, intense-looking character who introduced
himself as Mystery's wing, Sin
...
He had the complex¬
ion, however, of a man whose natural hair color is red
...

"What's your top score?" Sin leaned in and asked as I sat down
...

"My top score?"
"Yeah, how many girls have you been with?"
"Um, somewhere around seven," I told them
...

"Six," I confessed
...
I looked at them in
wonder: These were the pickup artists whose exploits I'd been following so
avidly online for months
...

As we waited for the other students, Mystery threw a manila envelope
full of photographs in my lap
...

In the folder was a spectacular array of beautiful women: a headshot of
a sultry Japanese actress; an autographed publicity still of a brunette who
bore an uncanny resemblance to Liv Tyler; a glossy picture of'a Penthouse Pet
of the Year; a snapshot of a tan, curvy stripper in a negligee who Mystery
said was his girlfriend, Patricia; and a photo of a brunette with large silicone
breasts, which were being suckled by Mystery in the middle of a nightclub
...

"I was able to do that by not paying attention to her breasts all night,"
he explained when I asked about the last shot
...
You must not do what everyone else does
...
"
I listened carefully
...
I was attending a significant event; the only other credi¬
ble pickup artist teaching courses was Ross Jeffries, who had basically
founded the community in the late 1980s
...

A second student arrived, introducing himself as Extramask
...
With the right haircut and outfit, he
would easily have been a good-looking guy
...
"I have virtually zero experience with girls," he explained
...
"
"You're kidding," Sin said
...
I grew up pretty sheltered
...
But
I've had three girlfriends
...
There
was Mitzelle, who broke up with him after seven days
...


19

"And then there was Carolina, my sweet Carolina," he said, a dreamy
smile spreading across his face
...
I remember
her walking over to my house the next afternoon with her friend
...
When I got closer, she yelled,
'I'm dumping you
...
Extramask shook his head sadly
...

The next arrival was a tanned, balding man in his forties who'd flown in
from Australia just to attend the workshop
...
He reeked of money and confi¬
dence
...
His voice trembled; he couldn't look anyone in the eye;
and there was something pathetic and childlike about him
...

He was new to the community and reluctant to share even his first
name, so Mystery christened him Sweater
...

"Okay, we've got a lot to talk about," Mystery said, clapping his
hands together
...

"My job here is to get you into the game," he continued, making pierc¬
ing eye contact with each of us
...

Think of tonight as a video game
...
Every time you do an ap¬
proach, you are playing this game
...
The thought of trying to start a
conversation with a woman I didn't know petrified me, especially with these
guys watching and judging me
...

"All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up," Mystery continued
...
You will feel shy sometimes, and self-conscious, and you
must deal with it like you deal with a pebble in your shoe
...
It's not part of the equation
...
"I need to teach you, in four days, the whole equation—the sequence of

20

moves you need to win," Mystery went on
...
So get ready to fail
...
He spoke in a loud, clear voice—modeled, he said, on
the motivational speaker Anthony Robbins
...

Since the age of eleven, when he beat the secret to a card trick out of a
classmate, Mystery's goal in life was to become a celebrity magician, like
David Copperfield
...
In the process, however, his social life suffered
...

"One of the world's greatest mysteries is the mind of a woman," he told
us grandiosely
...
"
He took a half hour bus ride into Toronto every day, going to bars,
clothing stores, restaurants, and coffee shops
...
It took him dozens of trips to the
city before he even worked up the guts to talk to a stranger
...

"It took me ten years to discover this," he said
...
Believe it or not, the game is linear
...
"
For the next half hour, Mystery told us about what he called group the¬
ory
...
"You
do not walk up to a girl who's all by herself
...
Women of beauty are rarely found alone
...
If the target is attractive and used to men
fawning all over her, the pickup artist must intrigue her by pretending to be
unaffected by her charm
...

Neither compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between—an ac¬
cidental insult or backhanded compliment
...

"I don't alienate ugly girls; I don't alienate guys
...
"If you don't believe me, you will see it tonight
...
First, I am going to prove myself
...
Tomorrow, if
you do what I say, you will be able to make out with a girl within fifteen
minutes
...
"Name the five characteristics of an alpha
male
...
What else?"
"Strength?"
"No
...
We were also clueless
...
"Smile when you enter a room
...
And by smiling, you look like you're together,
you're fun, and you're somebody
...
"When you came in, you didn't smile when you
talked to us
...
"I look silly when I smile
...
It's called the Mystery Method because I'm Mystery
and it's my method
...
You are going to
see a difference
...
No one
bothered to tell Mystery that those were actually six characteristics
...
They had never given us the

22

tools we needed to become fully effective social beings
...

Mystery went around the table and looked at each of us
...

Sweater pulled a piece of neatly folded notebook paper out of his
pocket
...
"And
one of the things I'm looking for is a wife
...
"
"Well, look at you," Mystery said
...
People think if
they look generic, then they can seduce a wide array of women
...

You have to specialize
...

Your khaki pants are for the office
...
And your
sweater—burn it
...
I'm talking over the top
...
"
Mystery loved theories
...
For humans, he told us, the equivalent of the
fanned peacock tail is a shiny shirt, a garish hat, and jewelry that lights up
in the dark—basically, everything I'd dismissed my whole life as cheesy
...

I wrote down every word of advice
...
The archive of his Internet messages was 3,000 posts
long—more than 2,500 pages—all dedicated to cracking the code that is
woman
...
An opener is a prepared
script used to start a conversation with a group of strangers; it's the first
thing anyone who wants to meet women must be armed with
...
'Hey, it looks like the party's over
here
...
'"
A flash of crimson burned up my face
...
"How is that
going to help?"

23

"Once she's attracted to you, it won't matter whether you said you were
gay or not
...
"It's flirting
...

The point of Mystery Method, he explained, is to come in under the
radar
...
Learn about her
first and let her earn the right to be hit on
...
"A pro waits eight to ten minutes
...


25

We piled into the limo and drove to the Standard Lounge, a velvet-ropeguarded hotel hotspot
...
Limits I had once imposed on human interaction were extended far
beyond what I ever thought possible
...

The Standard was dead when we walked in
...
There
were just two groups of people in the room: a couple near the entrance and
two couples in the corner
...
But then I saw Mystery approach the people in the
corner
...
The men
were on one side
...
Across from him were two women, a
brunette and a bleached blonde who looked like she'd stepped out of the
pages of Maxim
...
This woman was Baio's date
...

His intentions were clear because he wasn't talking to her
...
I moved in closer
...
"It cost forty-thousand dollars
...
He placed it carefully on the
table
...
"I tense my stomach muscles, in¬
creasing the flow of oxygen to my brain, and
...
He waited fifteen seconds, then waved his hands again, and slowly
the watch sputtered back to life—along with Baio's heart
...

"Do something else!" the blonde pleaded
...
"Wow, she's so demanding," he
said, turning to Baio
...
The more Mystery per¬
formed for the guys, the more the blonde clamored for attention
...

"I don't usually go out," Baio was telling Mystery
...
"
After a few more minutes, Mystery finally acknowledged the blonde
...
She placed her hands in his, and he began giving her a
psychic reading
...
In the field, all
knowledge—however esoteric—is power
...
Every response Mystery gave was intended to accentuate his youth
and enthusiasm for the good life Baio said he had outgrown
...

"How old are you?" she asked
...
"
"That's not old
...
"
He was in
...
He wanted me to talk
to Baio and his friend, to keep them occupied while he hit on the girl
...

I struggled to make small talk with them
...
"Tell me this is all an illusion," he said,
"and he's not actually stealing my girlfriend
...
Outside, he pulled a cocktail napkin from his jacket pocket
...
"Did you get a good look at her?" Mystery
asked
...
Everything I've learned I used to¬
night
...
And it worked
...
"How's that for a demonstration?"
That was all it took
...
Mys¬
tery was the real deal
...
A man has three seconds after spotting
a woman to speak to her, he said
...

The moment we walked into the Key Club, Mystery put the threesecond rule into action
...
"
As the girls gathered around him, Sin pulled me aside and suggested
wandering the club and attempting my first approach
...
But the word "hi" just barely
squeaked out of my throat, not even loud enough for them to hear
...
She turned around, startled, and gave me the withering whata-creep look that was the whole reason I was too scared to talk to women in
the first place
...
Always come in from the front, but at a slight angle so
it's not too direct and confrontational
...
Ever see
Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer? It's kind of like that
...
I decided that
approaching her would be an easy way to redeem myself
...

"Oh my God," I said to her
...
"What happened?"
She was interested
...
It was working
...

It was pretty brutal
...
"
She giggled
...
She was very friendly and actually seemed grateful for the conversa¬
tion
...

Sin sidled up to me and whispered in my ear, "Go kino
...

"Kino?" the girl replied
...
"Kino is when you touch a girl," he whispered
...
Pets like to be
petted
...
People
are the same way: We need touch
...
And, unfortunately, I am no exception
...
It was just resting there like some disem¬
bodied limb, and I imagined her wondering what exactly it was doing there
and how she could gracefully extricate herself from under it
...

"Isolate her," Sin said
...
Sin followed and
sat behind us
...
She said humor and ass
...

Suddenly, I felt Sin's breath on my ear
...

I smelled her hair, although I wasn't exactly sure what the point was
...
So I said, "It smells like smoke
...
I guess I wasn't supposed to neg
...
So, to recover, I took another whiff
...
"
She cocked her head to one side, furrowed her brow ever so slightly,
scanned me up and down, and said, "You're weird
...

Fortunately, Mystery soon arrived
...
"We're going somewhere more targetrich
...
They had no
problem whispering in students' ears while they were talking to women,
dropping pickup terminology in front of strangers, and even interrupting a
student during a set and explaining, in front of his group, what he was do¬
ing wrong
...

I bid my new friend good-bye as Sin had taught me, pointing to my

28

cheek and saying, "Kiss good-bye
...
I felt very alpha
...
"Are you
waiting for the toilet?" I asked
...
"Go ahead
...
"Can I tell you something?" he asked
...
"
"I have a lot of trouble peeing beside guys in urinals
...
Even if I'm peeing already and
a guy walks up, I stop
...
"
"No one's judging you
...
"I remember about a year ago, a guy and I were trying
to piss in these urinals that were right next to each other, but we both just
ended up standing there
...
"
He paused
...
"
I nodded, walked to the urinal, and discharged my duties with a dis¬
tinct lack of self-consciousness
...

As I left the bathroom, he was still standing there
...
"But you only seem to find them at the classy places
...
"Do you think I could have
kissed her?" I asked Mystery
...
"As soon as
you ask yourself whether you should or shouldn't, that means you should
...
Imagine a giant gear thudding down
in your head, and then go for it
...
Tell her you just no¬
ticed she has beautiful skin, and start massaging her shoulders
...
An IOI is an indicator of interest
...
If she asks you if you're single,
that's an IOI
...
And as soon as I get three IOIs, I phase-shift
...
It's like a computer program
...

"I just say, 'Would you like to kiss me?'"
"And then what happens?"
"One of three things," Mystery said
...
If she says, 'Maybe,' or hesitates, then you say, 'Let's find
out,' and kiss her
...
It
just looked like you had something on your mind
...
"You have nothing to lose
...
It's foolproof
...
"
I furiously scribbled every word of the kiss-close in my notebook
...
It was just one of those
things men were supposed to know on their own, like shaving and car re¬
pair
...
Taking a course in picking up
women wasn't the kind of thing normal people did
...


30

31

Perhaps it was because attracting the opposite sex was the only area of
my life in which I felt like a complete failure
...
The combination of desire and paralysis was
deadly
...
There was something I wanted to find, something I
hadn't looked at in years
...
" I pulled out a piece of lined notebook paper covered from
top to bottom with my chicken scratching
...
It was written in eleventh grade, and I never showed it to
anyone
...


When your own hand becomes your best lover,
When your life-giving fertilizer is wasted
In a Kleenex and flushed down the toilet
You wonder when you are going to stop
Thinking about what could have happened
That night when you almost got somewhere
...

So instead she will become one of your nighttime
Fantasies, where you could have but didn't
...


SEXUAL FRUSTRATION
BY NEIL STRAUSS

When you neglect work and meaningful activities,
When you neglect the ones who really love you,

The only reason you go out,

For a shot at a target that you rarely hit
...

A scoreless night fosters hostility
...

Through red eyes all the world is seen,
Angry at friends and family for no
Reason that they can perceive
...

There is the 'justfriends' one who you've
Known for so long, who respects you
So much that you can't do what you want
...


In the decade since I'd written that poem, nothing had changed
...
And, more important, I still felt the same way
...

After all, I was doing something proactive about my lameness
...


33

On the last night of the workshop, Mystery and Sin took us to a bar called
the Saddle Ranch, a country-themed meat market on the Sunset Strip
...

One of my goals in Los Angeles was to master the machine at its fastest set¬
ting
...
After three consecutive nights of going out until 2:00
A
...
and then breaking down approaches with Mystery and the other stu¬
dents far beyond the allotted half-hour, I was wiped out
...

Watching Mystery work, I noticed that he used the exact same openers, rou¬
tines, and lines—and got a phone number or a tonguedown nearly every
time, even if the woman was with a boyfriend
...
Sometimes a woman he was talking to was even moved to tears
...
She was talk¬
ing animatedly to two guys, bouncing around them like a cartoon character
...
Two seconds
...

"Hey, looks like the party's over here
...
I stuttered for a moment
...

"If
...
"
A huge smile spread across her face
...

I guess peacocking did work
...
"Hands off the merchandise
...
Every ounce of fear evaporated with her acceptance
...

"How do you all know each other?" I asked
...
"My name is Elonova
...

I took that as an IOI
...
The guys, in the presence of my superior game, wandered off
...
Every AFC we
walked past gave me the thumbs up and said, "She's hot" or "You lucky bas¬
tard
...
They were fucking up my game—that is, if I could figure
out a way to tell Elonova I was straight
...

I remembered Sin telling me to kino, so I put my arm around her
...
That was definitely not an IOI
...
She flirted with him as I stood there stupidly
...
She
agreed, and we exchanged numbers
...
I climbed inside, thinking I was hot shit for numberclosing in front of them all
...

"You got that number-close," he said, "because you forced yourself on
her
...
"
"What do you mean?" I asked
...
"
"Listen
...
It leaps in the air, dances around, and chases it all over the room
...
It's bored
...
"
"So
...

And you ran right back to her like a puppy dog
...
Let her work to get your at¬
tention back
...
"

34

"What should I have done?"
"You should have said, Til let you two be alone,' and started to walk
away, as if you were giving her to him—even though you knew she liked you
more
...
"
I smiled
...

"Yeah," he said
...
"
I grew silent and thought about it, kicking my legs up against the bar
counter of the limousine and slouching into the seat
...
It felt like
they were discussing me
...
I wondered if they were go¬
ing to tell me that I'd held the workshop up, that I wasn't yet ready for it,
that I should study for another six months and then take it again
...
Mystery broke into a
wide smile and looked straight at me
...
"You're going to be a superstar
...
I've decided to
teach several impressive ways to demonstrate mind power through magic at
my next workshop
...
If you are going in without an edge—like if you
say, "Hi, I'm an accountant"—you will not capture your target's attention and
curiosity
...
Here is the basic format to all
approaches:
1
...
See the group with the target and follow
the three-second rule
...

2
...

3
...
When talking, ignore
the target for the most part
...

4
...
Tell her,
"It's so cute
...
" Then get her friends to notice
and laugh about it
...
Convey personality to the entire group
...
Pay particular attention to the men and the less attractive
women
...
You may perform various memorized pieces like the photo routine,2 but

13
...
Say, out of the blue, "Would you like to kiss me?" If the setting

only for the obstacles
...
" Then get

6
...
If she wants to look at the pictures, for

her number and leave
...
How do you roll with her?"
—Mystery
7
...
If it's a serious
relationship, eject politely by saying, "Pleasure meeting you
...
If she is not spoken for, say to the group, "I've sort of been alienating your
friend
...
If it's okay with her
...

9
...
Take her to sit with you nearby
...
If she squeezes back, it's on
...

10
...

1 1
...
Tell me, what do you have inside that would make me want to know
you as more than a mere face in the crowd?" If she begins to list qualities, this
is a positive IOI
...
Stop talking
...


2

The photo routine involves carrying an envelope of photos in a jacket pocket, as if they've just
been developed
...

The PUA should also have a short, witty story to accompany each photo
...
But the undisputed father of modern seduction is Ross
Jeffries, a tall, skinny, porous-faced self-proclaimed nerd from Marina Del
Rey, California
...

His weapon is his voice
...
Jeffries, who claims to be the inspiration
for Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia, calls it Speed Seduction
...
The fundamental precept of NLP is that one's
thoughts, feelings, and behavior—and the thoughts, feelings, and behavior
of others—can be manipulated through words, suggestions, and physical
gestures designed to influence the subconscious
...

Over the years, Jeffries has either outlasted, sued, or crushed any com¬
petitor in the field of pickup to make his school, Speed Seduction, the dom¬
inant model for getting a woman's lips to touch a man's—that is, until
Mystery came along and started teaching workshops
...
Mystery's admirers wanted to know if the class
was worthwhile; his enemies, particularly Jeffries and his disciples, wanted to
tear him apart
...


At the end of my review, I issued a call for wings in Los Angeles, asking
only that they be somewhat confident, intelligent, and socially comfortable
...
This would happen
only through practice—through hitting the bars and clubs every night until
I became a natural like Dustin, or even an unnatural like Mystery
...
He wanted to "sarge" with me, as he put it
...

An hour after I sent him my phone number, Grimble called
...

"Hey, man," he said, in a conspiratorial hiss
...

"Wow, I like it," he said
...
We've been sarging with Ross Jeffries a lot
...
"
"Listen
...
"
"How much technology do you use in your sarges?"
"Technology?"
"You know, how much is technique and how much is just talking?"
"I guess fifty-fifty," I said
...
"
"What?"
"Yeah, I use a canned opener, then I elicit her values and find out her
trance words
...
Do you know
the October Man sequence?"
"Never heard of it, unless Arnold Schwarzenegger was in it
...
I had a girl over here last week, and I gave her a whole new
identity
...
Then I brushed my finger along her face, telling her
to notice"—and here he switched to a slow, hypnotic voice—"how wherever I
touch
...
and wherever

40

you can feel this energy spreading
...
to feel these sensations
...
intense
...
"Full-close!"
"Wow," I said
...
But I wanted this technology
...
In fact, this rejection is such a universal experience that
Ross Jeffries invented not just an acronym for it, LJBF, but a litany of re¬
sponses as well
...
He seemed to know everybody—
from legends like Steve P
...
, Ross's most
famous student, thanks to an incident that involved him, a hot tub, and five
women
...


3

One such response from Jeffries is, "I don't promise any such thing
...
The only thing I'll promise is never to do anything unless you and I
both feel totally comfortable, willing, and ready
...
This
would be my first time in the field since Mystery's workshop
...
All
I really knew about him was that he was a college student and he liked girls
...
He didn't seem dangerous or mean
...
He had the
complexion of barley tea, though he was actually German
...
He wore a brown leather
jacket over a silver floral-print shirt, which was unbuttoned to reveal an
eerily hairless chest thrust out further than his nose
...
He
reminded me of a mongoose
...
"You'll really like the DC
seminar, because he gets into synesthesia there
...
"It's their New
York seminar, 'Advanced Anchoring and Other Sneaky Stuff "
"What's anchoring?" I asked
...
Ever experi¬
enced condiment anchoring before?"
I had so much to learn
...
Women discuss everything
...
That's how it's done
...
It is a taboo among men to picture their best friends
naked or having sex, because then they might find themselves aroused—and
we all know what that means
...
The only tool they had in their belt was persistence
...
But that wasn't me
...
I didn't know anything
about anchoring, eliciting values, rinding trance words, or these other
things Grimble kept talking about
...
G
...
Friday's
...
, practicing openers, faking smiles, and
dancing in our seats to get energetic
...

We walked in the door of the restaurant—confident, smiling, alpha
...
There were two guys at the bar watching a base¬
ball game on television, a group of businesspeople at a corner table, and a
mostly male bar staff
...
As we pushed the door
open, a woman appeared
...

"Hey," I said to her
...
"
She stopped and listened
...
I decided to use the Maury Povich opener
...
"And it seems they're doing a segment on secret admirers
...
Do you think he should go on
the show or not?"
"Sure," she answered
...
"Talk shows always
need to put an unexpected twist on everything
...

She laughed
...
"Would you do the show?" I asked
...

Suddenly, Grimble stepped in
...
"You're not adventurous at
all, are you?" It was great to watch him work
...

"I am," she protested
...
"Let's try a little exercise
...
" He took a step closer to her
...
"
Synesthesia is the nerve gas in the arsenal of the speed seducer
...
In the context of seduction, however,
synesthesia refers to a type of waking hypnosis in which a woman is put
into a heightened state of awareness and told to imagine pleasurable im¬
ages and sensations growing in intensity
...

She agreed and closed her eyes
...
But as soon as Grimble began, a stocky, red-faced
jock wearing a pocket undershirt marched up to him
...

"I was showing her a self-improvement exercise called synesthesia
...
"
I had forgotten to check for a wedding ring, though I doubted minor
inconveniences like marriage mattered to Grimble
...
"
I had no idea how to disarm him
...
"He can show you the exercise, too," I said wanly
...
"
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," the guy said
...
He smelled like whiskey and onion rings
...
whether
...
"Never mind
...
Though I tell girls
I'm five feet and eight inches, I'm actually five foot six
...

"Stop it," his wife, our former sarge, said
...
"He's
drunk
...
"
"Like what?" I asked
...


44

"You seem like a great couple," I said
...
His red drunken face was
two inches from mine and yelling about ripping something
...

"Remind me," Grimble said as we retreated to the car, "to teach you
how to handle the AMOG
...
"
Oh, I see
...
He and his
wing, Twotimer, were going to meet Ross Jeffries at California Pizza
Kitchen for an expedition to the Getty Museum, and I was invited
...
Twotimer had black hair gelled to the texture of a licorice vine, a
matching leather jacket, and a snake-like quality
...

As I stood up to introduce myself, Ross cut me off
...
He wore a long wool overcoat, which flowed
loosely around his legs when he walked
...
His hairline was a receding mop of short, unkempt,
ash-colored curls, and the hook in his nose was so pronounced he could
have hung his overcoat on it
...

"A lot," I told him
...
Now I know
...

"When I get three indicators of interest
...
"
"Let's see
...
"
"That's one
...
"
"That's two
...
"
"Aha
...
"Then he's not a very good teacher, is he?"
"No, he was a great teacher," I protested
...
"
"I can't think of it right now
...

"Case closed," he said
...

A short waitress with blue nails, a touch of baby fat, and sandy brown
hair arrived to take our order
...

"These are my students," he told her
...
"
"Really?" she asked, feigning interest
...
"
"Yes, it's true
...
"
"And how's that? With mind control?" She was skeptical, but bordering
on curious
...
When you're really attracted to somebody,
how do you know? In other words, what signals do you get from yourself,
inside, that allow you to realize"—and here he lowered his voice, slowly pro¬
nouncing each word—"you're
...
attracted
...
this guy?"
The purpose of the question, I would find out later, was to make the
waitress feel the emotion of attraction in his presence, and thus associate
those feelings with his face
...
"Well, I guess I get a funny feeling
in my stomach, like butterflies
...
"Yes, and I bet that
the more attracted you become, the more those butterflies rise up from
your stomach"—he began slowly raising his hand to the level of his heart—
"until your face begins to flush
...
"
Twotimer leaned over and whispered: "That's anchoring
...
Now, every
time Ross raises his hand like that, she gets attracted to him
...
Ross seized the opportunity to toy with her
mercilessly
...
The dishes she
was carrying were forgotten, balancing precariously on her weakening arm
...
"Or did it take time?"

47

"Well, we broke up," she said
...
We were friends
first
...
" He pointed to himself, which I as¬
sumed was another NLP trick to make her think he was that someone
...

"What was wrong with your boyfriend?"
"He was too immature
...
"Well, you should date more mature men
...
" She giggled
...
"
"It's strange," she said, "because you're not my usual type
...
His tech¬
nique was so different than Mystery's, but he seemed to be the real deal too
...
"Well, your other customers are
probably getting angry
...
Why don't we
take all those good feelings you're having right now"—raising his hands
again—"and put them into this pack of sugar"—he picked up a sugar pack
and rubbed his raised hand on it—"so that you can carry them around with
you all day
...
She put it in her apron and walked away,
still beet red
...
After he's gone, the
sugar pack will remind her of the positive emotions she felt with him
...
Both women were in their twenties; Ross was
in his forties
...

We pressed into Ross's Saab and headed to the Getty
...
"And all you need to evoke that process are questions that make her
go into her body and brain and actually experience it in order to answer
you
...
"

48

Sitting in the back seat with me, Twotimer scanned my face for a reac¬
tion
...

"Amazing," I said
...

When we arrived at the Getty, Twotimer turned his attention to Ross
...
"I've
been switching around a few of the steps
...
"You understand that these things are very bad?"
As he spoke, Ross wagged a finger at Twotimer's chest, over his heart
...
"There's a reason I don't teach them at my seminars
...

"Because," Ross answered, "it's like giving dynamite to children
...
I could tell exactly what he was thinking—
because, in my mind, the word evil was anchored to that smile
...
"In earlier times, this meant that the strong survived
...
Women breed with seducers,
who understand how to trigger, through words and touch, the fantasy
parts of the female brain
...
It felt
as if he were sucking my soul into his eyes
...
As players, we stand at the gate of a new era:
the survival of the smoothest
...
My voice was fast and choppy, my movements effete, my body lan¬
guage awkward
...

"Casanova was one of us," Twotimer went on
...
"
"Well, it probably took a lot more work to seduce a woman back then
because of the morals of the day," I said, trying to contribute something
useful
...
"
"You mean NLP?"
"Not just that
...
" He grinned as his gaze bore
deeper into my eyes
...
"

49

We lurked through the galleries, gazing at the people gazing at paint¬
ings
...
But I
was far too scared to approach in front of Ross: It felt like trying to play the
cello in front of Yo-Yo Ma
...
On the other hand, this
was a guy who advised students to get over their fear of approaching by
walking up to random women and saying, "Hi, I'm Manny the Martian
...
He created fools
...
Twotimer and Grimble
had two each
...

As we took the train downhill to the museum parking lot, Ross slid
into the seat next to me
...
"I have a seminar coming up in a
few months
...
"
"Thanks," I said
...
Not Mystery
...
"
I wasn't sure how to respond
...

"And one more thing," Ross said
...
I need to widen
my horizons
...
I was sure he was anchoring me
...

A BODY LIKE ARNOLD WITH A
DENZEL FACE
...


—SALT-N-PEPA,

"Whatta Man"

The best predators don't lie on the jungle floor with their teeth bared and
claws out
...
They approach the prey slowly
and harmlessly, win its trust, and then attack
...
He facetiously called it Sin Method
...
I'd watch as a woman came over to his house for
the first time and he'd throw her against the wall by her neck, then release
her just before he kissed her, shooting her adrenaline level through the roof
with equal parts fear and arousal
...
" That was generally the
point when I'd excuse myself to go home
...
But our friendship didn't last long
...

"The military is a steady paycheck," he explained as we sat in a mall
cafe
...
I've been an unemployed computer
programmer for too long
...
Sin was into astral projection, goth rock, S
and M, and pickup
...

But his mind was made up
...
His tone, as always, was
deadly serious
...

Since I'm not going to be around to wing him, he wants you to do it
...
"I think I'll be free," I said
...
He must not know that many people
...
I'd booked a flight to Belgrade to visit Marko, the schoolmate who had
introduced me to Dustin and his natural ways
...

There had to be a solution
...

"Hey, buddy," Mystery said when he answered
...
"
"I find that hard to believe
...
But I have no one to go out with
and no clue where to go
...
"I'll prob¬
ably just get some sushi alone
...

Instead, he was stagnating at home
...
His mother was
overburdened
...

"Can't you go out with Patricia?" I asked
...

"She's mad at me," he said
...
He tried to mold her into
his ideal girl—he talked her into getting a boob job, giving him blow jobs
(which she'd never done before), and taking a job as a stripper—but she
drew the line at bisexuality
...

Everyone has their own reason for getting into the game
...
Others, like Grimble and Twotimer, desire new girls every night
...
Mystery had his
own specific goal
...
"I want a blonde 10 and an
Asian 10, who will love each other as much as they love me
...
" He moved the phone to
another room because his sister and her husband were arguing, and contin¬
ued, "I'd just break up with Patricia, but there aren't any 10s in Toronto
...
It's all 7s, at best
...
A
...
"This is where all the peacocky girls you like
live
...
"So I want to schedule
a bunch of workshops
...
"
"How about Belgrade?"
"What? Isn't there a war going on there?"
"No, the war's over
...
He said it's safe
...
"
He hesitated
...
"
Silence
...

I pushed further
...
It's an adventure
...
"
Mystery thought like a flowchart
...
"
"Great," I said
...
" I couldn't wait for the
six hour plane ride
...
I wanted to
mimic exactly what I'd seen him do, word for word, trick for trick, simply
because it worked
...
"There's something else
...
"It's time
for you to change, to just snap and become someone else
...
That isn't cool
...

They're at the bottom of the social ladder
...
And not
just with women
...
And I think your art is
actually the social skills you're learning
...
That's why Sin and I picked you
...
"
I heard him rustling through some papers
...
"These are
my personal development goals
...
I want to live in posh hotels
...

I want specials on TV with big illusions
...
I want to travel to England and Australia
...
And I want to act in Jesus
Christ Superstar—as Jesus
...
"What I'm really after," he fi¬
nally said, "is for people to be envious of me, for women to want me and
men to want to be me
...

At the end of the conversation, he said he was going to e-mail me the
password to a secret online community called Mystery's Lounge
...
After spending a weekend poring
through the rest of his online archive, she e-mailed Mystery's girlfriend, Pa¬
tricia, and told her about her boyfriend's extracurricular activities
...

Unlike the other seduction boards I had been reading, where hundreds
of newbies were constantly begging for advice from just a few experts, Mys¬
tery had cherry-picked the best pickup artists in the community for his pri¬
vate forum
...

"But remember," Mystery said sternly
...

When I see you in there, I want you to be someone else
...

"Style it is
...
"
Yes, it was Mystery and Style giving a workshop
...

Style the pickup artist—teaching lovable losers how to meet the women of
their dreams
...
After all, it had only been a month since my workshop with
Mystery
...

It was time for a motherfucking change
...
He was a poet from the 1920s,
and, frankly, his poetry sucked
...
The nephew
and godson of J
...
Morgan, he hobnobbed with Ernest Hemingway and
D
...
Lawrence, was the first person to publish parts of Joyce's Ulysses, and
became a decadent symbol of the lost generation
...
When he was
twenty-two, he married Polly Peabody, the inventor of the strapless bra, and
persuaded her to change her name to Caresse
...

At the age of thirty-one, when he realized that his lifestyle hadn't killed him
yet, Crosby shot himself
...
I immersed
myself in seduction theory
...
I wanted to live up to Mystery and Sin's faith in me
...
I needed to become confident, to become inter¬
esting, to become decisive, to become graceful, to become the alpha male I
was never raised to be
...

I bought books on body language, flirting, and sexual technique
...

I ordered books on marketing, like Robert Cialdini's seminal Influence,
from which I learned several key principles that guide the majority of peo¬
ple's decisions
...
So if
you are in a bar with a beautiful female friend on your arm (a pivot, as they

59

call it in the community), it's much easier to meet women than if you're
hanging out alone
...
There is a difference be¬
tween a line and a pattern
...
A pattern is a more elaborate script, specifically designed to
arouse her
...
Show a man the cover
of Playboy, and he's ready to go
...
Women, according to the speed seducers, aren't persuaded as
easily by direct images and talk
...

One of Ross Jeffries's most famous patterns uses a Discovery Channel
show about roller coaster design as a metaphor for the attraction, trust, and
excitement that are often necessary preconditions for sex
...
Even if it seems
unlikely that a pattern like this will turn a girl on, at least it's better than
talking about work
...
A lot of his
ideas are simply applications of neuro-linguistic programming
...

After NLP, it was time to learn some of Mystery's tricks
...
I'd learned from Mystery that one
of the most important things to do with an attractive woman was to
demonstrate value
...

To further demonstrate value, I bought books on handwriting analy¬
sis, rune reading, and tarot cards
...


I took notes on everything I studied, developing routines and stories to
test in the field
...
I was on an
eighteen-hour-a-day mission
...
I signed up for lessons in swing
and salsa dancing
...
I stud¬
ied Pierce Brosnan in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, Brad Pitt in
Meet Joe Black, Mickey Rourke in Wild Orchid, Jack Nicholson in The Witches of
Eastwick, and Tom Cruise in Top Gun
...
Were my arms swing¬
ing when I walked? Did they bow out a little, as if trying to get around mas¬
sive pectorals? Did I walk with a confident swagger? Could I stick my chest
out further? Hold my head up higher? Swing my legs out further, as if try¬
ing to get around massive genitalia?
After correcting what I could on my own, I signed up for a course on
Alexander Technique to improve my posture and rid myself of the roundshouldered curse I'd inherited from my father's side of the family
...

I wore stylish jackets with bright shirts and accessorized as much as I
could
...
I experimented with
cowboy hats, feather boas, light-up necklaces, and even sunglasses at night
to see which received the most attention from women
...
When I wore at least one item that stood out, women who were
interested in meeting me had an easy way to start a conversation
...
Women are sick of
generic guys asking the same generic questions: "So where are you from?
...

Not all women appreciated our efforts, of course
...
There was the story of Jonah, a twentythree-year-old virgin in the seduction community who was hit in the back
of the head—twice—by a drunk girl who took his negs the wrong way
...

But they were the exceptions, I hoped
...

Despite the cheat sheet of my favorite openers and routines in the back
pocket of my jeans, I was petrified as I roamed the streets, trying to select
someone for my first approach
...
She was thin, with
smooth, gentle curves, jeans that were just tight enough, and a beautiful
complexion, like burned butter
...

She walked into the store, and I decided to move on
...
She looked like a cool intellectual whose inner
bombshell hadn't blossomed yet, someone I could talk with about
Tarkovsky movies and then take to a monster truck rally
...
I knew that if I didn't approach her, I'd chastise myself af¬
terward and feel like a failure
...
Besides, I told myself, she probably wasn't that good-looking up
close anyway
...

"Hey, maybe you can help me settle a debate I'm having," I told her
...
I had stumbled across a genuine 10
...

"I know this is wrong to say," I blurted, "but I grew up on Bugs Bunny
cartoons as a child, and you have the most adorable Bugs Bunny overbite
...
I'd made the neg up on the spot and was
probably about to get slapped
...
"After all those
years of braces, my mom's going to be mad," she replied
...

I performed the ESP routine, and fortunately she picked seven
...
I asked her what she did for work, and she said she was a model

61

and hosted a show on TNN
...
But as I noticed the material working, I became ner¬
vous
...

Everyone in Office Depot was staring at us
...

"I'm late for an appointment," I told her
...
"But what steps can we take to continue this conversation?"
This was Mystery's number-close routine
...
A PUA must make a
woman comfortable enough to give him her number
...

"I could give you my number," she offered
...

I couldn't believe it
...
Maybe
she was already having regrets
...
Since she was supposedly a model, I
wanted to look for a picture of her online
...
I typed the words into Google, and nearly a hundred thousand re¬
sults came up
...


63

I sat in front of my phone and stared at Dalene Kurtis's number every eve¬
ning
...
I wasn't confident and goodlooking enough for this perfect specimen of femininity
...
I was so nervous, I couldn't stop my hands from shaking or
my voice from quavering
...
By the time the food arrived, I was too self-conscious
even to chew in front of her
...
So
what hope did I have with the Playmate of the Year?
There's a word for this: unworthiness
...

So I waited three days to call, then put it off to the next day, and then
decided that calling on the weekend would sound like I had no social life, so
I figured I'd call her Monday
...
She'd proba¬
bly forgotten about me
...
I was just some weird, interesting guy she had
met in an office-supply store
...

So I never called
...

My first legitimate success didn't come until a week later
...
He was very excited because he'd just
made a fascinating discovery
...

Extramask looked different
...
He actu¬
ally appeared cool
...
We were clearly on the same path
...


"Okay
...

"I guess I follow
...
So I'd go to sleep, and the cum would harden in my cockhole
...
" He put a hand on his crotch and wiggled it to illustrate the point
...
"
"You're out of your mind
...
Extramask was the strange result of a repres¬
sive Catholic education and an expansive stand-up comedy ambition
...

"It hurt like a fucker," he continued
...
But last night I squeezed
that shit right out of the cock as soon as I blew a load
...
"And I haven't even told you the good news yet
...
"
He raised his voice excitedly
...
So the stuff I learned in Mystery's workshop isn't just for chicks
after all
...
"
"It's used for pissing too
...
At a table nearby, there was an attrac¬
tive but slightly unkempt woman stuffing receipts into a bulging Filofax
...
I broke the threesecond rule by about two hundred and fifty seconds but finally worked up
the confidence to approach
...

"I've been taking a course in handwriting analysis," I told her
...
I handed her
my notebook and told her to write a sentence in it
...
"Your handwriting has no slant
...
"
I made sure she was nodding in agreement, and then continued
...

"You don't have a great organizational system to your writing, which means
that in general you're not good at keeping yourself organized and sticking
to a schedule
...
She had a wonderful smile and was easy to talk to
...

"I open my shows with this one," she said after my analysis
...
" This was her opener
...
Picking up women,
I realized, was a lot like stand-up comedy or any other performing art
...

She said she was spending the night at a hotel in town, so I offered to
drive her there
...
" She kissed my cheek
...
Then I told her I had work to do, but that I'd call her for a drink when
I was finished
...

"No, I should see this girl
...
"But when I get home afterward,
I'm going to pound out the biggest batch thinking about that girl who just
kissed you
...
I was determined to make
up for my recent mistake
...
She had changed into a frayed
blue sweater and saggy jeans, which made her look somewhat dumpy
...

Finally, I had an opportunity to experiment with more advanced material
...
" I felt like Grimble in T
...
I
...


65

"What is that?" she asked
...
A friend taught it to me
...
"
She wanted to hear it
...
" I said, as I unfolded the paper with the pattern on it and began
reading
...
As you feel it now, where in your body are those feelings?"
She pointed to the center of her chest
...
"
"Okay, now, as you focus in on this feeling right here, notice that you
can begin now to see a color flowing from this feeling
...

"Good, now what would it be like if you were to allow all of the purple
flowing from that spot to fill with warmth and intensity? With each breath
that you take, I want you to let the purple grow just a little bit brighter
...
I was doing it now—evoking a response like the one I had seen Ross
Jeffries get at California Pizza Kitchen
...
I imagined Twotimer mouthing the word evil in
the background
...

"Ten," she said
...

Then I had her shrink the color to a tiny purple pea that contained all
the power and intensity of the pleasure she was feeling
...
Then I traced my hand all along her body, first at
a distance and then lightly touching it
...
"
To be honest, I had no idea whether this was turning her on or not
...
In fact, I felt not only a little stu¬
pid but also lecherous using the pretext of hypnosis to touch her
...
I got into the game to learn confidence, not
mind control
...
"It felt good," she said, and

66

smiled her ferret smile
...

I folded the piece of paper, put it in my pocket, and drove her back to
her hotel
...
We
climbed out of the car, and I followed her to her room
...
I couldn't believe my luck
...

According to Mystery, it takes roughly seven hours for a woman to be
comfortably led from meet to sex
...

Waiting seven hours or more is what Mystery calls solid game
...
Mys¬
tery calls this fool's mate
...
I was about to experience my first fool's mate
...
She opened the
door, and I followed her inside
...
First the left, then the right
...
She flexed the toes of
both feet upward, then curled them downward as she collapsed backward
on the bed
...
But sud¬
denly the foulest smell I have ever encountered assailed my nostrils
...
It was the exact rancid-cheese smell that
homeless alcoholics on New York subways have
...
No matter how many steps back I took, the intensity of
the smell did not diminish
...

I looked at her, lying back on the bed, wanton, oblivious
...

Her feet were stinking up the room
...


Every night after outings and dates, seduction students and masters post online
breakdowns of their experiences, called field reports
...

The day after my misadventure with the stinky-footed comedian, Extramask
posted afield report online
...
His time in the seduction community had already paid off
...

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: Field Report—I F-closed a Girl!
AUTHOR: Extramask
I, Extramask, have f-closed a girl for the first time—eliminating my virgin status
(even though I didn't blow my load)
...

On Monday, I went sarging with Vision
...
We pretty much
sarged the whole place
...
I wasn't doing as well as I normally do
...
Some girl was wearing his scarf and he couldn't find her
...
She said, "Hi
...
I knew it didn't matter what I said by the look on her
wide face
...

Then somehow I started rubbing her vagina (over her pajamas)
...
So I took my pants off, but I left my underwear on
...

She was all moaning and shit, and I'm just pumping away like a tool
...
This was pretty hard
...
I was
doing my best though
...
LOL
...
I had always fantasized about this
...
My cock is gonna fucking
snap off
...
I got

WIDEFACE: Fuck me Extramask
...


her into doggy-style position
...
So I had her
from behind and I was trying to find the slot, but I couldn't
...
It was horrible, just

So I tore off my fucking underwear
...


like the sex
...
She started to whine because of the long
delay
...
" I
wasn't getting any arousal out of this deal
...
I have one
...


I got it in for two strokes, then it popped out
...
So I switched positions and, for some reason, I went to the her-on-top
position again
...
I feared my cock would break right the

I didn't want to use hers
...

WIDEFACE: What brand?
EXTRAMASK: Sheik
...
After about four minutes of that, we went back to missionary, and I
slammed her hard
...

I was saying shit like:
"You like that?"
"Say my name!"

Again, I was a virgin at this point and I didn't know how to properly put a
condom on
...
I
was pretty disappointed
...


EXTRAMASK: Put the condom on, it turns me on
...

She couldn't get the condom on, so she went to get hers
...
Then I fucked her!
I fucked her and fucked her and fucked her and fucked her and fucked her
and fucked her
...

EXTRAMASK: (Thinking: I guess this is something you do after a half hour of
sex
...
)
So I took my condom off and opened a new one
...
This is fucking sex? I hate this
...
" I legitimately wanted to

WIDEFACE: What are you doing?

leave
...


73

72

WIDEFACE: W h y ?

1
...


EXT RAM ASK: I thought you said you wanted me to?
WIDEFACE: N o
...
I was happy with that
...
She wanted to
cuddle
...

This was a mistake on my part
...
I should have wacked my
load all over the place, her face, and her Trinitron TV set
...
It was obvious this was a one-night stand
...
I would rather have it than not have it
...
I stuck my junk in a chick
...
The sex was
horrible
...

Overall, I don't feel any different compared to when I was a virgin
...
I mean, I've
had sex now
...
So from here on in, any girl I chat with, I'll be even

WIDEFACE: Lie down and rest for five minutes
...


more like, "Who gives a fuck? I don't need what you got
...
It's just good to rest after sex for
five minutes
...
Just relax
...
She was on hold with the cab company,
and she started getting all frustrated because she had to wait, which was
annoying
...

I chatted with her a bit more
...
She liked it
...
M
...
[I got
even more energetic
...
)
She totally didn't like that I said I was going out again
...
I
just lied to her
...
Overall, I wanted to leave her place immediately—I just wanted
to leave on my terms
...
We kissed about three times
before my exit
...
It's not a long
stretch, by any standard
...
Yet it is the most difficult three inches a man has to move in his life
...

