The Game

losers.
    Somewhere along the line, sarging became seen as the goal of pickup. But the point of the game is not to get good at sarging. When you sarge, every night is a new one. You’re not building anything but a skillset. What got me laid on my birthday was not sarging but lifestyle. And building a lifestyle is cumulative. Everything you do counts and brings you closer to your goal.
    The right lifestyle is something that is worn, not discussed. Money, fame, and looks, though helpful, are not required. 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.
    Sarging was for students, not players, of the game. 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. It was time for Project Hollywood.

Mystery flew into town to meet me. All he had needed was the word go.
    He was the only person I could talk to who wasn’t afraid to take chances and make changes to pursue his dreams. Everyone else I knew always said, “Later”; Mystery said, “Now,” and that was an intoxicating word to me—because later, every time I’d ever heard it, translated as never.
    “Now is the time, Style,” he said when he arrived at my apartment in Santa Monica. “Let’s build this shit. Sarging is for losers. I mean, sure, it’s better to be a loser who gets laid than one who doesn’t, but we’re talking about a championship level of game now.”
    I knew he’d understand.
    According to the books I’d read on cold-reading, all human problems fall into one of three areas: health, wealth, and relationships, each of which has an inner and an outer component. For the past year and a half, we’d been focusing solely on relationships. Now it was time to get every cylinder in our lives firing. It was time to follow through on Mystery’s codeineaddled ramblings and join forces to work together for more than just HB10s. We were greater than the sum of our cocks.
    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. Next we needed to hand-select the best in the community to live with us.
    Perhaps I shouldn’t have trusted Mystery again. But this time, I wouldn’t let myself be dependent on him. His name wasn’t going to be on the lease. Neither would mine, for that matter. We’d find a third party to take the risk and the responsibility.
    We found that third party living in the Furama Hotel. His name was Papa. His grades had kept him out of law school, so instead he’d enrolled at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles to study business. 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.
    “The three most influential people in my life,” Papa told us as he sat down on the couch at Mystery’s feet, “have been you two and my father.”
    Papa’s hair was now spiked and gelled, and he looked like he’d been working out. I left him to talk with Mystery in my living room while I ran downstairs to a Caribbean food stand to get dinner for everyone.
    When I returned, Papa was Mystery’s manager.
    “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked Mystery. I couldn’t believe he was going to let a protégé-turned-competitor manage him. Mystery was an innovator. If Ross Jeffries was the Elvis of seduction, Mystery was the Beatles. Tyler and Papa were merely the New York Dolls: They were brash, they were loud, and everyone thought they were gay.
    “Papa likes the business and he can fill workshops every weekend,” Mystery replied. “So all I have to do is show up.”
    Papa, in his networking mania, was in constant contact with nearly every major sarger. He knew all the lair presidents and was on all the seduction mailing lists. With just a few e-mails and phone calls, he could recruit a dozen students nearly anywhere in the world.
    “It’s win-win,” Papa insisted. Ever since he’d gotten into the pickup business, that had become Papa’s favorite phrase. He was smarter than I’d given him credit for. He was going to become the middle man for the biggest pickup artists in the community. And they