The Game

Stone at all. It was about getting another convert to Scientology. If that was true, he’d picked the wrong person. 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.
    After our meal and study session, Cruise invited me to the president’s room to meet his mother, who was taking a course in the building. “Let me ask you something else about that article you wrote,” he said as we walked. “A lot of that stuff is about trying to control people and manipulate situations. 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 interview ended. The article was published. And Tom Cruise and I would meet again. I would be a different person then, but he would be the same. He would never change. He was an AMOG—and he had AMOGed me. However, he hadn’t converted me.
    He had his church. I had mine.
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    10 When asked how he had come up with the character of T.J. Mackey in an interview in Creative Screenwriting in 2000, however, Paul Thomas Anderson did mention researching Ross Jeffries.

My church, however, still needed to be built.
    Tom Cruise was right: all our effort did need to be put toward something constructive, something bigger than ourselves. I had felt after writing the Times article that my work was not done in the community, that it was all leading somewhere. Now I knew where: Project Hollywood, our church of the spread legs.
    The epiphany came to me on my birthday. Some of the PUAs threw a party for me at a Hollywood club called Highlands. They called nearly everyone I knew and had met in the last year. About three hundred guests came, along with another two hundred who showed up at the club just because it was a Saturday night. Even the big boys from the community were there: Rick H., Ross Jeffries, Steve P., Grimble, Bart Baggett (who specializes in handwriting analysis), Vision, and Arte (who stars in his own line of sexual technique videos).
    Despite such heavy-hitters working the room, I had zero competition because, for the night, I was the man at the club. 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. And I was surrounded by women: fuck buddies, friends, strangers. I couldn’t carry on a conversation for more than two minutes because people were constantly pulling me away to talk. I didn’t have time to spit game.
    Women complimented me on my looks, my body, even my ass. Four different girls handed me their phone numbers over the course of the night. 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. These were girls I didn’t know before the party, and two weren’t even there for my birthday. I didn’t need routines, boyfriend destroyers, gimmicks, or wings. All I needed was a big pocket to hold all the scraps of paper.
    In addition, two porn stars a friend had brought with him introduced themselves. One was either named Devon or Deven; the other had big teeth.We talked for a half hour, and they supplicated to me the whole time. The night felt like the time in Toronto when everyone though I was Moby—except this time they knew I was Style.
    Mystery had recently developed another theory of social interaction. It basically stated that women are constantly judging a man’s value in order to determine if it can help them with their life objectives of survival and replication. In the microcosmic world we had created at the Highlands that night, I had the highest social value in the room. And just as most men are attracted in a Pavlovian manner to anything that is thin, has blonde hair, and possesses large breasts, women tend to respond to status and social proof.
    In the end, I took a petite, mischievous stripper with big saucer eyes named Johanna back to my house. While she was on my bed, grinding me through my clothes, she asked, “What do you do for a living?”
    “What?” I replied. 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.
    “What do you do?” she asked again.
    And that’s when I had the epiphany: Sarging is for