As I went out every night training to wing Mystery's workshop, I soon
developed a routine that worked—at least to a point
...
I knew how to open a group, respond to most contingencies, and
leave with a phone number and a plan to meet again
...
If the approach didn't work, I
thought of ways to improve it—angles of advance, backturns, takeaways,
time constraints
...
I blamed myself
and analyzed every word, gesture, and reaction until I pinpointed a tactical
error
...
I wanted the learning lessons to take place
in my head, so that in the field I was flawless
...
And one public
failure would discredit everything
...

But there was still one problem I couldn't work through
...
No one had taught me
...
After
spending so much time bonding with a girl (whether for a half hour in a

club or several hours at our next meeting), I was too scared to break the rap¬
port and trust I had built
...

It was such stupid AFC thinking
...
But, unfortunately, there wasn't going to be
time to do so before Belgrade
...
It had been the most productive plane trip of my life
...
Ice and slush
lay heavy on the street as Marko drove us to his apartment in a silver 1987
Mercedes that had a habit of stalling every time he put it into second gear
...
He
had cut away the bottom third of the coat and sewn in its place black fabric
covered with stars
...
Mystery had made his ring himself, too, painting an eyeball on
the plastic surface
...
His
greatest illusion was transforming himself into a good-looking player every
night he went out
...

"No thanks
...
You're wearing glasses because your vision sucks
...
You're ghostly white
...
You're doing
well because you're smart and you're a fast learner
...

You're Style, so start being Style
...
"
He was a very persuasive geek
...
Marko pulled in front of a small building,
and we walked inside to find an elderly Serbian man presiding over an
empty shop
...

"Balding is not a choice, but bald is a choice," he said
...
'" He laughed
...
" I made a
mental note to add both replies to my cheat sheet
...

"It looks good," Mystery said
...
We'll have you looking like a thug in no time
...
But I'm not getting Lasik in Serbia
...
I had transformed from a 5 to a 6
...
This trip was turning out to be a good idea
...
A big-boned six
foot three, he was much stockier than most Serbians, with an olive com¬
plexion and the out-of-proportion head of a Peanuts character
...

Marko had been unable to live his dream of being a high-society so¬
cialite after graduating from college in America, so he'd moved to a smaller
pond, Serbia, where his father was a well-known artist
...
Because there was no sleeping bag or even a couch, we
agreed to take turns sharing the larger bed
...

"What are you doing with this guy?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, he's totally superficial
...
We went to Vassar College
...
He's not one of us
...
I know
...
But trust me, this guy will change your
life
...
"We'll see
...
So make sure Mystery doesn't
ruin it with all his pickup tricks and embarrass me
...
But
a few months ago, through friend of his, he'd met a girl named Goca, and

78

he was sure she was the one
...

"Have you slept with her yet?" I asked him
...
I haven't even kissed her
...
One day a guy is going to walk
up to her in a club, say, 'Do you think magic spells work?' and take her
home
...
She wants to have sex
...
"
"Well," Marko said, "she's different from all those girls
...
A
...
It's a disease AFCs
get: They become obsessed with a girl they're neither dating nor sleeping
with, and then start acting so needy and nervous around her that they
end up driving her away
...


The prop bag I wore to the Belgrade workshop was black, Armani, and the
size of a hardcover novel, with a single shoulder strap so that it could be
slung artfully across my torso
...
So nearly every PUA in the game
had a prop bag
...

1 PACK OF CONDOMS, TROJAN, LUBRICATED

Necessary not only in case you have sex but also for the psycho¬
logical boost of knowing you're prepared to
...

1 PIECE OF DRYER LINT

For the lint opener: Walk up to a woman, stop, wordlessly remove
lint (hidden in the palm of your hand) from her clothing, ask,
"How long has that been there?," then hand her the piece of lint
...

1 DIGITAL CAMERA

For Mystery's digital photo routine: First take a photo of yourself
and a girl smiling, then another one striking a serious pose, and,

81

80

finally, one kissing (on the cheek or lips)
...
At the final photo, say, "We make a good cou¬
ple, don't we?" If she agrees, you're in
...
Ask, "You're not a
thief, are you?" Then slowly remove your necklace or thumb ring,
put it on her, kiss her, and say, "This is still mine
...
I want it back next time I see you
...


For the Tic Tac routine: Put two Tic Tacs in your hand
...
Then feed the second one to her
...
I'm an Indian giver
...
" Then kiss her
...


LIP BALM, COVERUP, EYELINER, BLOTTING PAPER

4 SAMPLE BOTTLES OF DIFFERENT COLOGNES

Optional male makeup
...
Two pages of
new routines and lines to practice
...
And for the cologne opener: Spritz a different
cologne on each wrist
...
Afterward, mark her choice on the appropriate
wrist with a pen
...


1 SET OF WOODEN RUNES IN CLOTH BAG

VARIOUS MAGIC TRICKS

For rune readings
...


CHEAT SHEET, THREE PAGES

1 SMALL BLACKLIGHT

1 NOTEBOOK

For phone numbers, notes, magic tricks, and Ross Jeffries's crappy
sketch artist opener, in which you very seriously draw a portrait of
a girl, tell her "your beauty has inspired me to high art," and then
show her a stick figure with a title like, "Semipretty Girl in Coffee
Shop, 2005
...

2 SETS OF FAKE EAR AND LIP PIERCINGS

Optional body adornment
...


Yes, I was bringing out the big guns
...

I had neglected to tell Mystery that his standard workshop fee was half
the annual salary of the average Serbian, so most of our students were from
out of the country
...
Exoticoption was an American who had taken a train
from Florence, Italy, where he was going to school; Jerry was a ski instructor
from Munich, Germany; and Sasha was a local who had been studying in
Austria
...
Mystery's
task—and now mine—was to fine-tune the details and make PUAs out of
these three
...
Jerry had a great sense of humor but came
off on first impression as boring
...
Just socializing was going to be a challenge for him: He looked like a
big baby goose with acne
...
"I have the
balls to approach, and I did pull some hons in the past," he began, draping
his left arm casually over a neighboring seat
...
Even when I get vibes that I attract them, I still don't close
...
"I can work
coffee shops and most other low-noise environments, but I'm uncomfort¬
able in clubs
...
"I'm into the game be¬
cause it's like Dungeons and Dragons
...
"
One by one, they placed their fears, and their voice recorders, on the
table
...
I needed to get what was in my
head into theirs
...
All I had to do was
keep Mystery on track—he loved the sound of his own voice—and give them
material
...

As we spoke, we sent the boys on missions to various tables
...
Stand up straight
and rock on your back foot as if you might walk away at any moment
...

You should have sat down and given yourself a time constraint
...
' This
way they won't worry that you're going to sit there all night
...
A two-set is a group of two people; a three-set is
three people, and so on
...
He fumbled through his openers, stared at his
shoes, and lacked even a modicum of confidence
...

At the bar, I noticed a delicate black-haired girl and a tall blonde with a
perfect fake tan, deep dimples, and hair in Bo Derek braids
...
This was not going to be an easy set
...

"Go into the two-set over there," I instructed him
...
"Tell them you're showing some friends from
America around and want suggestions for good clubs to take them to
...
Sasha meekly approached them from
behind and tried several times to get them to notice him
...
Like many guys, he didn't
communicate with energy
...
Whenever he
opened his mouth, there was no need for anyone to strain to make out his
faint mumblings
...
"
"Go in," Mystery said to me as he watched Sasha flounder with the Bo
Derek blonde
...
Help him out
...
"
Fear seizes hold in your chest first
...
Then you really feel it
...
Your throat closes
...
Even after all my training, I was terrified
...
They can
instantly spot insincerity and bullshit
...

Anyone talking to a woman while simultaneously worrying about what she
thinks of him is going to fail
...
And most men fall into this category
...
I do
...

Mystery calls it dynamic social homeostasis
...
The reason
this fear exists, he says, is because we are wired evolutionarily for a tribal ex¬
istence, where everyone in the community knows when a man is rejected by

84

65

a woman
...

As I approached, I tried to push the fear out of my chest and rationally
assess the situation
...
Both women
were facing the bar, and he had approached from behind
...


But if they wanted to get rid of him, all they had to do was to turn back
toward the bar, and he'd be shut out
...
Mystery and the other two students were watching me as
I approached
...
So I came in from the left side
of the bar, next to the black-haired girl—the obstacle, as Mystery would say
...
I cleared my throat
...
So what clubs did you recommend?"
I could sense a silent sigh of relief from all parties that someone had
come in to make things less awkward
...
"And
along the waterfront there are some great boats, like Lukas, Kruz, and Exil
...
"
"Hey, as long as we're talking, I want to get your opinion on some¬
thing
...
"Do you think spells work?"
By now, I was getting used to telling the spells opener—a story about a
friend who fell in love with a woman after she surreptitiously cast an attrac¬
tion spell on him
...
I
needed to reposition myself next to the Bo Derek blonde
...
It's not like he had a chance with her anyway
...
Here"—I addressed
the blonde—"let me show you something
...


86

Now that I was one-on-one with her, I still needed to sit down; other¬
wise she'd eventually get uncomfortable with me lurking over her
...

"Give me your hands," I told her, "and stand up for a moment
...
Now I was finally in the set, and she was lurking awkwardly on the out¬
side
...


"I just stole your chair," I laughed
...
The game had begun
...
"Stay close
...

But I can only stay for a moment
...
"
Even though I guessed her number wrong (it was ten), she still enjoyed
the process
...

Marko was right: The girls were gorgeous here
...
I truly en¬
joyed listening to this girl; she was captivating, well-read, and had an MBA
...
She pulled a pen from her purse and gave me her phone num¬
ber
...
Style was
the real deal
...
" He did and, lo and behold,
she gave it to him
...
Sasha was a new man
...
He was being, in his own awkward way, himself
...

"I'm so happy," Sasha raved
...
"
As anyone who regularly reads newspapers or true-crime books knows,
a significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting
sprees, is the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males
...

Mystery threw his arm around my neck and pulled my face into his wiz¬
ard's overcoat
...
"It's not just about getting
the girl
...
"
It was then that I realized the downside to this whole venture
...
I was beginning to see
women solely as measuring instruments to give me feedback on how I was
progressing as a pickup artist
...
Even when
I was having a deep conversation, learning about a woman's dreams and
point of view, in my mind I was just ticking off a box in my routine marked
rapport
...
And the most troubling thing about this new mind¬
set was that it seemed to be making me more successful with women
...
Inside, it was nearly empty
...

We were about to leave when Mystery spied, among the group of Ser¬
bians, a lone girl
...
It was an impossi¬
ble set: She was surrounded by stocky guys with crewcuts
...
And Mystery was go¬
ing in
...

"Here," he told me
...
And when I say so, act
as if you can't open them
...
I
pretended to be amazed
...
Instead, Mystery per¬
formed his watch-stopping illusion for them
...

"If you can make a girl envy you," Mystery told the students, "you can
make a girl sleep with you
...
First, he was generating social proof by
earning the attention and approval of the club staff
...

For his coup de grace, Mystery told the club manager he would levitate
a beer bottle
...

Now he was in his target's group
...
Then he relented, started
talking to her, and isolated her to a couch nearby
...

Since the girl spoke only a little English, Mystery used Marko as a
translator
...

"Everything you've seen tonight is fake," Mystery finally told her, via
Marko
...
It's a social illusion
...
However, on our way out, an
AMOG from the table blocked Mystery's path
...

"So you like Natalija, magic man?" he asked
...
Is that okay with you?"
"She's my girlfriend," the AMOG said
...
"
"That's up to her," Mystery replied, taking a step closer to the AMOG
...
He was an idiot
...

The AMOG lifted his waistband, exposing the black handle of a pistol
...

Marko turned to me, panicked
...

"Most of the guys at these clubs are ex-soldiers and mobsters
...
"
Mystery waved his hand over the AMOG's forehead
...
"It weighs eight hundred
grams
...
" He
snapped his fingers to indicate the pop of a brain cell
...
Mys¬
tery held his eye contact
...
Two seconds
...
Four
...
It was killing me
...
Nine
...
The AMOG lowered his shirt back
over the gun
...
They'd only been exposed to magic on televi¬
sion
...

The AMOG stood there, silent, as Mystery walked out unscathed
...

That's what Marko thought
...
Goca wasn't like those other
girls, he insisted
...

I'd heard it all before from dozens of guys
...
Yet minutes or hours later, I'd see them exchanging
phone numbers—or saliva—with one of the boys
...
Party girls with attention deficit disorder generally don't
stick around to hear the routines
...

And so it was that Mystery and I found ourselves out on New Year's Eve
with Marko and his one-itis, Goca
...
M
...
She seemed like a bright, successful, well-bred girl
...
Marko was right: She did look like the marrying kind
...
And the music was pure anarchy: Four brass bands wandered
the rooms, blaring a cacophony of overlapping parade marches
...

They sat next to each other awkwardly
...
"Ha ha, wasn't that funny when the waiter gave you my steak?"
The tension was killing me
...
In grade school he'd never been that
popular, largely on account of being foreign, having the nickname Pumpkinhead, and joining the Young Republican Club
...


In college, he began taking steps toward relations with the opposite
sex
...
The effort earned him some attention, even a few female
friends
...
The taste of those first small
victories was so sweet that Marko stayed in college for three more years,
basking in his hard-won popularity
...
No one has ever come up with a plausible explanation of
what he does in there, because nothing makes sense—masturbating, for ex¬
ample, doesn't take that long
...
com
...

I grabbed my camera and ran Mystery's digital photo routine on the pair
...
Marko stuck his neck out toward
her, chicken-like, and pecked
...

After dinner, Mystery and I terrorized the two-room restaurant, danc¬
ing with the old men, performing magic tricks for the waiters, and flirting
indiscriminately with the married women
...
I could swear it was an IOI
...
It
was my turn to share the bed with Marko, but this wasn't Marko
...
I felt a pair of warm hands caress my newly shaven skull
...

I pulled loose
...

"Did you and he
...

Goca and I had hit it off that night; so had Goca and Mystery
...
But it was
harder not to notice her when she was in my bed, in my nostrils, in my
mouth
...
It only enables them to do what
they've always wanted but repressed
...

Logically, it's easy to say that it's wrong to sleep with a girl your friend
is pursuing
...
It's just too
...

I ran my hands beneath her hair and slowly dragged my fingernails up¬
ward along her scalp
...
Our lips
met, our tongues met, our chests met
...
"I can't do this
...
"
"Marko?" she asked, as if she'd never heard the name before
...
"
"Listen," I said
...
Marko will probably be out of the
shower soon
...
I heard him and Goca
arguing in Serbian in the hallway
...

Marko walked wearily into the room and collapsed onto his half of
the bed
...
He was never one to show much emotion
...
"

I couldn't bridge the fucking gap
...
Her thigh was grazing
mine
...
And I was wussing out
...

I had great opening game, but no follow through
...
But it was too late
...
I
was scared of rejection, and of feeling uncomfortable afterward
...
They had nothing in common, not even a
language
...
His legs were crossed and he
was leaning back, letting her work to get his attention
...

I walked my date back to her house after coffee
...
All I had to say was, "Can I use the bathroom?," and I could have
been upstairs
...
Countless success¬
ful approaches had helped reduce my fear of social rejection and made me
seem like a promising pickup artist to others, but inside I knew I was just an
approach artist
...

In the course of my seduction research, I'd read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
...
But once he persuaded
her to submit the first time, it was all over
...

One of the tragedies of modern life is that women as a whole do not
hold a lot of power in society, despite all the advances made in the last cen¬
tury
...
It's not until they've made a choice, and submitted to
it, that the relationship is inverted—and the man is generally back in a posi-

94

tion of power over her
...

In order to excel at anything, there are always hurdles, obstacles, or
challenges one must get past
...

Those who push themselves, and are willing to face pain, exhaustion, hu¬
miliation, rejection, or worse, are the ones who become champions
...
To seduce a woman successfully, to inspire her to
take the risk of saying yes, I would have to grow some balls and be willing to
leave my comfort zone
...

"I just got a haircut," he told her as they left the cafe
...
I want to take a bath
...
"
Natalija, predictably, said that seemed like a bad idea
...
"I gotta get going, because I need to take a bath
...
"
As he walked away, her face fell
...
This is what Mystery calls a
false takeaway
...

Mystery took five steps—counting as he went—then turned around and
said, "I've been living in a shitty apartment for the past week
...
" He pointed to the Hotel
Moskva down the street
...
"
Natalija hesitated for a moment, then followed him
...

When I returned to the house, Marko was packing
...
"I tried to do everything right
...
"
"So what are you doing? Moving to a monastery?"
"No, I'm driving to Moldova
...
"
"Where's that?"
"It's a tiny country that used to be part of Russia
...
Just being American is enough to get you laid
...
Life is
short and the world is large
...
So I
couldn't think of a better reason to drive there
...
And traveling
with Mystery would be a perk
...


97

There are few moments in life as shot through with potential as that of hav¬
ing a car, a full tank of gas, a map of an entire continent spread out in front
of you, and the best pickup artist in the world in your back seat
...
What are borders, after all, but check¬
points letting you know that you've reached a new stage in your adventure?
Well, all this may be true most of the time, but let's say you're working
at Rand McNally, finishing the latest edition of your map of Eastern Eu¬
rope
...
What do you do?
Do you include the country on your map or not?
A magician, a faux aristocrat, and I were driving across Eastern Europe
when we quite accidentally discovered the answer to this question
...
Mystery was slumped in the back seat under¬
neath a blanket, unable to conjure his way out of a fever
...
Every so often, he'd leap to alertness
and disgorge the contents of his mind
...

"My plan is to tour North America and promote my shows in strip
clubs," he said
...

You can be my assistant, Style
...
"
After a couple of uneventful days in Chisinau—where the only beauti¬
ful women we saw were on magazine covers and billboards—we figured,
"Why stop there?" Odessa was so close
...

So we left Chisinau on a cold, snowy Friday and drove northeast to the
Ukrainian border
...
The vista looked like
a scene from an epic Russian romance, with tree branches coated with crys-

tallized ice and frozen wine groves running along the hilly landscape
...

But soon, all of that was the least of our problems
...

The first sign that something unusual was afoot came when we reached
a bridge over the Dniester River and found a military checkpoint complete
with several army and police vehicles, camouflaged bunkers on either side
of the road, and an immense tank with its barrel pointing in the direction
of oncoming traffic
...
Why?
We will never know
...
"I have
a version of the knife-through-body illusion I want to do
...
I'll play 'Stuck In
the Middle With You' from Reservoir Dogs while I put my fist straight
through your stomach
...

Then I'm going to lift you straight up, out of the chair, impaled on my arm
...
"
The second sign that something was not quite right came when we
stopped by a gas station to stock up on snack food
...
We paid in
American dollars, and they gave us change in what they said were rubles
...
Even stranger, they had been minted in 2000: nine
years after the Soviet Union had supposedly collapsed
...
"Ladies and gentlemen," he an¬
nounced from the back seat as Marko worked to start the car, "he levitated
over the Niagara Falls, he jumped off the Space Needle and survived
...

As we drove on, Marko and I began to see Lenin statues and commu¬
nist posters through the car window
...
Marko, who spoke some Russian, translated it as a
call for a Soviet Re-union
...
" Mystery wiped his nose with a
shredded tissue
...
"
Suddenly, a police officer (or at least someone dressed as one) stepped
into the road in front of the car with a radar detector in his hand
...
A¬
f
ter twenty minutes and a two-dollar bribe, he let us go
...
This officer
also told us we were speeding
...

Ten minutes and two dollars later, we were on our way again, crawling
at fifty-five just to be safe
...
Wherever we were, it was the most
corrupt country on earth
...
It will begin with a raven
flying into the audience and landing on the stage
...
"
When we finally reached the border, two armed soldiers asked for our
papers
...
They showed us the local passport—an
old Soviet document—and yelled something in Russian
...

"I will dress as Mystery, with platform boots and the works
...
I will be goth and club cool
...
Then I'll go back in time and turn into a child
...
Then he asked
for cigarettes
...

With pride, the guard answered back, "Pridnestrovskaia
...
Trans-Dniester is neither recognized
diplomatically nor mentioned in any of the guide books or maps we carried
...

"I'll do a science experiment where I transport a lab technician over the
Internet
...
So I need a
male kid, a raven, you, someone to play the lab technician, and a couple
people to be bank guards
...
The guard didn't lower his gun once
...
Instead, the guard turned and disappeared into an office
...

"I said, 'Listen, just arrest me
...
'"
This was getting ugly
...
"Imagine this
...
How
amazing would that be?"
For the first time, I lost it with him
...

Open your eyes
...

"We're about to get thrown in jail
...
Does nothing exist except for you and your fucking magic show?"
"Listen, if you want to go at it, I'll go at it," he thundered
...
Just step out of the fucking car, and I'll deal with you
...
There was no way I was going to tangle with him
...
Mystery had been dead weight this entire trip
...
He hadn't gone to the
Latin School of Chicago
...
The guy was a narcissist
...
Peacock theory wasn't
just to attract girls
...
Even
picking a fight with me was just another plea for attention, because I'd been
ignoring him for the past hundred miles
...
"I didn't mean to snap at you," I told him
...
My dad used to tell
me what to do
...
"
"Well, I'm not your dad," I said
...
He ruined my life and my mom's life
...
Tears lay over his eyes like contact lenses, unable to escape on
their own
...

When I got really depressed, I'd imagine going to his bedroom with a
shovel, smashing his head in, and then killing myself
...
"When
I think of my father, I think of violence," he continued
...
When we had to kill
our dog, he took a gun out and blew its head off right in front of me
...
They spoke for several minutes; then Marko handed him
several bills
...

His father, he said, was an alcoholic German immigrant who verbally
and physically abused him
...
And his mother blamed herself for smothering his brother
with love to make up for her husband's abuse
...
When he was still a virgin at age twentyone, he began to worry that maybe he was gay
...

It took two more bribes of equivalent sum, spread between two other
officials, to grease our way across the border
...
Each separate bribe took an hour and a half of dis¬
cussion
...

When we finally reached Odessa, we asked our hotel clerk about TransDniester
...
It was a place with no rules—the Wild West of the Eastern bloc and a
country few foreigners dared to visit
...
"

101

"Why?" he asked
...
"
"Then what would they have done with us?"
She shaped her fingers into a gun, pointed them at Marko, and said,
"Pow
...
Mystery's
seventeen-year-old, Natalija, had left a dozen messages
...

Natalija continued to call Marko after Mystery and I flew home, asking
when he was going to come back for her
...
"He was a wizard," he told her
...
Get some
help and stop calling me
...
He had tasted the forbidden fruit and
wanted more
...
At the time, I thought it was because I
wanted to keep my new identity separate from my past
...


103

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: Re: Sticking Point
AUTHOR: Maddash
I've never had a woman over to my place in a one-on-one situation who I
didn't at least kiss-close
...

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: Sticking Point

1
...
This is because it's a lot easier to get a woman back to your house
at the end of the night if you've already had her over and nothing has

I'm hitting a sticking point, which I hope you all can help me get past
...


Mystery and I just returned from Belgrade, where I met a beautiful,
intelligent girl who probably would have been my Serbian girlfriend if it weren't

2
...


for my sticking point I'm having huge trouble kiss-closing
...
I'll feel the
window open, and then instantly I start thinking all the "what-ifs"—"what if she

3
...


rejects me," "what if I ruin the rapport we have," "what about that thing she
said about her ex-boyfriend
...
We play with my puppy
...


5
...


So what's my problem? I'm so damn close to that golden ring of PUA-dom,
but this little sticking point is holding me back
...
I bring her back to the apartment and show her the Winamp music program

—Style

visualizations in Winamp, I kiss her on the cheek
...
While she's playing with the

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

7
...
If she hesitates, I just show her more things on the computer and then

AUTHOR: Nightlight9

kiss her on the cheek again
...
That
is what almost all women want
...

You asked how to tell if she's ready
...
You can figure out the rest
...
It works 100 percent of the time
...
If
she looks back for a count of three seconds, she wants to kiss
...

—Nightlight9

—Maddash

104
105

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: Re: Sticking Point
AUTHOR: Grimble
One of my favorite closing routines is massage
...
I agree
...
If she hesitates about the tit-play, simply point to the puppets and laugh,
"Look at the puppets
...
" Then play with the tits
again
...

But during the massage, I constantly tell her she's doing it all wrong
...
While
massaging her back, I tell her she carries a lot of tension in her legs and that I

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

give amazing leg massages to my friends
...
If

AUTHOR: Style

you act as if you are the authority, she will not question you
...
But, slowly, I work my way up to her buttocks
...
At this point, I usually just unbutton my pants, put on a con¬
dom, and start fucking her without kissing or actual foreplay
...


Thanks for all your help
...
The answer came
to me out of the blue a week ago, and I've field-tested it successfully nearly
every night since
...
When I
started to get lOls, I thought about your posts
...
So I decided to take baby steps in the direc¬
tion of kissing while doing something like Mystery's puppet show and talking

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

logically the whole time
...
Prob¬

SUBJECT: Re: Sticking Point

lem solved
...
" I actually don't care what she thinks
...
But now, whether I get it or not, I am still the guy who
goes for it
...
I leaned in and told her she smelled good
...


It helps to just think of the girl as practice
...
Let's see if she hates
me
...
I don't give a shit
...
So fuck¬
ing what? Do you care that she has a fond memory of some guy she met six

2
...
As I spoke, I ran my
hand up the back of her neck, grabbed a fistful of hair at the roots, and pulled
it firmly downward
...
Say, "Stick your tongue out
...
If she slaps you, good!
That story would rock
...
She didn't seem upset, so I pushed further
...
Then I took her arm, bent

105

104

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

focus a girl's attention on something else so she doesn't resist overt sexual

SUBJECT: Re: Sticking Point

moves
...
Say, "Look at the puppet show over there," while you play with

AUTHOR: Grimble

her tits
...
Look, they are funny puppets
...
When we're back at my

again
...

But during the massage, I constantly tell her she's doing it all wrong
...
While
massaging her back, I tell her she carries a lot of tension in her legs and that I

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

give amazing leg massages to my friends
...
If

AUTHOR: Style

you act as if you are the authority, she will not question you
...
But, slowly, I work my way up to her buttocks
...
I think I finally figured out a solution
...
At this point, I usually just unbutton my pants, put on a con-

every night since
...

This technique is not for the timid
...
When I
started to get lOls, I thought about your posts
...
So I decided to take baby steps in the direction of kissing while doing something like Mystery's puppet show and talking

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

logically the whole time
...
Prob-

SUBJECT: Re: Sticking Point

lem solved
...
I leaned in and told her she smelled good
...
" I actually don't care what she thinks
...
But now, whether I get it or not, I am still the guy who

they mate and how we're evolutionary wired to feel aroused when someone

goes for it
...


It helps to just think of the girl as practice
...
Let's see if she hates

2
...
If so, fuck it
...
"

pulling the back of the hair is another evolutionary trigger
...
So fucking what? Do you care that she has a fond memory of some guy she met six

hand up the back of her neck, grabbed a fistful of hair at the roots, and pulled
it firmly downward
...
Say, "Stick your tongue out
...
If she slaps you, good!
That story would rock
...
She didn't seem upset, so I pushed further
...
Then I took her arm, bent

STEP 4

106

if a little, and erotically bit the crease on the opposite side of the elbow
...

4
...
right
...
" I pointed to the side of my neck
...
She refused to at first, so I turned away
calmly to punish her
...
" This time, she did
...

5
...
So I told her, "That's not how you bite
...
" Then I swept her hair aside, gave her a good bite on the neck, and
instructed her to try again
...

6
...
" Then we finally
kissed
...
After a brief tour, I
did a Maddash move and had her sit on my lap while showing her a video on
the computer
...
Then she asked if she could lie on the
floor for a second
...
Cold!
I took off her shoes, threw a blanket over her, put a pillow under her head,
and climbed into my own warm bed
...
All it took was one night,
really, to get to the other side of this
...

—Style

DISARM

THE OBSTACLES

A MAN HAS ONLY ONE ESCAPE FROM
HIS OLD SELF: T O S E E A D I F F E R E N T
SELF IN T H E M I R R O R OF SOME
W O M A N ' S EYES
...

There's Ross Jeffries and the school of Speed Seduction, where subliminal language patterns are used to get a girl aroused
...

Or David DeAngelo and Double Your Dating, in which he advocates
keeping the upper hand over a woman through a combination of humor
and arrogance that he calls cocky funny
...
His crude motto: "Make the ho say no
...
, Major Mark, and Juggler—
the newest guru on the scene, who appeared online one day claiming he
could pick up women better and faster than any other PUA simply by reading his grocery list
...
and
Rasputin, who reveal their techniques only to those they deem worthy
...
And the giants do battle constantly—threatening, name-calling, debunking, competing
...
I've never been a true believer in
anything
...
The problem is
that when you drink from the source of knowledge, there is a price
...
Every single teacher wanted to know that he was the best, that
his students were the most loyal, that the competition wasn't getting laid
...
It is a crisis that's specific not to the community but to humanity: Power is retained by attracting loyalty, and subjugation is guaranteed by giving it
...
I

110

wanted more teachers
...
I found that out when Extramask took me to a party at the Argyle hotel on Sunset Boulevard
...
Extramask, meanwhile, looked better and more outrageous
every time I saw him
...

At the party, I noticed a pair of heavily peacocked twins sitting on a
couch like alabaster statues
...

"Who are they?" I asked Extramask, who was talking to a petite moonfaced woman who seemed very interested in him
...
"They do a goth burlesque show
together
...
They double-team band members
...
"
"Introduce me
...
"
"That's okay
...
"
Extramask walked over to the girls and said, "This is Style
...
They were surprisingly warm hands for girls who
looked half-dead
...
"Do you think spells work?"
I knew this was the perfect opener, because it was clear they believed in
spells—for some reason, most girls who strip or exploit their sexuality for a
living do
...

"Entertain us more," they cooed
...
"I'm not a dancing monkey," I replied
...
I need a few minutes to recharge
...
They laughed on cue
...
"I've shown you a couple of cool things
...
"I'm going to talk to some friends," I
said
...
"
I wandered away and struck up a conversation with a cherubic little
punk named Sandy
...

"We have something to teach you," they said proudly
...
I didn't think

111

they'd come up with anything
...
IOI
...
The girls were easy to tell apart, because one had chicken pox scars and the other had punctures in her face
from removed piercings
...
They told me about their striptease show, in which
they dance on stage and simulate lovemaking together
...
That's why
they'd been so quiet
...
Most of the
time, however, she's just as shy or insecure as the less attractive women he's
ignoring—if not more so
...
They were just sweet girls looking for a friend
...
As we exchanged numbers, I felt the window open
...
I couldn't figure out how to
separate them, but I didn't know what to do to seduce them simultaneously
either
...
So I excused myself and went to find to Sandy
...
She seemed like she
wanted something
...
I wasn't really attracted to her: I was
just excited about being able to kiss women so easily now
...

When we emerged ten minutes later, the twins had left the party
...

I returned to my apartment in Santa Monica empty-handed
...

Fortunately, the next day, I received a message from the girls
...
I
still had a chance to redeem myself
...

"Invite yourself over
...
' Don't give them any
option
...
As soon as you walk in, run yourself a bath
...
"
"Wow
...
"
"Trust me," he said
...

"We're just lying around in our sweats watching TV," they warned
...
I haven't showered or shaved in a month
...
"
So far, everything was going according to plan
...
When I walked
in the room, they were lying on adjacent twin beds watching The Simpsons
...
"My hot water at home isn't working
...

I made small talk while the water ran
...

I didn't want to use soap yet because it would make the water dirty
...
I felt so vulnerable sitting there pale, skinny, and naked
...

A minute passed
...
Ten minutes
...
The girls probably thought I'd drowned
by now
...
I'd hate myself if I didn't
...
There was silence, then whispering
...
What a
dumb thing to say
...
I thought of my favorite line from Ulysses, when sexually
frustrated Leopold Bloom imagines his impotent manhood in the bathwater and calls it the limp father of thousands
...
I'd been hoping for both, but beggars can't be choosers
...
I was too embarrassed to look her in
the eye
...
Burns
...
It wasn't
erotic; it was workmanlike
...
Then she wet the washcloth in the tub and wiped the
soap off
...

Now what?
I thought sex was supposed to automatically happen afterward
...
Mystery hadn't told me what I
was supposed to do after asking them to wash my back
...

He hadn't told me how to transition from a back scrub to a hand job
...
The last woman to wash my back was my mother, and that was
when I was small enough to fit in the sink
...
Something had to be done
...

She walked out of the bathroom
...
I'd blown it
...
I sat on the edge of the bed of the girl who had
washed me, and we talked
...
I told the other sister to sit on the bed with us
...
Then I pulled their hair simultaneously and bit each of their necks
...
They were both so passive
...
I wasn't going to leave the room a failure
...
"We get all our physicality
out on stage
...
We're probably more distant than most sisters
...
On the way home, I stopped by Extramask's house, where he lived with his parents
...
"I thought you said they did guys together
...
I thought you knew
...
Women with wide faces seemed to find
him attractive
...
Since adolescence, whenever I'd had the opportunity to make a
wish (on an eyelash, a digital clock at 11:11, an ever-increasing number of
birthday candles), thrown in with the usual pleas for world peace and personal happiness, I'd ask for the ability to attract any woman I wanted
...
But instead it was coming
in a slow drizzle and I was running around underneath it with a bucket,
working to catch each drop
...
And by
waiting, they miss out
...
This isn't because the universe is
cruel
...
It has its own cat-string theory and
knows we don't appreciate things that fall into our laps
...
His posts intrigued me
...
He told others to challenge themselves and intentionally make pickups
more difficult by saying they worked as trash collectors and drove '86 Impalas
...
And he had just announced his first workshop
...

One of the reasons Juggler rose so quickly in the community, besides his competitive pricing was his writing: His posts had flair
...
So when I called

I would have to pick up my bucket and work
...
I got Lasik surgery, shedding my nerdy
glasses once and for all
...
And I joined a
gym and took up surfing, which was not only a cardiovascular workout but
also a way to get tan
...

Some days you go out and catch every wave and think you're a champ; other
days you don't get one good wave and you think you suck
...
And that's what
keeps you coming back
...
I
needed to complete my mental transformation, which I knew would be
much more difficult
...
Now I needed to develop the confidence, self-worth, and inner game to back it up
...


when it came to getting girls to the house
...
I aimed to outdo Mystery's sarge at Club Ra in Belgrade
...
I planned to make myself
a seducing machine, designed from pieces of all the best PUAs
...


thing new instead: the story of the day he sarged me at his first workshop in San Francisco
...
"Style talks really fast," I said to my housemate's
cat, who understands these things and was my longstanding partner in crime
to my place and watch the cat do back flips?" hardly ever failed
...
Two weeks later I
sat in a restaurant in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf waiting for Style to
arrive, mentally tallying a list of crazy things that could be wrong with him
...
"Please, goddess of seduction and patron saint of pickup artists and
guys trying to get nookie everywhere, please do not let Style be weird
...
People who
feel that others aren't interested in what they think talk fast for fear of losing the
attention of their audience
...
Such people usually become writers
...
I hoped it was the latter
...
I sat down on the

seduction, not another student
...
She relaxed
...
We had come to admire each other's

shot from jet lag
...


postings on a website dedicated to the art of seduction
...
In that

and eloquence
...
be a positive guy who was focused on sharing
...


the woods
...
I wanted her to

Style entered the room with a galloping lope
...


he was wearing? He made easy eye contact, beamed with a beautiful smile,

CLICKITY CLOMP, CLICKITY CLOMP, CLICKITY CLOMP
...
With his relatively short stature, baby-like shaved

bisected the long room
...
It is not that I didn't

head, and soft-spoken voice, no one would ever suspect him of being a pickup

appreciate Style
...
I perked up
...

I liked Style right away
...
" It was just that the vibe between her and me and the never-ending
white petals was so
...
And also because I am a wolf and this

people like him
...
He had a way of summing up

little doe separated from her herd was mine
...


the while attributing the eloquence back to me
...

And yet I wasn't sure what his weakness was
...
Some guys tell me
they can't think of anything or they need a really good line
...
You are not that important
...
We have

know someone
...
We are never

care
...
As far as opening lines go, a grunt or

comfortable with those who have no visible flaw
...


weakness
...


others to open up and reveal themselves
...
Just something you hear every day from

goes but that was all I had to go on
...
But he had a lack of confidence that made no sense,

the grocery store clerk
...
" Three percent respond with enthusiasm: "great"

as if he felt there was something missing about himself—a piece that would

or "super
...
And

make him complete
...
My husband just left me for his

would eventually find it inside
...
How fucking Zen
...


After lunch, we did exactly what all hot pickup artists on the make do in
San Francisco
...

We walked downstairs and spread out—commandoes of seduction
...
" Her voice is rough for such a small package
...
I am not
really into the loud rock scene
...
But I forgive her
...
That would only limit my adventures
...
She was small
...
There is something about

I get treated
...
I joined her at a video projection on

I look at her expectedly
...
"How are you?" she asks
...
The scene looped every minute or so—white petals falling delicately

I ponder a moment
...
"

off seasoned branches
...
I am the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz—tall

I'm always an 8, sometimes an 8
...

There are two paths to move a conversation
...
It was like the soundtrack to falling leaves
...


Or you can make statements: "I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan—home to

Focus is passe
...
There is no point in just taking a walk in the park when we can also listen

her tongue into a poodle"; "My housemate's cat is the reincarnation of Richard

to headphones, munch on a hot dog, crank up our vibrating soles to the
maximum, and check out the passing carnival of humanity
...
"
I spent my early twenties trying to get to know girls by asking tons of

the creed of a new world order: stimulation! Thought and creativity have be-

questions—open-ended questions, smart questions, strange questions, the most

come subservient to the singular goal of saturating our senses
...
I thought they would appreciate
my interest
...

Interrogation is not seduction
...

Talking in statement form is the way old friends speak to each other
...
They
invite others to share and make perfect metaphysical sense
...
I have done it for you
...
"Like raking leaves into a big
pile and falling into them
...
"
She smiled
...
"
I chuckled
...

"You know," I said, "I have a friend who swears he can figure out a
person's personality based on the age and sex of their siblings
...
"That is so much bullshit
...
"Crazy bullshit," I agreed
...
Of course, he did read me exactly
...
Just like that
...
"

school
...

"Look, I can't talk to you anymore
...
And, besides, with you standing there I'm going to get a crick in
my neck
...
Ah
...

"I'm Juggler
...
"
"Hi Anastasia
...
Her nails were trimmed short
...
I needed to investigate fully
...
She
came willingly
...

Style entered the scene
...

Did he flourish? It felt like he flourished
...
A growl built deep in my
chest
...

"Does anyone truly know anyone?" Style retorted
...
Damn him to hell—in that moment I hated Style for his

"Are you?"

mischievous timing but loved him for his way with words
...
All my girlfriends have to write me love notes and give me

his face—this day
...
I introduced

backrubs
...
"

120

121

the two of them
...
Style's eyes rolled back in

Later my research shifted toward understanding people and myself
...
My best guess as to whom he was

became a variety act—juggler, street performer, comedian
...
He performed

entertainment, but a great place to learn about human interaction
...
He had her punch him in the stomach
...
By my twenty-third birthday, I had slept with

of nails
...
Her phone number appeared out of thin air
...
By my twenty-eighth, I could sleep with as many as I wanted
...
We left her where I found her
...


There is pride involved in being a pickup artist
...
I have

Then I found the community
...
I don't blame them
...


Most audiences are horny to be fucked
...
But the

Then I met Style and felt a kinship on an entirely new level
...


girl sitting on the barstool is more difficult
...
She is the five hundred

Most people don't listen because they are afraid of what they might hear
...
And she can bust you up, if you let her
...
He was cool with however anyone wanted to

she is also horny to be fucked
...


be
...
He found feisty girls who

San Francisco was my first group workshop
...
We met

were fun to play with
...
He saw an

up with them at a restaurant near Union Street
...
Together we were the Lewis and Clark of

their credentials
...


seduction
...
M
...
On the way back from the restroom, I ap-

hotel room with some of his family who were in town
...


voices so as not to wake them
...
He made fun of

"I hope I am not interrupting," I said to the woman, "but I just had to tell

my midwestern sensibilities
...
It made me cry

community and counted up the loot—a couple of kisses for Style, a couple of

for three days
...
He used to

telephone numbers for me
...
"
They nodded and smiled amicably "You
...
very much," the
woman responded in broken English
...
"
"Where are you from?" I asked
...
We felt on the edge of something
...
"I can't wait to see where all this

leads
...
"

benefits of self-improvement, in the belief that we—the community—had the

I gave her a hug and shook the man's hand
...
"

answer to the problems that had plagued him his whole life
...


him that the answer he was seeking lay elsewhere
...


I didn't start out as a pickup artist
...


taking things apart
...
I had a burning desire
to know firsthand how things worked
...
My dad would go
to cut the grass, but the lawnmower would be in pieces
...
and nothing
...
I was much better at taking things apart than putting them back together
...


123

When I returned home from San Francisco, where the only person I spent
the night with was Juggler, I received a phone call from Ross Jeffries
...
"If you want, you can
come sit in for free
...
"
"Sure," I told him
...
"
"There's just one thing: You owe me parties
...
You promised me
...
"
"And, before we hang up, you can wish me a happy birthday
...
And my youngest this year was
twenty-one
...

I arrived on Saturday afternoon to find a standard hotel conference
room, the kind that's so brightly lit and mustard yellow it seems designed
as a habitat more for salamanders than for human beings
...
Some were
greasy-haired students, others were greasy-haired adults, and a few were
greasy-haired dignitaries—top-ranking officials at Fortune 500 companies
and even the Justice Department
...

He was telling the students about the hypnotic technique of using
quotes in a conversation
...
"The unconscious thinks in terms of
content and structure
...
Do you follow me?"
He looked around the room for a response
...
He
stopped speaking
...
"Brothers, this is Style
...
"He has seen what Mystery has to offer and decided to become my disciple
...
The reviews of Mystery's Belgrade workshop had hit the Internet, and my skills in the field had
been soundly praised
...

I stared at the thin black headset coiling around his face like a spider
...

That was not enough for him
...

It was his room
...
I didn't know what to say
...
I couldn't come up with one
...

I could see that he wasn't happy with my response
...
It was a cult
...
"Why don't
you join me for some Italian?" he asked, twirling his ring, a replica of the
one worn by the superhero Green Lantern
...
"I thought you had come over to the good side of the force
...
I told
Mystery what you did with the waitress at California Pizza Kitchen, and he
flipped out
...
"
Ross's face turned purple
...
It was a hypnosis word, a
pattern interrupt
...
I don't want that guy
taking my best work, stealing it, and making money off it
...
" He stabbed a fork into his chicken
...
If
you're going to be this deeply involved with Mystery, then I'm going to have
a problem
...
"
"Listen," I tried to appease the angry guru
...
I just let him know that you were the real deal
...
Just tell him you saw me get a chick hot as hell and wetting
her panties just by asking a couple of questions and making some gestures
...
He was clearly a guy who'd been beaten down early in life
...
I knew because they'd arrived at the seminar a few
minutes after me and instantly started teasing him
...

His siblings must have been overwhelmed as well
...
As for Ross, he had turned to to a
religion of his own making
...
The title pretty much summed up where he was coming
from emotionally at the time—How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed: A
Down and Dirty Guide to Dating and Seduction for the Man Who's Fed Up With
Being Mr
...
He sold the book through small classified ads in the back
of Playboy and Gallery
...
One of his students, a legendary computer hacker named Louis DePayne, soon created the newsgroup alt
...
fast
...


