The Game

for the gallbladder,” Courtney Love said as she slammed an acupuncture needle into my leg.
    “Um, shouldn’t this be done by a licensed professional?”
    “I’ve been doing this since I was young,” she replied, “but you’re the first person I’ve done it to in a while.” She wiggled the needle around. “Tell me when you feel it.”
    There. An electric shock to the leg. Okay. Enough.
    My scheduled one-hour interview with Courtney Love had turned into a surreal slumber party. Outside of food runs, I didn’t leave her Chinatown loft for seventy-two hours. It was five thousand square feet with nothing in it but a bed, a television, and a couch.
    Dressed down in a T-shirt and sweatpants, she was in hiding: from the paparazzi, from her manager, from the government, from the bank, from a man, from herself. I was stripped down to my boxers on her couch, with a dozen needles sticking out of me. Over time the floor around her bed grew dense with crumbs, cigarette butts, clothing, food wrappers, needles, and root beer bottles; meanwhile, the color of her fingers and toes changed from flesh to blackened ash. She was too scared even to answer her phone, in case someone called her “with some bullshit news about some fucking thing.”
    It was just the two of us: journalist and rock star, player and playette.
    She put Boogie Nights into her DVD player, then climbed into her bed and threw a stained blanket over herself. “I always ask the guy I’m dating, ‘What’s your biggest fear?’ “ she said. “My last boyfriend said it’s drifting, which he’s doing now. The video director I’m currently obsessed with said failure. And I’m living mine: It’s loss of power.”
    Of all the problems in Courtney’s life, the one that seemed to consume her most was romantic. The video director wasn’t returning her calls. It was a problem common to all women, no matter what they looked like or how famous they were.
    “I have a theory,” she said. “You have to sleep with a guy three times forhim to fall in love with you. And I only slept with him twice. I need one more night to get him.”
    This director had captured her heart by playing push-pull. He’d walk her home, make out with her, and then tell her he couldn’t come inside. Whether by accident or design, he was following David DeAngelo’s technique of two steps forward and one step back.
    “If you want to get him,” I said, “read The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene. It’ll give you some strategy.”
    She stubbed her cigarette out on the floor. “I need all the help I can get.”
    The Art of Seduction was classic PUA reading material, along with Greene’s other book, The 48 Laws of Power. For the former, Greene studied the greatest seductions of history and literature in search of common themes. His book classified different types of seducers (among them rakes, ideal lovers, and naturals); targets (drama queens, rescuers, crushed stars); and techniques, all of which jibed with community philosophy (approach indirectly, send mixed signals, appear to be an object of desire, isolate the victim).
    “How do you know about that book?” she asked.
    “I’ve spent the last year and a half hanging out with the world’s greatest pickup artists.”
    She sat up in her bed. “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” she squealed like a schoolgirl. Talking about pickup was better than the alternative: Whenever the discussion veered toward her legal, media, and custody problems, her eyes filled with tears.
    She listened rapt as I told her about the community and Project Hollywood. It wasn’t easy to have a serious conversation with a dozen acupuncture needles sticking out of my body. “I want to meet them,” she said excitedly. “Do you think they’re as good as Warren Beatty?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never met him.”
    Courtney climbed out of bed and rubbed patchouli oil around the needles in my feet, legs, and chest. “Let me tell you, he’s smooth.”
    “I would love to know how he operates.”
    “He’s great. He once called me and said, ‘Hey, it’s me,’ as if I should have known who it was. Then he tried to convince me to come over to his house that night. When I finally say yes, he laughed and said he was in Paris. It’s a total mindfuck. He’ll blow his nose and then hand the dirty tissue to his date.”
    It was a neg. Warren Beatty negged women. Every PUA—whether he’s aware of it or not—uses the same principles. The difference