The Game

chance with her and nothing happened,” he replies. “The window closed and now it’s my turn.”
    When I woke up, I understood the part of the dream about the test right away. I’d failed it by making out with Tyler Durden’s target. And after my disaster with the porn star, the impotence was self-explanatory. But I couldn’t understand the part about Mystery hitting on my target—that is, until I returned home and Mystery called.
    “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but Tammy just gave me a blow job. She swallowed my load.”
    Somewhere in her stomach, my sperm was mingling with Mystery’s.
    “I don’t mind,” I said. And I didn’t. It was part of being friends—a playful competition between PUAs. “Just remember that I was there first.”
    Tyler Durden, however, didn’t see it that way. It wasn’t playful competition to him. It was his life.
    He would never forgive me for making out with his target.

The point was women; the result was men.
    Instead of models in bikinis lounging by the Project Hollywood pool all day, we had pimply teenagers, bespectacled businessmen, tubby students, lonely millionaires, struggling actors, frustrated taxi drivers, and computer programmers—lots of computer programmers. They walked in our door AFCs; they came out players.
    Every Friday when they arrived, Mystery or Tyler Durden stood in front of the pillow pit and taught them pretty much the same openers, body language tips, and value-demonstrating routines. On Saturday afternoon, they all went shopping on Melrose. They bought the same four-inch-platform New Rock boots and black-and-white striped shirt with bits of rope hanging from the sides. They bought the same rings, necklaces, hats, and sunglasses. They went to the tanning salon.
    We were breeding an army.
    At night they descended on the Sunset Strip, a swarm of player bees. Even when the seminar and workshop ended, students lingered in the clubs on Sunset for months afterward, working on their game. You could spot them from behind by the matching boots and the rope dangling from their shirts. They clustered in groups, prowling for open sets and sending in emissaries to say, “Hey, I need to get a female opinion on something.”
    Even on nights when there weren’t workshops, badly peacocked guys from a hundred-mile radius gathered in our living room before going out. At 2:30 A.M ., 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. They couldn’t stop talking about this stuff.
    “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. “There is only one fucking reason.”
    “You’re more sensitive?” I asked.
    “No, because I plow!” he said with a triumphant flourish. By “plowing,” he meant blitzing a girl with line after line, routine after routine, without even waiting for a response. “The other night, this girl was running away, and I screamed the routine at her. She came back like a fucking tractor beam. I have no regard for social conventions: I’ll pummel their asses down. You have to plow it. No situation can’t be plowed.”
    “I don’t plow,” I told him. There were guys who won girlfriends by chasing them until they relented and agreed to meet. But I wasn’t a chaser. I wasn’t a plower. All I did was give her the opportunity to like me, and either she did or didn’t. Usually she did.
    “You just fucking push push push, and it can’t not work,” Tyler Durden went on. “If the girls get mad at me, I’ll change my voice tone and apologize and tell them I’m not well socially calibrated.”
    I watched Tyler Durden as he spoke. For all his talk about women, I rarely saw him in the company of one.
    “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.”
    “Giving or receiving?”
    “Both.”
    That’s when I realized that Tyler Durden wasn’t in the community to get laid. He wasn’t motivated by sex. He was motivated by power.
    Papa’s motivations were harder to determine. Originally, he was in the game for the girls. When we moved into Project Hollywood, he envisioned turning his room into a high-tech sultan’s lair, with a harem just a phone call away.