"You are being led into the inner sanctum of power, my young apprentice," he warned, wiping the gray stubble on his chin with the back of his
hand, "and the price for betrayal is dark beyond measure of your mortal
mind
...
"

"When I first came out with this stuff, I was savagely ridiculed," Ross
said
...
I
was really angry for a while
...
But gradually the argument
went from 'Is this real?' to 'Should they be doing it?'"
And that is why every guru owes at least a pledge of allegiance to Ross
Jeffries
...
It's also why every time new teachers pop
up, Ross tries to shoot them down; in a few cases, he has even threatened to
reveal a young competitor's online seduction activities to his parents or
school administration
...
The fact was that Ross had built the seduction community almost
single-handedly
...
But there had never been a community of guys before
Ross
...
As Speed Seduction was developing, so was the Internet
...
His ambition was stand-up comedy and screenwriting
...
So Jeffries drifted between paralegal jobs, lonely and girlfriendless
...
That tome was Frogs Into Princes,
the classic book on NLP by John Grinder and Richard Bandler
...

One of his heroes had always been the Green Lantern, who was endowed with a magic ring able to bring the desires of his will and imagination to life
...
The power and control that had eluded him his whole life was finally his
...
Originally, DeAngelo called himself
Sisonpyh—hypnosis spelled backward—and worked his way into the
Speed Seduction hierarchy
...

According to Ross, DeAngelo had brought the girl to him to seduce
...
According to DeAngelo, Ross was in no way given permission to
touch the girl
...

It was based not on NLP or any other form of hypnosis, but rather on evolutionary psychology and DeAngelo's principle of cocky funny
...
A
...
"The guy is so fucking good-looking and
well-connected in the nightclub scene it just astounds me that people think
he could ever understand their situation and the difficulties they encounter
in dealing with women
...


126

"There's a certain view of women that David DeAnushole, Gun Bitch,
and Misery have," Ross continued, working himself into a rage
...
"
Ross reminded me of an old rhythm-and-blues artist who has been
ripped off so much that he trusts no one
...
There is no way
to copyright a woman's arousal, to declare certain authorship over her
choice of a partner
...

The waiter cleared our pasta
...
"I think that 20 percent of my students have been abused
...
Not just with
women but with all people, male and female
...
"
He turned around and noticed three businesswomen eating dessert a
few tables away
...

"How's that berry cobbler?" Ross yelled at them
...

"You know," Ross said to them, "people have signal systems for
dessert
...
"The signals say: This is sugar-free; this
melts in my mouth
...
It's tracing an energy flow through
your body
...
"Really?" they asked
...
The women ooohed in
unision
...
"We were just talking about whether
men really understand women
...
"
In a flash, he was at their table
...
I couldn't tell sometimes
if his patterns really worked on the sophisticated subconscious level he
claimed, or if most conversations were so boring that simply saying something different and intriguing was enough to trigger attraction
...
"I've never heard it said
like that before
...
"
Ross collected her phone number and returned to the table
...


129

I talked to his mother for a while about her son's line of work
...

"But he's not crude and vulgar
...
" She stood up and
ambled to a wall of shelving
...
Do you want to read some of it? One of them says he's a king
and he's on a throne
...

"Ross is a seductionist and a plotter," he said when I called him in
Montgomery, Alabama, where he'd been stationed
...
Unfortunately, the military frowned on such perversions, so Sin had to drive all
the way to Atlanta to walk her on the downlow
...
"You are the marketing tool he's using to attack Mystery
...
So every time Ross
asks you a question like, 'Are you lying to your guru?,' and you answer, the
presupposition that he's your guru is affirmed
...
That is his message
...
"
There was a catch to learning NLP, manipulation, and selfimprovement
...
Every word had a hidden meaning, and every hidden meaning had
weight, and every weight had its own special place on the scale of selfinterest
...

I invited Ross to his first event the following week
...
I thought it would be a good
scene full of beautiful people for Ross to dazzle with his skills
...

I met Ross at his parents' place, a middle-class red brick house on the
west side of L
...
His father, a retired chiropractor, school principal, and
self-published novelist, sat on a couch near his mother, who clearly wore
the pants in the family
...

"Style's very successful," Ross told them
...
" Even pickup artists in their forties still seek the approval of
their parents
...
"Jesus Christ, this
was a mistake
...
"
The party was a disaster
...
He spent most of the night thinking he was flirting by acting as if he
were my gay lover and crawling on all fours behind Carmen Electra, pretending to be a dog sniffing her ass
...
At 10:00 P
...
, he said
he was tired and demanded that I drive him home
...

"No, next time we have to arrive at the right time," he scolded me
...
"
"You're not that old
...
It was an
embarrassment
...
All my old friends had
fallen by the wayside
...
I was in the game to have more
women in my life, not men
...
Hopefully, this was just part
of the process, the way cleaning a house often makes it messier first
...
Of course, Ross's detractors weren't any
kinder to him
...

"That traitorous creep David DeAnushole," Ross seethed as I dropped
him off
...
They didn't even have the courtesy to let me
know
...


131

Attraction is not a choice
...
The
seminar was packed
...
Many of them I recognized from other seminars, including Extramask
...
But there was a difference
...
He reminded me of Robert DeNiro, if
DeNiro had been a mama's boy who'd never been in a fight in his life
...
He wasn't charismatic or interesting
...
He didn't even claim to be good at the game
...
But he was dangerous because he was organized
...
It was not only
entirely scripted but cleaned up for mass consumption
...

DeAngelo was a bright guy—and a threat to Ross
...
, Vision, and Orion, an uber-nerd who was famous as the first PUA to sell
videotapes of himself approaching girls on the street
...

"Seduction," DeAngelo read from his notes, "is defined in the dictionary as an 'enticement to wrongdoing, specifically the offense of inducing a
woman to consent to unlawful sexual intercourse by enticements which
overcome her scruples
...
That is not what I am teaching
...
Attraction is working on yourself and improving yourself to the point where women are magnetically attracted to
you and want to be around you
...
He was too smart for that
...
He had stopped posting online and, instead,
let his employees stick up for him when he was flamed
...
But he was a great marketer
...
"You give it
value
...
You make it scarce
...
I want you to think about other ways during lunch
...
A struggling real estate agent from Eugene, Oregon, he moved to San Diego for a fresh start
...
So he began
searching the Web for tips and cultivating friends who were good with
women
...
Sending instant messages
was a way for DeAngelo to practice flirting the way his new player friends
did, but without risking public embarrassment
...
"I was learning new ideas, implementing them, and then noticing how women responded on AOL
...
So I became cocky and funny
...
"
Flushed with his new findings, DeAngelo delivered a fifteen-page
screed to Cliff's List, one of the most established online seduction newsletters
...
Cliff, the middle-aged Canadian businessman who ran the list by day
and hunted for new master PUAs to bring into the community by night,
helped convince DeAngelo to spend three weeks turning his manifesto into
an e-book, Double Your Dating
...
joined us
...
I'd heard a lot about Rick H
...
His garish style of dress, like that
of a Vegas lounge lizard, was one of the inspirations for Mystery's peacock
theory
...
was short, slightly stocky, and dressed in a large-collared shirt
and a red blazer
...
I recognized two of them: Extramask, whose eyes were
swollen nearly shut, and Grimble, who was beginning to have doubts about
his application of Speed Seduction
...
So after spending time with
Rick H
...
His new approach was to stick
his elbow out whenever a woman walked past, bump her, and then yell
"owwww" loudly, as if she'd hurt him
...
It was much more rewarding, he realized, to be funny in a
bar than creepy
...
While
students crammed around him, he began holding court
...

The first: No good deed goes unpunished
...
)
The second: Always have a better answer
...
So if a woman asks what you do for a living,
keep her guessing: Tell her you're a cigarette lighter repairman or a white
slave trader or a professional hopscotch player
...
In a five-set in a hotel lobby one night, a woman asked
what my job was
...
As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized
I probably wasn't going to get a number-close
...

One thing I noticed as Rick talked was that people who liked the sound
of their own voice tended to do better with women—except for soft-spoken
Dustin
...

"Why is this shit so fun to talk about?" Rick H
...

"Because we're guys," DeAngelo said, as if it were the most obvious
thing in the world
...
"That's what we do
...
He was sipping apple juice
from a small can
...

"What happened to you?" I asked
...
"But even though we fucked three times, I didn't blow my load again
...
"
"But what does that have to do with your eyes? Did she punch you?"
"No, she had a feather pillow or some shit, and I got an eye infection because of my allergies
...
They sat together and he ran the ESP test,
a psychological game called the cube, and other demonstrations of value
...
They rented the movie Insomnia, went back
to her house, and cuddled together on the couch
...
"You
know, that kind of rock-hardness where you get the pre-cum dabbing your
Underoos
...
Do go on
...
She definitely felt the hardness
...
It was cool
...
"Then I took her shirt
off, so she was wearing just a bra
...
But when we went to the
bedroom, I had a problem
...
She still had her bra on
...
"
"I have no clue how to take off bras
...
"
"I guess unhooking a bra is something you learn from experience
...
Want to hear it?"
"Urn, sure
...
Then I'm gonna walk toward the pole blindfolded like
in pin the tail on the donkey, reach the bra, and try to undo it
...
I couldn't tell if he was joking or not
...
"It's a legit way to learn, and you know it'll
work too
...
I fucked her beyond belief, for probably a half
hour straight
...
But I couldn't spunk a load
...
Seriously, I really want to blow it during sex
...
Or maybe you're just n o t
into the girls, emotionally
...
Where
PUAs like Mystery advocated going under the radar, Zan flaunted the fact that he
was a ladies' man
...
"I think I got my first blow job, too
...
In four years on the

near my penis, and I couldn't tell whether she was sucking or not
...


cool when my balls were licked
...
"The seminar's

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

starting again," he told me
...
and Rasputin are speaking, and you

SUBJECT: Zan's Cocky Funny Waitress Technique

definitely don't want to miss them
...

"You know what else I did?" he yelled after me as I left
...
He made me laugh
...

"The inside of a vagina isn't at all what I t h o u g h t it would feel like," he
shouted excitedly
...
"
Maybe not
...
My method
is very simple
...
Period
...
It doesn't matter who she is
...

I am a slave to my love of women
...
The weakness of
women is language and words
...
If
they try to repel my advances, I act like they are from Mars and what they are
saying doesn't make any sense
...
Why?
Because a reputation is attractive to women
...
I am the other man who
guys worry about when they marry a girl
...
But when she comes to their table, they become downright courteous and nice and act like they are not interested in her
...
I am going to be very detailed in
my description of what I do because I think some guys don't really understand
cocky funny role-playing
...
I think I'm going to
call you
...
I make sure to face my body away

HER: You think so, huh? You don't have my number
...

When she comes up and asks us what we would like to drink, I ignore her

ZAN: Why, you're right! Okay, tell me and I will write it down
...
Then I glance in her direction and pretend I am just

HER: [Smiling) Not a good idea
...


now seeing her for the very first time
...
I didn't quite catch your
number there
...
Let's see
...


her—as if she were a new discovery
...
A big smile

HER: (Laughs and rolls her eyes)

and a wink, and the game begins
...
No girl would
...


its are not the goal just yet
...
And I've made

HER: My name is Stephanie
...


ZAN: I'm Zan
...
(Big smile)

This way, I can walk up, put my arm around her, and continue with my usual
"You would make a good girlfriend for me" talk
...
So the next time she comes

fooling around
...

HER: (Laughing) Oh no! Not you again!
ZAN: You again? Wow, you sure like to hang around us, don't you?

ZAN: Stephanie, my sweet! Hey, listen, sorry I didn't return your call last

HER: [Laughs] (some stuff)
ZAN: (Some other stuff)

night
...
I'm just a busy guy
...


HER: (Some other stuff)
ZAN: (As she is leaving) I bet you'll come back again real soon
...

HER: (Smiling) Yeah, I can't resist
...
Of course, she has to

This gets the whole table laughing, including her
...

Later:
ZAN: You know what, Stephanie
...
In fact, I can't
even remember the last time we had sex
...
We're through
...
And when she does, I smile at her

ZAN: (Pointing to another waitress) She's going to be my new girlfriend
...
" All along, I strive to make the interaction come off like I have known her

ZAN: [Playing with my phone) You are now downgraded from Booty Call

for a long time
...


# 1 to Booty Call # 10
...


So now, after a while, I will say something like:
And later still:
HER: Can I get you another drink?

13B

ZAN: [Motioning for her to come over and pointing at my knee) Stephanie,
come and sit down
...
[Smile, wink]
I have used that last line for years
...

Some of you guys are probably thinking, "Okay, now what? How do you
transition from funny ball-busting to more serious, romantic, sexual talk?"
It's simple, actually
...
Remember to turn on the bedroom eyes
...

ZAN: That's not what I asked
...

ZAN: Sneak away with me, girl
...
Etc
...
She was easily the hottest thing
around in a long time
...
My friends she views as nice guys, but not me
...
And now
she can choose to accept it or reject it
...
But it doesn't matter
...
And you can bet that the other waitresses know all
about the things I said to her
...
And I will continue to do so—right in front of Stephanie
...
When you go in, you own the place
...
In this
particular restaurant, there are four waitresses who have come home with me,
three less attractive waitresses who want to come home with me, and several
more who are works-in-progress (including Stephanie)
...
But, again, that is very good
...
and Rasputin
...

The first thing they did when they walked onstage was hypnotize everybody in the room
...
When they woke us up, we had no idea what they had installed in our heads
...
Every ounce of fire and charisma that
DeAngelo lacked, they possessed in bulk
...
was equal
parts Hell's Angel and Native American shaman
...
The two had met in a bookstore while both reaching for the
same NLP book
...
Their advice on seducing women was
simply: "Become an expert in how to feel good
...
had figured out a way to get women to pay to
have sex with him
...

Rasputin's forte was what he called hypnotic sexual engineering
...
"If a woman wants to give me a blow job," he elaborated, "I tell her,
'You only get three sucks
...
'" His chest stuck out like the top of a Volkswagen
...
'"
"What if you're scared of getting caught trying to manipulate her?"

140

asked a businessman in the front row who looked like a miniature Clark
Kent
...
"Emotions are just
energy and motion that you trap inside your body because of a thought
...

"Do you know how you get over it?" Rasputin looked at his interlocutor like a wrestler about to break a folding chair in half
...
Then you walk around
for two weeks wearing a dress and a goalie mask with a dildo strapped to
the front
...
And I will never be afraid of public humiliation
again
...
"I had a girl once tell
me I was kind of pudgy
...
'"
He paused, then added as an afterthought, "But I said it in a gentle
fucking way, on the spiritual fucking path
...
The top of my head
came up to Rasputin's Volkswagen
...

"You're nervous," Rasputin said
...
"
"Let me get rid of that anxiety," Steve offered
...
"
I started saying, "Five
...
nine
...
" As I did, Steve snapped
his fingers
...

As I did, Steve traced his fingers up from my navel and made a whooshing sound
...
"Now watch that feeling just blow
away like a smoke ring on a windy day
...

Take a tour of your body and try and find where it was
...
Okay
...
Try really hard to bring any
piece of it back
...
"
I couldn't tell whether it had worked or not, but I was reeling
...

He took a step back and scanned my face, as if reading a diary
...
said
...
You seem like you may care about women: You
don't just want to stuff your meat bat in some hole
...
"
Suddenly, we heard a commotion behind us
...
Orion the
uber-nerd was reading one of the girls' palms; Rick H
...

"Listen," Steve P
...
"Here's my card
...
"
"I'd love to
...
"If we let you in, you cannot share
these techniques with anybody
...
"
"Got it," I said
...
He approached the girl Grimble
was sarging, told her to smell the flower, and within thirty seconds she was
passed out in Steve's arms
...
And I was about to
learn it
...

Every weekend, I'd drive two hours south to San Diego and stay at
Steve P
...
His thirteen-yearold was already a better hypnotist than I would ever be
...
They'd sit me in a
chair and ask what I wanted to learn
...

It was easy to memorize routines, but mastering inner game after a lifetime of bad habits and thought patterns was not easy
...

"We're going to reframe you to where you're not glad to have some
boopsy sucking your dick," Steve explained
...
"
At each session, they'd put me under, and Rasputin would tell complex
metaphorical stories into one of my ears as Steve P
...
They'd leave open loops (or unfinished metaphors and stories) in my mind that they'd close a week later
...
They'd put me into
trances so deep that hours went by in the blink of an eye
...

I have a theory that most naturals, like Dustin, lose their virginity at a
young age and consequently never feel a sense of urgency, curiosity, and intimidation around women during their critical pubescent years
...
Thus, we're forced to spend years
feeling intimidated by and alienated from women, who hold in their sole
possession the key to releasing us from the stigma blighting our young
adult lives: our virginity
...
He was initiated into sex when
he was in first grade
...
But she eventually convinced him,
and the experience set off a lifelong obsession with oral sex
...
After he gave oral sex to one of the girls, word spread and he
soon became the sexual go-to guy on campus
...
And after a few too many confessions that involved the boy in the kitchen, Steve was fired
...
He now devoted his life to a self-styled mix of
sexuality and spirituality
...
Unlike many of the other gurus I'd met, I trusted him
...
The first weekend I stayed over, he gave me a lesson in soul-gazing,
which is when you look deep into a woman's right eye with your own right
eye as you breathe together
...
His cautionary speeches were often longer than the actual teaching process
...
A soul friend
...
The
next weekend he showed me how to throw chi through my hands into a
woman's abdomen
...
put it, she's "shaking like a dog shitting peach
seeds
...
"
This was a whole new level of game
...


144

I was in a whirlwind of learning
...
I barely talked
to my family
...
I
was living in an alternate reality
...
"
It was an offer I'd have to turn down
...
Walking through one, no matter how tempting the treasures
inside, would mean having to shut the rest
...
He was in town, and he wanted to take

me to meet his latest PUA discovery—a biker turned construction worker
who called himself David X
...
He was in his for-

ties and was as nice as he was uptight
...
He looked like

he'd stepped out of a 1950s family sitcom
...
There were issues of the

Pick-Up Times, a short-lived magazine from the seventies; an original edition

of Eric Weber's classic How to Pick Up Girls; and misogynist obscurities with
titles like Seduction Begins When the Woman Says No
...
Every PUA had a specialty, and David X's

was harem management—juggling relationships with multiple women
without lying to them
...
David X was quite possibly the ugliest PUA I'd ever met

He made Ross Jeffries look like a Calvin Klein underwear model
...

My meal with him was like so many I'd had before
...
His were:
I
...
You are the most important person in this relationship
...
He prided himself on bed

ding women by trapping them with their own words
...
I thought you did what you wanted
...
'" It wasn't a pretty visual
...
He was evidence of Cliff's
big mouth theory, a natural alpha male
...
While you're still in the bar doing magic tricks,
I'm coming back for seconds
...
But by the time brunch was over, I'd realized something: I didn't need to meet any more gurus
...

I had hundreds of openers, routines, cocky funny comments, ways to
demonstrate value, and powerful sexual techniques
...
It wasn't necessary to learn anything else, unless
it was for my own fun and interest
...
I was ready for Miami, and all the workshops to follow
...


STEP 5

ISOLATE
THE TARGET

As Mystery and I traveled the world doing workshops, meeting all the players
in the game, the seduction community became more than just a bunch of
anonymous screen names
...
Maddash was
no longer seven letters of type but a funny, Jeremy Piven-like entrepreneur
from Chicago; Stripped was an uptight book editor from Amsterdam with
male-model looks; Nightlight9 was a lovable nerd who worked for Microsoft
...


Over time, the posers and keyboard jockeys were outed, and the superstars were given their due
...
Every workshop made us better, stronger, more driven
...
They
had never been forced to prove their teachings in the field city after city,
night after night, woman after woman
...
Through word
of mouth, the lairs soon doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in size
...

Each workshop generated more online reviews praising my newly acquired game
...
The list of sargers in my phone book was
actually starting to surpass the number of girls I'd met
...

And, dispensing with introductions, he'd ask, "When you call a girl, should
you block your number or not?" or "I was in a three-set, and the obstacle
ended up liking me and giving me her phone number
...
But it was worth it, because it was
part of the process of becoming that guy in the club—the one I'd always envied, the one in the corner making out with a girl he'd just met
...

Before I discovered the community, the only time I'd ever made out
with a girl I met in a club was when I first arrived in Los Angeles
...
" The subtext was t h a t she was otherwise
too h o t to be making o u t with a slob like me
...

I was too insecure to handle what was, in retrospect, her own form of neg
...

For all the self-improvement books I had read, I still wasn't above shallow
validation-seeking
...
That's why we were in the game
...


It was the perfect sarge
...
They were b o t h platinum blondes with well-tanned fake breasts and

Mystery, in the meantime, h a d gone t h r o u g h his own metamorphosis

identical outfits—tight white tank tops a n d tight white pants
...
He had developed a radical new form of peacocking
...
This was South Beach, where

opposite sex
...
He wore six-inch platform boots and a bright red tiger-

all night
...
He added

vored shooting down the men who gave it to them
...


mesh see-through shirt, black eyeliner, white eye shadow, and as many as

A pickup artist m u s t be the exception to the rule
...
Every head turned as he walked down the

evolutionary instinct inside me and pay them no attention whatsoever
...

He didn't need openers
...
Girls followed him
for blocks
...
And
all he had to do if he was interested was perform a few magic tricks, which
seemed to justify his outlandishness
...
It repelled

With me were Mystery and two of our students, Outbreak and the
Matador of Love
...

Outbreak went in first, complimenting the platinum twins on their
outfits
...
Next, the Matador of Love moved
in with the Maury Povich opener
...


the type of girl he wasn't interested in and attracted the type he was
...
This was going to take every bit of confidence and

dressing for the outrageous club girls, the hot slutty girls, the ones I could

self-esteem that Steve P
...
If I showed

never get," he explained one night when I accused him of looking like a

even a flicker of weakness or doubt, they'd eat me alive
...
"They're playing groupie, so I gotta play rock star
...


"That tall one isn't a 10," Mystery leaned in and whispered to me
...
This is going to take some hardcore negging
...


in a black tutu
...

My reputation stemmed largely from the Miami workshop, where in a
period of thirty minutes I p u t my previous six weeks of hypnosis, training,

transvestite as if I knew him
...
It didn't really matter what I said to him: I was just maneuvering into
position, pawning him for the two-set
...
It was a night that would go down in the an-

Now that I was in range, it was time to neg
...
It was seduction not as wrestling b u t as ballet: a

ing your style," I said to the 10, the shorter of the two
...
" I

perfect example of form
...

"She's just got the same hair," the 10 replied, dismissively
...


152

"No, look at her outfit," I persisted
...
"
They looked over, and here was the make-or-break moment
...
So I continued with the negging
...
"You both look like strange little snowflakes
...
I could
sense it, and my heart began to pump faster
...
Is your
hair real?"
The 10 looked shocked, then recovered her composure
...

"Feel it
...
"Hey, it moved
...
"
"Pull harder
...
"Okay," I
said
...
But how about your friend there?"
The 1 l's face reddened
...
"That is really rude
...
It's disrespectful
...
All
I had done so far was commandeer their attention and provoke an emotional reaction
...
If
I could turn her anger around, I'd be in
...
It's all game
...
"Well," I told her
...
"
I paused, and she looked at me with her mouth open
...
Now it was time to reel her in
...
Whether I go out totally bald, in this wig, or in some crazy longhaired
wig, it doesn't change the way I'm treated by other people
...
Don't you agree?"
Everything I say in a pickup has an ulterior motive
...
Beauty to me was now a shit test: It weeded out the losers who got dumbstruck by it
...
"It's where the most beautiful
women in the country come to try and make it
...
It makes this VIP room look like a dive
bar
...
And
they were working
...
It's something you're born with or you pay for
...
What counts is a great outlook
and a great personality
...
It was the girls who were dumbstruck now, not me
...
And, to ensure my position there, I threw in one more neg, but
softened with a slight compliment, as if they were winning me over: "And
you know what? You have a great smile
...
"
The 10 sidled up to me and said, "We're sisters
...
But no, this was just one more shit test
...
"Bullshit," I said, smiling
...
When I look at
you both, I can tell you're very different
...
"
The 10 broke into a guilty smile
...
We're just friends
...
I took another chance: "And I'd be willing to bet that you
haven't even been friends for that long
...
"
"We've only known each other a year," the 10 admitted
...
However, I made
sure never to ask questions; instead, as Juggler had taught me, I made openended statements that led them to ask me the questions
...
As we talked, I kept my back to the 11, as
if I were less interested in her
...
Nothing in the game is an accident
...
So, just when the 11 was about to
walk away to find someone to talk to, I turned around and delivered a beautiful line: "You know what? When I look at you, I can see exactly what you
looked like in middle school
...
"
Sure, it was a truism
...
To seal the victory, I laid out one last
beauty-neutralizing cold-reading routine
...
But you're not
...
"
She began to give me the doggy dinner-bowl look, as the PUAs call it
...
Her eyes glazed over, her pupils
dilated, and she just watched my lips move, entranced and attracted
...

"You're interesting," the 10 gushed, pressing her breasts against me
...
"We have to hang out with you in L
...
"
She leaned in and gave me a tight hug
...
"This shit ain't free
...
"I love
him," she told her friend
...
A
...
But as the words left my mouth, I realized, too late, that I
should have made my hospitality more of a challenge
...
But no matter
...

You may have noticed that I haven't been referring to these girls by
their names
...
As
Mystery had taught me at that first workshop, I wait for the woman to introduce herself or ask for my name
...
So, as
we exchanged numbers, I received my first real IOIs and learned that the 10
was Rebekah and the 11 was Heather
...

A guy they knew suddenly showed up and bought three shots—for
Heather, Rebekah, and himself
...
Heather, who I was slowly realizing was ac-

155

tually a sweet girl beneath that laboriously wrought exterior, took the bait
...
"He's just rude
...
"Remember our rule?" she whined
...
But David X had taught me better: Girls don't respect guys who buy
them drinks
...
Dating is for tools
...

"But you're not buying a drink for yourself," I told them
...
And I'm different from all the other guys
...
And the
rules must be obeyed, because they work
...
I led her to a nearby booth, sat her down, and performed the ESP experiment
...
It was a code: the signal to phase shift, to slow down and move
in for the kill
...
In my head, I imagined her as the pudgy middle school
student she used to be
...

I slowly moved my head toward hers
...

I held up my index finger, placed it against her lips, and said, "Shhhh
...

It would have been the most beautiful kiss of my life
...
Worried that it
would fall out (or, even worse, end up on her lip), I pulled back, looked at
her again, and then nibbled on her lower lip
...
"Hey, not so fast," I told her, as
if she were the one hitting on me
...


156

We made out carefully, and then I returned her to Rebekah at the bar
...
We confirmed our plans to spend a
weekend together, and I left with my heart singing
...
He took my
hand in his and kissed it
...
"You've given me a new meaning on life
...
You
knew he had game before, but in that moment he really proved it
...
"
For the rest of the night, I was on fire
...
They could smell it
...

I removed my necklace and very slowly put it around her neck
...
"It's something to remember tonight by
...
It's very special to me
...

It didn't even matter whether I got laid or not, because this was the
game artfully played
...
I just
didn't realize that I'd ever be able to pull it off so smoothly or that, in the
process, I was creating a hunger that could never be satiated
...
But I grew restless sitting at home alone
...
The compulsion to sarge consumed my body like a fever
...
He was at the Whiskey Bar
and had started talking to Heidi Fleiss, the former Hollywood madam
who'd recently been released from jail for pandering and tax evasion
...

I slipped into a custom-made suit I had recently bought, threw my
prop bag over my shoulder, and dabbed a different cologne on each wrist
...

When I arrived, Grimble was standing next to her at the bar
...
Three buttons
were open, and his hairless chest was thrust further out than ever
...

"This is Style," Grimble told her, flashing a shady smile that was a little
unnerving to a friend, but to a certain type of girl was no doubt a turn on
...
"
Heidi was attractive but hard, like only women who've had to fend for
themselves in Los Angeles can be
...
She seemed like an odd choice
...

She reached out and shook my hand firmly
...
"Show me
your stuff
...

"Grimble here says you're a pickup artist
...
Let's see what you've got
...
He'd sold me out
...

"I have a girl here," he said, flashing a cruel smile and nodding to a petite
Hispanic woman in four-inch heels
...
"

158

159

Grimble had told me months ago that he was going to test his seduction skills by auditioning for the dating show Elimidate
...

"When's it airing?" I asked
...
"
"Who won?"
"I'm not allowed to talk about it
...
"
I searched his face for a clue, but he betrayed nothing
...
" Heidi prodded
...
I bet I can get anyone you can
...
I
was exhausted from months of travel and constant pickups, but I wasn't
going to pass up the challenge
...
I also noticed that she always kneeled on the ground after
approaching, so as not to intimidate the girls
...

In recent weeks, I'd figured out my own routine
...
Then demonstrate higher value
...
And, finally, create a physical connection
...
I ran a piece I'd invented after meeting the fake sisters in
Miami—the best friends test
...


Heidi spun around and approached three girls who were sitting on the
patio smoking
...


"About six years," one of the girls said
...
"
"How?"
"Rather than explain, I'll give you two the best friends test
...

Guys in the community have an expression for this phenomenon: I was giving them "chick crack
...

"Okay," I said, as if I were about to ask a serious question
...
"Do you both use the same shampoo?"
They looked at each other to decide on an answer, then turned to me
and opened their mouths to speak
...
"You already passed
...

"But you both looked at each other before you answered
...
But when two
people have a connection, they look at each other first and communicate almost telepathically before answering
...
"
The two girls looked at each other again
...
"You're doing it right now
...
Big points for Style
...
Afterward, I
asked the usual fact-finding question: "How do you all know each other?"
Unfortunately, she was married to one of the guys in the set
...

"So," she asked my former target
...

"You looked like old friends," Heidi told her with an obsequious smile
...
Let's move on
...

"The girls were all twenty," she said
...
" Evidently, pickup to Heidi Fleiss meant recruiting girls as escorts
...
I had to give her credit: She
had no fear of approaching
...

She was kneeling on the ground in front of two women with gold glitter lightly dusting their cheeks, talking about local restaurants
...

"Is she being fair?" I asked
...
I mean, I always put out
on the first night
...
The girls seemed to have completely
forgotten about her
...
"So," she announced loudly, "are any of you
girls gonna fuck him?"
Ouch
...
Of course none of the girls
wanted to fuck me—not yet
...

"Hey, I'm not that easy," I responded, recovering a little too late
...
"
Heidi and I walked away together
...
"If I left here right now," she said, "they'd follow me out like a
line of ducks
...
I dashed in after her, and the
competition was on again
...
Her name
was Hillary, and she said she was performing a burlesque show the following night at a club called the Echo
...
We just talked, and I took her phone number right in front of
her date
...

She wasn't going to let me walk away victorious
...
She always had to get the
last word in
...
Others are born to be teachers
...
"I'll always be one
...
By the time we left the bar that night, we had competed for every girl in the place
...

Grimble and his date came up to me laughing afterward
...
"I can't believe how much you've
changed
...
" He gave my forehead a slimy kiss and then
negged me
...
"
"Well," I replied
...
"

It was a red-letter day for the seduction community
...
Our entire lifestyle was at stake
...
If he lost, then we
were just self-delusional keyboard jockeys
...

I sat on Grimble's couch and watched the episode with Twotimer
...
Where the other guys bragged
about how successful they were, Grimble took the advice of his new guru
and claimed to be a disposable lighter repairman
...

During the second round, a waitress brought a bottle of champagne to
the table for Alison, courtesy of Grimble
...
He made it past the
second elimination
...
When he
dipped her to the floor and scooped her back up, taking her breath away, I
could see it in her eyes
...

"Congratulations," I told him
...
"
"Yeah," he said, with a cocky smile
...
"
We went out that night to see Hillary perform
...
But in
the past eight months, I hadn't felt even a tremor of one-itis
...
I was experiencing seducer's paradox: The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women
...
The bars and clubs became, as Mystery had coached me at

162

that first workshop, just different levels on a video game I had to get
through
...
Not only was she
sharp and cynical, but she'd seen me run around picking up women all
night with Heidi Fleiss
...

She was dressed as a gangster, with a machine gun water pistol and a formfitting pinstripe suit over a garter and matching panties
...
When she saw me in the back of
the room, she sashayed over, sat on my lap, and sprayed me in the face with
the water pistol
...

Afterward, I joined Hillary, her sister, and two of her friends for drinks
at a Mexican bar called El Carmen
...
She squeezed back
...
Grimble was right: A new me had evolved
...
My heart began to hammer against my
chest, as it always does during the two parts of a pickup that give me the
most anxiety: the approach and the kiss
...
Andy Dick walked in the bar with a group of
his friends
...
Our connection was eclipsed
...
When we rearranged ourselves,
Andy Dick somehow ended up between us, separating me from Hillary
...
It happens in Los Angeles: Celebrities
hit on your dates
...
But I was a PUA now, and a PUA wouldn't stand by helplessly and
watch a celebrity molest his date
...
I needed to think
...
It wasn't going to be easy, though, because he was so loud and obnoxious
...

The only chance I had was to become more interesting than he was
...
He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a pen and paper
...


163

Suddenly, the girl broke away from Grimble
...

I looked at her: She seemed familiar
...
"Jackie
...
It was the stinky-footed comedian whose hotel room I
had run out of
...
Either this was a miraculous coincidence, or we were running out of fresh women to sarge
...

I couldn't lose any more time; every minute was an inch higher up Hillary's
thigh that Andy Dick's hand was moving
...

I walked back to the table, sat down, and ran the best-friends test on
Hillary and her sister, which diverted the attention to me
...
In the game, a
woman comes up with four true statements and one lie about her house or
her car
...
And by looking for a variation in her eye movements, you can
usually tell which is untrue because people look in different directions
when they lie than when they're telling the truth
...

Andy asked me what I did for work (I didn't realize this at the time, but
it was an IOI), and I told him I was a writer
...
Soon he completely forgot about Hillary and started barraging me with questions, asking if I'd help him
...
And, as
Mystery says, own the men and you own the women
...
That was
his weakness
...
The tactics had worked, even better than they had the
night before with Heidi Fleiss
...

Andy slid closer to me and whispered: "What are you? Straight, bi, or
gay?"
"Um, straight
...
"That's too bad
...
"
After Andy and his friends left, I cozied back up to Hillary
...
I took her hand under the
table and felt the warmth emanating from her palm, from her thigh, from
her breath
...
I had won her
...
The king of the naturals had returned
...
He was wearing a tweed
sportcoat with large brown buttons, straight-legged polyester black slacks,
and a black skullcap
...
Last I'd heard, he was managing
...
He
had sent me photos of his girlfriends: one for each night of the week
...

"How'd you get in here?"
"Your landlady, Louise, let me in
...
Her son's
a writer too, you know
...

"It's good to see you, by the way," he said as he gave me a big bear hug
...

The feeling was mutual
...
Where Ross Jeffries needed spoken hypnotic patterns to convince a woman to explore her fantasies with him, Dustin was
able to achieve the same result without uttering a word
...
I never had
the resources to understand how he operated before; but now, with my new
knowledge, I could watch him work, ask questions, and eventually model
his process
...

"I don't know if I told you what I've been doing the past year," I said
...
My
whole life has changed
...
"
"I know," he said
...
"

He looked at me with big, wet brown eyes, the ones that had gazed into
the souls of countless beautiful women
...
" He paused
...
"
I looked at him—incredulously, at first
...

"I live in Jerusalem now," he continued
...
It's a religious
school
...
"
"No
...
It's not allowed
...
It couldn't be true
...

"Are you allowed to masturbate, at least?"
"No
...
"Well, sometimes when I sleep, I have wet dreams
...
God is trying to tell you something
...
"
He laughed and patted me on the back
...
"I go
by my Hebrew name now," he said
...
It's Avisha
...

"When you can get any girl you want, every guy—even if he's rich or
famous—looks at you in a different way because you have something he
doesn't," he said
...
I just wanted to talk
...
That's when I started to leave it behind
...
Women became like gods to me, but false
gods
...
"
Sitting in his Moscow apartment, he said, he searched the Internet for
guidance, until he came across the Torah and started reading
...
So he packed
his bags, left his week's worth of girlfriends, and arrived in Jerusalem on the
eve of Passover
...
"
I had no idea what he was talking about
...

"I idealized a lifestyle and behavior that were corrupt," he explained
...
Instead, I used, degraded, and exploited women
...
I despised
the good instincts within me and within others, and attempted to corrupt
anyone I met
...

"I promoted and dragged you into this whole pickup thing, as if what I
was doing were the highest ideal a person could live for," he went on
...
"
It all made sense intellectually
...
There was
something odd about Dustin, or Avisha
...
I listened to him, but I had a different opinion
...
"
He looked at me softly but didn't say anything
...

"Think about it," I continued
...
And
it just so happens that all the qualities women look for in guys are good
things
...
I started working out and eating healthier
...
I've become a more fun, positive person
...

"And I'm not just more successful with women now, I'm more success-

167

ful in every other human interaction, from dealing with my landlord to
handling credit card overcharges
...

"So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm learning how to pick up
women, sure, but in the process, I'm becoming a better human being
...
He was going to speak
...

Yes? What?
"I am eternally here for you as a true friend, and also to make up for
what I did
...
Fuck him
...

"Mind if I stay over for a couple of days?" he asked
...
"
"Do you have an alarm clock I can borrow? I need to pray with the
sunrise
...
"Here," he said
...
"
It was a small hardcover edition of an eighteenth century book called
The Path of the Just with a note he had written for me inscribed on the title
page
...


So he was trying to save me
...


169

Mystery and I were on another road trip
...
We had five workshops sold out in three cities in Australia
...

Mystery, however, was in low spirits
...
Before he left Toronto, his girlfriend, Patricia, had given him an ultimatum: marriage and children, or good-bye
...
"But I've been jerking it mercilessly
to lesbian porn
...
"
After four years of dating, their goals were diverging
...
Celebrity and alternative lifestyle be damned
...
"I mean, I know exactly
what to do to attract them
...
"
We'd come to Australia because Sweater, the older Australian student
from Mystery's first workshop, had invited us to stay with him for a week in
Brisbane
...

"I'm like a smitten teenager," Sweater exclaimed when we pulled into
his driveway
...
He was tan, healthy, and, most extraordinarily, an irresistibly welcoming smile was now plastered constantly
to his face
...
" Since society holds men to less rigid standards of beauty than
women, this is doubly true of guys
...

"I just spent the week in Sydney with my girlfriend," Sweater said, walk-

ing us into his house
...
I
asked her to marry me before I left
...
So life is just
amazing
...
"
Sweater's place was a sunny, airy bachelor pad overlooking Brisbane
River and the City Botanic Gardens
...
Sweater had
not only trained each of them to sell his products—books and courses on
real-estate investing—but he'd turned them onto the seduction community as well
...

"I'm still having fun helping the guys here get girls, but I'm off the
market," Sweater said when we asked how he felt about his decision to settle down with one woman
...
I've come to understand that without commitment, you cannot
have depth in anything, whether it's a relationship, a business, or a
hobby
...
I hadn't met any woman yet I could say
that about
...
Sweater was filthy
rich and in love; Extramask had recently moved out of his parents' house
and finally orgasmed in coitus; and I was traveling the world teaching men
a skill I'd never even possessed a year ago
...
When he wasn't grilling Sweater and
his employees on how they ran their business, he was silently watching
them work
...
"You have a good social environment, and it creates a good working environment
...
"
As we drove to the airport, tan and flush with excitement, Mystery and
I plotted our next adventure
...
"The guy is paying me fifteen hundred dollars
...

"His dad's rich," Mystery said
...
He's a student at the University of Wisconsin
...
"
Most conversations with Mystery involved plans: organizing workshops, performing a ninety-minute magic show, creating a porn website in
which we'd have sex with girls disguised as clowns
...

"Everyone in the Lounge is going to get the tattoo," he said as we parted
ways at the airport
...

It'll allow us to identify each other in the field
...
"
A couple of PUAs had already run out and gotten the tattoo—including
Vision, which was somewhat of a surprise considering he'd moved to Los
Angeles to make it as an actor
...
But there was a
problem: He'd put the tattoo in the wrong place and upside down
...
But he
had put it in the center of his wrist, an inch too high, and facing inward
...


The day had arrived
...
First, I was going to Toronto for Papa's one-on-one workshop with Mystery
...
He
wanted to return to Eastern Europe, find two young bisexual women
searching for a better life overseas, and seduce them
...

Tattoos and white slavery: That's where self-improvement had led me
...
Along with the usual
overdue bills and raised car insurance notices was a postcard of the Wailing
Wall in Jerusalem
...
" The writing was Dustin's
...
Its opposite is Ra, or evil
...
So your
essence is connected to a desire to search out and connect to that which
endures—the good
...
"
On the flight, I reread the postcard
...
And maybe he had a point
...
Now I was getting my wish
...
This was Tov
...
9, a Chinese software engineer who, thanks to Mystery's everpresent advice, had turned himself into a relatively cool-looking guy
...

Since No
...
Patricia had broken up with him, for good this time
...
Getting out of the house for these
upcoming workshops would be good therapy for him
...

There were guys like Exoticoption from Belgrade, who were normal and
well-adjusted socially, but wanted to have greater flexibility and choice in
meeting girls
...

They tended to gather as much knowledge as they could but had trouble
making even the smallest behavioral change
...
Approach machines tended to improve the
fastest, simply by following the flowchart of material they were given
...

And this was going to be Papa's challenge
...
He wore a checkered button-down shirt and jeans
that were a size too large
...
And they always left in a loud shiny
shirt, tight black synthetic pants, silver rings, and sunglasses pushed up on
their heads
...

Mystery and I sat down with Papa at a cafe and asked the usual questions: What's your score? What would you like it to be? What are your sticking points?
"Well, I used to be the social chair of my fraternity," he began
...
My father is the president of a major university
...
"You're qualifying yourself to
us
...
A rich man doesn't have to tell you he's rich
...
His head seemed to be surrounded by a dense
invisible fog, which made his reaction time just a little slower than most
people's
...

"Is it okay if I record everything you're saying?" Papa asked, struggling
to pull a small digital recorder out of his pocket
...
And it has been the role of parents and
friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to reinforce the belief that we're
okay just as we are
...
You have to be
your best self
...

That's why the workshops were so life-transforming: We told each stu-

173

dent the first impression he made
...

We corrected his every gesture, phrase, and item of clothing, because we
knew he wasn't living up to his potential
...
We get stuck in old
thought and behavior patterns that may have been effective when we were
twelve months or twelve years old, but now only serve to hold us back
...

But who are we, really? Just a bundle of good genes and bad genes
mixed with good habits and bad habits
...

And that was Papa's asset: will power
...
I demonstrated some
of my best routines on him—the jealous girlfriend opener, the best friends
test, the cube, and a new piece I'd made up involving C-shaped smiles,
U-shaped smiles and the personality characteristics each conveyed
...
He would later transcribe them,
memorize them, and ultimately use my exact words to pick up Paris Hilton
...
I should have realized what
was going on
...
Mystery and I were traveling around the world making miniature versions of ourselves
...

Our first stop was a lounge on Queen Street
...
For some reason, I was on
fire
...
Every woman's eye was on me
...
I figured this must be what they call seducer's aura: I was emanating
something special
...

I noticed Papa talking to a cute girl with short brown hair and a round
face that perfectly matched his
...
This was what the PUAs, in
their worst acronym ever, call pAImAI, which basically translates as an unspoken invitation to approach
...
)
When Papa walked away, I said something to her
...
He was even studying to get a hypnotist's certification with one

that I could ride a little without the training wheels
...
But until this workshop,

noticed she was giving me the doggy dinner bowl look
...
He was so blown away he

question: "Would you like to kiss me?"
"Well, I wasn't thinking about it before," she said, holding eye contact
...

On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment
...
She responded enthusias-

pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers,

tically, thrusting her tongue into my m o u t h and grabbing my knee with her

routines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him
...
I saw a flash in the background; Papa was taking a picture
...
It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines

When I came up for air, she smiled and said, "I don't have any of your
albums, b u t my friends like your music
...
"

could be—and it was also a little depressing
...
But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at

Who did she think I was?

the exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being

Then she smiled and licked my face, like a dog
...
Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the

was right with his whole canine-training advice
...


