The Game

become a guru too. And, along the way, he’d lost the innocence he had when we first met.
    “I do a lot of things with this cell phone, and it doesn’t even work,” he said, holding it up. “I just like to talk into it and pretend that I’m the man, especially if I feel uncomfortable at a club. Your cell phone is your best wingman.”
    Extramask had great stage presence and an oddball sense of humor. I wished he’d spend more time working on his stand-up comedy career than teaching seduction. Unlike Mystery and Tyler Durden, he wasn’t born for this.
    I followed Mystery into the kitchen. He was leaning against a counter, waiting for me. “Papa’s been doing workshops behind my back,” he fumed. “Someone told me they saw him at the Highlands with six guys last weekend.”
    I hopped onto the counter and sat at eye level with him.
    “Let me catch you up to speed on what else has been going on,” he said. I assumed he was going to complain about Papa, but instead he wanted to talk about Patricia. She had started dating an African-American jock she’d met at her strip club, and now she was pregnant with his baby. Though she had no plans to marry him, she wanted to keep the child. Her biological alarm clock was still ringing.
    “I’m trying to look at this objectively,” Mystery said, straddling a chair at the breakfast table that no one used. “I’m not angry. But I am hurt. It makes me want to kill the baby and kill him.”
    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. You read them, and you understand why women tend to like jerks, why men want so many sexual partners, and why so many people cheat on their spouses. At the same time, however, you understand that the violent impulses most of us successfully repress are actually normal and natural. For Mystery, a Darwinist by nature, these books gave him an intellectual justification for his antisocial emotions and his desire to harm the organism that had mated with his woman. It was not a healthy thing.
    Tyler Durden walked into the kitchen and saw Mystery moping at the table.
    “You know what you need to do?” he told Mystery. “You need to sarge.”
    Sarging was Tyler Durden’s solution for everything: He truly believed in it. Picking up women could cure all problems—depression, inertia, animosity, colitis, lice. Though I’d moved into the house to build a lifestyle, for Tyler Durden sarging was the only way to live. He never went on dates. Instead he brought women to the clubs on Sunset, and then usually ditched them to pick up more girls.
    “You need to get out of the house,” Tyler continued. “Go out with Style tonight. You guys have super-tight game. You can find a new girlfriend twice as hot as Patricia.”
    Next, the virgin brothers came into the kitchen, with their sister Minand a shaven-headed PUA in tow. It seemed like wherever I was during the convention, a small group gathered, and I wound up holding court.
    “You had the best presentation of the day,” the bald PUA said. “You were so gentle and elegant with those girls. It was like watching a beautifully choreographed dance.”
    “Thanks, man. What’s your name?”
    “I’m Stylechild.”
    For the first time in months, I was speechless.
    “I named myself after you.”
    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. And I made the conscious decision not to game her, because that’s what all the other guys at the seminar were doing. Besides the girls I had used in my presentation, she had been the only woman in the house all weekend.
    That night at the Saddle Ranch, Min’s eyes were still burning a hole in my head. I had to say something—but it couldn’t be anything she’d read online or heard from her brothers.
    “Listen,” I finally told her. “I’m about to sign up to ride the mechanical bull. Why don’t you join me?”
    It wasn’t a line: I still had designs on that mechanical bull. In many ways, it reminded me of the game. It had eleven settings, from ridiculously easy to fiendishly difficult. 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. So far, I’d only made it to ten.
    It was a completely pointless ambition, with no practical application whatsoever. But if you sit the