The Game

out with me as friends. They just wanted to listen and absorb and take notes. It was dehumanizing. But then again, no one in that house seemed entirely human to begin with.
    I needed to get out of there.
    Fortunately, Rolling Stone wanted me to tackle another tough subject. Her name was Courtney Love.
    The interview was scheduled to take place for one hour at the Virgin Records office in New York. Courtney was at the peak of her infamy at the time. That week she’d bared her breasts to David Letterman on network TV; appeared on the front page of the New York Post with one of her mammaries in the mouth of a stranger outside Wendy’s; and been arrested for allegedly hitting a fan in the head with a microphone stand during a concert. On top of all that, she was facing drug charges and had recently lost custody of her daughter. The Rolling Stone story was the first interview she’d agreed to do since all the trouble went down.
    When I met her at Virgin, Courtney was wearing a black dress with asash wrapped tastefully around her torso. Her lips were painted red and full. Considering the number of ugly tabloid headlines featuring her name, Courtney looked good—pale, thin, statuesque. Soon, however, the sash was loose and dangling behind her like a tail and the lipstick was smeared. It seemed like a metaphor for her life: constantly unraveling.
    “If you guys are waiting for me to die, you’re going to have to wait a long time,” she began. I was the press; I was the enemy. “My grandmother didn’t die until she was a hundred and two.”
    This is what PUAs call a bitch shield. It was nothing personal, just a protective mechanism. I couldn’t let it faze me. I had to get rapport and show her I was human, not just another bloodsucking journalist.
    “I still have nightmares about my grandmother,” I told her, “because the last time I had the chance to see her alive, we had plans to go to the Art Institute of Chicago. And I blew her off because I wanted to sleep late.”
    We fluffed for a while about our families. She didn’t like hers very much.
    Now we were getting somewhere.
    As the interview continued, I hit the hook point. She looked up at me and the walls came down. Her face flushed, the muscles in her cheeks clamped, and the tears started dripping. “I need to be saved,” she sobbed. “You need to save me.”
    Now we had rapport.
    Rapport equals trust plus comfort.
    When our hour was up, Courtney suggested exchanging phone numbers. She said she’d call me later that night to continue the interview. I was relieved, because an hour-long discussion in a record company office wouldn’t have made for a very interesting profile. At least Tom Cruise had taken me motorcycle-riding and Scientology-sightseeing.
    That night, I met some old college friends at Soho House, a private club in the meatpacking district of Manhattan. I hadn’t seen them since I’d joined the community, and they hardly recognized me. They spent a half hour discussing how awkward and introverted I used to be. Then their conversation turned to work and movies. I tried to contribute, but I had trouble focusing on the words. They just floated into my ear and accumulated there like wax. I felt like I didn’t fit in with them anymore. Fortunately, an Amazonian woman with tree-trunk thighs and a lethal boob-job soon stumbled past the table. She was a foot taller than me and somewhat drunk.
    “Have you seen a girl in a black cowboy hat?” she asked in a staccato German accent.
    “Hang out with us,” I said. “We’re more fun than your friends.”
    It was a line I’d learned from David DeAngelo. And it worked. My friends looked on in shock as she sat down and asked for a cigarette.
    For the rest of the night, the Amazon and I talked. Every now and then, she’d drag me to the bathroom, where I’d watch her inhale cocaine like a human Dustbuster.
    “Do you watch Sex in the City? ” she asked as we left the bathroom for the third time that night.
    “Sometimes,” I told her.
    “I just got a pearl,” she said, with Teutonic pride.
    “That’s great.” I had no idea what a pearl was.
    “It’s cool,” she said. “With those little beads.”
    “Oh, the beads. Those things are great.”
    I was totally confused. But I liked listening to her, enjoying the mismatch between her harsh accent and her spongy lips. Maybe she was talking about anal beads. Good for her.
    I stopped and leaned against the wall of the corridor we were walking