She looked at me expectantly, like I was supposed to talk about my mu-

When Papa left to get some sleep before his flight home, Mystery and I

sic
...
Grimble had recently given me the

earned by kissing me, so I politely excused myself
...

On the way out, the hostess of the lounge pulled me aside and said,
"Thank you very m u c h for coming
...
Let me know if we can
ever do anything for you
...


putting t h e m under glass on a coffee table for decoration
...
"Proximity alert system!" he
announced
...
It means they're

So I wasn't having an on night after all
...


shaven head, the hostess had t h o u g h t I was Moby, and she'd told half the

Mystery wheeled around and started talking to a delicate blonde in a

people in the room
...
When he introduced

simply with fame
...
We'd been winging together

the same attraction switches a celebrity does—chiefly validation and brag-

for m o n t h s now, so I knew just what to do: fake t h e m out with a couple of

ging rights—without being famous
...


I suppose a lesser m a n would have taken advantage of the situation
and continued the charade
...
I got into the game
not to deceive women, b u t to make them like me for me—or at least for the
new me
...

Mystery had brought along a video camera, so he began taping the interaction
...
As he isolated the brunette, I

In the clubs that followed, we watched Papa work
...
Her name was Caroline; her friend was Carly
...
Every error we pointed out, he corrected instantly
...
Her goal in life was to be a nurse, b u t

With each successful set, he seemed to grow an inch taller
...


175

174

was internalizing the game, that I was getting away from canned material,

tion skills
...
After two minutes, I

of the field's most respected teachers, Cal Banyan
...
So I popped the

he'd never seen real PUAs in the field before
...


"Well, I wasn't thinking about it before," she said, holding eye contact
...
I

I took that as a yes and moved in for the kiss
...
And women were re-

hand
...


sponding to him now
...
"
My response: "Umm, okay
...
Maybe David DeAngelo
was right with his whole canine-training advice
...
The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any
audience
...
Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the
same side effect
...
I didn't want to correct her and rob her of the story she t h o u g h t she'd

stayed at the club to continue sarging
...
She gave me her phone

idea of taking all the scraps of paper with phone numbers I'd collected a n d

n u m b e r and told me to call when I got back to my hotel room
...
But as I was

On the way out, the hostess of the lounge pulled me aside and said,
"Thank you very m u c h for coming
...
Let me know if we can
ever do anything for you
...
"Proximity alert system!" he
announced
...


when there's no real reason for t h e m to be hanging o u t in that particular

"Aren't you Moby?"

spot, it trips what Mystery calls the proximity alert system
...
Apparently, because of my

interested; they want to be opened
...
All that time I'd p u t into seduction could be subverted

strapless dress and a muscular brunette in a do-rag
...
To truly get to the next level, I'd have to find a way to flip

me, he told them I was an amazing illusionist
...


the practical jokes and pseudomagic tricks I'd learned in elementary school
...
But I never called the girl
...


In the field, one quickly learns that everything that was funny at age ten is
funny all over again
...
The girls didn't seem to mind
...
Every piece of mate-

talked to the blonde
...
Caroline

rial we gave him, he used
...


lived in the suburbs with her family
...
Instead of sum-

she was currently working at Hooters, despite having breasts the size of

mer school, he told me, he'd spent three m o n t h s working on Speed Seduc-

SweeTarts and a shy, withdrawn personality
...
One of her teeth was

little more comfortable, I went down on her
...
She had a red mark on the skin over her collarbone, as if she'd

P
...


been itching it
...
She had gotten a manicure in the

But when I reached for a condom afterward, I heard the five words that had

last twenty-four hours
...


taken the place of "let's just be friends" in my life: "But I just met you
...

I observed all these things as my m o u t h moved, reciting the routines

It was a much sweeter sound, and there was no reason to push for sex
with Caroline
...


I'd told to hundreds of girls before
...
She was nine-

that the routines didn't seem to be working
...
The reason: She had

the hook point, which is when a woman you've approached decides she en-

a one-year-old child at h o m e in the suburbs
...
T h o u g h I stood just a

was determined not to be another neglectful teenage mother
...


first time she'd been apart from him for a weekend
...


other words, they were a waste of paper
...
At the diner the night before, Caroline's blue

date—to a nearby bar or restaurant
...
But at breakfast in the morning, they glittered

piece in the pickup game
...
Whenever I made a joke, even one that

three different places with a group you'd just met, by the end of the night it

wasn't funny, a broad smile spread across her face
...


heart had opened
...


connection with a woman since I'd started picking t h e m up
...
Dur-

I don't have a particular type of girl I'm attracted to, the way some guys

ing the meal, everything suddenly clicked in the group
...
But of all the women in the world,

able enough to unleash her biting wit, and Caroline began to radiate

the last type I ever t h o u g h t I'd fall for would be a nineteen-year-old single

empathy and warmth
...
We all just

m o m who waited tables at Hooters
...
Juggler was right: Laughter was the

that it has no master, despite what reason may think
...


After the girls dropped us off at home, Mystery and I broke down the

Afterward, Carly invited us to call a cab from her apartment around the

events of the previous night, trying to figure out what we did right and

corner
...
Despite what Caroline and I had thought, Mystery h a d n ' t even got-

tery and I sat on the floor
...
She had a boyfriend
...


She was clearly attracted to Mystery, however, despite having resisted

Carly soon left the room with Mystery, giving Caroline tacit permission

his advances
...
It was based on my

to fool around with me
...
If women have sex for validation, Mystery figured, why

chasm that had separated us in the bar disappeared
...
Now I understood why it had

until she became so uncomfortable that she wanted to cozy up to h i m just

been so difficult to get rapport with her when we'd first met
...


communicate with words; she communicated with feelings
...


We loaded the footage of Carly and Caroline into Mystery's computer
and proceeded to spend the next six hours self-indulgently editing it into a

178

six-minute video
...

Juggler was in town, running his own workshop
...
So we all went to dinner together
...
"I want to
devote the time to my relationship
...

"Some people may say I'm pussy-whipped, but I say it is my choice
...
"
It was good to see Juggler again
...
And for that very reason I didn't believe he was
truly a pickup artist: He was simply a funny, masterful conversationalist
...
If Mystery's plan
worked, it would be worth it; if not, then he was just an asshole
...
" Victory belongs
to the person with the strongest reality and the most decisive actions
...
Afterward, I brought her into No
...
Her body trembled with so much emotion
that it seemed to dissipate beneath me
...

When she came, she didn't make a sound
...
She stared
at the wall and grew distant
...

When I asked her about it, she burst into tears
...
"Now I'm never going to see you again
...
I slid my arm
under her and placed her head on my shoulder
...
It was a line
I'd learned from Mystery, but I did believe it
...
It was a line I'd learned
from Ross Jeffries, but I did believe it
...
It was a line I'd learned from David X, but I did believe
it
...
It wasn't a line
...
Judging by the clothing
strewn across the floor, Mystery's freeze-out had been a success
...
It was a beautiful moment
...


181

There is nothing more bonding than successfully picking up girls together
...
Because afterward, when the girls are
gone, you can finally give each other the high-five that you've been holding
back since you met them
...
It's not
just the sound of skin hitting skin; it's the sound of brotherhood
...
"I feel so bad, and then
a girl sleeps with me and likes me and, bam, I'm on top of the world again
...

"So?" Mystery asked
...
"
"Are you ready to commit to this lifestyle?"
"I thought I was committed
...
It's in your blood now
...
Of all the guys I've met, you're my only competition
...
"
When I was a teenager, I'd lie awake in bed, praying to God, "Please
don't let me die before having sex
...
" But
now I have a different dream
...
I've always lived for experience: traveling, learning new skills, meeting new people
...
And despite my
rakish behavior, I hadn't lost sight of that
...
I can't imagine ever
choosing one person for life
...

This pickup thing had never been about sowing my wild oats
...
And that's not necessarily something I relish
...
If I'd married my first girlfriend
and had kids with her, they'd be, say, eight and ten now
...
But it's too late for
me now
...
I'll be so out
of touch they'll make fun of my taste in music and beat me at arm-wrestling
...

An hour later, Mystery and I were outside Fineline Tattoo on Kingston
Road
...
But it's easy to get caught up in
the moment, in the hand slap, in the brotherhood
...
It didn't open
...

"Damn," Mystery said
...
"
I'm not a superstitious person, but when I'm on the fence about an
idea, it only takes a slight draft to push me in either direction
...

"What's wrong?"
"I have problems with commitment
...
"
My neurotic nature had saved me for once
...

"Where's Carly?" Mystery asked
...
"She, um, couldn't make it,"
she said
...
"
I could see Mystery's body language change
...

"Did she say why? Is there a problem?"
"Well," Caroline said
...
well, she's with her boyfriend
...
"And she wouldn't come?"
"Carly said you and she were very different anyway
...
He didn't speak for another ten minutes
...

It wasn't that he loved Carly; he just hated rejection
...
And seeing Caroline and I enjoying each other's company
so much only rubbed it in
...

"How come I don't have a girlfriend?"
"Well, maybe because you're the world's greatest pickup artist
...
She dropped him off
in the parking lot, and then took me to spend the night at the house in the
suburbs where she lived with her mother, sister, and brother
...

Her mother greeted us at the door
...

"Do you want to hold him?" Caroline asked
...

But I didn't
...
It was kind of cool
...

Dropping him off at the club was a bad move
...
Not only would she not take him back, but she also told
him that she'd started dating other people
...

"She lost fifteen pounds and her ass is a 10, dude
...
Damn
...
"Look for the flaws
and blow those up in your mind
...
"
"I know that intellectually, but emotionally I'm fucked up
...
It all came crashing down on me when I saw her
again
...
She was the hottest stripper in the place
...
Carry's back with her boyfriend
...
For what?"
"Dude, you're a pickup artist
...
And you can get them in a night
...
I'm a lover
...
I swear, I don't even
think about threesomes anymore
...
I've got Patricia withdrawal on the mind
...
"
Mystery had hardly thought about Patricia or talked about her until
she rejected him
...
His own theories on attraction had
come back to slap him in the face
...
But for her
it wasn't a technique—it was for real
...
His religion was Darwin
...
He
called that impulse pairbonding
...
"I feel so alone now
...
We'll pick you up tomorrow, and you can play in the
suburbs with us
...
"

184

Caroline and I put Carter in his stroller and pushed him around the
block to a park
...
Kids around the world
thought we were in hot tubs surrounded by bikini-clad models
...

In the morning, Caroline and I fetched Mystery from the city
...
He wore a gray T-shirt that hung loosely over faded
jeans
...

Yet that night, when Caroline's mother asked him what he did for
work, Mystery launched into a spectacular performance
...
He charmed everyone in the room: Caroline's
mom was flabbergasted, her younger sister was attracted, and her brother
wanted to learn how to levitate chalk to freak out his teachers
...

After Caroline's family turned in for the night, Mystery asked her if she
had any sleeping pills
...

"That'll work," Mystery said
...
I have a
high tolerance
...
But
they weren't enough to knock him out
...


MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: Life Goals
AUTHOR: Mystery
I'm staying at Caroline's place right now because I've been upset over Patricia
...
She is really
beautiful, but she's got a kid
...
Damn
...
Love her, dude
...
The idea of having
many girls inmany ports can be wholesomely nurtured
...
I did magic for her eighteen-year-old sister, who's a
cutie, and her brother and mom for like forty-five minutes
...
I did a
rune cast for the mom
...
I get that feeling of caring for
her and her baby
...
But I didn't sleep
...
Don't get
me wrong
...
I love this lounge
...
I hope we can all
have a huge party one day
...

This is what I want to see happen in the future: I want us to become closer
friends—you think we can manage that? Grimble and Twotimer, your game is
so different from mine
...

Papa, the game you played was fucking mint when you were up here
...
I
don't even mind that you call me every day
...
Women are a huge part of that, and we work
together to help each other obtain them
...


187

186

I think one of life's biggest difficulties is not being able to share your

P
...
I've been reading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and I want to

problems honestly
...
If you regularly masturbate, you can easily become

intelligent, trustworthy men who can assist you

addicted
...
If you don't have any, now is the
time to make them
...
Travel, women, money, social status, whatever
...
It also does not allow you to harness your sex drive, which
can be used to motivate yourself to work on wealth-building projects
...
Let's all work on the same projects and synergize our

from time to time), then don't just choke 'til you're broke
...


yourself
...
If you jerked it today, set the jerk date for

I want to see Vinigarr5 in his own apartment with a kickass car, coin in the

seven days from now
...
Make it a good jerk! Use the best porn and

couple girls who love him to death
...
Look forward to it and this will keep you from wasting your life

nightclubs or whatever
...
He should

away jerking it daily and focusing constantly on the pain of not having a

run his own escort agency
...


Papa, you sponge off daddy And the enemy of the best is the good
...

You have the drive to become a multimillionaire
...
Imagine harnessing your sex
drive and using it to create a successful business
...
I need major funding to produce this
...
People
who have met me know I can play the role all the way
...
I've designed the show in detail
already
...
Let's exploit the fact that I need attention (must do shows) every day or I
don't feel normal
...
I don't believe in that
...
Just tell me what your objectives are first so we can work on all
our shit together! Gentlemen, let's get down to business
...


189

"I'll tell you what," Mystery snapped
...
"
Mystery marched back to the house as the rest of us exchanged concerned looks
...

The morning after his codeine-high post, Mystery lay slumped in the backseat of Caroline's car, wrapped in a blanket and shrouded by a hat pulled
low over his eyes
...
It reminded me of our Eastern
European road trip
...

We parked and took the elevator to his sister's apartment on the twentieth floor
...

Mystery's mother, a zaftig German woman, sat on a beat-up flowerpatterned sofa chair
...
Mystery's father was shut up
in his apartment four floors above them, sick with liver disease from a lifetime of drinking
...
She knew all about his girls
...
He truly loved his nieces and seemed to come back to life a little
when he saw them
...
The best of these was a song called "Casanova's Child," which
Mystery sang along with at a near-deafening volume
...

Caroline and I left afterward
...
Suddenly, a door
swung open and a m a n in a clerical collar gave the girls a steely, condescending stare
...

Mystery turned crimson
...

"Because I think we should
...
They're having fun
...
"They can have fun in a place where they're
not disturbing other residents
...


191

We walked upstairs to Mystery's apartment and opened the door
...
He
was wearing the same gray T-shirt and jeans I had last seen him in
...

He turned to me and began to speak
...
"I've been thinking," he said
...
I've lived in cities my whole life
...
They set objectives and then work to accomplish them
...
Like Andy Dick, my biggest fear is being bored or boring
...
The sex robot chases

Weekend nights weren't made for sitting around watching videos from

women
...
But Caroline couldn't stay in Toronto
...
"

away from her son; she didn't want to be a typical teenage mother
...

Mystery and I had posted a field report about Carly and Caroline a few days

"Okay
...

The room was the size of a large closet
...
"What's your
point?"

earlier, and my inbox was full with messages from kids in N o r t h Carolina,

"The point is," he said, in the same deadened voice, "what is my objec-

Poland, Brazil, Croatia, New Zealand, and beyond
...


robot
...
In the first, he wrote that

On the floor in front of his bed was a half-eaten plate of uncooked

he'd gotten into a fight with his sister over the hallway incident: "She pro-

spaghetti
...


ceeded to punch me several times
...
I then left to go back to my house
...
The battery dangled helplessly out of the open back
...
I just wanted to stop her from attacking me
...
I'm hungry, my head
hurts, my skin aches, and I've been choking it all day to Kazaa porn
...
I
can't wait to disappear
...
This
living thing isn't fun anymore
...

"I blew up at my sister and my m o m
...
"
When Mystery—or any PUA—was in a funk, there was only one cure for
it: to go out sarging and meet new options
...
Strip
clubs were Mystery's weakness
...
And I was stuck in bumblefuck, Ontario,

much guaranteed him at least a phone number every time: among them,

watching Britney Spears in Crossroads with three teenagers, one of w h o m

befriend the DJ; never pay for a dance or a drink; do not hit on, compli-

was supposedly now my girlfriend
...

"Can you stay with me?" I asked
...
"I haven't been paying
enough attention to him, and I don't want my m o m to think I'm being
neglectful
...
You're putting this pressure on yourself
...


ment, or touch a stripper; stick to your material; and change the subject
whenever a stripper starts reciting the stories she tells every other guy
...
"There's no point
...

"What are you doing?" I asked
...
" He spoke as if he were on autopilot
...
I'd p u t a m o n t h of my life on

192

hold so we could go to New York a n d Bucharest together
...
And now, because of some mixture of Steven
Spielberg and codeine after effects, he was bailing out
...
Oh well
...
"You're already making eighteen h u n d r e d dollars
...
It's New York, for
chrissake
...
"
"Living," he sighed, "costs too much
...
The guy was a black hole sucking
up attention
...

"You are so fucking selfish," I seethed
...
I'm canceling all shows, all agents, all seminars, all workshops, all trips
...
I d o n ' t want to be
known for being a Ross Jeffries
...

I could tell I was becoming a burden to her and a distraction from her
son
...
It wasn't her constant fretting over her son I minded; it was her complete lack of initiative
...
I refuse to take time for granted
...
It happens every night
...
I have a long fuse, b u t when

who start rubbing your chest and making out with you in a club in two

it hits b o t t o m I explode
...
That's the

about women, he did teach me that
...
That's life in the field
...


An orange prescription bottle hit the floor, scattering pills
...
The word Rivotril was on the label
...
On her nightstand there was a thin book by a guy

"What are these?"

named Joel Kramer
...
They really aren't about deal-

pages
...
" Cold
...

I figured they couldn't be doing much good
...
I didn't want him overdosing
...
The Mystery I knew was too logical to gamble
...
But I didn't wait for an answer
...
"

this idea that love is supposed to last forever
...
It's a
free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases
...
So don't
fear love when it comes simply because it makes you vulnerable
...
Just be glad you had the opportunity to
experience it
...


I spent yet another night in bed with Caroline
...


the passage to use as a routine
...
She didn't know what to say
...
Love was supposed to be something women chased, not men
...
She just seemed so useless
...
I kept my
flight to Eastern Europe, b u t instead of watching Mystery h u n t for bisexual
slave girls, I decided to meet a group of PUAs operating out of Croatia
...


194

195

One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, di-

"One of the things that attracts a woman is lifestyle and success," I told

recting movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone
...
"Imagine how easy the game would be if you were a high-powered en-

Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself
...
By getting into a good law school,

laborations, because most people in this world are n o t closers
...
"

finish what they start; they don't live what they dream; they sabotage their
own progress because they're afraid they won't find what they seek
...
I had wanted to be him
...

When I checked the seduction boards that day, there was one new message from Mystery
...


"Yeah," he said
...
I love the game, but it's become
too much of a drug for me now
...
Some,
like Papa, were still modeling him, even in his downward spiral
...

"Ross Jeffries, Mystery, me
...
Just wanted to say thanks for the memories and good luck to you all
...
"
The problem was that this epiphany was coming too late for Papa
...
All of it,

Your friend,
Mystery

of course, meant blowing off days of classes
...
"He's really worried about
me
...
It's
impressive how quickly years of work and effort can be dismantled
...
It was Papa
...

"So am I," I told him
...
"
"I feel the same way as Mystery
...
"My
life is going all the way down
...
I haven't opened a book
since school started
...
"
Papa wasn't an exception
...
Especially now
...
"
"You have to learn balance, man
...
"
It was wise advice—advice I should have been following myself
...
He wanted to give me his motorcycle
...
And he wanted to give the illusions he had designed for his ninety-minute show to a local magician
...
"You may want them later
...
I'm not good at anything b u t bullshitting people
...
"

workshops, it was just an online addiction
...
It wasn't just a lifestyle;

warning signs
...
I

it was a disease
...
And

couldn't turn the other way while my mentor walked off a cliff—even if it

the better you got, the more addictive it became
...
I once had a friend whose ex-boyfriend was al-

to clubs could now walk in, be superstars, and leave with pockets full of

ways threatening to kill himself
...
And then, as icing on the cake, they

help
...


could write a field report and brag about it to everyone else in the commu-

As Mystery h a d noted in his codeine-high Lounge post, we h a d a valu-

nity
...
The Lounge linked together surgeons, stu-

school in order to master the game
...


concierges, stockbrokers, and psychiatrists
...


196

Doc had discovered the community when Mystery signed up, on a lark,
for a dating seminar Doc was conducting at the Learning Annex
...
Afterward, he talked to Doc,
who confessed to not being much of a ladies' man
...
Now Doc was a machine, with his own harem of

When I arrived at Mystery's place, he was in the process of dismantling his

women
...
His movements were mechanical
...


him and asked for advice
...
I love her, and she deserves a

• Are you so down that you just feel like giving up on everything?
• Are you thinking about death a lot?

better bed
...
It's the futility of it
...
If you understand

• Do you think about hurtingyourself or doing something destructive?
• Are you thinking about suicide?
• How wouldyou do it?
• What keeps you from doing it?
• Do you think you would do it within the next twenty-four hours?

memetics, then you understand that it's all futile
...

STYLE: But you have a superior intellect
...

MYSTERY: It doesn't matter
...

STYLE: Are you thinking about death a lot?
MYSTERY: All the time
...
This would be my cheat sheet
...


STYLE: Do you think about hurting yourself or doing something
destructive?
MYSTERY: Yes
...

STYLE: Are you thinking about suicide?
MYSTERY: Yes
...

STYLE: What keeps you from doing it?
MYSTERY: I have to give away all my stuff
...
So I want to give her mine
...


19B

STYLE: Did she care?
MYSTERY: No, not really
...

STYLE: Do you think you would take your life in the next twenty-four
hours?

I left Mystery in his room, went to the kitchen, and dialed information for
his parents' number
...
He'd legally changed it from his birth name, Erik

MYSTERY: Why are you asking me all these questions?
STYLE: Because I'm your friend, and I'm worried about you
...

The phone rang once, twice, a third time
...
His voice
was gruff, his manner curt
...


[Doorbell rings]
STYLE: Who is it?

"Hi, I'm friends with your son, Erik
...
And I wanted to
...
I'm here for Mystery
...

STYLE: It's probably not a good time right now
...

"But he needs
...
The asshole h u n g up
...
I returned to Mystery's

VOICE ON INTERCOM: But I came all the way from Kingston
...
He can't see anyone
...


room
...
His face was red
and twisted, as if he were crying invisible tears
...

"Some sleeping pills," he said
...
I was going to have to call an ambulance
...
"
"Why'd you take them?"
"When I'm awake, life sucks
...
When I'm asleep, I dream
...
"I dreamed
last night that I was in a flying DeLorean
...

And there were all these wires a r o u n d us
...
And she was
driving
...
And I saw my life below them
...
"I need Patricia's phone number
...
He looked like a big baby
...

"Can you tell me Patricia's phone number?" I asked again slowly, gently, as if speaking to a child
...


200

I hoped that Patricia wouldn't hang up on me, that she hadn't cut Mystery out of her life entirely, that she'd have a solution
...
As a girlfriend, she had been taken for
granted by Mystery
...
Her stabilizing effect wasn't noticed until she was gone
...

She didn't seem overly intelligent, b u t she cared about Mystery
...
He was descending the stairs slowly, as if sleepwalk-

compassion and concern in her voice
...
I shot ahead of him and barred the lobby door in front of him
...
"The best thing you can do
is call his mother or his sister
...
"
"Forever?"

"Hey
...
"Let's go back upstairs
...
She's coming to get you
...
"
He hesitated for a m o m e n t , u n s u r e whether to trust me or not
...
"

was so docile, he d i d n ' t seem like he would h u r t a fly
...
Mystery emerged
...
As he t u r n e d and walked, I

He walked past me toward the door
...


"Hey!" I yelled at him
...


"He'll be okay," I thought, "as long as his father doesn't answer
...
She said she'd be there within a half hour
...
The sleeping pills

"Good knowing you, buddy," he said, then turned away
...
He stared at the wall and mumbled strands of evolu-

"Where are you going?" I repeated
...
The conclusion of his

"I'm going to shoot my father and then kill myself" were his last words

mutterings was always the same: the words "futile" or "fubar
...


His mother arrived with his sister in tow
...

"I had no idea it had gotten this serious," Martina said
...

He followed passively, dead to the world
...
As
Mystery's mother opened the door for him, a four-set of girls poured out of
an SUV parked in front of them
...

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
...
His mother helped lower him into the
car
...

I saw him through the glass, the smiling blonde four-set reflected
against his face
...
He stared blankly

202

ahead, his m o u t h closed, his jaw set, his sharp labret piercing angrily glinting in the cold afternoon light
...
They giggled
...
It was the s o u n d of life
...


Mystery's breakdown triggered a crisis of faith and self-examination in the
community
...

Papa was failing out of school
...
And my writing had come to a
near-standstill
...
"
Meanwhile, the community was growing exponentially
...
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 b u t everything
...
They wanted to know what to read, think, and do to be like us
...
He was from El Paso and had never even
kissed a girl
...
And, second, he
needed to experience sex, and not be too picky about a partner
...

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 it's not technically a pickup
...
It was my first time for all of that
...
This makes four hookers for me now
...
Is
this normal? Anyway, what I did this time to help my game is I pretended like
she was my girlfriend
...
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
...
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 reports about prostitutes, he was the first to turn to me for help
...
Then came pleas from a dozen others
I'd never met
...

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
...
And somehow I had become their new guru
...

But seduction is a dark art
...
We may have been supermen in the club, but on the inside we
were rotting
...
"I need to be me
...
I used to be a straight A student
...
"I'll also stop calling HBs until I get my
life in order," he said
...
I choose life
...
"
"You have to treat school and studying like you treat seduction
...
"I will make school wings
...
I will fuck-close my tests
...
But, um, good for you
...
"Whoa
...

But there is a concept in hypnosis called fractionation
...

And so it was with seduction
...
But then we went back
under, deeper than we ever were before—and to an extent beyond what any
of us could have imagined
...

BUT THE GIRLS WEREN'T DOING
NOTHING

THEY WERE TALKING
...
A N D THEY
B E C A M E VERY E X P E R T A B O U T T H A T
IN A WAY T H E BOYS D I D N O T
...
I met her and her cousin on the island of Hvar in Croatia with a
Seattle PUA named Nightlight9
...
They
showed us their popcorn
...
They met us and led us by
the hand to a small, deserted beach
...
We followed and
made love to them as they chattered away in Czech to each other
...
She oozed confidence, sensuality, and good
breeding; her sister was the opposite
...
That night they slipped away from
their parents, and we wandered along the waterfront until we found a
docked sailboat
...
I left twenty
euros for the bottle of wine we drank
...
She
approached me and complimented me on my dreadlocks; I neglected to tell
her I was wearing a Rastafarian wig as a joke
...
When I e-mailed her the
next day to tell her she'd left her rings at my house, she responded, "I don't
wear rings
...
"
Martine was a free-spirited blonde I met in New York, with milky skin,
smeared red lipstick, and an iron-on T-shirt
...
The next night, we went to a bar
...
For a second I
felt guilty about that
...
In the bar, I asked her how good
she was in bed, on a scale of one to ten
...
She
was a seven
...
I'd met her when I
was in college and we were both interning at the same weekly newspaper
...
But when I ran into her years
later in Los Angeles, Style took her out on the town
...
"
Neither could I
...
During a
lengthy e-mail correspondence, she seduced me with her intelligence, candor, and poetry
...
She probably felt the same way
about me
...
I put a finger inside her and felt a fleshy cord bisecting her
vagina like a tennis net
...
I told her I didn't want to be the
one to take her virginity
...

Yana was an older Russian woman with chiseled features and a great
boob job
...
She told me it was her birthday but
wouldn't say her age
...
As a present, I
told her I'd be her boy toy
...
Two nights later, we had a cocktail and adjourned to my house
...
We had sex that night
...
I was the teacher; she was the
naughty schoolgirl
...

She was a drunk Asian girl with large breasts, surrounded by three
sober Asian girls with small breasts
...
She
thought I was gay
...
We gave each other oral sex and never
spoke again
...

Jill was an Australian businesswoman a fellow pickup artist set me up
with
...
When she danced—if you could call it that—every man's head
turned
...
When I asked her when she had first wanted to kiss me, she said, "As
soon as I saw you
...

Sarah was a fortysomething casting agent I met at the lounge of the
Casa Del Mar hotel in Santa Monica
...
She kept asking if
there were cameras
...
Probably both
...
Hea was a teeny
indie-rocker nerd with a boyfriend
...
It took a month to convince Hea to cheat on her boyfriend; it took a day to convince Randi
...
She was an orange dream
machine with energy boost
...
I was intrigued
...
The next morning she told me, "I grow my hair
out because I donate it to children with cancer
...

Ani was a stripper who worked out two hours a day and was addicted to
plastic surgery
...

After we had sex, she told me, "I have mastered the art of visualization
...
But when she developed feelings for me, she discovered that she was no longer able to have sex
because the emotions opened wounds from childhood abuse
...

Maya was a black-haired goth belly dancer I flirted with at one of her
performances
...
I invited her over the next night
...
She was there in a half hour
...
Susanna was a recently divorced designer who wanted to rediscover her sexuality
...
Nadia was a librarian who had the skills of a porn
star; I guess you can learn a lot from books
...
After several failures, I succeeded
...

Maggie and Linda were sisters; they're no longer talking to each other
...
Jessica was a
bookworm I met on jury duty
...
Stef was handing out flyers for a strip club on Sunset
Boulevard
...
Tanya was a neighbor
...
Women were no longer a challenge
...


212

In the months since Mystery's breakdown, I'd turned a new corner in
my game
...
In the past, I was too obsessed with trying to get some to
actually take a step back, assess the situation, and act appropriately
...
I understood the process of attraction and the signals
women gave
...

When talking to a woman, I could recognize the specific point when
she became attracted to me, even if she was acting distant or felt uncomfortable
...

Whatever test, challenge, or objection a woman threw my way, I knew
how to respond
...
Call and we can discuss when you'll be taking me out
for dinner
...
She just trying to
get validation for having put out so quickly and testing to see how much
she could control me
...

"I'll tell you what," I wrote
...
" She took me out to dinner
...

I was Mystery
...

Obviously, a lot of egos are involved in this assessment, and everyone has
their own opinions about who the best really is
...
It's like asking who the best warrior or soldier is in a
war
...
So I've decided to rate the top PUAs operating out
there
...
This
guy is probably the most evil, sneaky, manipulative bastard I have ever seen in
operation
...
His subtlety is so amazing that before you know if,
you are qualifying yourself to him and he has you right where he wants you
...
No one is safe
...
He is practically
Machiavellian in nature and is someone I both admire and fear
...


215

was walking to the dry cleaners and an aspiring actress-model-waitress
passed by, I felt like a hypocrite if I didn't open her
...

Though I knew my new mindset was seriously warped, I felt more ethical in many ways as a PUA than I had been as an AFC
...
It was no longer necessary to
deceive a woman by telling her I wanted a relationship when I just wanted
to get laid; by pretending to be her friend when I only wanted to get in her
pants; by letting her think we were in a monogamous relationship when I
was seeing other women
...
I was no longer in the game to meet women; I was
in the game to lead men
...

Despite my aversion to being a guru, I had clearly become one
...
The guys leaned in close to hear
what I was saying, pulling out notebooks to write my words down and commit them to memory
...
Afterward,
he even e-mailed and asked for a copy of my evolution phase-shift routine
...
And he planned on sharing these techniques in his
seminars
...
I
could no longer claim to be a student
...
In
the eyes of these men, I was Style, the king of the unnaturals
...

I had overshot my goal
...
's
hypnotic subject
...
Guys in
the community would ask behind my back, "How is Style? Is he any good?"
If I didn't walk up to a group of girls and make out with the hottest one
within fifteen minutes, they'd think I was a fraud
...
Now I was afraid of
failing in front of men
...
If I was at an Italian restaurant and there was an alluring woman five tables away, I felt like a failure if I didn't sarge her
...
In fact, once unleashed, a woman's physical needs are often
more ravenous than a man's
...
I got good at the game because I understood
that the goal of the PUA was simply not to trigger a woman's shutdown or
flight responses
...
She has blonde hair and a sleeveless undershirt with a black bra underneath
...
I am inside her
...
I
can hear her gasping
...

"You know it turns me on when you click the typewriter," she just said
...
This is the new one
...
It reminds me of sometlkhing
Steve P
...
Everyone is jus a guest
in it
...

I think she's about to come
...
]6

6

This portion of the text has not been edited in order to preserve its authenticity
...

The opener, for example, is casual
...
You are just being a friendly stranger when you walk up and ask her
and her friends, "My neighbor just bought two dogs, and she wants to
name them after an eighties or nineties pop duo
...
"I can only stay for a
minute," you tell them as you join their group, "because I need to get back
to my friends
...
You make
them feel good about themselves as you challenge, tease, and neg the target
...
Is she always like that? How
do you deal with her?" If she looks shocked, you reel her back in with a light
compliment
...

After they're finished giving opinions on names for the dogs (Milli and
Vanilli, Hall and Oates, Dre and Snoop—I've heard them all), then you
demonstrate value
...
Then
you pretend like you have to get back to your friends
...
You are in
...
This is the hook point:
You can now relax and enjoy their company
...

In a best-case scenario, you can take the group or your target on an instant date to another bar, club, cafe, or party
...

You may relax, tease, enjoy, and bond with your target, who is becoming attracted to you after the negging and after leading her group
...

This will give the woman an opportunity to be alone with you without letting her friends know she plans to sleep with you
...
)
When she pulls up to your house, invite her in to show her that thing

217

you were talking about (a website, a song, a book, a movie clip, a shirt, a
bowling ball, whatever)
...
Say, "You can only come in for fifteen minutes, and then I'm going to
have to kick you out
...

Show her around the house
...
Tell her you're dying to
play her a really funny five-minute video clip
...

Of course, there are no chairs in your bedroom, only a bed
...
Allow her
to feel comfortable, perhaps even confused that you're not hitting on her
...
Continue using a combination of time
constraints and push-pull to amp her attraction
...

Then, at your leisure, tell her she smells nice
...
This is when you use the evolution
phase-shift routine: smell her, bite her arm, let her bite your neck, bite her
neck, and then kiss
...
You should always be the first one to
object
...
The goal now is simply to arouse
her without making her feel pressured, used, or uneasy
...
What's this? She's stopping you from going any further?
The PUAs have a name for this—last minute resistance, or LMR
...
Wash, rinse, repeat
...
It's just
ASD—anti-slut defense
...
So you
cuddle, you talk
...
Then you start
from the top: You make out, then remove her bra
...

You suck her breasts
...
She is aroused now
...
You are hard
...
You want her
...
She pulls your hand
away
...

We shouldn't be doing this
...
You reach for the pants again
...

But she still stops you
...
Then you grab your laptop computer and check your e-mail while she lies there confused
...
She was feeling good a moment ago, enjoying your attention,
your touch, and the intimacy of the room; now you're taking it all away
...

You put down your computer, turn off the light, and return her affection
...
She stops you
...
You tell her that
you understand
...
She asks what you're doing
...
You are not upset
...
She rolls on top of you and whines, playfully, "No
...
All she wants to know is that you're going to call
her afterward, so that she feels good about what she did—even if she doesn't
actually want to see you again
...

You tell her, "Take off your pants
...
You enjoy yourselves and give each other many orgasms over
the course of the night, the morning, and perhaps even for years afterward
...

This is the only time you're allowed to lie
...

"I'm starting to feel like I'm hunting rabbits with a howitzer," Maddash, a former student, told me
...
A Chicago office worker named Jackie Kim had accidentally forwarded her highly judgmental review of a date to her entire address book
...

"So where do I stand on
...
"The car, the money,
the job, the cute apartment, the boat—which by the way only seats six people, so I really don't consider that really amazing—his mannerism, and his
great kiss will probably lock in another date
...
"
The post became an Internet phenomenon, forwarded around the
globe and chronicled in the Chicago Tribune
...

Jackie wrote him back, saying the e-mail made her day and she read it every
time she received a hate letter
...
It took no gifts, no boats, no haircut
...

Maddash's success set off a rash of copycat sarges in the community
...

Vision called an escort and paid her $350 for an hour
...
He managed to tease her out of eighty dollars at the rate of
twenty dollars per hour
...

Grimble seduced a nineteen-year-old girl who came to his door selling
magazines
...
And he didn't even buy a magazine
...
And the most full
throttle of them all was Papa
...
Then he went
on a road trip around the country, visiting all the PUAs he could
...
9
...
The week after, he was working his way down the
California coast, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego
...

After a while, I couldn't tell whether he was still learning game or just
trying to build his social circle
...
He was simply
imitating what he'd seen me do: travel around the world, meet different
PUAs, and become the best
...
He called himself Tyler
Durden, after the seditious character in Fight Club
...

He was a philosophy student at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario
...
He claimed to have been one of the biggest drug dealers
in Kingston
...
He claimed to have
written rigorous philosophy papers for academic journals
...
But no one really knew
...
Before anyone had even
met him, one thing was clear: He was obsessed to a degree beyond what any
of us had seen before
...
And he was whipping through the
list of recommended books—from Introducing NLP to Mastering Your Hidden
Self—at a furious rate
...

Within a couple of months, he had consumed nearly every piece of rel-

221

evant information on seduction and reinvented himself as a self-styled authority, delivering stream-of-consciousness essays and field reports full of
impressive feats and braggadocio
...
He
was a manic new voice, an instant do-it-yourself guru
...
He joined Papa on his journey to spend face time with
every seducer with a silly nickname
...

Tyler Durden e-mailed me constantly
...
He seemed to pride himself on being a provocateur
...
It involved simply showering, putting on nice
clothes, going to the nearest shopping center, and smiling and saying "hi"
to every woman who passed by
...

Tyler Durden advocated a new mission
...
And the directive was to run up to an attractive woman
and—before even uttering a word—lightly body check her, whack her on the
head with something soft, or physically accost her in some other playful
manner
...
They
obeyed
...

So after reading about Project Mayhem, hundreds of sargers around the
world were suddenly knocking into women with grocery carts and smacking
them with gym bags
...

And therein lay his appeal: Tyler Durden made seduction seem playful
and subversive—unlike, say, Speed Seduction, which required homework,
rote memorization, and even meditation exercises
...
Vision had kicked him out of his house after finding him a snotty and ungrateful guest, constantly demanding to be shown new routines
...


223

TD: I love you
...
Urn, okay
...

TD: Awesome! We're going to get married
...

HB: Ha ha
...
I know, close your eyes
...


AUTHOR: Tyler Durden

HB: Are you gonna steal my cash register or something?
TD: No, nothing like that
...
Remember, I love you
...

I was pretty bored today, so I went to the Rideau Centre shopping mall in
Ottawa, hoping to meet some new HBs to hang with tonight because my AFC
friends were all with their girlfriends
...
5, so I was

The counter was pretty wide
...

As soon as I kissed her, she started screaming like fucking crazy
...

I was about to leave when I saw this new Booster Juice place with a cute
little redhead working there—about a 7
...

I ordered a juice, and here's what happened:

All these people started looking over at me
...

I was thinking, "Fuck, fuck, fuck
...

Fuck
...
Fuck
...


TD: Urn, I said I loved you first
...
I'll have the breeze
...
Which booster do you want?

TD: Urn, are you okay?

TD: What are boosters?

HB: Aaaaaaaahhhh!

HB: Those things on the sign on the wall
...


TD: Ooh, so I can get like vitamins and energy and shit in it
...
That will be five dollars and thirty-one cents
...
This is the shit!
HB: Ha ha
...


HB: Okay! (She high-fives me
...

TD: Pretty bored, huh?
HB: Yeah, it sucks here
...

HB: Urn, yeah
...
What's your name?
TD: Please don't call the police on me
...
It's just for the computer
...

TD: Okay
...


224

HB: Wow, that's an awesome name
...
What's your name?
HB: Lauren
...

HB: Oh my God, that was the most awesome thing that's ever happened
to me in my entire life!
TD: Cool!
HB: Oh my God, you rock
...
I promise I'll come back
...

HB: Will you do more next time? [winks, implying sex, I suppose)
TD: I won't let you down
...

HB: I'm looking forward to it
...
Give me the backstage tour
...

I was thinking, "Holy shit, I can't believe this!" I felt inside my jacket pockets,
and I still had these two LifeStyles Tuxedo Black condoms that Orion had given
me last weekend, so I could go for it if I wanted to
...
I was like, "I can't handle this shit! I met this
girl not even two minutes ago!"
There were literally fifty people all staring at me, watching the chick open
the door for me to come back there with her
...
With
hindsight now, I would have done it
...

So I said:
TD: Urn, actually I'm in a major rush
...

HB: Okay, what about after work?
TD: Urn, I have to go hang out with my friends
...

HB: Okay
...

—TD

Mystery was back
...
9, his roommate, called and told me Mystery had been released
from the hospital and was staying with his family
...
It was probably too soon to be
teaching again, but Mystery needed to pay the rent—and Tyler was determined to meet him
...

His voice was Anthony Robbins clear again, his mind lucid
...
However, something seemed different
...

He hadn't exactly returned; he had transformed
...
"The motivational carrots are
all dangling properly in front of me
...
I've decided to beat him
...
My brain
pupated into a butterfly
...
He said he wasn't
...
"I only get depressed
when I isolate myself
...
So we need to design a social
environment with people to motivate me—something like Sweater's place in
Australia
...
While I was at the hospital, I took
a lot of notes on this idea
...
Even he was impressed
...
"
That moment was the first time I heard the phrase Project Hollywood
...
I figured it would end up like Project Bliss: another stillborn scheme consigned to the trashcan of mental
masturbation
...
See glossary
...
"I see this now
...

I'm simply a superstar who's been holding himself back
...
"
It was good to have Mystery back
...
Some would call it narcissism, and they wouldn't be wrong, but
at least he saw greatness reflected not just in the mirror but also in the potential of those around him
...

"Dude, I'm already a star, at least in the community," I told him
...
It's insane
...
It makes
him feel more powerful
...
One of our former students, Supastar, a ruggedly handsome teacher from South Carolina, had recently posted, "When I die and go to pickup heaven, Style will be there
waiting for me because he is a pickup god
...
"That's something you're going to
have to come to grips with," he said
...
He planned to
schedule workshops in London, Amsterdam, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Austin, Los Angeles, Boston, San Diego, and Rio
...
I needed to resuscitate my career
...
It was called
writing
...

Now that I was mastering this whole girl thing, I needed to put the
other pieces of my life back in balance
...
I was becoming too dependent on female attention, allowing it to be my sole reason for leaving the house besides food
...

So I told Mystery that I was going to cut back on the whole sarging
thing
...
A
...
There
was Nadia and Maya and Mika and Hea and Carrie and Hillary and Susanna
and Jill
...
They knew I was
seeing other women
...
I didn't
know, didn't care, and didn't ask
...
And when they called me, I came
...

What I didn't tell Mystery was that I didn't trust him anymore
...
I wasn't a babysitter
...
And he would have to earn my trust again
...
I wasn't surprised
...


