The Game

involvement in it. And, in doingso, I’d discovered a curious phenomenon: If I told a woman that I was a pickup artist before sleeping with her, she’d still have sex with me, but she’d make me wait a week or two longer just to ensure that she was different from all the other girls. 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. However, her tolerance for the community lasted only until we broke up or stopped seeing each other, at which point it was used against me. The problem with being a pickup artist is that there are concepts like sincerity, genuineness, trust, and connection that are important to women. And all the techniques that are so effective in beginning a relationship violate every principle necessary to maintaining one.
    Shortly after the article came out, I received a phone call from Will Dana, the features editor at Rolling Stone.
    “We’re doing a cover story on Tom Cruise,” he told me.
    “That’s great,” I said.
    “Yeah. He wants you to do it.”
    “Would you mind specifying the pronoun? Who do you mean by he? ”
    “Tom Cruise asked for you specifically.”
    “Why? I’ve never interviewed an actor before.”
    “He read that article you wrote in the Times on the pickup guys. You can ask him about it when you see him. He’s in Europe right now scouting for locations for the next Mission: Impossible. But he wants to go to wheelie school with you when he gets back.”
    “What’s wheelie school?”
    “It’s where you learn to do motorcycle wheelies.”
    “Sounds cool. I’m in.”
    I neglected to tell Will that I’d never ridden a motorcycle in my life. However, it was high on the list of seduction-related skills I still wanted to learn—just above improv classes and below self-defense.

AMONG OUR STRUCTURALLY
CLOSEST ANALOGUES—THE
PRIMATES—THE MALE DOES NOT
FEED THE FEMALE. HEAVY WITH
YOUNG, MAKING HER WAY
LABORIOUSLY ALONG, SHE FENDS
FOR HERSELF . H E MAY FIGHT TO
PROTECT HER OR TO POSSESS HER,
BUT HE DOES NOT NURTURE HER .

    —M ARGARET M EAD ,
Male and Female

He was the first person I’d met since joining the seduction community who didn’t let me down.
    His name was Tom Cruise.
    “This is going to be great, man,” he greeted me when I met him at wheelie school. He smiled, complimented my adventurousness, and smashed a friendly elbow into my chest. It was the exact same AMOGing gesture that Tyler Durden had written about in London.
    He wore black bike leathers with a matching helmet tucked under his left arm and two days of stubble on his chin. “I’m training to jump a trailer,” he said. He pointed to a mobile home sitting just off the track. “It’ll be bigger than that one. But it’s not that hard.”
    He squinted at the vehicle for a moment, visualizing the feat. “Well, the jumping’s not that hard. It’s the landing that’s difficult.”
    He cocked his right hand and slugged me in the shoulder.
    Tom Cruise was the perfect specimen. He was the AMOG that Tyler Durden and Mystery and everyone else in the seduction community had been trying to emulate. He had a natural ability to remain dominant, physically and mentally, in any social situation without seeming to exert any effort. And he was the living embodiment of all six of Mystery’s five characteristics of an alpha male. Nearly everyone in the community had studied his films to learn body language and regularly used terminology from Top Gun in the field. There was so much I wanted to ask him. But first I needed to confirm something.
    “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.
    “I dug your New York Times piece,” he replied. “You were writing about the dating guys.”
    So it was true.
    He paused and his eyes narrowed to slits, indicating that he was speaking about a serious topic. His left eye closed a little more than the right one,giving the appearance of deep intensity. “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. One of Ross’s claims to fame was that he was the inspiration for Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia. Mackey was the character Cruise played: an arrogant seduction teacher with unresolved father