228

229

Mystery would call every day to fill me in on their progress
...
He was the victim of a disease called thinking too much
...
He was an asshole

head spun listening to him
...
"
He'd say, "I've finally figured out the formula for getting rapport with a
woman
...
"Rapport equals trust plus comfort!"
He'd say, "When you meet Tyler Durden, don't expect to like him
...
He makes rationalizations constantly
...
"I was busting on
her hard
...
" And here he pulled his head back,
pursed his m o u t h , raised his eyebrows, and started nodding
...
"Then this dude comes up to her and is like, 'Michelle, you are so
cute
...
' And she looks at me and goes"—here he smirked

"Then why do you hang out with him?"

and spoke in a whiny falsetto to imitate her—" 'I hate it when guys do that
...
He's

Now I will never ever like him
...
I

like a t h o r n in my side that gets me out of the house
...
I hate it
...
H u m a n

Papa?"

interaction to him was a program
...
Just think of him as the annoying cousin
who farts a lot
...
And he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz: the little guy behind the

One week later, Papa and Tyler Durden were on my doorstep
...
He wore a leather jacket, sun-

big and powerful master of the realm
...
I liked getting it
...
Behind him was the palest non-albino h u m a n being I

Now here's the context: He grew up physically small and mentally slow

had ever seen
...
His father, a football coach, imposed high standards on

head like a toy troll
...
This was all thet biographical detail I was

plastic snap-on attachment, and his features were flattened as if pressed

able to gather
...
And I

back by an invisible stocking
...


weight-lifter, his body and face were doughy
...
He just had a certain genetic softness
...
He reminded me of Heat Miser from The Year
Without A Santa Claus
...
No word of greeting—and, a pet

Every time the waitress came to the table, Tyler Durden wanted me to
demonstrate a routine on her
...

"Show me an IVD," 8 he'd say
...


peeve, no eye contact
...
But I gave him the benefit of the doubt
...
Now I understood why Vision had kicked him out of

nervous about making a good first impression
...
He didn't seem to see the humanity in us
...
He looked up to me
...
But most were humble about it
...


fortable by acting aloof and arrogant
...
Bono from U2 does that too
...


There was a distinction he didn't seem to understand: We weren't just
PUAs
...


When we went out to dinner, Tyler opened up
...
It was difficult to get a word
in edgewise
...
See glossary
...
See glossary
...

She had such soft skin
...
The last time I
saw her, she told me she'd had a herpes outbreak
...

After dinner, I had a special evening planned for Tyler Durden and Papa
...
So I called a few
other women to join us there, including Laurie, the Irish girl who had inspired me to invent the evolution phase-shift routine
...

When we arrived, Laurie and her girlfriends were sitting at the bar
...
I introduced them to Tyler
...
For ten minutes, he sat
there in uncomfortable silence
...

When I introduced them to Papa, he immediately came to life
...
He then started running my valuedemonstrating routine about C-shaped smiles versus U-shaped smiles
...
Arbiters of cool like to say that some
people have it and other people don't
...
I'd thought my whole life
that it was something one was born with
...

Though there was still something mechanical about Papa, he was starting
to get it
...

While Papa entertained the girls, Tyler Durden and I went to the other
room to watch Hillary dance
...
A glimpse of shoulder here
...
She had a spectacular body
...

"Why didn't you say anything to Laurie and her friends?" I asked Tyler
...
"I
didn't want to repeat anything
...

"Why? There are plenty of girls here
...
It's better
than keeping it a secret and letting me catch it
...
But now I was too paranoid to sleep with her
...

She covered her body with a feather, reached under her legs, and threw
her panties into the audience
...
A hipster with muttonchop sideburns caught it
...
His little venereal prize
...
It was Grimble, in his lucky pickup shirt
...
How do you feel about accompanying Tyler Durden
here to the Saddle Ranch?"
"You're not coming?" Tyler Durden asked
...
"
"I'm tired, man
...
It's a real crowd pleaser
...

I walked to a booth and grabbed a seat opposite Hillary
...

"They're pickup artists
...
"
"Well, they're young
...
Give them time
...
"Want to go to El
Carmen?" she asked
...

If I went, I'd have to sleep with her
...
"No
...
"
I wanted to get myself tested for everything
...


233

I understood where Ross was coming from
...
He'd have to hypnotize the image
of him sniffing Carmen Electra's butt out of my head if I was ever going to
take him to a party again
...
Everyone else seemed to
...
Perhaps he'd just been nervous around
me
...
I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt
...
Ross Jeffries and Speed Seduction
had ruled the seduction boards when I arrived over a year ago
...
Now,
Tyler Durden and Papa were on the rise
...
The community was still so underground that few women,
if any, knew what we were up to
...

And one of the biggest egos of them all, Ross Jeffries, was getting left
behind
...
And Ross wasn't happy about it
...
I found that out one night when I returned
home to find the following message on my machine:
Hey Style, it's Ross
...
It's ten after twelve
...

But I'm not going to do that
...
It
won't kill you to take me to more than one party, buddy, though I think you
owe me a lot more than that
...
I'll just cut you out of the
Speed Seduction community and everything else
...
So think
about how my work has changed your life, and think about what you've
given in return and what you've promised to give
...
I'm hoping there's more to you than that
...


However, I called Ross a couple of nights later and invited him to dinner for old-time's sake
...

"The guy gives me the willies," Ross said
...
I wouldn't be surprised if sooner
or later he breaks from Mystery and just teaches totally on his own
...
Besides, he's
already claiming to be better than Mystery
...

And it was my fault, according to Mystery
...
He was
calling from New Jersey, where he was rained in with Tyler Durden and
Papa at the home of a PUA named Garvelous, who invented toys for a living
...
These things are only fun when you come with, because then we get to wing each other
...

"Besides, my goals are changing," he continued
...
Now I think I'm looking for love
...
I want a woman I can
respect for her art, like a singer or a super-hot stripper
...

Mystery flew to England and Amsterdam with Tyler and Papa to teach
another round of workshops
...
They
were on break from college, and teaching men how to pick up women
seemed a lot more appealing as an interim job than scooping ice cream or
working at the local Baby Gap
...
"My father has
lung cancer, so he's on his way out," he said
...
"

234

"So how do you feel about it?"
"I'm not upset, but my mom was crying and it's the first time I've ever
seen her cry
...
'"
Mystery laughed
...
But it didn't
come
...

Meanwhile, Tyler Durden and Papa were running wild in Europe
...
But that all changed one
night in London, when they came into their own in the great outdoors of
Leicester Square, ground zero for backpackers, clubbers, tourists, players,
and drunks
...

The AMOG is the alpha male of the group, a constant thorn in the side
of sargers
...

It's a constant reminder that you are not one of the popular kids, that
you're just a closet nerd faking it
...
But what
he lacked in coolness and grace, he made up for in analysis
...
He could watch a human
interaction and break it down to the physical, verbal, social, and psychological components that powered it
...

So he watched the body language AMOGs used to lower his status in
sets; he observed the eye contact they used to signify to girls that he was a
creep; he analyzed the way they'd pat him on the back with so much force
that he'd lose his balance
...

Now nothing could stop the PUAs
...

They were stepping into dangerous territory
...

I learned most of this from European naturals while trying to steal sets from
them and prevent them from stealing sets from me
...
Many have game
...

All of this has been field-tested probably hundreds of times
...

(The girls will go, "No, no
...
" And they'll giggle and crawl
on you, which is immediately deflating to the guy
...
Are you like trying to pick a fight with me? Ha ha
...
Hold up, hold up
...
We'll do even better
...
Then, we'll do
one-armed push-ups
...

The AMOG will look like a tool because you're making him seem like he's
trying too hard to impress the girls with his physical superiority
...
Let's hear your pitch
...
You're doing awesome
...
You guys
fucking rock
...
If
he's just met the girls, the goal is to blow him out
...
When you say these

(The point is to cut him down on whatever limited amount of knowledge you

lines, you want to have a big smile on your face
...
He'll feel uncomfortable and his body

in the chest or slap him on the back hard enough to make him spit up his drink
...
)

All this has to be under the guise of being friendly
...
When

AMOG: Is that design on your shirt a sphincter? Man, you're going to need
somebody to protect you, mate
...
Tool him constantly
...

PUA: Dude, that's why I rolled up on you
...
Help me,

Also, you can use an AMOG's work for yourself
...
This is something I do a lot
...
I look at you, and I just know that you were born to

increase her buying temperature, then I go in and out-alpha him
...


creepy to the girls, and then remove them from him
...
I can do this

(Somebody actually said this to me
...
So

on maybe 90 percent of sets I approach where a natural AMOG is talking to

when you have an AMOG who knows the game, you have to go further
...


him in the position of trying too hard to be your friend or joke about hiring him

Have fun
...
Say, "You're like a comedian, but you don't
have to be funny for me to like you
...
You should like
design my website or something
...
I'm not into guys, man
...
Hands off the merchandise, buddy
...
)
AMOG: (Gets in your face)
PUA: (Silence)
(Don't respond
...
If he keeps trying to out-alpha
you and you don't answer, eventually he looks beta because he is trying
too hard to get your attention
...
)
Here are some other pointers
...
He wasn't upset about AMOGing
...
He was upset because Tyler Durden and
Papa had set up their own website and rival company
...
They called their in-field workshops Real Social Dynamics
...
He copied Mystery's model to the letter
...
So did Tyler and Papa
...
So did Tyler and Papa
...
M
...
M
...

Though Tyler Durden and Papa said Mystery gave them permission to
run their own workshops, Mystery claimed they used his client list and
never asked him
...
And when Ross began to smell a rat, they started their own lair in each
region, beginning with P-L-A-Y (for Player's Los Angeles Yahoo group) in
Southern California
...
It was sarging anarchy, but they were rolling in
money
...
Soon, Papa had his own gang of wings—Jlaix, a San Francisco
karaoke champ; Sickboy, a square-jawed New Yorker in the fashion industry; Dreamweaver, a University of California senior and former Mystery
student; and even Extramask—that he was flying around to each workshop
...
When I asked him
why, he answered, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
...


In the meantime, after seeing Tyler and Papa's success, two things
dawned on the rest of the community
...
It didn't take any special talent to point two girls out to a guy
and say, "Go approach them
...
Guys would throw any amount of money at the
problem to solve it
...
And now the genie was out of the bottle
...
We were the creators and beneficiaries of
a body of knowledge that was light years beyond the rest of the mating
world
...
There was a market for this
...

Next, two PUAs named Harmless and Schematic began advertising
their own workshops, which was a surprise to everyone considering that
Schematic had only lost his virginity a month beforehand
...
Students
flew to visit him in Zagreb for training in how to become an alpha male
...
The average monthly salary in Croatia was
$400; his workshops cost $850 per student
...
A mysterious website appeared offering a
book called Neg Hits Explained
...
One of Sweater's employees put together a seduction website and
line of products
...
And
even Prizer, the border-crossing hooker-fucker, put out a rambling DVD
course, Seduction Made Easy, that doubled as unintentional comedy
...
Grimble made
fifteen thousand dollars the week his was released; Twotimer took in six
thousand
...

I realized that it was time for me to move
...
The
lid was going to blow
...
It was time to stake a claim on the seduction subculture before another writer beat me to it
...
It was time to
remind myself that I wasn't just a PUA; I was a writer
...
So I
called an editor I knew at the Style section of the New York Times
...

No one ever posted their real names online; we called each other by our
nicknames
...
Our
real-world jobs and identities were unimportant
...
Few, if anyone, knew my real name or that I
wrote for the Times
...
It took two months
of going back and forth with editors, writing draft after draft
...
They wanted proof of the powers of the various gurus
...

They seemed to have trouble believing that these people—and this world—
really existed
...
I had created this character Style; now, in two thousand words of newsprint, I was going to kill him
...

I had nightmares of sargers gathering outside my house with torches to
burn me alive
...

Sure, there was a little bit of bellyaching about the community being
exposed and potentially ruined
...
But Style's credibility was safe: He
had become so entrenched in the community that to the sargers of the
world, he was a pickup artist first and a journalist second
...

I was flabbergasted
...
I'd only made him
stronger
...
When I asked them to keep my realworld and my online identities separate—especially since I didn't want
women I met looking up field reports I'd written about them—they actually
agreed
...

Even more surprising, I didn't want to leave the subculture
...
I had friendships to maintain
...
Like it or not, I was an integral part of the
community now
...
I was
one of them
...
I'd already
told them about the community and my involvement in it
...
If I told a girl I was a pickup artist after sleeping
with her, she was usually amused and intrigued by the whole idea, and convinced that I hadn't been running game on her
...
The problem with being a pickup
artist is that there are concepts like sincerity, genuineness, trust, and connection that are important to women
...

Shortly after the article came out, I received a phone call from Will
Dana, the features editor at Rolling Stone
...

"That's great," I said
...
He wants you to do it
...
"
"Why? I've never interviewed an actor before
...
You
can ask him about it when you see him
...
But he wants to go to wheelie
school with you when he gets back
...
"
"Sounds cool
...
"
I neglected to tell Will that I'd never ridden a motorcycle in my life
...


STEP 7

EXTRACT TO A
SEDUCTION LOCATION

AMONG OUR STRUCTURALLY
CLOSEST ANALOGUES
PRIMATES

THE

T H E MALE DOES NOT

FEED T H E FEMALE
...
H E MAY F I G H T T O
P R O T E C T HER OR TO POSSESS HER,
BUT HE DOES NOT N U R T U R E HER
...

His name was Tom Cruise
...
He smiled, complimented my adventurousness, and
smashed a friendly elbow into my chest
...

He wore black bike leathers with a matching helmet tucked under his
left arm and two days of stubble on his chin
...
He pointed to a mobile home sitting just off the track
...
But it's not that hard
...
"Well, the
jumping's not that hard
...
"
He cocked his right hand and slugged me in the shoulder
...
He was the AMOG that Tyler
Durden and Mystery and everyone else in the seduction community had
been trying to emulate
...
And he was the living embodiment of all six of Mystery's five
characteristics of an alpha male
...
There was so much I wanted to ask him
...

"So what made you pick me for this article?"
The dust lifted off the track and blew around us as we clutched our
bike helmets under our arms
...
"You were writing about
the dating guys
...

He paused and his eyes narrowed to slits, indicating that he was speaking about a serious topic
...
"Now is that guy you wrote about
in your article really saying that the character in Magnolia is based on him?
Is he saying that?"
He was talking about Ross Jeffries
...
J
...
Mackey was the character Cruise played: an arrogant seduction teacher with unresolved father issues who wears a headset during
his seminars and orders his students to "respect the cock
...
He swallowed a salt pill and chased
it down with a long swig of bottled water
...
It's not true
...
That is an invention that PTA had
...

"That guy is not Mackey at all
...
" It seemed important for
Cruise to establish this
...
And I didn't use that guy at all
...
Then he raced around the track, popping
wheelies, while I wiped out going five miles an hour on his top-of-the-line
bike
...
The walls were covered with
pictures of the children he and his ex-wife Nicole Kidman had adopted
...

"He's arrogant and megalomaniacal like Mackey
...
"
"I'll tell you something," Cruise said as he sat down at a table spread
with finger sandwiches and cold cuts
...
And the
guys just started getting pumped up as I was talking
...
We just want to tell
you that where this character is going and what he's saying is not good
...
'"
Here came the lecture
...
I couldn't understand it
...
It's how the species survives
...
J
...


ary edge
...
And I wasn't
hurting anyone
...
They wanted to be seduced
...
It makes us feel wanted
...
So PTA and I were saying,
'Hey man, oh my God
...
'"
See, I wanted to tell him
...
But I couldn't, because
as he remembered that moment, Cruise let out a laugh
...
His laugh takes over a room
...
You will be laughing too
...
At this point, however,
Cruise's laugh will just be crescendoing
...
Ha ha HA HA heh heh
...
But it doesn't come out right, because it's not natural
...
And then he will stop, as
suddenly as he started, and you will be relieved
...

"That's easy for you to say
...

It's no secret that Tom Cruise is a member of the Church of Scientology—a
religion, self-help group, charity, cult, and philosophy started by the science
fiction writer L
...
But Cruise had never taken a
journalist into that world before
...
Ron Hubbard, the more I realized that he
was the exact same personality type as Mystery and Ross Jeffries and Tyler
Durden
...
They were obsessive students of the principles
that guide human behavior
...

On our last day together, Cruise took me on a tour of the Scientology

24B

Celebrity Center in Hollywood, where I saw a classroom full of students being trained to use e-meters, devices that measure skin conductance
...
Afterward, the interviewer goes over the results
with them and tells them why they need to join the Church of Scientology
to fix their problems
...
They had large books spread out
in front of them
...
Nothing was left to chance
...

What they were rehearsing, I realized, was a form of pickup
...

One of my main frustrations with sarging was repeating the same lines
over and over
...
I just wanted to walk into a set and say,
"Love me
...
' Every form of demagoguery depends on them
...
Politics is pickup
...

Every day, we have our routines, which we rely on to make people like
us or to get what we want or to make someone laugh or to endure another
day without letting anyone know the nasty thoughts we're really thinking
about them
...
He was clean-shaven and ruddy-cheeked, wearing a dark-green crewneck T-shirt that fit his body like a glove
...
He believed in learning new things, doing the work required of him, and competing with no one but himself
...
Any thinking that must be done, any turmoil
that must be resolved, any issue that must be handled was solved first and
foremost in a dialogue between Tom Cruise and himself
...
"I'm the kind of per-

249

son who will think about something, and if I know it's right I'm not going
to ask anybody
...
"
Cruise leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows in his lap
...
As he
spoke, he expressed himself through gestures as subtle as changing the
aperture of his eyes
...
Whenever I criticized myself or made an excuse for myself, he
jumped down my throat
...
"I
don't mean to sound like one of those writer guys
...
" Then he continued, mockingly, "No, you don't want to be one of
those guys who's creative and expressive
...
I had thought I was done with gurus, but I needed one
more
...
, or my father ever had
...
"Why don't you want to be one of those guys? Be one of those guys,
man
...
That's cool
...
Cruise says it's cool
...

As we talked, I realized that out of all the people I'd met in my lifetime,
no one had their head screwed on more tightly than Tom Cruise
...
Ron Hubbard
...
He opened it to the Scientology code of
honor, and we discussed it point by point—set a good example, fulfill your
obligations, never need praise or approval or sympathy, don't compromise
your own reality
...
It was about getting another convert to Scientology
...
At most, he was introducing
me to a body of knowledge I could draw from, like the writings of Joseph
Campbell or the teaching of the Buddha or the lyrics of Jay-Z
...
"Let me
ask you something else about that article you wrote," he said as we walked
...
Can you imagine all the effort they're putting into that? If they took
that effort and put it toward something constructive, who knows what they
could accomplish
...
The article was published
...
I would be a different person then, but he would be the
same
...
He was an AMOG—and he had AMOGed me
...

He had his church
...


My church, however, still needed to be built
...
I had felt after writing
the Times article that my work was not done in the community, that it was
all leading somewhere
...

The epiphany came to me on my birthday
...
They called nearly
everyone I knew and had met in the last year
...
Even the big boys from the community were
there: Rick H
...
, Grimble, Bart Baggett (who specializes
in handwriting analysis), Vision, and Arte (who stars in his own line of sexual technique videos)
...
I was dressed like a dandy,
in a long black jacket with a single button at the top and a cream shirt with
ruffled sleeves exposed at my wrists
...
I couldn't carry on a conversation for more than
two minutes because people were constantly pulling me away to talk
...

Women complimented me on my looks, my body, even my ass
...

One said she had to meet her boyfriend, but then wanted to escape and
party with me; the other gave me not just her phone number, but also her
address and apartment number
...
I didn't need routines,
boyfriend destroyers, gimmicks, or wings
...

In addition, two porn stars a friend had brought with him introduced
themselves
...


We talked for a half hour, and they supplicated to me the whole time
...

Mystery had recently developed another theory of social interaction
...
In the microcosmic world we had created at the Highlands that
night, I had the highest social value in the room
...

In the end, I took a petite, mischievous stripper with big saucer eyes
named Johanna back to my house
...
I couldn't believe she would ask that, but she seemed
to need that piece of information in order to explain my status at the party
and her attraction to me
...

And that's when I had the epiphany: Sarging is for losers
...

But the point of the game is not to get good at sarging
...
You're not building anything but a skillset
...
And building a
lifestyle is cumulative
...

The right lifestyle is something that is worn, not discussed
...
It is, rather, something
that screams: Ladies, abandon your boring, mundane, unfulfilled lives and
step into my exciting world, full of interesting people, new experiences,
good times, easy living, and dreams fulfilled
...
It was time to take
this brotherhood to the next level, time to pool our resources and design a
lifestyle in which the women came to us
...


Mystery flew into town to meet me
...

He was the only person I could talk to who wasn't afraid to take
chances and make changes to pursue his dreams
...

"Now is the time, Style," he said when he arrived at my apartment in
Santa Monica
...
Sarging is for losers
...
"
I knew he'd understand
...
For the past year and a half, we'd
been focusing solely on relationships
...
It was time to follow through on Mystery's codeineaddled ramblings and join forces to work together for more than just
HB10s
...

The first step to making Project Hollywood a reality was to find a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, preferably with guest bedrooms, a hot tub, and
a location near the clubs on Sunset
...

Perhaps I shouldn't have trusted Mystery again
...
His name wasn't going to be on
the lease
...
We'd find a third party to
take the risk and the responsibility
...
His name was
Papa
...
The day he moved
from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, he dropped his bags off in his hotel room
near the airport and took a taxi to my apartment, where six foot five inch
Mystery was sleeping on my five foot six couch
...
"
Papa's hair was now spiked and gelled, and he looked like he'd been
working out
...

When I returned, Papa was Mystery's manager
...
I couldn't
believe he was going to let a protege-turned-competitor manage him
...
If Ross Jeffries was the Elvis of seduction, Mystery
was the Beatles
...

"Papa likes the business and he can fill workshops every weekend,"
Mystery replied
...
"
Papa, in his networking mania, was in constant contact with nearly
every major sarger
...
With just a few e-mails and phone calls, he could recruit a
dozen students nearly anywhere in the world
...
Ever since he'd gotten into the pickup
business, that had become Papa's favorite phrase
...
He was going to become the middle man for the
biggest pickup artists in the community
...

We never actually invited Papa to join us in Project Hollywood that day
...
There was a Coldwell Banker office across the street from the hotel, and Papa walked in and
found us a real estate agent named Joe
...

"He's going to take us tomorrow to look at houses," Papa said when we
met him in the lobby of the Furama Hotel one afternoon
...
There's a mansion on Mulholland Drive; there's the former Rat Pack crib off Sunset; and there's the supermansion, which has ten
bedrooms, tennis courts, and a built-in nightclub
...
"How much is it?"
"It's fifty thousand a month
...
"

255

Papa's face clouded
...
He was an only child
...
On it, he had sketched out a plan to earn
$50,000 a month
...

It was completely impractical
...
But it was impressive
...
I began to understand why Mystery
wanted to work with Papa
...
He had initiative
...

As a pickup artist, Papa also seemed worthy of Project Hollywood
...
And he would prove himself once more the following day, when
he picked up Paris Hilton at a taco stand
...
Actually, this is a two-part question
...
And you were going to move in with him but he had a
drawer with pictures of his ex-girlfriend—not nudie pictures or
anything, just regular pictures and some letters
...
I would so get rid of them
...


SUBJECT: Field Report—The Seduction of Paris Hilton
AUTHOR: Papa
Today, I went with Style, Mystery, and our real estate agent to our prospective
mansion, Dean Martin's old crib in the Hollywood Hills
...
We will be on top of the world, literally
and figuratively
...

It's a short walk to a popular Mexican fast-food restaurant, so we went
over there for a late lunch
...

Suddenly, our agent leaned over to me and whispered:
REAL ESTATE AGENT: You know, I saw Paris Hilton walk inside the
restaurant
...
Why don't you go pick her

I cut her off and continued with the opener
...
I dated a guy who did that, and I tossed them
...

PARIS: Yes
...
[Smiles]
PAPA: Hmm
...

Paris finished getting her salsa, then took her salsa containers and started to
walk away
...


PAPA: Hey, you know, you look like a little cartoon version of Britney
Spears
...


PAPA: All right, it's playtime
...


Paris put her salsa container back on the table, looked at me, and smiled
...


So I thought, "Salsa sounds good to me
...
So I walked over to
her side and pretended like I was just at the salsa bar by coincidence
...

PAPA: Hey, I need a female opinion on something?
PARIS: (Smiles and looks up) Okay
...
Well, that's what my ex-girlfriend said
...
You have the same kind of C-shaped teeth
...

They have the same kind of teeth
...


PAPA: Would you date a guy who was still friends with his ex-girlfriend?

She even got surgery done to her teeth because she had U-shaped

PARIS: Yeah
...
Sure
...
She said U-shaped teeth are perceived
as unfriendly, and that's why Christina Aguilera has the bad girl

I started to walk away, then turned back and continued the conversation
...


259

PARIS: [Smiles) Wow
...
Sure
...
I acted as if I were
going to leave, but don't think I'm going to leave Paris without proper game
...
Are you intelligent?
PARIS: Yes
...
I looked over my shoulder and continued the conversation
...

PAPA: Do you have a good imagination?

PAPA: I have an intuition about you
...


PARIS: What?

PAPA: Okay
...
Imagine you're driving in the
desert and you see a cube
...


PARIS: It's really big!
PAPA: How big is that?

PAPA: You know, I can tell you deep insights about yourself just by asking

PARIS: As big as a hotel
...

PARIS: Oh yeah?
PAPA: Yeah
...


Though I knew who she was, I didn't give it away and acknowledge she was
a Hilton
...

PAPA: Hmm
...
Okay, so what color is it?
I sat down at a nearby table, and she placed her food on the table and sat

PARIS: Pink
...
When she sat down, she smiled
...
Is if something you can see through or is it solid?
PARIS: You can see right through it
...
For the next fifteen minutes, we shared some stories about Hollywood and talked about commonalities
...


PAPA: Rock on! Now, let's add a ladder
...

PAPA: Ah! I would have expected you to say that
...
(Smiles and giggles)

called the Cube
...
So let's add one more thing to your picture
...


shopping for a house over there [pointing in the direction of the Holly-

Where is the horse in relation to everything in your picture?
PARIS: It's sleeping
...
I've been living in a hotel for the last ten weeks
...

PARIS: Oh yeah! Which one?

PAPA: Where is it sleeping?

PAPA: The Furama
...


PARIS: [Nods) Yeah, I live right up the street on Kings Road
...
Interesting
...
Are you ready to find out what all

PAPA: Cool
...
I'm moving into a house on Londonderry
...
The

It's a great place, and I already have so much heart for it
...
It's your ego
...


cube is pretty big
...
It's not super-

PARIS: Cooool
...
I mean, it's not like you have a huge ego, but you definitely

PAPA: Okay
...
Also, your cube is pink
...
That's my favorite color
...


PAPA: Well, pink is also a color that is playful and bright, and you chose
that because you carry yourself with the same kind of energy
...
This rocks
...
It just makes sense that I would roll with Paris Hilton

are also the kind of person who just enjoys being in other people's

when I am in Project Hollywood
...


Mystery, this is my set
...


PARIS: Yes
...
Now, that
represents how people interact with you because you are the kind of

Cheers,

person who even when people first meet you, they can see right

Papa

through you
...

PARIS: What's your name?
PAPA: Papa
...


PAPA: Rock on
...

PARIS: Yes
...

PARIS: Yes
...

PAPA: Here
...
She wrote down her first and last
name, and then handed it to me, expecting to impress me and get a wow
response
...

Then I handed it back to her
...


PARIS: Okay
...


PARIS: This is my cell phone
...


PARIS: Yeah
...

PAPA: Yeah
...
I'll see ya, kid
...

STYLE: Nice job, man
...
Well done, bro
...

He even used Speed Seduction and NLP tactics to try and hypnotize people
into investing in the house
...
Even his delivery of
the Cube was the exact same as what he'd recorded at his first workshop
with Mystery and me, down to the way he said, "Interesting" and "Cool
...

We walked back to the house to meet the owners and sign the paperwork
...

It was $36,000 cheaper per month than the supermansion, and it was walking distance from the clubs on Sunset Boulevard
...
There was a fireplace, a sunken
dance floor, a thirty-foot-high ceiling, a massive wood-inlay wall mural, and
a large bar in the corner
...
There were two bedrooms off the living room on
the ground floor
...
And then there was a small maid's room off the kitchen
...
On one
level, there were two patios shaded by palm and lemon trees
...
Beyond it lay a landscaped hill with a path winding up to a small, secluded deck at the top of
the property
...
The place was a chick magnet
...

Papa put his name down on the lease
...
The bathroom was decked out with a glass-encased circular
shower, two walk-in closets, and a whirlpool bathtub built for three
...
Papa had visions of renting the house
for after-Grammy parties, movie premieres, and corporate events
...
He wanted to make Project Hollywood a
place Paris Hilton would want to come every weekend to party
...
The response was terrifying:
Everybody wanted in
...

I SEE YOUR RANKS ARE
ADVANCING
...


—ANI DIFRANCO,
"The Story"

The first night, we all sat in the Jacuzzi from midnight until the skin hung
loosely from our bodies, gazing at the palm trees of our new place and the
lights of the Hollywood clubs we would soon descend upon
...
Papa told us
about his plan to use the house for A-list Hollywood parties
...
There were no girls, and we
didn't need any to validate us
...
We had done it
...

"We'll make the house famous with our public exploits," Mystery predicted as we all sat there with smiles plastered to our faces
...
They built their careers here and had parties
that were the envy of the world
...
He was a tall, pale, even-tempered
twenty-two-year-old PUA from Austin who peacocked by painting his nails
silver and wearing all-white clothing
...
But he owned a house in Texas, a Mercedes Benz S600, a Rolex, an office on Sunset Boulevard that he never went to, and a robot vacuum cleaner
...
He had earned them in
some kind of shady casino operation, in which he hired others to gamble
for him
...

Mystery insisted that everyone in the home have an identity—so we had
a magician, a writer, a gambler, and a businessman
...

A few days later, Papa moved a fifth roommate, Playboy, into the maid's
room
...
He was genetically good-looking—tall and slender with thick
black hair—but he had a bad habit of wearing long artsy scarves and pants

269

268

pulled up to his belly button
...

Then there was Xaneus
...

Xaneus was a short, stocky, fresh-faced college soccer player from Colorado who had begged to live in the house
...
So Papa pitched a tent for him, asked him to pay for utilities
and house cleaning, and brought him into the Real Social Dynamics fold as
an intern
...
We'd done it;
we had beaten the system
...
And we had lucked out with our roommates
...

At our initial house meeting, we established a structure for Project
Hollywood, putting Papa in charge of social activities and Herbal in
charge of finances
...
All these rules would
soon be broken
...
Every morning, I'd wake up and see Herbal and Mystery pitching
quarters into an ice bucket in the middle of the living room or jumping off
a stepladder into a pile of pillows
...

"I have a feeling that you and I are going to become great friends," Mystery told Herbal one morning
...
We were setting a great example—maybe not to the neighbors, but at
least to the community
...

A group of PUAs moved into Herbal's old house and christened it Project Austin
...

Several college students in Perth, Australia, found a house together and

started Project Perth, approaching one hundred women in their first three
days on campus
...

This was Project Sydney
...
We had manicures,
we had mansions, and we had game
...


271

In my first month at Project Hollywood, entirely by accident, my sexual reality burst open
...

And it all happened because Herbal wouldn't let me sleep—for a week
straight
...
"I discovered it on the Internet
...

"Basically," he continued, "it's a way to train your body to survive on
just two hours of sleep a day
...
"
I was tempted
...

"Is there a catch?"
"Well," Herbal said
...

And it's not easy
...
People say they have more energy, though they also find themselves wanting to drink a lot of juice for some reason
...
I had nothing to lose if it didn't work, except ten days of sleep
...
Oversleeping or missing even one nap
would throw off the entire experiment, and we'd have to start over
...


I was seeing about ten different girls now
...
Unlike AFCs, I never lied to
these girls
...
And, to my surprise,
even if it didn't make all of them happy, none of them left me
...
It taught me the idea that, "The world is what you think it is
...
It's simply your reality
...

The only woman who wasn't entirely comfortable with this arrangement was a short, curvy, effervescent Spanish girl named Isabel, who had a
habit of twitching her nose like a rat in search of cheese
...
"And I wish you'd do the
same
...
She was tiny, like a Chihuahua, and wore large black spectacles
...
Potential for beauty is as attractive to most men as actual beauty
...
Men,
though they certainly enjoy it, don't require fashion-magazine grooming
from a stranger: We have active imaginations
...
Hea, then, was a girl who other women ignored yet every man desired
...

When Hea arrived, Herbal and I greeted her at the door with bloodshot
eyes, unshaven faces, and dragging feet
...

Our manners and maturity were the first to go
...

When the doorbell rang again, I trudged to answer it and found Isabel
standing on the doorstep
...
"So since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I'd
drop by
...
" I had always told my MLTRs to call before

272

273

coming over, in case something like this happened
...
It
seemed rude to turn her away
...
"
I brought her into Herbal's room and introduced everyone
...
Her intuition tingled
...
It was
amazing
...

"Get on your stomach," I told Isabel
...
So I left

be jealous, I knew we'd need to massage her first
...
I was too tired for drama
...


"Dude," I said
...
Isabel and Hea are catfighting
...
The girls positioned themselves on either side of my back and

"I've got a better idea," he said
...
"

began massaging me—tentatively at first, then with more confidence
...
"

two of them leaned over me, their hands tracing circles around my shoulder

"No
...
The sexual na-

used to get a threesome started
...
Just suggest an innocent
three-way massage
...
"
"Sounds like a gamble
...

"You're not gambling
...
Gambling is completely random; a risk is calculated
...
"
Mystery could be very persuasive
...

Some of them worked, so I kept them; others didn't, so I discarded them
...
I was willing to risk losing them
...
"Hey, guys," I told the girls between yawns
...
They're hilarious
...

I brought t h e m up to my room
...
So we all lay on the comforter while I showed them a video Mystery
had made of our trip to Australia
...
"I just experienced
the most amazing thing," I told the girls
...

This was quite possibly going to work
...

This time I made the massage more erotic, rubbing her inner thigh and the
sides of her breasts
...
This was the deciding moment
...

I was so nervous my hand started shaking, just like at my humiliating
high-school lunch with Elisa
...
As we kissed, I lowered our bodies until we were practically lying on top of Hea, who was trapped under us
...
She responded
...

I gently pulled Isabel into the kiss
...
They were all over each other, as if they'd been wanting to do this all
along
...
They'd been bitter rivals less than an hour earlier
...

Hea removed Isabel's shirt, and we both began sucking on her breasts
...
I pulled off Isabel's panties while Hea crawled behind me and
struggled with my pants
...
, who's a guru and a shaman
...
It was 2:00

his students perform what he called a dual-induction massage on me
...
M
...
It had been four hours since my last nap
...
And because your conscious mind can't process all those movements, it discon-

go to sleep in the middle of the first threesome of my life
...


274

"Hey," I told them
...
You can join me if you want
...
I
dreamed that the streets were water, and I was swimming through them
...

But this time Isabel pulled away
...

"It's totally weird," I replied
...
But it's
a new experience, so I'm just going with it
...
Both women
put their hands around me, and I leaned back and watched
...

However, when Hea began to give me a blowjob, Isabel's body tensed
...
had said about threesomes at David DeAngelo's seminar: The experience has to be about your girlfriend's pleasure,
not yours
...

"Is this making you uncomfortable?" I asked the lead sled dog
...

I guided Hea's head back up, and we lay together, talking and fooling
around, until my next nap
...
This had
already been a big step for her
...
Herbal and I sat in the living room watching Dangerous Liaisons to stay awake, but we kept drifting
into daydreams that lasted fractions of a second
...

"This sleep diet thing was a terrible idea," I told Herbal
...
"It'll pay off in the long run
...
Fortunately,
Nadia was coming over soon
...
She showed up after a
Suicide Girls burlesque show at the Knitting Factory, accompanied by a girl
named Barbara whose black bangs reminded me of Bettie Page
...
Though Barbara

275

had a boyfriend, I noticed that she was very touchy-feely with Nadia
...
So I thought I'd give her the opportunity to
act on it
...
Afterward, I initiated the dual-induction
massage
...
The moment they started
kissing, the girls devoured each other just like Isabel and Hea had
...

Unlike Isabel, Nadia was a lead sled dog with no jealousy issues
...
I wanted to
wait and fuck Barbara too, but there would be no waiting
...
I couldn't hold out any longer
...

This is what the PUAs call a quality problem
...
Yet now, when all those
qualities were at their lowest—when I looked and felt like shit—I'd had the
most sexually decadent two days of my life
...

The next day, Herbal and I sat in the living room with a bowl of ice
cubes, which we rubbed on ourselves every few minutes to shock our systems into staying awake
...
I began to worry that we were wasting
our time
...

"There better be a rainbow at the end of this tunnel," I babbled to
Herbal
...
And we don't even know if it's there, or if the rainbow even has an end
...
"I had a
dream about gummy worms," he slurred
...
"
After another two nap cycles, my head began to hurt and my eyes refused to raise any higher than half-mast
...
But nothing worked
...
I hadn't worn braces since junior high
...

"We can't," I told him
...
"
"Watch out for the toothpicks," he said
...
He'd just had a microsleep
...

"Just try to make it through one more sleep cycle," I told him
...

He refused to even open his eyes
...

And though I had failed the sleep experiment, I'd reached a new plateau in
my game
...
But discovering the secret to threesomes was like finding the Rosetta Stone of pickup
...
It was like breaking the three-minute
mile
...

Project Hollywood was already a success
...

He looked like he'd been spray-tanning
...
A
...
He shook my hand
...

He wore a trendy black-and-white shirt with ropes hanging from the
rib cage area like a corset
...
"Social intelligence is something that hasn't come easy for
me," he continued
...
"I'm still working at it
...
Not cool
...
"
It was humble of him
...
His students said he now rivaled
Mystery in his pickup prowess
...
That's the idea
This community was predicated on, after all
...

Tyler slung his bag over his shoulder and walked up to Papa's room
...

Our house now had the most admired PUAs in the game
...
There wasn't room for anyone else
...

We didn't have furniture yet
...
That night, Playboy rigged his
movie projector to show films on the ceiling, and we all lay in the pillow pit
and watched Carnal Knowledge
...
"Your archive has been really influential in my game," he said
...
"A lot of my best shit I took
from there
...
Whenever
he wasn't playing the game, he was talking about it
...

"What do you mean?"
"I tell them I'm Neil Strauss, and that I write for Rolling Stone
...

"It depends
...
Sometimes girls instantly
say, Oh my God, we should hang out'
...
"
"Let me tell you something
...
Writers aren't cool or sexy
...
At least, that's been my experience
...
"
That weekend, Tyler Durden, Mystery, and I went to Las Vegas
...
We took them to the Hard Rock Casino
...

As a PUA, Tyler Durden had improved drastically since I'd last seen
him in Los Angeles, where he didn't talk to any women
...
He was talking about
Mystery
...
"He needs a lot
of attention, so he'll say hurtful things to people just to make them like
him
...
"
He was giving away Mystery's game—neutralizing his negs
...
"So just be nice and pretend like you're excited
...
"
Now he was neutralizing Mystery's value-demonstrating routines
...
"Papa

and I have developed a lot of new techniques to blow you and Mystery out,"
he said
...

Tyler Durden started laughing
...
He's actually
forty-five years old, but he looks pretty young to me
...
He's like
a little Elmer Fudd
...
He was AMOGing his fellow PUAs
...

"You can get me," Tyler said
...
"
I choked back my disgust and thought, "What would Tom Cruise do?"
"But I don't want to get you, man," I replied, keeping my own counsel
and giving him a big smile like I thought it was all very funny
...
You, on
the other hand, like to become the best person in the room by eliminating
anyone who's better than you
...

Later, I would realize I was only half right
...
But not before he'd squeezed every piece of useful
information out of them
...
I
could see him thinking, trying to figure out the rules and patterns behind
everything I said that kept me dominant in a group
...
He was studying my personality
...
And then, as with the AMOGs in Leicester
Square, he'd turn my own words and mannerisms against me
...

"That blonde girl's a porn star," Mystery said
...
"Her
name's Faith
...
"
Despite the year and a half I'd spent in the community, despite being
supposedly the best, I was still intimidated when I saw a beautiful woman
...

But I pushed myself to enter the set anyway, just to prove that little
AFC voice in the back of my head wrong
...

I opened with jealous girlfriend
...

I negged the target about her hoarse voice
...

C-shaped smiles versus U-shaped smiles
...

"There's so much I can learn from you," Faith said
...

They were eating out of my hands
...
I had nothing to be afraid of
...

I must kill off that inner AFC
...
As he sat next to the creepy
girl, I went back on autopilot
...

Smell
...

Bite arm
...

"How do you rate yourself as a kisser on a scale of one to ten?"
Suddenly, Faith jumped out of her seat
...
"I have to leave
...

I approached a nearby set—two hippie girls on a bender—and was in
with them instantly
...
"
We walked into the restroom on the side of the Peacock Lounge, and
she lowered the toilet seat and sat me down on it
...
"

"I know," I told her
...
Even when I was talking to those two
other girls, I saw you looking at me
...
But I couldn't get hard
...

I stood up and pushed her roughly against the wall
...
Then I pulled her pants down, sat her on
the toilet seat, fingered her, and went down on her
...

"I want you to cum in my mouth," she said
...
This had never happened to me before
...

"I want to be inside you," I told her, in a last-ditch effort to get my
blood flowing to the right place
...
I pulled a condom out of my pocket
and thought about every beautiful woman I had approached that night
...
She sat down on me, her back against my stomach, which was the worst position for a semi-erect dick to reach around
...
I couldn't figure out if it
was the two Jack and Cokes I drank that night, the lack of foreplay, the intimidation factor of being with a porn star, or the fact that I'd masturbated
earlier that day
...
One of the hippies I had been
talking to before went to the bathroom and emerged afterward with my
condom wrapper in a Kleenex
...
Everyone was celebrating a feat that hadn't
actually happened
...
I had built myself up as such
a mysterious, fascinating, sexually powerful guy
...


"Come with me," Tyler Durden said, grabbing her arm
...
What I had done was wrong, and I knew it logically
...
I had fucked
up
...
But two wrongs don't make a right
...

On the last night of the Las Vegas workshop, Tyler Durden picked up a
hostess named Stacy at the Hard Rock Cafe
...
When her shift ended, Stacy met us at the casino
and brought along her roommate, Tammy, a quiet beauty with a touch of
baby fat and a scent of grape Bubblicious
...
Even for
Vegas, he looked like a freak
...
"He wears
these weird signs and people laugh at him," he told her
...
"
The students fanned the room to talk to women as I leaned against the
bar and watched them
...
She had
been watching me lead the workshop and, from sheer social proof (lead the
men and you lead the women), she had become interested
...
She played with her hair
...
She leaned in when I leaned back
...

I could feel the air around us tingle, as it always does when a potential kiss
is accumulating energy
...
She was Tyler Durden's girl
...
But a PUA also doesn't AMOG his wing
...

I stroked her hair
...

Would she like to kiss me?
She would
...

Then a shock of orangey blonde hair appeared in the periphery of my
vision
...
Heat Miser
...


However, consolation was only a few steps away
...
We were making
out within five minutes
...
She was the
sixth girl I'd made out with that weekend
...
5
...
M
...

As we walked to the cab stand, Mystery paused and looked at himself in
the casino mirror
...

In the taxi, Angela sat on Mystery's lap, facing him, with her skirt
spread over his knees
...
She bit her lip before they kissed
...
She sucked his index finger in and out of her mouth
...
Everyone we drove past yelled and whistled at the lip-locked
pair
...
Mystery
put a finger inside her
...
She was validated
...
They were a perfect pair, each completely unaware of the other
...
M
...
I collapsed onto the bed with Tammy, and we started
making out
...
Tyler was in a chair, with Stacy
in his lap
...
She
wrapped her hand around me, and started working it up and down while
twisting her wrist
...
This time my equipment
worked, no problem
...


EB4

Tammy took her pants off, and I reached into my jeans pocket and put
a condom on
...
The
boys were there
...
I had no idea; I was too scared to look at them
...

Tammy didn't seem to have any qualms about it
...

Nonetheless, I picked her up, brought her into the shower, and turned on
the water
...
After five minutes of thrusting,
the bathroom door burst open and a flash went off
...

All I could think was, "They have dirt on me now
...
Just as
with the New York Times article, I was the only one worried about being exposed
...
I had to
get it through my head that these guys didn't care about the writer Neil
Strauss
...
Newspapers only came across their radar if
they happened to run a science article about animal mating habits
...

Afterward, the girls invited us to their place for breakfast
...
Tyler Durden and Mystery sat on the couch and talked openly about
their pickup business: I could see they were squaring off
...

The sun was up, and I didn't feel like talking about pickup when I had
a real live girl I could be sleeping with
...

There was something about her bed—the way it filled the room, the immaculate whiteness, the softness of the sheets, the thickness of the comforter, the tightness of the tucked-in bedding—that was intoxicating
...


Mystery and Tyler Durden weren't leaving Vegas until the evening, so they
stayed with the girls and I took a cab to the airport alone
...
She takes me to her room,
and I struggle with last minute resistance for hours
...
Finally, I give up and go to sleep
...
Her roommate, a Latin woman with bright red lipstick, saunters up to me and says,
"I'm sorry my roommate isn't putting out, but you can be with me instead
if you want
...
She isn't wearing
anything below the waist
...
I accept
...
But when it comes
time to have sex, though my dick looks hard, it isn't rigid
...

Afterward, my original target walks in
...
I try to hide my lipstick-stained mouth as we talk
...
And I know I've
just failed a planned test by cheating on the girl who brought me home
...

That night, the girls have a party
...
He
gives her a garage-door opener as a gift
...
I keep pressing it, figuring that a door will open somewhere with a spectacular present for her
...
It
turns out that the gift was part of a routine—a way to get her outside in private
...
I run down the street at top
speed, but within seconds Mystery catches up to me
...

"I'm pissed at you for hitting on my target," I say
...

"The window closed and now it's my turn
...
I'd failed it by making out with Tyler Durden's target
...
But I
couldn't understand the part about Mystery hitting on my target—that is,
until I returned home and Mystery called
...

She swallowed my load
...

"I don't mind," I said
...
It was part of being friends—a playful competition between PUAs
...
"
Tyler Durden, however, didn't see it that way
...
It was his life
...


The point was women; the result was men
...
They walked in
our door AFCs; they came out players
...
On Saturday afternoon, they
all went shopping on Melrose
...
They bought the same rings, necklaces, hats, and sunglasses
...

We were breeding an army
...

Even when the seminar and workshop ended, students lingered in the clubs
on Sunset for months afterward, working on their game
...
They clustered in groups, prowling for open sets and sending in
emissaries to say, "Hey, I need to get a female opinion on something
...
At 2:30 A
...
, they reconvened at the house—either accompanied by
drunk, giggling girls from Orange County, who they brought to the
Jacuzzi, the terrace, the closets, and the pillow pit, or empty-handed and
breaking down their approaches until dawn
...

"Do you know why my skill set is better than all my friends?" Tyler
Durden said one afternoon, as he plopped down in the booth at Mel's next
to me
...
"
"You're more sensitive?" I asked
...
By "plowing,"
he meant blitzing a girl with line after line, routine after routine, without
even waiting for a response
...
She came back like a fucking tractor
beam
...

You have to plow it
...
"
"I don't plow," I told him
...
But I wasn't a chaser
...
All I did was give her the opportunity to like me, and either
she did or didn't
...

"You just fucking push push push, and it can't not work," Tyler Durden went on
...
"
I watched Tyler Durden as he spoke
...

"Maybe the reason I'm not getting into a lot of relationships," he said
as we left the diner, "is that I don't like oral sex
...
"
That's when I realized that Tyler Durden wasn't in the community to
get laid
...
He was motivated by power
...
Originally, he was in the
game for the girls
...
He talked about getting a bed like a throne, a high-end home entertainment center, a bar next to the fireplace, and drapery hanging from
the ceiling
...
When I returned from Mel's with
Tyler, Mystery was in Papa's room, arguing
...

"I'm trying to make this win-win for everyone," Papa protested
...

As I looked around his room, I was appalled
...
Women have
one word for bedrooms like this: dealbreaker
...


"Some of the RSD11 guys
...
And I have three boot camp students sleeping in the room
...
There are enough guys in the house
as it is
...

"If they're using the resources of the house, they should be paying,"
Mystery said
...

"I can't talk to that guy," Mystery complained to me
...
' He's so fucking passive
...
"You think you can push me around because I was a former student
...
He didn't
get loud, like most people; instead, his voice became very stuffy
...

After that day, Papa stopped entering the house through the front
door
...

All his guests did the same
...
See glossary
...


My father died when I was forty
And I couldn't find a way to cry
Not because I didn't love him
Not because he didn't try
I'd cried for every lesser thing
Whiskey, pain, and beauty
But he deserved a better tear
And I was not quite ready
The lyrics boomed through the living room
...
He was playing the song "The Randall
Knife" by Guy Clark over and over
...
So I walked over and gave him
some
...
His voice was flat and even
...
"It's about time
...
He had another stroke, and then he died at 10:00 A
...
today
...
He was a passive observer of himself, analytically deconstructing his emotions as he felt them
...
It's like when Johnny Cash
died
...
"
Mystery had hated his dad his whole life and wished death on him
countless times
...

He seemed confused that he felt a little sad, despite himself
...
"Then he'd look at me and I'd look at him, and we'd quietly appreciate it together
...
PUAs from around the world flew in to speak, and several hundred rAFCs (recovering average frustrated chumps) gathered in our living
room to hear them
...
I remembered too-cool Exoticoption, Sasha skipping down the street with his first e-mail-close, and
Jerry's sense of humor
...
I cared about them
...
I e-mailed them for months afterward, checking on their
progress
...
Bald guys with goatees—miniature and super-sized versions of myself—asked me to pose for photos with them
...

Two gangly brothers at the convention—both virgins—brought their
sister along
...
Thanks to her brothers, she
knew everything about the game
...
I've
read it all
...

"I'm a big fan of your posts," she said
...

"Yeah
...

For my presentation, I brought in five of the girls I was dating
...
I
received a standing ovation
...
They were discussing
the video of Mystery and I picking up Caroline and Carly
...

"It's so genius," Papa was saying
...
He calls it Stylemogging
...

"It's a type of frame control," Tyler Durden replied
...
Whoever's

232

frame—or subjective reality—is the strongest tends to dominate an interaction
...
He makes sure that the focus is always on him
...
"
"That's awesome," I said
...
"That's one
of the things you do," Papa said
...
"
"What? I just said 'awesome
...
Seriously, I can't wait to read it
...
Evidently I was Stylemogging them
...
"You'll use curiosity as a frame to get rapport
and make the other person lose social value
...
We're teaching that
...
"Now, every time I say something, people are going to
think I'm running a Real Social Dynamics routine
...
And that's when I realized that I was fucked:
Everything Tyler Durden was writing about wasn't anything I had learned
in the community
...
And even
though he had my intentions wrong—that was his frame, his way of looking
at the world—he had my mannerisms down
...
He was going to take my soul and spread it all over the Sunset Strip
...

He wanted Papa to change the website to reflect the increase
...
"The market won't support
that
...
Instead, he spent his nights working
on the Real Social Dynamics website and Internet affiliate program
...

"It's my method," Mystery said
...
I've worked it all out
...
" Papa stared straight through Mystery's chest
...

"This is unacceptable!"
Mystery stomped through the living room, where Extramask was giving
a presentation
...
I had hardly talked to Extramask
since he'd arrived
...

I watched him for a few minutes
...
He was telling the students that he hadn't
lost his virginity—or even held a girl's hand—until he was twenty-six-anda-half
...
He had become
a guru too
...

"I do a lot of things with this cell phone, and it doesn't even work," he
said, holding it up
...
Your cell phone is your best
wingman
...
I
wished he'd spend more time working on his stand-up comedy career
than teaching seduction
...


I followed Mystery into the kitchen
...
"Papa's been doing workshops behind my back," he
fumed
...
"
I hopped onto the counter and sat at eye level with him
...

I assumed he was going to complain about Papa, but instead he wanted to
talk about Patricia
...
Though she
had no plans to marry him, she wanted to keep the child
...

"I'm trying to look at this objectively," Mystery said, straddling a chair
at the breakfast table that no one used
...
But I am hurt
...
"
Among the required reading for all PUAs were books on evolutionary
theory: The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins,
Sperm Wars by Robin Baker
...
At the same time, however, you understand that the violent impulses most of us successfully repress are actually normal and natural
...
It was not a
healthy thing
...

"You know what you need to do?" he told Mystery
...
"
Sarging was Tyler Durden's solution for everything: He truly believed
in it
...
Though I'd moved into the house to build a lifestyle, for
Tyler Durden sarging was the only way to live
...
Instead he brought women to the clubs on Sunset, and then usually ditched
them to pick up more girls
...
"Go out with Style
tonight
...
You can find a new girlfriend
twice as hot as Patricia
...
It seemed like wherever I was during the
convention, a small group gathered, and I wound up holding court
...
"You
were so gentle and elegant with those girls
...
"
"Thanks, man
...
"
For the first time in months, I was speechless
...
"
As he told me about his luckless life and his discovery of the community and my posts, I saw Min looking at me with her impish eyes
...
Besides the girls I had used in my presentation, she had been the only woman in the house all weekend
...
I had to say something—but it couldn't be anything she'd read online or heard from her brothers
...
"I'm about to sign up to ride the mechanical
bull
...
In many
ways, it reminded me of the game
...
And ever since I'd first set eyes on the bull, it had
been my goal to get to the top setting—the mythical eleven
...

It was a completely pointless ambition, with no practical application
whatsoever
...
Hence the popularity
of video games, martial arts, Dungeons and Dragons, and the seduction
community
...
I was wearing leather pants—not to peacock, but to
help me stick to the sides of the machine
...
I understood
then what a woman must feel like after sex with a three-hundred-pound guy
...

In an instant the machine shuddered to life, vibrating me so quickly that
my eyes lost focus
...
But just as I was about to slide off the side, the bull stopped
...

At first, I was elated
...
It wouldn't change my life, or the life of anyone around me in the least
...

Within minutes, I already had buyer's remorse
...

I understood the subtext
...
"They're real protective and get mad when I go on dates," she said
...
"
When we returned to Project Hollywood, I brought her to the Jacuzzi
...
"But I didn't like him
...
After I started
reading my brothers' pickup stuff, I understood why I wasn't attracted to
him or any of the other guys at school
...
They don't understand cocky funny
...
She joined me in her bra and panties
...
I took her hands and pulled her toward me
...
I took her bra off and put
her gumdrops in my mouth
...
There was no LMR
...

She was my first groupie
...
This whole
PUA thing was getting too big
...

No woman was safe
...
Bands of former students patrolled every club—the Standard,
Dublin's, the Saddle Ranch, Miyagi's
...
M
...
They carted women into the house by the truckload
...
They were running around Stylemogging and delivering the best-friends test like they were Spanish flys
...

Mini-mes were everywhere
...


299

and there were already two workshops there
...

I would recommend that anyone starting out go and do this
...
My open-

SUBJECT: My Approach Schedule

ing game is going to be supertight, and I will no longer be resentful of women

AUTHOR: Adonis

and fear their power to make me feel inadequate
...
A
...
I've always felt like the odd guy out here because I'm still a virgin and kind of a keyboard jockey, so I have locked off Saturday and decided to do a hundred
approaches in a single day
...
I figure I can do ten approaches per hour for
five hours, yielding fifty approaches
...
A hundred approaches
should be no problem
...


I have kept score of every approach I have done and, as promised, I just got
through my thousandth approach—and still with four days left in the month!
I can say after a thousand approaches, there are only so many ways to
get rejected or ignored
...
I can stay in sets now for ten or fifteen minutes
...
But now I'm find-

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge
SUBJECT: 1 25 Approaches!
AUTHOR: Adonis

ing it easier to control a set, despite my size (I'm 5'4")
...
I feel like I've
become a new, more confident person, with no social fears
...
HBs can just sense it
...
I got through 1 25 approaches
...
It's worth it
...
Before I left, I listened to Ross Jeffries s Unstoppable Confidence tapes
...
I pictured myself forty feet tall and made of diamond, so no
one could hurt me
...
It really
started clicking for me at the Saddle Ranch
...
One HB8 offered me an e-mail address, but I pushed for a number close
and lost it completely
...
Afterward, I went to the Standard,

Next month, I'm going to master phone game—a thousand phone calls,
lol
...

—Adonis

301

hen you may be a social robot
...
This is especially true among
those who found the community in their teens or early twenties
...
They
don't seem entirely human
...
They may never be normal again
...
And then they post online complaining
that women are flakes
...
You can end up
becoming a one-dimensional person
...


Some of these guys even do well in the field
...

Are you one of these guys?
To find out, ask yourself the following questions:

* Do you panic if you run out of "material" during a conversation with a
woman?
* Do you think that everything a woman says to you that isn't 100 percent
positive is a "shit test"?
* Do you see every other male who is interacting with a woman as an
AMOG who must be destroyed?
* Are you unable to discuss a woman without first asking, "What's her rating?"
* Do you call women in your life who you are not sleeping with "pivots" instead of friends?
* If you are around a woman in a non-social setting, such as a business
meeting or a nursing home, do you get a strange shot of adrenaline and
feel obligated to sarge her?
* Have you stopped seeing value in things that are not pickup related, such
as books, movies, friends, family, work, school, food, and water?
* Is your self-esteem constantly at the mercy of the reactions of women?

The solution is to remember that the best way to pick up women is to have
something better to do than to pick up women
...
But all these
things are what make one complete and enhance one's attractiveness to the
opposite sex
...
If you can make something of
yourself, women will flock to you, and what you've learned here will prepare
you to deal with them
...
The curious thing is: Most robots don't program themselves
...
"
Mystery and Papa were arguing again
...
"It's not fun for me
...
"
"And you're making my business look bad
...

"Fine," Mystery yelled
...
Our business relationship is through
...
"
It was a doomed partnership to begin with
...
It
seemed as if he'd been laying low the whole time, waiting for his moment to
get involved in the pickup business
...
When Mystery and Sima
started getting on each other's nerves shortly after her arrival in town, she
started showing IOIs to Herbal
...
Sima
and Herbal ended up fooling around that night
...
But they seemed unaware of
something that everyone else around them realized: a bad precedent was being set
...

I was the only person under the roof who wasn't on the payroll of either
...
I was guilty by association
...

He wasn't angry
...
We had no idea how many students, sargers, and instructors Papa
was packing into his room
...
We didn't even bother to lock the doors anymore
...
No one knew their names
...

The mini-Papas were just as cold to me as Papa was, but they were constantly around
...
Sometimes I'd see them sitting at Mel's Diner with Tyler
Durden
...

"He'll reposition his body to steer the conversation in his direction
...
"
"If you make a joke, he exaggerates it to steal the glory
...
"
They weren't criticizing me
...
Yet, oddly,
they never hung out with me as friends
...
It was dehumanizing
...

I needed to get out of there
...

Her name was Courtney Love
...
Courtney was at the peak of her infamy at the
time
...
On top
of all that, she was facing drug charges and had recently lost custody of her
daughter
...

When I met her at Virgin, Courtney was wearing a black dress with a

304
305

sash wrapped tastefully around her torso
...
Considering the number of ugly tabloid headlines featuring her name,
Courtney looked good—pale, thin, statuesque
...
It
seemed like a metaphor for her life: constantly unraveling
...
I was the press; I was the enemy
...
"
This is what PUAs call a bitch shield
...
I couldn't let it faze me
...

"I still have nightmares about my grandmother," I told her, "because
the last time I had the chance to see her alive, we had plans to go to the Art
Institute of Chicago
...
"
We fluffed for a while about our families
...

Now we were getting somewhere
...
She looked up at me
and the walls came down
...
"I need to be saved," she sobbed
...
"
Now we had rapport
...

When our hour was up, Courtney suggested exchanging phone numbers
...
I was
relieved, because an hour-long discussion in a record company office
wouldn't have made for a very interesting profile
...

That night, I met some old college friends at Soho House, a private
club in the meatpacking district of Manhattan
...
They spent a half
hour discussing how awkward and introverted I used to be
...
I tried to contribute, but I had trouble focusing on the words
...
I felt like I didn't fit in with them anymore
...
She was a foot taller than me and somewhat
drunk
...

"Hang out with us," I said
...
"
It was a line I'd learned from David DeAngelo
...
My
friends looked on in shock as she sat down and asked for a cigarette
...
Every now and then,
she'd drag me to the bathroom, where I'd watch her inhale cocaine like a
human Dustbuster
...

"Sometimes," I told her
...

"That's great
...

"It's cool," she said
...
"
"Oh, the beads
...
"
I was totally confused
...
Maybe she was talking
about anal beads
...

I stopped and leaned against the wall of the corridor we were walking
through
...
"I like soft, slow, teasing kisses
...
"
"Yeah, I had a girlfriend who did that
...
"
"I give amazing blow jobs," she said
...
"
That one-word answer had taken me months to figure out
...
It is a
shit test
...
After watching the British television character Ali G, I discovered the solution:
Just look her in the eye, nod approvingly, and, with a slight smile creeping
across your face, say, "Respect," in a smart-ass tone
...
But this was hardly a
challenge—it was fool's mate
...

I fell silent and did what the PUAs call triangular gazing, looking slowly
from her left eye to her right eye and then to her lips to create suggestive
sexual tension
...
The next thing she did was ram her
tongue down my throat, like a cow
...
"Talking about
kissing got me excited," she said
...

We took the elevator downstairs and hailed a cab
...
I guess we were going to her place
...
I guess I was supposed to suck it
...
She
turned on a lamp, which cast a dull brown glow over the room, and slipped
the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup into her stereo
...

"I can't wait," I said
...

As I lay there, I realized I'd forgotten to say good-bye to my friends
...
Sarging had dropped a polyester curtain between me and my past
...
The pearl wasn't anal
beads at all
...

She'd probably left the house that night hoping to find someone to
take home to show it off to
...
I figured that was what it was for, though I wasn't really
sure because, a minute later, the chain of balls snapped off the underwear
...

So much for her new pearl
...
She didn't seem upset
...

She re-emerged in knee-high black leather boots, lay down on the bed,
and took another Dustbuster snort from a burgundy vial of coke
...

I'm not a fan of drugs
...
But if I
were ever going to do cocaine, now would be the time
...
Each has her own tastes and quirks
and fantasies
...
Reaching that moment of
passionate truth—of surrender, honesty, revelation—was my favorite part of
the game
...
I guess I just like people
...
I was really dreading this: I didn't want to be up all night, and I had a feeling that coke wasn't
good for a gentleman's staying power
...

And then the phone rang
...

"I have to get this," I told her
...
I had a feeling I knew who was
calling
...
"See if you can get
some acupuncture needles in Chinatown—the big ones that hurt the most
...
"

309

him to fall in love with you
...
I need one
more night to get him
...
He'd walk
her home, make out with her, and then tell her he couldn't come inside
...

"This one's for the gallbladder," Courtney Love said as she slammed an acupuncture needle into my leg
...
" She wiggled the needle around
...
"
There
...
Okay
...

My scheduled one-hour interview with Courtney Love had turned into
a surreal slumber party
...
It was five thousand square feet with nothing in
it but a bed, a television, and a couch
...
I was stripped down to my boxers on her couch, with a
dozen needles sticking out of me
...
She was too scared even to answer her phone,
in case someone called her "with some bullshit news about some fucking
thing
...

She put Boogie Nights into her DVD player, then climbed into her bed
and threw a stained blanket over herself
...
"My last boyfriend said it's drifting,
which he's doing now
...
And I'm living mine: It's loss of power
...
The video director wasn't returning her calls
...

"I have a theory," she said
...
It'll give you some strategy
...
"I need all the help I can get
...
For the former, Greene studied
the greatest seductions of history and literature in search of common
themes
...

"How do you know about that book?" she asked
...
"
She sat up in her bed
...
Talking about pickup was better than the alternative: Whenever
the discussion veered toward her legal, media, and custody problems, her
eyes filled with tears
...
It wasn't easy to have a serious conversation with a dozen acupuncture needles sticking out of my body
...
"Do you think they're as good as Warren Beatty?"
"I don't know
...
"
Courtney climbed out of bed and rubbed patchouli oil around the needles in my feet, legs, and chest
...
"
"I would love to know how he operates
...
He once called me and said, 'Hey, it's me,' as if I should
have known who it was
...
When I finally say yes, he laughed and said he was in Paris
...
He'll blow his nose and then hand the dirty tissue to
his date
...
Warren Beatty negged women
...
The difference between those
in the community and lone wolves like Warren Beatty (when he was single),
Brett Ratner, and David Blaine is that we name our techniques and share
our information
...
"I
have a magic pussy
...
I'm a kingmaker
...
)
She began pulling the needles out of my body
...
"You have to get
one in your head
...
"
Fumbling around the floor, Courtney grabbed a dirty needle
...

"No thanks
...
"
"You gotta try it
...
"
"My liver's fine, thanks
...
"Fine
...
"
She wriggled out of her pink shirt and stood in front of me topless
...
"Do you know
how much a shot of my tits is worth? Nine thousand dollars
...

"That won't even get me in the door at the lawyer's office," she
snapped, slipping into a black-and-white baby-doll dress
...

She pulled a coffee cake out of her bag and split it in half, leaving a trail of
crumbs behind her as she made for the safety of her bed
...

"What?"
"I will bet you that I can get this director back
...
If he's not returning your calls, he's not interested
...
" She handed me half of
the coffee cake in her blackened fingers
...
"
"Well, if you can get him back, you're a better pickup artist than I am
...

"What are the stakes?"
"If I can't get him back, I will give you a one-week stand with me—
wherever you want
...
I was so taken aback by the notion that I had
trouble processing the words
...
It's your choice
...
"
"But I have one condition: I get an hour of advice with each pickup
artist you're living with
...

"I just need to be fucked," she said as I waited for the elevator that
would take me out of her loft
...
"
I knew I could have been that guy
...
But there's a
PUA's code of honor, there's a gambler's code of honor, and there's a journalist's code of honor
...

What I had told Dustin that morning in my apartment really was true:
Learning pickup had enriched so much more than just my sex life
...
I discovered just how good when I was assigned an interview with Britney Spears
...
Besides, I had n o t h i n g to lose by gaming Britney Spears
...
Maybe I'd
even get a decent quote I could actually print
...
I had to
treat her like any club girl with attention deficit disorder
...

Was there a lot of pressure on y o u while making this album?
What, now?

"I'll tell you something about yourself that other people probably don't
know," I began
...
"

Was there a lot of pressure from yourself or the label to have a major

"Totally," she said
...


"Yeah
...


You have no idea?
I have no idea
...
Why was that?
What's the DFA?
They're two producers from N e w York, James Murphy and Tim
Goldsworthy, w h o call themselves the DFA
...

My interview with Britney Spears was going nowhere
...
She didn't
give a shit
...

Her hair was tucked under a white Kangol hat and her thighs pushed at
the seams of her faded blue jeans
...
But in person, she looked like a cornfed Southern sorority girl
...
As a sexual icon, she was unintimidating and, I imagined, lonely
...
And every time you think, they
go down and to the left
...
You're
someone who lives in her feelings
...
"That's totally true
...
It was one of the value-demonstrating routines I'd developed
...

As I taught her how to read different types of eye movements, she clung
to every word
...

The game was on
...
"Who told you this?"
I wanted to tell her, "A secret society of international pickup artists
...

"In fact, by watching the direction peoples' eyes move when they speak, you
can tell whether they're telling the truth or not
...
I wasn't a journalist anymore
...
I had demonstrated authority over
her world
...
No

"I can tell from your eye movements, from your eye contact, from the
way you speak, and from your body language
...
"

matter what country I was in or what age or class or race of woman I was

"I need to do psychology classes," she said, with endearing earnestness
...


314
315

"That would be so interesting to me, studying people
...
She
was opening up
...
"
It was time to pull out the heavy artillery
...
"It'll be an
experiment
...
"
Then I used a simple psychological gambit to guess the initials of an old
friend she had an emotional connection to—someone I wouldn't know and
hadn't heard of
...
C
...
It was a new routine I was still learning, but it was good enough for her
...
"Let's try it one more time
...
" She put her knuckle in her mouth and pinched the skin
between her teeth
...
They really were a perfect C-shape
...
"
She was no longer Britney Spears
...

Or, as Robert Greene would classify her in his breakdown of seducer's victims, she was the lonely leader
...
"I'm going to write down a number
...
What I want you to do is not to think at all
...
There's no special ability required to read
minds
...
"
I wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to her face down
...
"
"What if it's wrong?" she asked
...
"
This was what we called in the field an LSE girl—she had low self-esteem
...

"Now, turn over the paper," I told her
...

She screamed, leaped off the couch, and ran to the hotel mirror
...

"Oh my God," she said to her reflection
...
"

It was as if she had to look at herself in the mirror to make sure that
what had just happened was real
...
"I did that
...
She was her own fan
...
Of course she knew
...

So, yeah, I had tricked her
...

"See," I told her
...
It's just that
society trains you to think too much
...

"Cool interview!" she exclaimed
...
She was just a lost little girl going through a late emotional
puberty
...
I had demonstrated value, and now we were moving on to the rapport phase of seduction
...

Rapport equals trust plus comfort
...
I started the tape recorder and asked the
questions I'd given her at the start of the interview, plus all the other questions I had
...

When the hour was up, I stopped the tape recorder
...
"Everything happens for a reason
...

"I do too
...
"I'd like to exchange numbers
...
She returned ten minutes later with her publicist
...

"You know, she's never done that with a writer before," she said
...

"She said it was like the two of you were destined to meet
...

"So you had a crazy time out the other night," the interviewer asked
...

"What was the energy level like in the club when you walked in and surprised everyone?"
"Oh, it was just crazy
...
"This isn't working," she told the crew
...
"
She pivoted on her heels and walked toward the door, leaving the crew
and her assistants befuddled
...
I had gotten to her
...

The game, I realized, works better on celebrities than ordinary people
...

In the days that followed, I thought often about what had happened
...
She wasn't considering me as a potential mate
...
And that was a step in
the right direction
...

Interest plus attraction plus seduction equals sex
...
For all I knew, she exchanged phone numbers with every journalist to make him feel special and
ensure a good story
...
Or perhaps it was a scheme of the publicist's to make journalists
think they had a special connection with her artist
...

I would never know the truth
...

I told myself that it was crossing a journalistic line: If she didn't like the
piece I was writing (which was quite possible), I didn't want her to go on
record saying I had written a bad article because she hadn't phoned back
...
"What do you have to
lose? Tell her, 'Can you not look like Britney Spears? We're going to do
some crazy shit, and we can't get caught
...
'"
"If I had met her socially, fine
...
"
"You're playing the game at another level now
...
So call her
...
If it had been Dalene Kurtis, the Playmate of the
Year, I would have called her back in a second
...
I felt worthy
...

But Britney Spears?
One's self-esteem can only grow so much in a year and a half
...
V I N C E N T MILLAY,
"And do you think that love itself "

It took just one woman to bring Project Hollywood down
...
She liked to
drink, dance, have sex, and get high, not necessarily in that order
...
All those years of study,
all those memorized routines and learned patterns of behavior, all those
New Rock platform boots were no match for a woman scorned
...
He was charging fifteen hundred dollars now—and people
were paying
...
Katya's was just one of several numbers he had
collected while demonstrating his game during the workshop
...
She was very drunk at the time, and
quite possibly high
...
Everyone called the
numbers they'd collected the previous weekend to see which leads were hot
and which had staled
...
If Katya hadn't been home and another one
of Mystery's numbers had answered instead, all our lives would have been
different
...
Women
are at different places in their lives when we meet them
...
Or they
may be looking for nothing at all, because they're in a happy relationship or
recovering from an emotionally destructive one
...

When Mystery called, Katya couldn't remember having met him
...

"Dress casual," Mystery told her
...
"

r
322

Using words like "casual" and "hang out," and the time constraint,
were all part of a strategy to make the visit a low-pressure event
...

Katya arrived that evening wearing a pink sweatsuit and dragging
along a scrappy little terrier named Lily
...
The former collapsed into the pillow pit and the latter
took a shit on the carpet
...
"I'm just going to hook my computer up to the
projector and show you some movies I made," he told her
...

She had a button nose that wiggled, puffy cheeks that flared, and blonde
hair that bounced to maximize her cuteness
...
They
were becoming a popular routine around the house because they allowed us
to convey positive qualities about ourselves and our friends without even
talking
...
On their second meeting, three days later, after much LMR, they
closed the deal
...
"So is
it okay if Lily stays here while I go to Las Vegas this weekend?"
Leaving Lily at the house was a cunning tactic because, while Katya was
gone, we all grew attached to the cheery, lovable dog—and, by extension, to
its owner as well
...

When Katya returned from Las Vegas, Mystery helped her move out of
her old house
...
"So why don't you just move into my room?"
All she had to her name were two duffel bags, a makeup kit, Lily, and a
Mazda SUV stuffed with clothing and shoes
...
In the evenings, she went to school to learn specialeffects makeup
...

Katya quickly wove herself into the fabric of the house
...
She had an amazing ability to befriend anyone, though
her motivation was unclear: Maybe she was genuinely a people-loving person, maybe she enjoyed the free rent
...
I liked her
...

We even let her brother, a shaggy-haired sixteen-year-old with Tourette's
syndrome, sleep in the pillow pit for a few weeks
...
He hadn't dated anyone
seriously since Patricia
...
"I think of her constantly, like when you have a baby
...
I need to take care of this girl and make sure she's safe
...

"I'm really scared," she said
...

"I'm starting to fall in love with Mystery
...
"
"Yeah," she said
...
I don't know
enough about him yet
...
"
Then she sat there quietly
...

I didn't say anything
...
As we changed
to go out for the night, he rattled on about his favorite subject
...
" He smudged on black eyeliner and smeared white concealer
beneath his eyes
...
She has a couple she sleeps with in New Orleans
...
"I feel like I'm pairbonding
...
Lucky1 s at the Hard Rock Casino, where Katya
put away two glasses of champagne; then crossed the street to Club Paradise, a strip club, where she put away two more glasses of champagne
...
" Mystery looked the waitress over
...

"Ever seen the movie Poltergeist?" Mystery asked her
...
He told her they wouldn't get along
...
" Soon the waitress was
stopping by our table every few minutes to flirt with Mystery
...
"
"You just want to fuck her," Katya slurred
...
And effectively
...
Mystery followed to appease her
...
Although Katya was bisexual, Mystery still wasn't
getting threesomes
...
He needed to follow Rick H
...

When I woke up, I took a plane home, leaving the two of them alone in
the hotel room until their flight in the evening
...
"
"Hey
...
Mystery wants to marry me
...
Everyone applauded
...
What
should I do?"
The only reason I could come up with to explain Mystery's desire to get
married was so he could get a U
...
citizenship
...
S
...
She still had a Russian passport
...
"Just get engaged
...
Do that
...
"
Mystery grabbed the phone
...
We're getting married
...
She's crazy
...
Okay, bye
...

That evening, Mystery carried Katya over the threshold of Project Hollywood humming "Here Comes the Bride
...

"Look at my ring," Katya cooed
...
That
was basically all the cash he had
...

"This whole marriage thing," Mystery told me while Katya was in the
bathroom, "is the best routine ever
...
She gets off on calling me her husband
...
"
"Dude, it's the worst routine ever," I replied, "because you can only do
it once
...
"I'm going to tell
you a secret," he whispered, putting the ring in my hand
...
"
If any other PUA had told me he'd gotten married in Vegas to a girl he'd
just met, I would have known it was a joke
...

"Yeah, after you left, we walked by a jewelry store in the Hard Rock and
decided to fake our marriage
...

She's such a good liar
...
"
"You're both great illusionists
...
I think she's really enjoying the role-play
...
"
Mystery was right: Perception is reality
...
They actually started acting like an old married couple
...
To him, clubs were for sarging
...
So she started going clubbing without him
...
It was hard to tell
whether he was just being lazy, or if a depression was coming on
...
It's a
speech a man gives a woman he's dating when she stops having sex with
him
...
Rocks, for a woman, are wonderful nights out, romantic attention, and emotional connection
...
If you give a
woman only gold or a man just rocks, neither will be satisfied
...
And Katya was giving Mystery the gold, but he wasn't giving her the rocks
...

It wasn't long before they began to resent each other
...
It's driving me crazy
...
Now
he never leaves his bed
...
She's constantly yapping about something pointless and bouncing off the walls
...
"
Mystery needed a more passive girl
...

And it saddened the rest of us; after living in a house full of men for so
many months, we'd grown attached to her positive energy and high spirits
...
He had this
beautiful creature, full of sparkle and life, and he was just throwing it away
...

I received the text message at 11:39 P
...
: "Can I stay at yr house? They
repoed the car and worse
...
Need to not be alone
...


I knocked on the door of Courtney's corporate apartment in West Los Angeles
...
It's open
...
She wore a
black Marc Jacobs dress with buttons running down the side
...
"There are so many loans
here that I never knew of or approved
...
Half
the items were highlighted, with notes in black ink scribbled in the margins
...

She didn't have a manager, and taking care of her own affairs was proving to be more than she could handle
...
"I need somewhere to stay for a
couple days
...
I promise
...
" I guess she didn't have a problem with the story I'd written in Rolling Stone
...
I just want to
warn you, though, that you're not going into an ordinary house
...
I want to meet the pickup artists
...
"
I walked her downstairs and strapped her sixty-pound suitcase to the
luggage rack on the back of my Corvette
...

"And if he seems a little off, it's because he has Tourette's
...
It's sort of like that
...

The first person we saw inside was Herbal, who was coming out of the
kitchen
...

"No," I told her
...
"

3ZB

Her brother walked out of the kitchen a moment later, sipping a Coke
...

She took a step backward and stepped on Lily, who yelped loudly
...
I assumed she was going to apologize
...

This was going to be an interesting couple of days
...
Two minutes later, she marched into my room
...

"There's a clean one in the medicine cabinet," I yelled after her
...

There was something endearing about her
...

The next morning, I came downstairs to find her in the living room,
smoking a cigarette and wearing nothing but a pair of expensive Japanese
silk panties
...

In that state of dishabille, she met the rest of the house
...

Courtney scowled
...
All Papa had wanted
from the day he'd signed the lease to Project Hollywood was to hang out
with celebrities
...
He
avoided her from that day forward, like he did everyone else who wasn't
part of his pickup business
...
"I just took a pregnancy test," Katya told
her, puckering her lips into a childish expression of self-pity
...
"
"You should have the baby," Courtney said
...
"
I was living The Surreal Life
...
"If you want to keep
the baby, whether we are together forever or not, I will support your decision
...
"
The sun poured into the kitchen from the patio, illuminating a thin,
orderly chain of ants that ran from the brickwork outside to the overflowing trashcan
...
The ants went scurrying in
every direction at the point of rupture
...
"You are weird
...
"
The ants began to fall back into line
...
It was
hard to tell there had ever been a catastrophe
...
"And you know my mission in life: survive and replicate
...

I'm willing to fulfill my half of the obligation
...
There was no chain
of command or unspoken structure
...
And its natural state was disorder
...
These matters, however, are not group decisions
...

"Guess what?" Katya squealed when she returned
...
"
She jumped into the air and clapped her hands together in praise of
luck
...
The look on his face
was pure hatred
...

A few hours later, I found Katya at the bar pouring herself a glass of
Chardonnay
...
Then another
...
"So I'm going to have a good time tonight without him
...
"
"Come drink with me," she cooed
...
"
"No worries, no troubles
...

"Wow," she said
...
Your arms look
good
...
" One of the things I'd learned in the past year and a half was
how to take a compliment
...
" It's the only response a
confident person can make
...
"You're the only person in
the house I can talk to
...

I felt that tingle of energy, the one I'd felt just before I kissed the hostess Tyler Durden had picked up at the Hard Rock
...
She was lifting her top now
...
"
"That's nice
...
"
She took my hand and pulled it toward her breast
...

"Well, it's been fun talking, but I have to go to my room and floss my
cat now
...

I circled around to the back of the house and entered Mystery's
room through the patio
...
He was watching Back to
the Future II
...
"Then I heard that Back to the Future II was opening in twenty-three days
...
It's the only thing that kept me from killing myself
...
"When I saw
it and heard the opening music, I cried, dude
...
I
know all the props
...
"I
touched this car
...
No one wants to be the bearer of bad
news
...
Mystery enjoyed movies

like Real Genius and Young Einstein and The Karate Kid
...
It didn't mean I was better than him: It just meant
we were different kinds of nerds
...
"
"I'm not surprised
...
"
"Aren't you going to do anything about it?"
"I don't care
...
"
"Well, at least she's not pregnant
...
"She's such an idiot
...
It was an ovulation test
...
She took
the test three times and each one was positive
...
"
"Listen, man
...
"You're
driving her away
...
It's rocks versus gold, man
...
"
"Yeah
...
" He paused, shut his eyes for a moment, and nodded wistfully
...
"
When I left Mystery's room, Katya was no longer in the living room
...

I retreated to my room and waited
...

Voices yelled, doors slammed, glass smashed
...

It was Courtney
...

I followed Courtney to Herbal's room
...
Clothes, books, and
cigarette ash were spread across the floor
...
One of her
dresses was draped over a hot, exposed light bulb for mood lighting
...
I examined the ripped scraps: They were listings for lawyers
...

"Let's see what's going on," she said
...
I didn't want to clean up anyone's mess
...


332

We walked into Mystery's bathroom
...
Her brother
was leaning over her, holding an asthma inhaler in her mouth
...

"Should I call an ambulance?" I asked
...

Katya looked up and glared at him
...

When Katya finally emerged from Mystery's room, her face red and
damp, Courtney took her by the hand and led her to a sofa in the living
room
...
I
looked at the unlikely pair sitting there
...

She was also probably the sanest person in the house
...


The next morning, Courtney burst out of her door at an atypically early
hour
...

"What? What's going on?" she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes
...
I didn't know where I was
...
"Everyone's nice," she observed with relief
...
Okay
...
A few minutes later, a
driver arrived at the house
...

"Sleeping," I said
...
"
He knocked on her door and walked inside
...

"I need to find something to wear to court," she said as she slipped on
various outfits, running in and out of the bathroom to check them in the
mirror
...

"It's a silly dress because it's a silly case," she told court reporters that day
...
There were cigarette
burns in Herbal's bedspread, and the wall behind the door was destroyed
from the constant slamming
...

In the kitchen, the refrigerator and cabinet doors all hung open
...
Globs of peanut butter dripped from the counter, the
cabinets, and the refrigerator shelves
...
She didn't give a fuck
...
It was another
quality that pickup artists admired: She could go caveman
...
Mystery and Herbal taught her about concepts like social
proof, and NLP ideas like framing
...
The current
frame everyone saw her through was that of a crazy woman
...
She was eccentric, but not crazy
...
She
understood and internalized every concept they taught her
...

That evening, she shone on The Tonight Show
...

I had driven to the show in Katya's car with Herbal, Mystery, Katya,
and Kara, a girl I'd met in a bar a couple of days before
...
I was stunned by her guitarist: She was a
tall, gorgeous bleached-blonde rock-and-roller oozing attitude
...

"Sure," he replied
...
While Mystery had been moping in his room, he was out helping Katya
keep her brother entertained
...

In the parking lot, Mystery climbed into the driver's side of Katya's car
...
She sat in the passenger seat and
slipped a dance mix by Carl Cox into the CD player
...
That should have been a warning sign
...
He turned
the music off to answer it
...

Mystery angrily turned it off again
...

He stood in the middle of Ventura Boulevard blocking traffic, with his

right arm thrust out and a middle finger in the air, directly in line with
Katya's face
...
When she pulled up next to him, he stopped, shot her a scornful
look, crossed his arms into the fuck-you position, and then continued
walking
...
She wasn't angry; she was just disappointed
by his childishness
...
I called him several times, but
he didn't answer
...
Every time I dialed his number, the call went straight to voice mail
...

A few hours later, there was a knock on the door
...
One of
Courtney's many talents was the ability to turn anyone within a hundredyard radius into a personal assistant
...

"Shitballs!" she called to Katya's brother
...
"
"You know, he's a virgin," Katya said
...
She went silent, contemplating this piece of
information for a few moments, then nodded her head and told Katya, "I'd
give him a mercy fuck
...
He had a stripper on each arm
...

"Hey, buddy," he said, as if he'd just come back from the grocery store
...
"
"Hi," said a horse-faced brunette on his left arm
...

"Well, dude, you should have called
...
That wasn't cool
...

Katya went about her business
...

While Mystery's stripper gambit had failed to make her jealous, it did
succeed in making everyone else's respect for him dwindle further
...
Katya eventually reached someone in the house
...

It was Herbal who ultimately cracked
...
He never lost
his cool
...
He was modest and understated
...
All that time he had spent with Katya
while Mystery was pouting or laying indolently in bed or sleeping with a
stripper out of revenge had affected him
...
After watching her suffer through Mystery's manipulation and neglect, he'd even begun to believe that he was more worthy of her
...

"Just ask Mystery
...
"
"Yeah
...
" (Sima was
Mystery's ex-MLTR from Toronto who Herbal had fooled around with
...
The answer was no
...
"We're
broken up," he said casually
...
"
They were words he would soon regret
...
Since Courtney was sleeping in his bed, he fucked Katya in Playboy's room off the kitchen
...
That was when he heard them
...
He
stood outside Playboy's door in shock, listening to them have sex
...
Loudly
...
The
blood drained from his face
...

Never underestimate your own capacity to care
...
"I love that
girl
...
"You said the other day that you hated

338

339

her
...
"All you like about her is her body
...
"
"No
...
"
"She loved you more than any other girl I've seen you with
...
And as soon as she did, you became a cold, shutdown, miserable bastard
...
"
"You say that about every girl you sleep with
...
It's
fake love
...
"
"No it isn't," he screamed at the top of his lungs
...

He'd been so neglected as a child that the withdrawal of love pulled all
his emotional triggers, exploding the carapace of narcissism built by his
childhood escapism
...
"
I was looking forward to letting my dreams file away all my thoughts,
worries, and aggravations so I could start the next day fresh
...
She stood in my doorway, a sheaf of papers in her hand
...

"He can fix this
...
"
"You got it
...
I didn't know how to get in
touch with Frank Abagnale (the counterfeit artist whose memoir inspired
the movie Catch Me If You Can) or, for that matter, Lisa, her guitarist
...
She'd forget what she wanted in a few hours anyway
...
He was sitting on his bed in his
robe, shaking and convulsing
...
I'd never seen him like this before
...
This time, he
seemed to be in real pain
...


"Do you want to tell me about what happened last night?" Mystery had
asked
...
"
"Did you fuck him?"
"Well, let's put it this way," she had said, "I just had the most amazing
sex of my life
...

"I want to kill her
...
"Logically, I know I'm being controlled by my emotions
...
I feel emotionally raw
...
"I feel strange and empty, like after a shit
...
"I feel shit empty
...

As he grieved, I kept thinking of one of Courtney's lyrics: "I made my
bed/I'll lie in it
...
And now Herbal was lying in it
...
Suddenly, Courtney poked her head in the door
...
"
She could be so sweet
...

Katya was sitting on the patio outside, smoking a cigarette
...
"Poor Mystery
...

Herbal shuffled to the table with his head slumped forward
...
Neither of them seemed to regret
sleeping together
...
None of us did
...
Somewhere in her meandering speech there was a metaphor for Herbal's current dilemmacaught between his closest friend and the girl he was falling in love
with—but we couldn't find it
...
He answered it and, with a shocked expression on his face, handed it to Courtney
...
"I guess he got my message
...

"He's starting to crash again," I said
...
The situation seems to have triggered some kind of chemical reaction
...
"
"Well, if it gets any worse, I'll get him a ticket back to Toronto
...
"
"You realize that if he comes back to Toronto, everything will be lost
...
He'll have no chance of becoming a famous illusionist
...
"
"I realize that
...
"
"Just send him home
...
We can't afford to
take him anywhere in the States—especially if they institutionalize him
...
If it gets worse, I'll send him back to you
...
He invited her to move in
...
He got her not-pregnant
...
He gave Herbal permission to sleep with
her
...

In the meantime, ever since the New York Times article, half a dozen reality TV executives had called Mystery—including the producers of American Idol
...
The stardom Mystery wanted so desperately was his
for the taking
...

"This has happened before," Martina sighed when I told her about the
reality-show offers
...
"
"So do you mean
...
"He's actually scared of the success he wants so badly
...
M
...
Mystery pushed open
his door, sat on a pillow on the floor, and watched them as they drank in the
common room
...

The woman in the couple was six feet tall, with a gym-taut abdomen,
brown hair hanging down to a well-sculpted butt, brand new fake breasts,
and a large nose that was next in line for the plastic surgeon's scalpel
...
If he'd just held onto Katya a little longer, he could have had his
elusive threesome
...

Katya had given Mystery her love, and now he was paying for tossing it
in the trash
...

By morning, Mystery's sanity had decomposed further
...
If he couldn't find them, he'd call her
...
He pulled several bookcases to the ground; decimated his pillows,
leaving feathers strewn across his room; and threw his cell phone against
the wall, snapping the apparatus in half and leaving a deep black dent in
the plaster
...

"She's shopping for clothes on Melrose
...
"
And then Mystery's heart would twist and his face would fall and his
eyes would leak and his legs would give out from under him and he'd make

342
343

some bizarre evolutionary justification for it all
...
"It's the nonexistent potential baby punishing me for leaving
...
She's using you to get back at Mystery
...
"It's not true
...
"
"Well, can you do me a favor and just try not to see her until Mystery
gets better? I'm going to ask her to leave the house for a while
...
"But it's not going to be easy
...
Plan A was to
get her out of the house and away from Herbal so that Mystery didn't get
any worse
...

Fortunately, plan A worked
...
"You need to leave the house
...
This isn't about you anymore
...
"
"Okay," she said
...

"And promise me not to sleep with Herbal again
...
I can't
stand by and watch it
...

"The fun is over
...
"
"Okay," she said
...
"
"Pinky swear?"
We locked pinkies
...

Seduction was easy compared to this
...
All we had figured out were a
few simple cause and effect relationships
...
If you make a woman jealous, she
will become more attracted to you
...
And
these feelings—for which the heart and the word love axe
...

And so it came to pass that Mystery scared everyone out of the house

and he started talking about killing himself and I got him a Xanax from
Katya and I put him in my car and I took him to the Hollywood Mental
Health Center and he tried to run away twice and he wanted to hit on the
therapist but couldn't
...
I'd never heard of Seroquel before,
so when we returned the house I looked at the pamphlet that came with it
...

Mystery took the pamphlet from my hands and looked it over
...
"They'll help me get to sleep
...
"Sleeping pills
...
At least, that's what Courtney
Love had decided
...


WHAT IS SEXUAL IS WHAT
GIVES A MAN AN E R E C T I O N
...


— CATHARINE

MACKINNON,

Toward a Feminist Theory of the Stale

Cigarette hanging from her mouth, dropping ash onto her Betsey
Johnson T-shirt, Courtney grabbed a giant mixing bowl from the cabinet
...
She emptied them
into the mixing bowl and, when that overflowed, several pots
...
Finally, she plunged her black-charred fingers into each vessel and
stirred
...

Stubbing her cigarette out on the yellow tile countertop, she looked
around frantically until she noticed an overhead cabinet
...
One by one, she
dipped the glasses into the bowl and filled them
...

In the living room, Mystery sat cross-legged on a couch, leading his
first pickup seminar since returning from the mental-health center three
weeks earlier
...
His feet were bare
...
He'd been taking the Seroquel regularly and sleeping out his depression
...

"There are three phases to a relationship," he told his students, speaking in a torpor
...
And I'm going
through the end right now
...
I've cried three times
in the last week
...
They were there to

348
343

learn to get laid
...

He'd been telling them about Katya for two hours now
...

"My plan for the next girl is to have a fake marriage again
...
Next
time, I'll have the wedding in the backyard
...
"
One of the students, a good-looking man in his thirties with a crewcut
and a jaw like a block of cement, raised his hand
...
"It's a great routine
...
This time there was an anger lurking beneath the surface,
along with a new bitterness toward women
...
"Who wants
lemonade?"
The students looked at her dumbstruck
...
"What are you doing
here?" she asked
...
"
"I'm a self-defense instructor," he said
...
"
Courtney shot off to the kitchen and came back with two more glasses
of lemonade, then two more, and two more, until there were more glasses
than people in the room
...

"Where's Herbal?" she asked
...
"
Courtney dashed to the bathroom and kicked the door
...

"I'm showering," he yelled back
...
I'm coming in
...

"What's going on?" Herbal asked, panicked
...
"Is the house on fire?"

"I made this for you," Courtney said
...
Herbal stood there silently
...
Though he was too proud
to admit it, his heart ached
...

As Mystery's students broke for lunch, Courtney dashed past them and
up the stairs to Papa's room, leaving a trail of lemonade drops on the carpet
...
Inside, Papa, Sickboy, Tyler Durden, Playboy, Xaneus, and the mini-Papas were working on individual computers
...

While staying at the house, Extramask had gotten bored and started reading Playboy's books on eastern religion, which had unexpectedly led him
down a path of spiritual self-discovery
...
"Brent," she said
...
" Tyler waved his hands frantically in a futile attempt to signal
Courtney not to talk about it
...
It's really
cool
...
"Can you put him on the
guest list so he can come with some of his pickup artist friends and pick up
chicks?"
Courtney picked a strip of six wrapped condoms off the edge of the
sink and wrapped it around her wrist like a bracelet, then began exploring
the bathroom
...

"Let me ask you something," she said as she withdrew from Tyler Durden's closet, which contained a suitcase, a pile of dirty clothes, and a mattress on the floor
...

"I wasn't a misogynist when I started this," Tyler replied
...
"
A side effect of sarging is that it can lowers one's opinion of the oppo-

35D

site sex
...
If a woman has
been married three years or more, you come to learn that she's usually easier to sleep with than a single woman
...
Women, you eventually realize, are
just as bad as men—they're just better at hiding it
...
"I'd
meet an amazing girl I really liked, and we'd talk all night
...
But then I'd fail one shit test,
and she'd walk away and wouldn't even talk to me anymore
...
So it
hardened me
...
These are not PUAs
...
Simply by defining oneself as a PUA—a title
earned solely by the responses of women—one becomes doomed to derive
his entire self-esteem and identity from the attention of the opposite sex,
not unlike a comedian's relationship to audience members
...
So, as self-esteem defense mechanisms, some PUAs
developed misogynist tendencies in the process of learning
...

Outside the window, Cementjaw held the sandbag as Mystery flailed at
it with long, limp punches
...
"I want to see more aggression!"

Beyond Project Hollywood, the whole community appeared to have taken on a
dangerous, unstable edge
...
Community members began living
vicariously through the drama taking place in Project Hollywood, as well as through the
distinct writings of Jlaix, a shotgun-toting karaoke-singing, Elvis-looking PUA whom
Tyler Durden and Papa had discovered in San Francisco
...
I was thrown out of a
karaoke bar last night for rolling on the floor and crying during the bridge of
Journey's "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)
...
It is about fucking a stripper
...
Some guys
from work and I were staying at the Hard Rock, just like the characters on The
OC did in this week's episode
...
A typical meat
cocktail contained beef, bacon, beer, mashed potatoes, more beer, ribs, ice,
onions, mustard, A-l Sauce, salt, pepper, Nutrasweet, and perhaps a little
vodka
...

I was pissed because I wanted to sarge, not get some lame-ass lap
dance
...
I'd been
training for this thing hard and was frankly a little nervous that I'd look like a
tool if I didn't pull on this trip
...
But I went along for the ride and sat there
with a beer while the guys had their fun
...
It turned out she worked
there, but decided to take the day off because there weren't enough customers
and there were too many chicks in the place
...
My friends were looking at me like I was insane because

We got to the room and three bozo co-workers were in there, wasted
...
The chick
looked at the desk and said, "Someone's been doing coke here
...
I'm
a stripper
...

She kept saying, "You are so cocky!" and started really getting into me
...
I told her we
were going back to our hotel and she should come and call some of her "hot
ho friends
...
"Oh my God, my friend is so weird
...
" And this made her forget
...
This went on for a while
...


I serenaded the stripper
...
I told her I wanted to cuddle, and we did and just talked for a
while
...
I got on her and initiated
tonguedown
...
No panties
...
She had a clit piercing, which
I'd never encountered before
...
I put the fingers in
after five minutes and licked her into submission
...
But I
pulled her away, and we got into a cab
...

When we got back to the hotel, I told her we should drop her shit off in
my room
...
Then I told her, "When I did this on
Paris Hilton at the taco shop, she said her cube was as big as a hotel
...

I also did Tyler Durden's new stuff about having standards and said, "I'm so
sick of dating these chicks who do drugs all the time and have plastic surgery
...
Then I asked her if she was a good kisser, and we
kissed for a while
...

In the casino
...
I ran Supercuts, Summer of Ripped Abs, Balloons in the Park,
Stripper Babysitter, and My Cat Got Laid
...


She said, "It looks okay to me," and I fucked the shit out of her
...
Oh my fucking
God, this was the hottest chick I've ever fucked: my first stripper and my first 9
...
She expressed shock at my many
injuries and scars
...
I'm a poser insane maniac
...
"
She gave me her number and fold me to call her
...
("Hey
...
") By the end of the night, after I got thrown out
of the karaoke club, I was just going up to chicks and drunkenly bellowing,
"Maaaah lil poneee
...

The last thing I remember is sitting up in my bed watching the TV, confused
and screaming at nobody, "What the fuck am I watching? Is this The OC?
What the fuck is this?" until I realized that it was just an episode of Punk'd
where they were pranking The OC cast
...


We walked around the casino looking for my friends for a while
...
She asked, "What are we going to
do? Bad things? I've only known you thirty minutes!"
I said, "Sheesh! I hope not! I have to wake up early so you better not
keep me up! Besides, I have whiskey dick
...


—Jlaix

355

Gabby took a bite, then dropped the muffin back onto the plate
...
Maverick wasn't
around, and she wasn't friends with anyone else here
...

I opened my bathroom door and she was sitting on the toilet
...

"I'm Gabby
...

She had the attitude of a beauty queen but the body of a sack of tomatoes
...

"Hey," she said, flushing
...
What do you do for
work?"
Those words were an instant dealbreaker
...
The less tactful among them will
ask, within the first few minutes of a conversation, what kind of car you
drive or what you do for work or what celebrities in the room you're friends
with in order to determine your social ranking and how useful you might
be to them
...
These are the signals that PUAs
call subcommunication
...

As she washed her hands, she opened the medicine cabinet and inspected the contents
...
"Are you a writer?" she asked
...
I
have a really interesting story
...
And you know how
some people are just born to be famous
...
"Well, that's me
...
It's just something you know from a very
young age because people treat you differently
...

As she chattered away, she grabbed a muffin from a plate on my desk
...
Courtney had run around the house giving
everyone plates full of more muffins than they could eat
...
"But nice meeting you
...
But she must
have taken a wrong turn
...

Both were such narcissists, I thought they'd repel each other like two
positive ends of a magnet
...

She spent the next week at the house, sleeping with Mystery and catfighting with Courtney after borrowing her clothing without permission
...

One afternoon, as Courtney stood in the kitchen digging into a jar of
peanut butter with two spoons, she asked Gabby, "Aren't you ever going
home?"
"Home?" Gabby looked at her funny
...
"
It was news to Courtney, to me, to Mystery
...
Eventually, it would expel them all
...
She first apperared at
the house when a stripper Mystery made out with several years ago was going through a major depression
...

However, the stripper came over drunk and with Twyla in tow
...
She was a tattooed thirty-four-year-old Hollywood
rock-and-roller with weathered skin, a body as hard as her face, black hair in
a bird's nest of dreadlocks, and a heart of gold
...

When Mystery and Twyla started flirting, their drunk, depressed friend
burst into tears
...
Gabby returned home that night
and, without a word of objection, crawled into bed with the two of them
and promptly fell asleep
...

That morning and the morning after, Twyla cooked pancakes for
everyone in the house
...


35B

357

The more Mystery neglected Twyla, the more she began to believe she
loved him
...
Mystery seemed to enjoy the tears; they made
him feel like he mattered to somebody
...
If it wasn't Gabby, it was someone else
...

Project Hollywood was supposed to be a way to surround ourselves with
healthy, helpful influences to better ourselves, our career, and our sex lives
...
It sucked in anyone with mental problems and scared away anyone
of quality
...

However, at least the way I rationalized it, I was continuing my learning
and growing process
...
I've never
had a strong social circle or a tight network of friends
...
Project Hollywood was bringing me out of my solipsistic shell
...
It was making me, for the first time in my life, a responsible adult
...
Every day, someone ran up to
me with a new crisis to be managed:
DABBY: Mystery's being a dick
...

MYSTERY: Courtney took eight hundred dollars from my room
...

COURTNEY: That guy with his pants pulled up too high is bothering
me
...
And Twyla's
crying in my bathroom and won't come out
...
And Papa won't let me sleep in his room
...

Every problem had a solution; every dispute had a compromise; every
ego had a way to be stroked
...
The only
new women I was meeting were the ones who came into the house
...


r
359

minded me of masturbating as a teenager to Susanna Hoffs in the Bangles video for "Walk Like an Egyptian
...


I left the house for an hour to get some groceries
...
And when
I returned there was a red Porsche spewing smoke in the driveway, a
thirteen-year-old girl in the living room, and two pissed-off bleached
blondes smoking on the patio
...

"This is Mari," Mystery said
...
The task of cleaning a week's accumulation of dishes, overflowing
trash cans, fast-food debris, spilt alcohol, and cigarette butts from a
dozen guys and countless party girls was more than most could handle
...
The latest had set a record: two consecutive weeks
...
" He
took a few strides closer to me
...
"
It was nice to see Mystery acting somewhat normal again
...
As for the Porsche,
Courtney had it brought to the house so that Mystery could drive her to rehearsal
...

"And who are they?" I asked, pointing at the blondes
...
"
I went out to the patio and introduced myself
...
"I play
drums with Courtney
...

"We've met before too," sneered the other girl
...
She was two inches taller than me,
her hair was pushed straight back over her head like a horse's mane, and
her large brown eyes were framed with thick black mascara that re-

"Yeah," I stammered
...
At that party at the Argyle Hotel where you were talking
to those twins the whole night
...
" I couldn't imagine having forgotten her
...
Good posture is one of the things I find most attractive about a woman, and this girl's posture screamed confidence
...
"
I went back inside and asked Mystery about her
...
"She's a total bitch
...
But
Courtney was nowhere to be found, and Sam and Lisa were fuming
...
I felt so small next to them
...
I was impressed
...
Her mournful songs, backed by a lilting Latin rhythm,
are perhaps the best make-out music on the planet
...

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I dimly recalled what enabled me
to meet and interact with women before I'd discovered the seduction industry: commonalities
...
Scientists studying pheromones claim
that when two people discover they have things in common, pheromones
are released and attraction begins
...
He dropped into a chair and sat
there for a moment, a vortex of neediness sucking up any stray pheromones
Lisa and I had managed to release
...
"And we
talked for a while
...
"
He looked at Sam and Lisa, as if trying to select a target
...

The girls rolled their eyes
...

"Well," I excused myself
...

Nice meeting you—again
...
I didn't want to be associated with the
madness—even if I was part of it
...
He was wearing
shorts, a headband, and a torn white T-shirt with a fresh sweat stain from
the gym
...
Ever
since meeting him at Mystery's first workshop, I'd felt like he was my
younger brother in this whole endeavor—though, since joining the Real Social Dynamics crew, he'd been more like an estranged sibling
...

"What are you reading?" I asked
...
Some people
spend their lives trying to fill a hole in their soul
...
I wondered where
Dustin and Extramask would turn afterward, when they discovered that
even God wasn't big enough to plug the hole inside
...
I wish I could say that I was going to miss you, but we've hardly even talked to each other for half a year
now
...
"
"Yeah," he said
...
" He paused, and his lips forced themselves into a curvy smile
...
"I
used to be an insecure bitch," he said
...


"I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj," he said
...
His teachings are more modern and easier to
read
...
" I didn't know what else to say; I wasn't particularly
familiar with Indian Vedanta writing
...
All of
this stuff"—he gestured up the hill to Project Hollywood—"means nothing
...
"
I half-expected him to burst out in laughter at any m o m e n t and start
talking about his penis, like the old days
...

"Yeah, I was obsessed with it, b u t when I read your post about social ro-

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
...
"Ever since
she's been doing drugs, she's become a nightmare to deal with
...
I felt bad for her
...
Perhaps we all were
...


bots, I realized I was becoming one
...
"
"Are you heading back to your parents' house or getting your own
place?"
"Neither," he said
...
"
"That's amazing
...
He'd never
even been on a plane before
...
"This will be our
hammer
...
It was 2:20 A
...

"Do you have any nails or tacks?" she asked
...


"I want to figure out who I am
...
"
"For how long?"

"This is the heart-shaped box," she said
...
"
She picked up my guitar, sat on the edge of my bed, and played my favorite country song, "Long Black Veil
...
I really don't know
...
"
I was surprised but not shocked
...
"I want you to come too
...
"

362

"I'll tell you what
...
" I knew how long she could take
to get ready
...
I'll go with Lisa
...
"There were a bunch of people waiting for
you here today and you were nowhere to be found
...
"
Her face clouded, her lips puckered, and tears dripped from her eyes
...
"I promise
...
I input the words
"Kill me
...
My expectations for Courtney showing up to Forbidden City were
low, so I brought Herbal along as a wing
...
Flush with the success of that scheme, Herbal had, against our better judgment, put down a deposit to buy a wallaby at an exotic pets website
...

"They make the best pets," he insisted
...
They sleep with you, they bathe with you, and you can take them for
walks by holding their tail
...
The only bright side to the fiasco was that it made for a great opener
...
Between the opener and my shirt, within a half hour we were
surrounded by women
...
We'd been so absorbed by the drama of the house that we had forgotten the reason we'd
moved there in the first place
...
I
looked closer
...
Her jaw was set, her face was chiseled, her eyes smoldered beneath a
half-shell of heavy blue eye shadow
...
Next
to her, all the wanna-be models and actresses I had been talking to seemed
insignificant
...

I excused myself and ran up to her
...

"She was taking too long to get ready
...
"

364

"I respect a person who isn't afraid to show up at a party alone
...
I think she was
serious
...
The party seemed to come to us, as if we exerted
some sort of gravitational pull together
...
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
...
We were in our own little bubble, where
we were king and queen, and everyone else was our plaything for the night
...
And out of nowhere, my heart awoke from its torpor and bodychecked my chest
...
" My heart slammed again, and
then settled into a fast, arrhythmic throb
...

Without waiting for a response, she dropped the keys to her Mercedes
into my hand
...
"I
can't believe it," I told him
...

I drove Lisa back to her place
...
When we arrived, she went to the bathroom
...

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
...
You have to love me
...

She changed, and we drove to my house to look for Courtney
...
Tyler had been experimenting lately with a technique of physically pumping up his students' mood for
a night out meeting women
...
It was becoming a competitive industry
...
Maybe she'd been serious
the other night and really was getting help, or maybe she was off getting
into more trouble
...

"Let's have some fun," I told her
...
We tried them all on, taking photos with my digital camera
...

We took a photo smiling, then serious
...
Her eyes seemed so happy
...

I held her eye contact and moved toward her for the kiss, holding the
camera in front of us to capture it
...

The words scalded my face like hot coffee
...
What was her problem?
I froze her out and tried again
...

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 poems about this exact situation in high school
...
Somewhere in the distance, I heard a thousand PUAs
applauding
...

I wasn't through
...
It is about a man and a woman who are soul mates
...

She was ice cold
...

She climbed into my bed, curled up under the covers, and went to sleep
...


3GB

I still had one trick left: going caveman
...
If I
could just turn her on physically, her logic would disengage and she would
no doubt submit
...
I knew I wanted to see her
again, no matter what happened
...
She wouldn't be trying to keep
anything from me; I wouldn't be trying to get something from her
...
It is
something that should be shared
...
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
...

We had breakfast together, and lunch, and dinner
...
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
...
Nothing happened
...

After breakfast, I stood on the front stoop and watched Lisa leave
...
I turned around to climb the stairs
...
I wanted to look cool, and not give her any more IOIs
...

I shook my head no
...

"No, seriously, come here
...
"
I sighed and walked back down to her car
...
"But I think I might have accidentally dented your limo when
I was pulling out
...
It was our newest and most expensive possession
...
I saw her blonde hair streaming over the side of the car
as she turned down Sunset, blasting the Clash
...


I told Mystery about my frustration with Lisa as we sat in the hot tub one
night
...
Though relationship management was
clearly not his forte, he was flawless when it came to blasting through lastminute resistance
...

"Now? Here?"
"No, next time you're in bed together, just take your cock out and start
stroking it
...
And she'll start giving you a hand job
...
Then you put your finger on your dick and put a little precum on
it, and put your finger in her mouth
...
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
...
You've practically had sex after that
...
M
...
She was wasted
...
"I don't
know what my problem is," she slurred
...
I
could just listen to you talk forever
...
"Forget I said that," she snapped
...
Alcohol is like a truth serum
...
Mystery's words ran through my head, and I considered the pros and cons of stroking myself and placing her hand on me
...
Not because I was scared, but because there was no way
it was going to work
...
" Then she would have told all her friends about the cheesy
guy who started rubbing his dick in front of her
...

So we spent another platonic night together
...
I
knew she liked me
...
I was teetering on the
border of being LJBF'ed
...
I imagined her with tattooed, musclebound, leather-jacketed Danzig types, not scrawny metrosexual guys who
had to take pickup workshops
...

For the first time since I'd learned the word one-itis, I had it
...
No one ever gets his one-itis
...
And, sure enough, I blew it
...
She called three times while she was gone
...

"I don't know," I told her
...
"
"Fine, then," she said
...
"
I was just trying to tease her and bust her balls, like David DeAngelo
had taught me
...
I sounded
like an asshole
...
It was time to be straightforward
...
I'm leaving town for two weeks, so it will
be our last chance to hang out
...
"You're talking to him
like he's your boyfriend," she told Lisa
...

So I hadn't been LJBF'ed
...
I wanted
her to be my girlfriend too
...
I
would pick her up from the airport in the limo
...
Then I'd take her to the Whiskey Bar at
the Sunset Marquis Hotel—walking distance from Project Hollywood
...
Afterward, I planned to take her home
...
Now that I knew she liked me, I had the confidence to push this
thing to the end
...

Her flight was scheduled to arrive at 6:30 P
...
As Herbal drove the limo
past the Delta terminal looking for her, I mixed Cosmopolitans at the bar
in the back of the car
...

I was confused, but not disappointed—yet
...
So Herbal drove me home, and I left a message for Lisa
...

At five o'clock that morning, I was awakened by my cell phone ringing
...
" The voice on the
other end was a man's
...
It was Sweater
...
I thought about him often
...

"I tried to kill myself today," he said
...
I do
everything for her, but it's not enough
...
My business partner is leaving me
...
" He paused to choke back his tears
...
"
"But you were in love with her
...
The problem is that I changed
...
That person wasn't a
good guy
...
I like doing nice
things for people
...
I sent her flowers three
times a week
...
"
I'd never heard grown men cry as much as I had in the last two years
...
"I haven't thought of suicide since 1986
...
' I didn't see any purpose in living
...
He just wanted a friend to talk to
...

"When I first got in the community, I wrote down everything I wanted,"
he said
...
I have the money, the big
house, and the beautiful girl
...
I never wrote that she had to treat me with respect and kindness
...
I could hear her
screaming at Gabby in the living room
...
"So I'm helping her
...

"Did the rest of the band get back from Atlanta yet?" I asked, trying to
sound casual
...
They came home on an earlier flight
...
I knew if I said anything in response, my voice
would betray my disappointment
...

"Let's clear the air in here," she said
...
"
Unable to locate any rice, she returned with a package of jambalaya mix
and a bowl of water
...
She emerged carrying
a blue-and-white-checkered flannel shirt
...
"It's one of Kurt's shirts
...
"
She carefully arranged the shirt underneath the table, safe from harm,
so that it could bring good energy to the house
...
Her grip was bone-crushing
...
"We ask that you clear the energy of this house of all evil
...
No more tears!
And help me win my court case in New York and help clear up all my other
problems
...
I really will
...
Amen
...

The next day, a driver came and whisked Courtney to the airport to go
to New York
...

Courtney and Gabby, it soon became clear, weren't the cause of any problems: They had merely been the symptoms of something much larger that
was eating away at our lives
...
"Hi, it's Lisa
...
We
took an earlier flight
...
No apology, no tenderness, no mention
of the plans she had completely blown off
...
"I'm leaving town in a few
hours to go to Miami with Vision," I told her voice mail
...
" It was an AFC message, and I never heard back
from her
...
Nothing
...
If she were interested, she would
have called
...
And by the first woman I had felt something
for in a while
...

First I was angry at her, then I was angry at myself, and then I was just
sad
...
So I went on a rampage
...
I had almost let myself get
caught
...
I've never been a fan of one-night stands
...
So after I slept with each
woman, I mixed and matched them like jellybeans
...

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 innocent looking, with a touch of baby
fat
...

After a drink at the hotel bar, I brought them up to my room for a rune

reading and then left them alone for a few minutes to get acquainted
...
It was all just a routine now, like the jealous
girlfriend opener or the best friends test
...

Once the girls' lips touched, they transformed from strangers to lovers
...

The night was as nasty as I'd anticipated
...
When Jessica I asked
me to come in her mouth, I obliged
...
It was the sexiest moment of my entire life
...
I didn't care about them
...
Every girl in my life could disappear and
never call me again, and I wouldn't have cared
...

The PUAs were wrong
...
We merely think we are W
are
...
But, despite all this, true male desire is often
kept repressed
...
Teachers think about fucking their students, fathers think
about fucking their daughter's friends, doctors think about fucking their
patients
...
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
...
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
...
It is abhorrent because it threatens a woman's reality
...
As a woman ages,
an eighteen-year-old girl will always be eighteen
...

Fortunately, this is not the entire story
...
But the truth is that the fantasy is often
better than the reality
...
Most men eventually
learn that lesson
...


* ^ "

^ ^

m e n tend

*> & a r

377

1

KATYA: I flew into Los Angeles the day before, which Mystery doesn't
know, to rent a studio apartment and hang out with some friends
from New Orleans
...
The next
morning, I just showed up at the house and told Mystery my
plane got in early so I took a taxi
...

I dreaded the day and the terror it would unleash in the house
...
He had it all planned out
...

Project Hollywood had reached a new nadir
...
However, Mystery and Katya came in a n d started talking to me
...
She disappeared into Mystery's walk-in closet to get a
sweater, then Mystery went in
...


MYSTERY: I met a nineteen-year-old hottie named Jen at an afterparty at the house
...
She had the softest, purest skin
and the best ass I'd ever been with
...
"

MYSTERY: She called me into the closet and said, "I want to date
Herbal
...
She just said it to bug me
...
So I called
Herbal into the closet and told Katya, "Why don't you say it to
him?"

KATYA: Mystery called me every other day while I was in New Orleans,
trying to sweet-talk me
...
We talked on the phone t h r o u g h o u t my

year-old girl that you'll love
...
He was

me
...
"

so easygoing, and he never disagreed with anything
...
My plan was to pick her up from
the airport in the limo, grab some food at the Farmer's Market,
a n d then go back to the house a n d do the dual-induction massage
...
Mystery spent the whole time bragging a b o u t how he was going to
get a threesome with her, which was like a knife being twisted in
my heart
...
But he wouldn't
do it
...
I didn't expect that to
happen after so much time had passed
...

HERBAL: That night, we went on a double date
...
I guess I was naive,
but I really t h o u g h t everything would be fine
...
He thought he was this grand manipulator
...


378
379

MYSTERY: Jen and Katya ended up making out with each other in the
limo that night
...
But it was getting complex
...
However,
Katya was attracted to Jen, so she started talking trash about me
to her
...
I told him, "You guys are
great
...
" I
was glad he had someone because I wanted Herbal
...
One night while Jen was gone, I had a sixfoot-tall model in bed with me and was dealing with last-minute
resistance
...
So during a freeze-out, I went to the
kitchen to get a Sprite
...
The moaning triggered feelings of jealousy, and I started
crying
...
I went
back to my room and told the model how fucked up my life was
...
I was going to drive her, but
then Twyla started laughing at me
...

I kind of giggled a little bit because I was quite entertained by it
all
...
Then he flew off the
handle and fired me
...


blow-up
...
" After that,
she asked me never to call her again
...
If anyone sees Herbal (easy to spot as he frequently
peacocks) or his girlfriend Katya (a bi Russian 9
...
5, also easy to spot), please
call Mystery so I may administer punishment to Herbal without
warning
...
But after that
car ride, she didn't want anything to do with me either
...
It
made me look like an ass
...
So we went
to Chicago together for a workshop
...

HERBAL: On the last day of the Chicago workshop, Mystery and I went
to get food together
...

During the sarge, he said, "Can you believe it? This guy actually
took my ex-girlfriend
...
I'd occasionally give my perspective, and he started getting really angry
...
"
I said, "It's my house too
...
"
He said, "If I see her in the house again, I will end you
...
"

KATYA: The next week, Mystery wanted to use my car to pick up Jen
from San Diego
...
Mystery felt left out so he started
negging me
...


MYSTERY: I felt that Katya was trying to steal Jen from me and share
her with Herbal
...
We bonded over talking about
what kind of a person Mystery was
...
So I said, "Right on
...
I said that Katya
wouldn't spend more than half the week at the house
...

When I came back from Chicago, I had a week in Los Angeles
before going to Boston for a family reunion
...

KATYA: While Herbal was gone, I was helping Papa with his workshops
...
I had to be up in the afternoon and
look pretty
...
When I woke
up, I saw Mystery
...
We had fun
...
"
He said, "Who did you meet?"
I said, "Sima
...

MYSTERY: When Katya told me in a very glib way that she had hung out
with my ex-girlfriend from Toronto, I was furious
...

KATYA: He ran past me and kicked Herbal's door off the hinges and
said, "Where's Herbal?" Then he ran back to his room, grabbed a
framed photograph of Sima, and threw it at the wall over Herbal's
bed
...
"

Herbal's mattress off the bed; he threw a flowerpot against the
wall; and then he opened Herbal's balcony door and started
throwing my stuff into the driveway
...
I was so pissed
...
I love you
...
Tell him to control his girl
...
So I got in
my car and drove to my apartment
...
He said, "It's not Mystery's house
...
I'm going to pick you up right now
...

MYSTERY: Papa was breaking a cardinal rule
...

HERBAL (to Mystery, via e-mail): I have been told that my bedroom and
personal belongings have been "destroyed" because Katya was at
the house
...
You seem to believe that the
world revolves around you and that everyone else should bend to
your wishes
...
I kicked the door and told her I
wanted her out of the house
...
"
And I told her, "I pay rent
...
You're a guest, and your
host is not here
...
"

MYSTERY (to Herbal, via e-mail): I don't want Katya here and that is so
final that there will be no need for you to reply to this e-mail in any
way
...
There will be no further warning
...
If you come by and she isn't around, then we can safely live in
peace under the same roof
...


KATYA: Mystery started threatening that if he saw me in the house
again, Herbal would get hurt
...
You are needy and like a black hole sucking in attention
...
That is your tragic flaw
...
Don't try to make a party girl into your girlfriend
...

My phone rang every day while I was in Miami
...
I even received
phone calls about Project Austin, which was also falling apart: The gas and
electricity had been shut off because the bills hadn't been paid, and the bedrooms were cluttered with candles, dirty clothing, and pornography
...

When I returned to Project Hollywood, Herbal's room was in tatters
...

From the perspective of a pickup artist, all Mystery was doing was
strengthening Katya and Herbal's relationship by creating drama and a
common enemy
...
He was
unable to control himself
...
When Mystery answered it, he found a
well-muscled man in his twenties standing in the rain with an angry look
on his face
...

"I'm Katya's brother," the man told Mystery
...
I know her brother
...
"I heard you
threatened to kill her
...
"
"I never threatened Katya
...
He was
shorter than him but definitely stronger
...
"
"Well, if you do anything to her, I will personally crack your skull wide
open
...
Just like during our argument in the car at the Trans-Dniester border, Mystery snapped
...

"You want to go?" Mystery yelled
...
"
"Fine," Katya's friend said
...
I don't want to get
blood on the carpet
...
I want blood on the floor
...
"
In the periphery of his vision, Mystery spotted a cluster of large rocks
he'd brought back from the beach and painted into runestones
...
He took three giant strides to Herbal's already-decimated door
and kicked it to the ground again
...
"I'm not making any apologies for
what I'm about to do
...

Katya's friend saw the gleam of madness in Mystery's eyes—and in a
fight the insane generally have a competitive edge
...
"All I want is the dog, man
...
"
The guy scooped Lily into his arms, and Mystery paused and looked at
him
...
The Cortisol, the adrenaline, the testosterone—all
those hormones that were rushing through his body—began to ebb
...
"Why didn't you say that in the first place
instead of threatening me in my own home?"
The guy stood next to the door, befuddled, with Lily cradled in his arms
...

"Um, yes
...
"
Mystery walked to the kitchen, grabbed Lily's bag of dry food and several cans of wet food, and gave them to his would-be attacker
...
Mystery
bent down, picked them up, handed them to him, and then patted him on
the back
...

I walked upstairs, collapsed on my bed, and stared at the ceiling
...

Along the way, I had gotten caught up in the social network and bonding rituals of the community—in the idea that we were the supermen of
the future, the smoothest who would inherit the earth from the strong,
the sole owners of the skeleton key to the female mind
...
I imagined
working together to bring all the other areas of our lives up to a new

plateau, beyond just women
...

But rathter than creating a mutual support system, we had created Lord
of the Flies
...
My faith in these guys -and this
community-was hanging by a thread
...
It was not only a defensive position, but also a
stubborn one
...
Herbal had refused to set
foot in the house without someone there to protect him from Mystery
...
Tyler Durden didn't attend because
he claimed to be a guest, although he'd been living in Papa's closet for
months now
...

We allowed each to present his side of the story without interruption
...
And Herbal said he would move out if his girlfriend couldn't
come over
...

"Now, normally, I would just say that Herbal should move out if he
wants to be with Mystery's ex-girlfriend that badly," I said, trying to play the
role of peacemaker that had been foisted on me
...
You have
neither apologized for your actions nor repaired the damages
...
"And it makes us very reluctant to reward bad behavior by letting you get your way
...
"It was a
perfectly acceptable means of showing that I was willing to enforce my
rules
...
And chief among them was the idea of being an alpha male
...

"If I may say something?" Roadking interjected
...
"
"And what's that?" Herbal asked
...

"It's the rule of bros before hos," Roadking said
...
"I'd like to agree, but sometimes it's hos before
bros
...

Strip away the community bond and the seduction business interests
that united us, and what was left? Six guys chasing after a limited subset of
available women
...
Perhaps
we'd just been too blind to see that Project Hollywood was doomed from
the start by the very pursuit that had brought it together
...

They both agreed to accept whatever we decided
...
Several figures darted into his bathroom and shut the door
...
The carpet was barely visible beneath six convertible black
foam chairs that had been unfolded into beds
...

Where were the people who slept here? Who were they?
We folded the beds back into chairs, sat down, and prepared to reach a
conclusion
...

"I will not live in the same house as that guy," he said
...

"Mystery!"
Papa's hands trembled from either hatred or nervousness
...
He hadn't been sarging in months, and much of the
progress he'd made after working so hard to improve himself had disap-

391

peared
...

His passion was no longer pickup; it was Real Social Dynamics
...

"Mystery disrupts my workshops," Papa continued
...
"He
damages the house
...
"
"What are you talking about? He wouldn't do anything to you
...

I'm getting locks put on my doors because I'm scared he'll break in
...
"He's not going to hurt you
...
"
But no matter what I said to dissuade Papa, he kept repeating the same
sentence—"I will not live in the same house as that guy"—in a robotic voice,
as if he'd been programmed to say it
...
I was giving Mystery special-circumstances
treatment, because he had brought me into the community and because
the house had been his idea
...

But he had screwed up
...
I needed to consider what was
best for the house
...
"I'd still like to find a way to solve this without anyone
having to leave the house
...
"You're the house leader
...
"
I found it strange that Papa, who was so adamant about having Mystery leave, was putting the decision in my hands
...
The more we talked about it,
the more complex the dilemma seemed
...

Mystery wouldn't live in the house with Katya
...

Someone had to go
...
"
I looked at Xaneus
...

"I do," he said
...
He was turning as robotic as the rest of
them
...
"
We called Mystery and Herbal into the room to give them our decision
...
Having come up
with the only possible compromise for a complicated dilemma, I was proud
of myself—mistakenly, it would turn out—for exercising my newfound leadership skills in a Solomon-like manner
...
"Katya will not be allowed in the house for two
months
...
"
Herbal nodded
...
In addition, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for violence
in this house
...
"
Mystery didn't nod
...

"Well," Playboy said
...
"
"I don't see that happening," Herbal said
...
"Well, then you guys are kicking
me out
...
"We're giving you two m o n t h s to come to grips with your
emotions
...
But he refused to be helped
...
"
Papa was happy
...

Mystery's forehead creased; his head twitched involuntarily
...
This is not about Mystery versus Herbal
...
I gave Papa his entire business model
...


394

He's even charging fifteen hundred dollars now for boot camps where he
teaches my material
...
"And now that he doesn't need me anymore, he wants to move me
out and turn my room into a twelve-person dorm
...
"It didn't have to turn out like this," I
told him
...
We're not even kicking you out
...
"
Mystery folded his arms across his chest and looked at us disdainfully
...

"It was a tactic designed to keep Katya out of the house, and it worked,"
he maintained
...
"
I lost my cool
...

"You need some tough love," I said, raising my voice for the first time
all meeting
...
Your pickup business is a mess, and your former
students are raking in all the money that should be yours
...
I would
not recommend a girl ever dating you
...
" With each sentence I felt like a weight was being lifted off my
chest
...
And
you have no one to blame but yourself
...
His shoulders started shaking
...
"I'm a broken man," he cried
...
"
The wall of sophistry and self-deception that had been propping him
up came tumbling down
...
"Tell me
what to do
...
I couldn't help it
...
The tears ran faster
...
After two years in the seduction community, I still didn't have a girlfriend, but for some reason I

395

had bonded with this big blubbering genius
...

"You need therapy," I said
...
You can't just keep doing this to yourself
...
His eyes filled with tears as viscous as mercury
...
"I know
...
"

MANAGE EXPECTATIONS

397

make small talk or pretend to enjoy it
...
I
wanted to connect with her
...
I
couldn't take it
...
I needed to sarge—not because I wanted to
pick up women, b u t because I wanted to get into a positive state and talkaI walked out of Papa's room a n d left the house
...
It h a d
been a long day
...
Otherwise I was going to just crack sitting there so awkwardly
...
I turned

As I started down the hill to grab a burrito at Poquito Mas, a black Mer-

a r o u n d to see two women in black evening dresses
...


your opinion on something," I began, with a little less enthusiasm t h a n

Inside were two blondes
...


The car screeched to a halt in front of me, and a voice yelled my name
from the driver's seat
...
My heart skipped a beat
...
I was unshaven,
wearing sweatpants, and frazzled from debating with my roommates all
day
...
I didn't think I was ever going to see her again
...
"Do you want to join us?"
"What are you doing here?" I tried to keep my cool and appear unfazed
by her sudden reappearance
...
"
"Didn't you just pass it?"
"Yeah
...
Do you have a problem with
that?"
A touch of attitude
...
She was a challenge
...

"Let me change," I said, "and I'll meet you there
...

I was anxious to talk to Lisa and find o u t why she'd disappeared after
Atlanta
...
They were the type of guys I h a d imagined Lisa
dating
...

As they gossiped about local rock scenesters I neither knew nor cared
about, an overwhelming anxiety took hold of my body
...
"You have a friend whose girlfriend is jealous because he still talks to his ex from college
...
"What's the
deal?"
I grabbed my Jack and Coke and shuffled out to the smoking patio—
the site of my pickup battle with Heidi Fleiss
...
Fortunately, they
hadn't heard it
...
I really wasn't feeling it, b u t I wanted to push
myself to be talkative
...

"I could tell
...
"
"Oh, we know that one already," she said politely
...

The community had grown large and reckless; too many competing
businesses were teaching the same material
...
PUAs in San Diego, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto had been reporting the same problem lately: They were
running out of fresh girls to sarge
...
"I'm wiped out," I told Lisa
...
But I'm driving to Malibu tomorrow to surf
...
It'll be fun
...

For three extraordinary seconds, the rest of the club disappeared
...
"Sounds cool
...
Meet me at the house at noon
...


338

When I returned home from rhe Whiskey Bar, Isabel was waiting for
me
...

"Didn't I tell you to call first before dropping by?" I asked
...
"
There was nothing wrong with Isabel
...
But she offered nothing
...
We weren't a team; we were just
a distraction for each other, a way to feel less lonely for a few hours in a big,
uncaring world
...
At least, that's what I thought
...
She can start wanting more
...

It was a loaded question with only one right answer
...
"Well, I met a girl named Lisa, who I'm developing feelings for
...
"
In the past, I used to fall for ultimatums
...

"Just by asking me to make that choice," I said, "you're setting yourself
up to be the loser
...
I felt bad for her
...

An hour after she left, Sam and Lisa arrived
...
He looked up at Lisa, who was wearing a Juicy Couture linen pullover with the hood over her head, and tried to neg her
...
It was the only way he knew how to relate
to a beautiful woman
...
He was wearing a robe, boxer
shorts, black toenail polish, and slippers
...
"
Lisa was neg-proof
...
For most of their childhood, females are conditioned to act

399

subservient to male authority figures
...
They believe that the techniques they used to manipulate their fathers will work just as well on the rest of the world, and
often they're right
...
She lived the advice that most women
hypocritically give to men; She wasn't afraid to be herself
...
He cleared his throat; announced, a little
too loudly, "I'm busy"; then turned away to continue typing
...

Before we left for the beach, I showed Sam and Lisa the photos I had
taken the first night Lisa slept over, when we had played dress-up with the
wigs
...
"I've never seen Lisa
look so happy
...
"I guess you're
right
...
As we
drove to Malibu, I noticed Sam leaning over the seat divider to whisper
something to Lisa, which wiped the smile off her face in an instant
...

They looked at each other hesitantly
...
I really wanted to know
...

"It's not important," Sam said
...
"
"Urn, okay
...
I thought I was better than them because I got more waves
...

As I waited, I looked on with envy as the surfers on the inside—closer to
shore—caught wave after wave
...
As a wall of blue grew in my peripheral vision, my body tensed: I wondered if I could handle a wave this big
...
The blue
stretched far overhead
...
I felt alive, exhilarated, ecstatic
...
For the first time since junior high, I felt like writing poetry
...
I deserved it
...

"I'd like to take you out for sushi on Saturday," I said
...
I was asking her out on a date
...
She pursed her lips and squinted
...

"Okay, I guess
...
"Never mind
...
I was wondering when you were finally going to ask
...
I'll pick you up at eight
...
The
remains of countless meals made by scores of guests had congealed into a
black crust that coated the stovetop
...
He lifted up his T-shirt, examined a roll of baby fat on his belly,
and took his Walkman headphones off
...
"I'm really
sorry about how things turned out
...
"
"He's very stubborn
...
"
"If he leaves, there's no Project Hollywood anymore," he went on
...
"
"I guess so
...

"By the way
...
It looks just like
something you would wear
...
"

401

"That's great, but kind of weird
...
"I'd like to talk to you
about paying a small rent or part of the utilities
...
"
"Sure, man," he said
...
"
His words were agreeable, but not his body language
...
He always seemed to go unnaturally out of
his way to make sure he wasn't actively involved in any house issue, drama,
or meeting
...
By asking him to pay rent, I'd become
a threat to him
...
I wanted to read the masterpiece Mystery
had been so furiously working on that afternoon
...


—Mystery

P
...
If I move out, I will be selling my bed
...
It's a California king-sized bed
...

Here is a list of who's been bedded on the bed:

AUTHOR: Mystery
1
...
The invasive social environment has made liv-

2
...

As far as lifestyle goes, Project Hollywood is a bust
...
The hot bartender from the Spider Club

to be a positive experience for anyone
...
Sima the ex-girlfriend from Toronto

dermine your happiness
...


5
...
G a b b y the gabber

tween Papa and me], house members think that it's appropriate to intervene in
my private sex life
...
I've been told that my

7
...


8
...
Un-

9
...
The six-foot tall model I scared a w a y (third base only)

bitterness
...
It's a great bed
...
Eleven happy people
...
The long-term fix is a positive so-

MSN GROUP: Mystery's Lounge

cial environment filled with friends who will listen and share your challenges
...
If anyone would like to talk to

AUTHOR: Mystery

me openly about the situation and why I do not endorse living here, call me
...
Know the cul-

I have met my future wife
...
She is

ture before making any decision to move here
...
She is my dream girl (at least I think she is so far)

4D4

Unlike the last girl, I will not make her public
...
I will be
more loyal to her than to you because the bros before hos ethic only applies if
you think of the girl as a ho
...
I met her for seven minutes and then numberclosed
...
I love her
personality
...
I have talked with her
mom on the phone, and she likes me too
...
I bought her a flight
...

Though we have only been in each other's presence for seven minutes, I
predict that I will marry her, live with her, and possibly have kids with her
...

You won't see her winging my workshops because I will refrain from ex-

Mystery sulked through the trash-strewn house in his robe, telling anyone
who would listen about the former student who was stealing his business
and the bitch who ruined his life
...
The window of vulnerability and honesty that
had opened when he broke down in the house meeting had closed
...

Though he wasn't upset with me, I felt guilty
...
She is untouch-

was effectively pushing him out of the house had been my decision
...
She isn't a party girl like the last five girls
...

To make matters worse, Katya was twisting the knife
...
Her revenge, then, was complete
...
They piled into the back of the limo and surrounded him with the love he so desperately craved
...
Mystery had one more
guest coming in for the week: Ania
...
Mystery, the ultimate
rebound
...
Ania was a
coatcheck girl at the Chicago Crobar
...
My friends
will meet her soon
...


Love,

Mystery

We pulled outside the terminal and waited
...

"Don't scare her away like the last one," his mom chuckled
...

Life was an in-joke between her and God
...

Mystery greeted her, grabbed her bags, and brought her to the limo
...
Instead, she sat passively and listened to Mystery
...

She may not have been a party girl like Katya, but Ania came with her
own baggage, which arrived unexpectedly at the airport the next day
...

On Saturday we discovered Shaun standing outside the house, dialing
Ania's cell phone every five minutes
...
And, clearly, she had never told her fiance she was flying to Los
Angeles to visit a pickup artist she had met at work
...
A
...

The irony wasn't lost on Mystery
...
"I'm like Herbal to him
...
" He paused for a moment and adjusted his posture into what
would have been an alpha male pose if he had any pectorals
...
"
As Mystery swaggered outside, I waited in the living room with his sister and mother
...
I felt a need to escape this trap I had set for myself; this trap Mystery kept setting for himself;
the traps we all constantly set for ourselves, over and over, and never seem
to learn from
...
"
"Yes," his mom said
...
It's
about his low self-esteem
...

"What worries me is the violence," I said
...
"
"Butting heads with someone never works," his mom said
...
You can just go around because there's always a back way
...
" In three sentences
...

Martina knitted her eyebrows and shifted her weight on the couch
...
"He was never violent
before
...
"But I never saw him get mad about anything else
...
'"
"What I think is happening," Martina said, "is that with our father
gone, he's starting to realize that Dad was never as bad as he remembered
...
"
I reflected back on my conversation with Mystery at the Trans-Dniester
border
...
"So your dad wasn't as bad
as Mystery always said?"
"The problem is that they were too similar," Martina explained
...
He was very charismatic but also
very stubborn
...
Mystery would always do things to
antagonize Dad
...
"
"We'd have to put them on opposites sides of the table," Mystery's
mom cut in, "and if one so much as looked at the other wrong, a fight
would break out
...
So Katya has taken the place of his father
...
"
Now was my chance to bring up the question I'd wanted to ask ever
since Mystery's breakdown in Toronto, the question that would free me of
the inexplicable obligation I felt to save him from himself
...
The answer, Martina finally decided, was to let him run free; to give him a chance to make something of his
talent and genius; to give him time to quest after two 10s who will love him
as much as they love each other
...
He was
walking on quicksand with helium balloons in his hands
...


408

We cut our discussion short when Mystery strode into the kitchen
...
"I had a long talk with Ania's fiance at Mel's
...
Ania is now my girlfriend, and
we are in love with each other
...
"
Martina gave me a knowing glance
...

He slammed a tape recorder down on the kitchen counter
...
"Do you want to hear it?"
"No," I told him
...

Besides, I had a date with Lisa to keep
...
M
...
It was one of the toughest dinners of my life
...
I was forced
to be myself
...
The question had been giving me insomnia for weeks
...
"
"You were rude on the phone," she said
...
" So it had been her version of cat-string theory, punishing me for bad behavior
...
I wanted to see you
...
You were rude
...
I thought, 'I can get
anybody, and all of a sudden this guy is acting like Mr
...
A cynical part of
me said I was simply falling for the female equivalent of the tactics we use
...
She had blown me
off and rebuffed me physically while stringing me along with just enough
encouragement to keep me chasing her
...
If a woman I didn't care about
had played this hard to get, I would have given up long ago
...
Lisa was fiercely
independent, someone I looked up to rather than down at
...

And then there was always the remote possibility that she had managed
to touch a part of me that I kept hidden from everyone, even myself
...

And every now and then, when Lisa and I both dropped our defenses, I felt
like that with her
...

We drove back to my house
...

I wanted to continue our conversation from dinner
...
I just needed answers
...
" I loved
watching her lips part over her front teeth when she talked
...
"My friends were making fun of me because I was
counting down the days until you came home
...
I don't know why
...
"I bought a fresh piece of swordfish and had to throw it
away because it went bad
...
So I still had a chance with
this girl
...
"The window was open with me, and you
blew it
...
Ross Jeffries
would have said not to buy into her frame
...
But I had to ask: "How did I blow it?"
"First off, you didn't call me when you came home from Miami
...
"
"Hold on
...
You never even called
while I was away
...
"
"Yeah, but I would have returned your call
...
"
"Then you came to the Whiskey Bar and hardly talked
...
I told Sam I was starting to like you again and she said, 'Get over it
...
'"

411

My brain leaped up and slapped itself
...
So that's what Sam and she
were whispering about in the car on the way to Malibu
...
And you were a little nervous, so I
figured you must really be into me
...
I was about to say the most AFC
thing of my life
...
The pickup artists have a word
they call one-iris
...
And they never end up with this girl because they get too
nervous around her and scare her away
...

"So," I said
...
"
We were looking each other in the eyes now
...
I
knew mine were sparkling
...

There were no lines, no routines, no evolution phase-shift—I'd tried
them all unsuccessfully anyway
...
She leaned in
...

My eyes closed
...
It was just like I'd always thought a kiss was
supposed to begin
...

While Lisa slept in the morning, I crept downstairs with my phone
book
...

"So you're choosing her over me?" Isabel asked angrily
...
"
"Is she better in bed or something?"
"I don't know
...
"
"So you made out with some girl," she said, with a weak attempt at a
cruel laugh, "and you want to get rid of me now
...
I'd still like to see you, but as a
friend
...

"But I love you
...


412

"I'm sorry," I said
...

There is a downside to casual sex: Sometimes it stops being casual
...
And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest
expectations suffers
...
It always comes
with a price
...


Steam rose from the water into the starless L
...
sky as Mystery and I sat opposite each other in the Jacuzzi
...
It seemed like a cocktail, which was
strange because Mystery never drank alcohol
...
"I'm officially moving out next month
...
Now I would be stuck living with the happy couple who had
forced him out and the clone army being built in Papa's room,
"But you're letting your enemies win," I said, picking a cigarette butt
out of the Jacuzzi and dropping it into an empty glass
...
Katya wouldn't dare set foot in the house if you were
here
...
Don't leave me alone with these guys
...
The anger and resentment I have is very great—great enough for
me to move out so that I don't have to see them ever again
...
"What's that you're
drinking, by the way?" I asked
...
I think I feel a little tipsy
...
I always avoided it because I didn't like my father
...
"
"Well, dude, now is a bad time to start
...

You don't need to add alcohol to the mix
...
"
As usual, I was wasting my breath
...
"So Isabel stopped by here looking for you last
night," he said
...
I tried to be clear with her about Lisa
...
"You haven't even had sex with Lisa yet
...
"

414

"No way, dude
...
I don't want to lie in bed next to
Lisa, feeling guilty for something I can't tell her about
...
"
I leaned over the edge of the Jacuzzi and dipped my hand into the pool
...
Someone had left the heat on again
...

"No, but I love analogies
...

"One day, a scorpion stood on the side of a stream and asked a frog to
carry it to the other side
...
'Because if I sting you, I'll drown,' the scorpion said
...
So
he put the scorpion on his back and started ferrying him
...
As
they both began to drown, the frog gasped,'Why?'"
"The scorpion replied, 'Because it is my nature
...
He spoke slowly and deliberately, like the Mystery who'd first told me to snap and shed the boring skin
of Neil Strauss
...
"You are a pickup artist
now, You are Style
...
You cannot
go back to the way you were before
...
" I took a couple strokes backward
...
"
"We're polyamorous," he said
...
And if that threatens our relationships, so be it
...
"Never underestimate the power of denial
...
" I couldn't look at him
...
"I don't
need any more advice
...
Xaneus, Playboy, and Tyler Durden were sitting there
...
It was odd behavior, but nothing unexpected after living in Project Hollywood this long
...
People often read books to
search for themselves and find someone who agrees with them
...

As I interpreted the legend, it's the story of a sheltered mother's boy
who meets some knights and decides he wants to be just like them
...

The country, at the time, has become a wasteland because the grail king
(who guards the holy grail) has been wounded
...
As a
compassionate human being, he wants to ask, "What is wrong?" And, according to legend, if someone pure of heart asks that question of the king,
he will be healed and the blight on the land will be lifted
...
And as a knight he has been
trained to observe a strict code of conduct, which includes the rule of never
asking questions or speaking unless he is addressed first
...
In the morning, he wakes to discover that the
grail castle has disappeared
...
Unlike the scorpion,
Parsifal had a choice
...

When I walked through the living room to get a drink from the
kitchen, I saw Mystery nursing another cocktail in front of the TV
...
"I never had a Mr
...
He was drunk
...
All I wanted was a Mr
...
"
I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we
needed to win at life, the knightly code of conduct, the ways of the alphamale
...
But a sequence of maneuvers and a
system of behavior would never fix what was broken inside
...
All we could do was embrace the damage
...

And I'm sure she felt the same
...
Sex with Lisa was
not entertainment
...
It was about creating a vacuum
where nothing else existed except the two of us and our passion
...

Lisa and I spent the next day together, and the day after that, and the day after that
...
Rick
H
...
" But we couldn't seem
to part
...
"I've never had sex with a guy I liked this much before
...
"
Beneath that tough exterior, she was scared
...

Perhaps the reason she'd been so reluctant to open up was that she was protecting something fragile inside
...

When I slept with all those other girls, I just had sex with them once a
night—and, if I liked them enough, a second time in the morning
...

After I had an orgasm, it didn't go down
...

I did it with her a second time
...
It was still ready to go
...
I
couldn't understand it
...
It had feelings too
...
It
stayed up through three or four orgasms every time Lisa and I made love
...

When I'd gone impotent in the bathroom with the porn star, perhaps it
didn't have anything to do with the whiskey
...
She pulled up to the house in a limo and leaped out, looking
radiant in a blue dress and white shawl
...

"Did you land that director you were chasing?" I asked
...
I got a new man in New York
...
"
She danced toward me, light like a ballerina
...
"We had a bet about your director crush
...
I guess I lost
...
"
She smiled and stared at me expectantly, as if I were supposed to just
select one on the spot
...
"How about
Style?" I finally decided
...
" I thought about the idea for a moment
...
Then again, her daughter's middle name is Bean
...
"You know, I've found
you sexually intriguing these last few months," she said
...
Before I opened my
mouth, however, she continued
...
I think
that's great
...
For you too, I hope
...
"
"Well, you look great
...
"
"Well, that and rehab
...
Her prayers had been answered
...

"I'm going to get out of your hair and live at the Argyle hotel until I get

418

my daughter back, which should be very soon," she said
...
"
She handed me a check and bounded back into the limo
...
"
I was really going to miss her
...
We
hadn't become Scientologists; we liked our income too much
...
It was one
of the most star-filled events I'd been to in Los Angeles
...
His approach was hypnotic: There was no doubt in
his walk, no effort in his smile, no intricacy in his intentions
...
I kept my balance
...

"Is that your girlfriend?" he asked, looking Lisa up and down in a nonlecherous way
...
"You didn't tell
me how gorgeous she was
...
I can't remember ever feeling this fulfilled by someone
...
"
"Exactly," he exclaimed
...
And when you kind of get down to it, those things are a false intimacy
...
In a real relationship, sex means more
...
It's very cool
...
It just reaffirms society's message of monogamy and
true love conquers everything and all those Hollywood happy endings
...
"
"Who says it's cheesy?" Cruise asked, his eyes narrowing and his hands
reaching out to attack me with a friendly gesture
...
Since when is it cheesy to be in love?"
He had AMOGed me again
...

We were just phantoms, drifting invisibly through a putrefying house
that hadn't seen a maid or repairman in months
...
Herbal wasn't talking to Mystery
...
And for some reason Sickboy, Playboy, Xaneus, and all the other Real Social Dynamics worker bees had stopped interacting with Mystery and me
...
If I tried to engage them in conversation, they were
curt
...

The only person who spoke to everyone was Tyler Durden
...

"I really want to ask you something," he said one afternoon as he
emerged from the kitchen with Sickboy
...
Despite
the name, he was a well-raised, mild-mannered New Yorker
...

"Because I go out every night and work so hard on myself, and I know that
I couldn't get her as a girlfriend
...
She'd make my bed
every morning; she'd cook meals and bring them up to my room when I was
working; and she rarely came over without a small gift—a tube of Origins
face cleanser, a bottle of John Varvatos cologne, a copy of Henry IV} Part I I'd
been looking for
...

"I guess I have life experience," I told him
...
You're only working on one aspect of yourself
...
"
His brows knitted, and his mind began turning rapidly
...
Then he rejected it, and his eyes began to blaze
...


42D

He resented me because I still didn't see him as an equal, because he still
wasn't cool in my eyes, because he couldn't pick apart the idea of coolness
to a subset of behaviors he could model
...
Tyler Durden would never be cool
...

Finally, he turned to walk up to Papa's room
...
"Aren't you coming?" Tyler asked Sickboy, nodding his head upstairs as if something important were occurring there
...

"You're leaving?" I asked
...

The door to Papa's room slammed lightly overhead
...

"I'm out of this whole thing," he said
...
" The words burst out of him, as if they'd been
slowly forming inside like a blister
...
A
...
I haven't even seen the Pacific
Ocean the whole time I've been here
...
I wouldn't introduce any of them to any of my friends back in New York
...
Lisa can't stand them
...
He sighed the tension out of his shoulders,
as if relieved he'd found someone normal, someone who understood, someone who wasn't entirely brainwashed
...
Tyler Durden can
hardly get anyone to return his calls
...
Papa's had sex with probably one girl in the last year
...
And when Xaneus came here, he was a
cool guy
...
All he talks about is sarging
...
You have a great lifestyle, a good job, and a cool
girlfriend
...
"I'll tell you what
...
Why don't you join us? It'll be good for you
to get out of the house and see the ocean
...
Today was the best day I've ever had here, despite all the crazy drama
that has been going on
...
Seeing how cool they get along is
really inspiring
...

The surfing was amazing
...
I recommend taking up the sport to anyone who's never tried it
...
It's truly a relaxing experience
...

W h e n I returned to the house, I did some work
...
During the movie,
Herbal and Mystery talked outside and settled their differences
...
And Herbal said that if Mystery paid for the damages to his
room, he'd forgive Mystery for his behavior
...
It's good to see this
thing ended in a sane way
...

At about 2 : 0 0 A
...
, Playboy, Mystery, and I sat in the main room smoking
a hookah, listening to music, and talking about our goals in life
...
My day was filled with real conversations with real friends
...
A
...
In fact, I
didn't do a single set all day
...
These are also the days that
will miss when I move out of Project Hollywood
...

I couldn't help feeling that maybe we'd made the wrong decision
...

'I'm moving to Las Vegas
...
I've learned
from my mistakes here, and Project Vegas will be bigger and better
...

I'm going to fly my brother-in-law to Vegas to record his songs, with me
singing
...
Who
wouldn't buy that?" Mystery's manic sense of possibility was back
...
And, since you're my best friend, once I get it set
up, I'd like you to join me
...
We will be in charge,
and we'll carefully screen everyone we move into the house
...
" I couldn't just follow him around every time he
fucked things up for himself
...
He
opened the front door of the house and carried a suitcase onto the landing
as he delivered one of the many great aphorisms that he used to turn defeat
into triumph
...
"
"I can't go through this again
...

"I understand," he said
...
I want you to know that, even though we haven't
seen eye to eye lately, I will always be your friend, for life and a day
...
Enjoy your girlfriend, and
we will always have time to hang out together
...
"

424

425

My face swelled and my eyes tingled with the first flush of tears
...

A cab pulled into the driveway and honked, and Mystery slammed the

"That's part of it," he said
...
Everybody thinks that you're a snob and that you're responsible for a lot of trouble in this house, because you talk about people
behind their backs
...
The blank whiteness of the door wavered

Durden, who had never said a cross word to my face before, his voice wasn't

in the mist of my eyes
...
For a mo-

venomous
...


constructive advice from one PUA to another
...
One of them was Dreamweaver,
a former student of mine; the other one I'd never met before
...
With the influx of new, younger
residents, Project Hollywood looked more like a frat house every day,
though most frat houses were cleaner
...
"
I didn't know how to respond because I was so taken aback
...

"Yeah," he went on
...
Dreamweaver told me he hates your guts
...
"

the details of his latest drama with whoever passed by, the lack of commu-

I t h o u g h t about what he was saying
...
The enthusi-

nication in the house became even more uncomfortable
...
They never looked up or said a

creepy social parasites
...
They weren't PUAs; they were vegetables
...


forward to, I would never have joined the community
...

At Papa's twenty-fourth birthday party, not a single woman showed
up—let alone Paris Hilton, who, needless to say, had never come to party at
Project Hollywood as Papa had hoped
...
And, for
some reason, they all ignored me
...

In the week that followed, Tyler Durden, who'd never been directly hostile to me, started writing posts attacking me online
...
I
navigated through the overflowing trash bags in the kitchen; walked
through the backyard, where just a small puddle of sludge lay at the b o t t o m
of the hot tub; and knocked on Papa's back door
...

"I want to talk to you about what's been going on lately," 1 said
...
And you seem to
have a chip on your shoulder
...
I'd always been friendly and easy to get along
with, even before I'd joined the community
...

When I left the room after another h o u r of talk, my head was spinning
...
What had I done?
The answer, I soon found out, was nothing
...
"
First Extramask, then Mystery, then Sickboy, and now Playboy
...

"Do you have a few minutes?" he asked
...
"
Playboy brought me into his room and shut the door
...

"Who's trying to freeze me out?"
"Papa and Tyler Durden
...
"
"What are you talking about? What do you mean by tactics?"
"Wow, you really have no idea what's been going on up in Papa's room
...
He wants you to think that
everyone hates you
...
"
"Why would he want to do that?"
"He wants to take over
...
"
This explained the head games Tyler Durden was playing the other day,
the reason he was trying to make me think everyone was against me
...
He was running game on me
...

You're not weak like Xaneus," Playboy continued
...
And he sees you as a
threat to his women because you made out with that girl he picked up in
Vegas
...
"
"He's still upset about that?"
"Yeah
...
They have a gang mentality
...
So they pushed Mystery out, and now

they're pushing you out
...
"
"I don't understand
...
"
"But don't you see how they helped it along? How Papa invited Katya
to sleep at the house and then brought her back after Mystery kicked her
out? They were baiting him
...
"Everything Papa said in his room
during the house meeting, he was instructed to say by Tyler Durden
...
And I made a mistake by going along with it too
...
This house was his project
...
"
I had played right into their hands
...
Papa even kept calling me the house leader
...
So much for the whole
win-win idea
...

"They played me, too
...

Tyler Durden can get those guys to do whatever he wants
...
He's motivated by acquisition and power
...
And he had agreed
...
"Every word that comes out of Tyler Durden's mouth is
calculated
...
That guy's mind is all
gears, turning and manipulating
...
They
even talk about (guy sets' up in Papa's room now
...
Every time someone new comes up to
their room, they inoculate him against you
...
It had led to a mindset that everything in life was a game
that could be manipulated to a player's advantage with the right routines
...
"If what you're saying

428

is true," I asked Playboy, "why was Papa avoiding me and Mystery before
there was even a plan to freeze us out of the house?"
"That came from Tyler Durden too," Playboy said
...
Then, once Mystery and
Papa started bickering, he told Papa to avoid you guys completely and use
the back door to enter the house
...
All the
weirdness that had been taking place in the house since day one had been
orchestrated by a little man in the closet, the wizard of Project Hollywood
...

"The biggest mistake you and Mystery made," Playboy concluded, "was
having Papa move into this house
...
And that was always to follow my instincts and first impressions
...
I
found Papa spoiled and robotic, and Tyler Durden soulless and manipulative
...

Yet, at the same time, Mystery and I weren't entirely blameless
...

We had never attempted to befriend him or treat him as an equal
...
I would have ignored it if it weren't for the paranoia I'd developed as a result of my discussion with Playboy
...
When 1 saw the
results, anger swung through my body like a wrecking ball
...
The computer was intended as a shared resource so
that residents and guests could check the Internet
...

Unbeknownst to me, there had been a war going on in the house from
the moment we'd moved in
...
I wanted a second opinion
...


429

"Totally
...
Tyler Durden and Papa would say, 'Don't talk to Mystery; freeze him
out
...
The house meeting about Mystery was
thought out for days
...
The house is
part of their business plan
...
I can't be around that shit
...
They
both told the same story: Mystery and I, supposedly the best players in the
community, had been played
...


thinks they're inadequate, then that ache goes away and the idea that we're
not a person of value disappears to some extent
...
I didn't want advice from
him on how to pick up girls; I wanted advice on how to stop
...
He was a sort of
spiritual presence that hung over the pickup world, a mythological figure
like Odysseus or Captain Kirk or an HB11
...

I met him in a small post-production studio, where he was editing a
film he had directed
...
Only his eyes, which
sparkled with energy, gave evidence that his youthful daring had not yet
been extinguished
...
But I look at it with the sense of being imitated
...
I don't believe in doing things that
twist and turn a person
...
I was interested in finding somebody to love
...
I felt like there were too
many other things I wanted to do
...
What also helped was having two daughters who have
occasionally accused me of being sexist, which I am mildly, I guess
...
But when we realize that we're not as inadequate as we thought we were, and when we realize that everybody else also

And what about those people who don't get rid of their sense of inadequacy?
They become obsessed with sleeping with more and more women
...

Then there are the kinds of guys who need to be in therapy sessions
...
" I tell them, "You need new clothes, better posture, and a speech therapist
...

The phone rings
...

That was a girl I picked up thirty-eight and a half years ago—my wife
...
She walked past me in a bar and I said, "You're much too pretty
to let get away
...
But
she said, "You think so
...

So how did you actually conceive of the book?
I had a friend who was a copy trainee with me at Benton and Bowles
...
She was Mediterranean and gorgeous, like a
Botticelli
...

The next week, he came in and said that she was a virgin
...
That's what gave me
the idea of doing a book on picking up girls
...
I was very shy and unconfident growing up
...

Was there any precedent for it at the time?
In the mid-sixties, life was changing radically in America
...
A whole counterculture was taking shape
...

In the forties and fifties, if you grew up in your hometown, you met
people at church socials or were introduced by an aunt
...
They lived alone without the conventional means of
meeting
...
And people needed new tools to
meet strangers
...
Toward the end
of my singlehood, I found a boldness that was shocking
...
" There
are some women looking for you to be bold and a leader
...

Something strange happened to Eric Weber when the conversation veered
toward naturals and tales from the field
...
The spark in his
eyes brightened
...
For all his talk of marriage and happily ever after, beneath the surface
still seethed that awkward guy who was envious of his friends' success with
women
...
It
was about a pale, bald, unemployed middle-aged man shopping a terrible
screenplay and sponging off his ex-wife, who was now married to a handsome, successful man
...

"That's the inner me," he admitted
...
"
"Even after all the confidence you acquired as a pickup artist, a husband, and a father?"
"Well," he said, opening the door to his car, "all you can do is put on an
appearance of confidence sometimes
...
" He grabbed the door handle to pull it closed
...
"
Slam
...
M
...
She stomped up my stairs, shedding her purse and clothing on the
way, and leaped onto my bed wearing nothing but a beer bottle
...

"Really?"
"Do you know what all the ways are?"
"Urn, maybe
...
"
"Emotionally, physically, and mentally
...
"
"I can elaborate
...
Let's start with the physical
...

"I love your teeth, and your mouth especially
...
There was none
...
I love the hair placement on your body
...
I love the shape of your
nose
...
"
"Oh my God
...
"No
one has ever complimented me on my head indentations before
...
"
I laughed, a little too loudly, at the ridiculousness of what I'd just said
...
I told her about the last two years of
meeting players and learning about the game
...

"I would love to have you dress super-hot one day," I said, caught up in
the excitement of the game I had helped invent, "and then go to a bar
...
"
She rolled me off her, so that we were facing each other on our sides,
our faces an inch apart
...
"Everything I like about you, and
everything that makes me think you're rad, is all the stuff you already had
before you met those PUA guys
...
I would have liked you before all that selfimprovement shit
...
"All the things you
learned from the PUAs almost made us not come together," Lisa continued
...
"
Maybe she was right
...
But she
never would have had the opportunity to meet him if I hadn't spent the last
two years learning how to put my best foot forward
...

I needed Mystery, Ross Jeffries, David DeAngelo, David X, Juggler, Steve
P
...
I needed them to discover what
was me to begin with
...

Lisa sat up and took a sip from the bottle of beer she had brought upstairs
...
Modesty was
never her strong suit
...
A
...
I turned the first envelope upside down and dumped its contents onto
the comforter
...
Each one contained the
handwriting of a different girl
...
They were all phone numbers I'd collected since taking that first
fateful workshop with Mystery
...
"I've spent two years meeting
every girl in L
...
And out of them all, I chose you
...
And, after I
spoke it, I realized it wasn't entirely accurate
...
All he can do is give her
an opportunity to choose him
...

I saw him from my bedroom window, stuffing his robot vacuum
cleaner into a U-Haul van
...

He was the last person I expected to abandon the house
...
"No one hangs out
anymore
...
"
"What's Katya doing?"
"She's moving to Austin with me
...

"Um, by the way, what should I do when your wallaby arrives?"
"I've already arranged to have it sent to Austin
...
With
Mystery, I had lost a friend and former mentor
...
However, between Tyler
Durden's plotting and Herbal's imminent departure, Project Hollywood
was truly dead
...
Even Prizer—the sarger
who had lost his virginity in Juarez—had stopped selling his pickup DVD
course and become a born-again Christian
...
There's more to life than
sarging
...
I looked up and saw a teenager with a
dyed-blond Eminem crewcut and a white tanktop sitting on our steps
...
"He's been staying up in Papa's room
...
It was just me in my bedroom against the borg in
the rest of the house trying to force me out
...
I was
tired of being disappointed in people
...
Besides, I had a girlfriend
...

"Because you didn't want the house," she said
...
It's a subculture you dipped into
...
These guys aren't helping
you anymore
...
"
Watching The Wizard of Oz as a child, I was always disappointed when
Glinda the Good Witch told Dorothy that she'd possessed the power to return home since the moment she had arrived in Oz
...
I had possessed the power to leave the community all along, but I hadn't reached the end of the road until now
...
Yet the reason all the gurus
latched on to me—the reason Tyler Durden wanted to be me, even though
he hated me—was that they thought I had something they lacked
...
Instead of finding ourselves, we'd
lost our sense of self
...
A blonde 10 in a twoset at the Standard didn't have the answers
...

To win the game was to leave it
...
After staying at a Vipassana meditation center in Australia and an ashram in India, he was coming home to,
as he put it in an e-mail to me, "the way things were before
...
Three new recruits for Real Social Dynamics—replacements for Playboy, Sickboy, and
Extramask—were hauling boxes from Ikea into Herbal's room
...
They had quit their jobs; they had dropped out of school; they had
left their hometowns for this
...
They were diligent
...
They were automatons
...
Herbal's room was being converted into a barracks to house this
growing army
...
Even Mystery's Lounge would soon be theirs, with Mystery himself
purged
...

I returned to my room, pulled several duffel bags off my closet shelf,
and started packing
...

Stacked on the floor were dozens of books on flirting, NLP, Tantric massage, female sexual fantasies, handwriting analysis, and how to be the jerk
women love
...

It was time to leave the house, and the community, behind
...


GLOSSARY
Below is a list of pickup terms and acronyms used or referred to in this book
...
The definitions
below pertain solely to each word's use in the context of seduction
...

AFC—noun [average frustrated chump]: a stereotypical nice guy who has no
pickup skills or understanding of what attracts women; a man who tends to engage in supplicative and wimpy patterns of behavior around women he has not
yet slept with
...

AMOG— 1
...
Origin: 01d_Dog
...
verb: to remove a potential male competitor—through physical, verbal, or psychological tactics—from
a group of women
...
Origin: Tyler Durden
...
noun: an external stimulus (a sight, sound, or touch) that triggers
a specific emotional or behavioral response, such as a song that makes one
happy because it's reminiscent of a positive life event
...
2
...
Origin: Richard Bandler and John Grinder
...
This can
occur before or after sex, or it can prevent sex from occurring
...


440

BF—noun [boyfriend]
...

BITCH SHIELD— noun: a woman's defensive response to deter unknown men
who approach her
...

BLUR—verb or adjective: an occurrence in which a woman stops returning calls,
although she was initially interested in the man phoning
...
Antonym: DLV [demonstration of lower
value]
...
Also: DDB
...

ELICIT VALUES—verb phrase: to draw out, through conversation, what is important to a person, usually with the intention of reaching a deep inner desire
that motivates them
...
Also: EV
...
Unlike attraction, a high buying temperature generally appears and fades quickly
...
Origin: Tyler Durden
...

FALSE TAKEAWAY-see takeaway
...

FB—noun [fuck buddy]: a woman with whom a man engages in casual,

CALIBRATE—verb: to read the verbal and nonverbal responses of a person or
group and accurately deduce what they are thinking or feeling at that moment
...


consensual sex without an emotional attachment or relationship expectations
...


CAVEMAN—verb: to directly and aggressively escalate physical contact, and
progress toward sex, with a consenting woman; predicated on the idea that early
human beings did not use intelligence and words but instinct and strength to
mate
...


FIELD REPORT—noun: a written account of a pickup or a night out picking up
women, usually posted online
...
Other types of reports include an OR
(outing report), LR (lay report), FU (fuckup report), and TR (threesome report)
...
Origin: Tyler Durden
...
A cockblock can be a friend

a planned meeting
...


on a number of women in different social situations before sharing it with
other pickup artists
...


have just met; common subjects include where one lives, what one does for

DAY TWO—noun: a first date
...


FMAC—noun [find, meet, attract, close]: a rudimentary, sequential model of

DHV—noun or verb [demonstration of higher value]: a routine in which the

work, and general interests and hobbies
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Richard Bandler and John Grinder
...


man to indicate that she is not sexually or romantically interested in him
...
verb: to have sexual intercourse
...
noun: sexual intercourse
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Mystery
...
When discussing a specific woman, it is often followed by either a numerical ranking of her beauty—such as HB10—or by a nick-

can hear an LJBF speech or get LJBF'ed
...

LSE-adjective [low self-esteem]: used to describe a woman who is insecure
and tends to engage in self-effacing or self-destructive behavior
...


name, such as HBRedhead
...


LTR—noun [long-term relationship]: a girlfriend
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Style
...


harem, or one of many girlfriends a pickup artist is currently seeing and sleeping with
...
Origin: Svengali
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Richard

veals she is attracted to or interested in him
...


and subtle, include leaning toward a man when he speaks, asking mundane ques-

MPB—noun [male pattern blindness]: some men's inability to recognize that a

tions to keep a conversation going, or squeezing his hand when he takes her

woman is attracted to and interested in him until after she leaves and it's too

hand in his
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Vincent
...
Origin: Style
...

MYSTERY'S LOUNGE-nown
...
Origin: Mystery
...
Origin: Ross Jeffries
...
verb: to kiss or make out, with passion
...
noun: a passionate
kiss or makeout
...
Origin: Mystery
...
For example:

444

445

"Those are nice nails; are they real?" 2
...


in a way that appears accidental, or offering constructive criticism
...

Origin: Mystery
...
The newbie mission involves spending a day

quickly changing the subject
...


in a public area, such as a mall, and saying "hi" to every woman who passes by
...
verb: to approach and talk to one group of people in order to meet a
NLP —noun [neuro-linguistic programming]: a school of hypnosis developed in

woman or group adjacent to it
...
noun: a person one approaches in order to

the 1970s based largely on the techniques of Milton Erickson
...
A pawn can be an acquaintance or stranger
...


which subtle conversational cues and physical gestures are used to influence a
person on a subconscious level
...


PEACOCK—verb: to dress in loud clothing or with flashy accoutrements in or-

NONVERSATION—noun: a conversation in which one person isn't paying attention to what the other person is saying, generally due to lack of interest or
being distracted
...


light-up jewelry, feather boas, colorful cowboy hats, or anything else that makes

der to get attention from women
...
Origin: Mystery
...
verb: to obtain a correct phone number from a woman
...
2
...
Also: #close
...


tion with a woman, from ordinary calk to slower, sexually-charged talk, touch,
or body language; intended to precede an attempt to kiss
...

PIVOT—noun: a woman, usually a friend, used in social situations to help one
meet other women
...
Origin: Mystery
...
an obsession with a girl whom one is not dating; pickup
artists believe that such an extreme fixation on one woman significantly lowers
a man's chances of dating or sleeping with her
...
a girl with whom one is obsessed
...
Ryan
...
Openers may be environmental (spontaneous) or canned (pre-scripted); and direct (showing
romantic or sexual interest in a woman) or indirect (not showing interest)
...

PAIMAI--noun [pre-approach invitation, male approach invitation]: a nonverbal action or series of actions meant to induce a woman or group to notice a
man and passively express interest in meeting him before he actually approaches her
...


she can create jealousy in the target, she can make it easier to open difficult sets,
and she can brag about the pickup artist to his target
...

PROXIMITY ALERT SYSTEM-noun: the state of being aware of a woman or
group of women who are standing awkwardly nearby in hopes of being talked
to
...
Origin: Mystery
...
This sequence can take place in a few
seconds—such as taking a woman's hands and then dropping them as if you
don't trust her yet—or over time, such as being very nice during one phone
conversation but then very distant and abrupt during the next one
...

RAFC-noun

[reformed average frustrated chump]: a seduction student who

has not yet become a pickup artist or mastered the skills offered by the community
...


is no longer an effective means of making plans with her, usually because too

Origin: Richard Bandler and John Grinder
...


other piece of prepared material intended to initiate, maintain, or advance an

STYLEMOG—noun or verb: a subtle set of tactics, mannerisms, backhanded

interaction with a woman or her group
...


the evolution phase-shift, and the ESP value-demonstration
...


RSD— noun [Real Social Dynamics]: a company specializing in pickup seminars,

SUBCOMMUNICATION—noun: an impression, message, or effect created by a

workshops, and products started by Papa and Tyler Durden
...


person's mannerisms, dress, or general presence; an indirect, nonverbal form of

SARGE—1
...
2
...
Origin: Aardvark
...

SECOND MEETING—noun: a first date
...


communication generally perceived better by women than men
...

SUPPLICATE—verb: to put oneself in a servile or inferior position in order to
please a woman, such as buying her a drink or changing an opinion in order to
agree with her
...
A two-set is a group of two peo-

a color; in seduction, a name given to a type of waking hypnosis in which a

ple; a three-set is three people, and so on
...
Origin: Mystery
...
The goal is to arouse her

SHB—noun [super hot babe]: an extremely attractive woman
...
If he takes the question, demand, or comment at
face value, he fails and generally loses the opportunity to move forward in his
interaction with her
...

SHOTGUN NEG—noun: a type of neg used in a group situation with a woman,
intended to amuse the group at her expense
...

SNIPER NEG—noun: A type of neg used to embarrass a woman while talking
one-on-one with her
...

SOI—noun [statement of intent or show of interest]: a direct comment intended
to let a woman know that one is attracted to or impressed with her
...

SS—noun [Speed Seduction]: an NLP-based school of pickup founded by Ross
Jeffries in the 1980s
...


through suggestive, metaphorical talk, sensations, and imagery
...

TAKEAWAY—noun: a pickup technique in which a man who has approached a
woman and is getting along with her leaves—for as little as a few seconds or as
long as a couple hours—in order to demonstrate a lack of neediness and increase her attraction to him
...

TARGET—noun: the woman in a group whom the pickup artist desires and is
running game on
...

THREE-SECOND RULE—noun: a guideline stating that a woman should be
approached within three seconds of first seeing her
...
Origin: Mystery
...
The purpose of a time constraint is to lessen a
woman's anxiety that a man she has just met will hang around her all night, or

448

that she is expected to have sex with a man upon entering his house
...
Origin: Style
...
Examples of time distortion include taking a woman to several different places over
the course of a night or having a woman imagine future events and adventures together
...


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TRANCE WORDS—noun: the words a person emphasizes or repeats when
speaking, indicating that they have a special meaning to the speaker
...

Origin: Richard Bandler and John Grinder
...


Where are they now?
In the time since this book was written, enough has occurred in Project
Hollywood and in the lives of the characters in this book to warrant a sequel
...
My story is done
...

Thanks to Mystery, who followed through on his plan to move to Las Vegas
with his girlfriend, Ania
...

WING—noun: a male friend, generally with some pickup knowledge, who assists
one in meeting, attracting, or taking home a woman
...
Also:
wingman
...
He finally found a worthy business partner, Savoy, who has turned his financial life around
...
The price is a
staggering $2,250, but from what I've seen, everyone leaves happy
...
However, Mystery has yet to succeed in talking Ania into a threesome
...
After several more PUAs came and went ignominiously from the house,
they moved a new age couple into Mystery's room in exchange for the right to

WINGWOMAN-noun: see pivot
...

YES-LADDER—noun: a persuasion technique in which a person is asked a series of basic questions designed to elicit positive answers, increasing the likelihood that the person will also respond in the affirmative to a final, open-ended
question
...
Hare Krishna
devotees of the new residents dropped by to pay tribute almost daily—offering
song, dance, and psychic battles in the Project Hollywood living room
...
In the meantime,
according to house residents, a struggle for control of Project Hollywood began
...
The new age
couple contend that Tyler Durden and Papa skipped out after local authorities
tried to deliver a summons charging them with running a commercial business
in a residential zone
...
Either way, a

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

450

451

month and a half before the eighteen-month lease was up, Papa, Tyler Durden,

matters pickup-related, and his research and website were instrumental in put-

and the rest of the pickup artists living in the house suddenly packed a U-Haul

ting the glossary together
...
They moved into an apartment complex a block away from Lisa

recently brought hundreds of students and several dozen instructors to Mon-

and the mental care facility where I took Mystery
...


his new girlfriend, and Papa continues in his quest for Paris Hilton
...
The pair continues to run Real Social Dynamics and receive extraordinary testimonials from students
...
I recently had the honor of meeting her; you'd never suspect it
...
Twice
...
She calls herself the Cleaning Buddha, and she lives in my old bedroom
...
Herbal lives with his wallaby, Shaniqua, in the house he owns there,
where he is training to beat the 100-meter dash record for a bet and offering a
reward to anyone who can successfully master the sleep diet
...
Her brother
became a born-again Christian and has not had a symptom of Tourette's in over
a year
...
Shortly before

Thanks to Sickboy and Playboy, who were not able to leave the seduction
world behind when they returned to New York
...

Thanks to Dustin, the king of the naturals, who is still living in Jerusalem,
where I was unable to attend his wedding to a Rabbi's daughter
...
He tells me that he re-

from the rooftops
...

publication of this book, he was diagnosed with brain cancer and brought to
the hospital by Maverick
...
Dreamweaver, you are
one talented, creative person, and our prayers are with you
...

Thanks to the community itself and to the hundreds of friends I've made
over the last two years
...
Some of you may fret that I've given the game away
...
And whatever
that way happens to be, all of you will find it
...
They plan to move to Chicago

sicas I and II, and all the other amazing, unique women who became part of my

and start a family together
...
Call me, and I'll explain everything
...
He
dated a nurse briefly and is now back in the field sarging, making, he says, major breakthroughs in helping guys overcome their fear, shyness, and old habits
of thinking
...

Thanks to Courtney Love, who has resolved her court cases and managed
to stay out of the tabloids so far
...
She says that she wants to play Katya in the movie
...
His Fast Seduction website remains the clearinghouse for all

Thanks to all the rest of the gurus: David DeAngelo, whose mailing list has
grown to an estimated 1
...
, who moved to Romania to pursue
his latest business and romantic adventures; Steve P
...
Thanks also to Swinggcat and David
Shade
...
Juggler, who has put his comedy career on hold to expand his seduction
business and complete his e-book, is living with his new girlfriend, a fitness
trainer and marathon runner; he still likes Barry Manilow
...
Jlaix, who found the bisexual girlfriend that

452

Mystery has always dreamed about and has detailed their adventures in a series
of careening field reports that are worthy of their own book
...
And even
if she wasn't, I'd forgive her
...

Thanks to the rest of the staff at ReganBooks, particularly my [insert hyperbolic adjective here] editor Cal Morgan, who was so excited to meet Lisa after editing the book that when he saw her he was too tongue-tied to speak a word
...

Thanks to Ira Silverberg, my agent, who keeps trying to get me to write
about a highbrow topic
...

Thanks to David Lubliner, Andrew Miano, Craig Emanuel, Paul Weitz,
Chris Weitz, Andrea Giannetti, Matt Tolmach, and Amy Pascal for support with
the other Project Hollywood
...
Maybe not James Joyce,
but at least Dr
...
(You've been Stylemogged
...
And thanks to Sue
Wood, who patiently transcribed tape after tape, which was no easy feat considering the many hours of hypnosis and house meetings contained therein
...

Thanks to my many self-improvement instructors, among them Joseph
Arthur (for voice lessons, infinite wisdom, and an eye-opening Esalen retreat)
and Julia Caulder (for teaching me Alexander Technique and letting me watch
her sing Wagner at the Los Angeles Opera)
...

Finally, yes, Lisa and I are still together
...
Being together has
required a lot more time and work than learning to pick up women ever did,
but it has brought me far greater satisfaction and joy
...




---