The Game

during the night came by to flirt, Lisa and I drew on their arms with pens or fed them shots of Hypnotiq or gave them intelligence tests that they usually failed. This is what the PUAs call creating an “our world” conspiracy. We were in our own little bubble, where we were king and queen, and everyone else was our plaything for the night.
    When a phalanx of paparazzi started taking pictures of Dennis Rodman, who was standing nearby, I looked at Lisa’s face, illuminated by the flashbulbs. And out of nowhere, my heart awoke from its torpor and bodychecked my chest.
    When the party broke up, Lisa put her arm around me and asked, “Will you take me home? I’m too drunk to drive.” My heart slammed again, and then settled into a fast, arrhythmic throb. She may have been too drunk to drive, but I was too nervous to drive.
    Without waiting for a response, she dropped the keys to her Mercedes into my hand. I called to Herbal and asked him to drive my car home. “I can’t believe it,” I told him. “It’s on!”
    But it wasn’t on.
    I drove Lisa back to her place. I recognized the building: It was directly across the street from the Hollywood Mental Health Center where I had taken Mystery. When we arrived, she went to the bathroom. I lay down on her bed and tried to look relaxed.
    Lisa padded out of the bathroom, looked at me, and then said, with a withering look, “Don’t think anything’s going to happen between us.”
    Damnit, I’m Style. You have to love me. I’m an mPUA.
    She changed, and we drove to my house to look for Courtney. All we found there, however, was Tyler Durden leading ten men in the living room through some sort of exercise that involved running around the couches, yelling loudly, and giving each other high fives. Tyler had been experimenting lately with a technique of physically pumping up his students’ mood for a night out meeting women. He believed that whether or not they actually performed better, the shot of adrenaline and camaraderie would makethem think they had fun, and thus give Real Social Dynamics good reviews in the seduction newsgroups. It was becoming a competitive industry.
    Courtney seemed to have disappeared again. Maybe she’d been serious the other night and really was getting help, or maybe she was off getting into more trouble.
    I took Lisa up to my room, lit some candles, put Cesaria Evora in the CD player, and went to my closet.
    “Let’s have some fun,” I told her.
    I pulled out a garbage bag full of old Halloween costumes: masks, wigs, hats. We tried them all on, taking photos with my digital camera. I was going to attempt the digital photo routine.
    We took a photo smiling, then serious. For the third photo, the romantic pose, we gazed at each other. Her eyes seemed so happy. Behind that tough exterior was vulnerability and tenderness.
    I held her eye contact and moved toward her for the kiss, holding the camera in front of us to capture it.
    “I’m not kissing you,” she barked.
    The words scalded my face like hot coffee. There was no girl I couldn’t kiss within half an hour of meeting her. What was her problem?
    I froze her out and tried again. Nothing.
    It is in these moments that, as a PUA, you start to question the work you’ve done on yourself. You begin to worry that maybe she sees the real you, the one who existed before the silly nickname, the one who wrote poems about this exact situation in high school.
    I delivered a moving, impassioned performance of the evolution phase-shift routine. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a thousand PUAs applauding.
    “I’m not biting you,” she said.
    I wasn’t through. I told her the most beautiful love story ever written: “On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” by Haruki Murakami. It is about a man and a woman who are soul mates. But when they doubt their connection for a moment and decide not to act on it, they lose each other forever.
    She was ice cold.
    I tried a hardcore freeze-out: I blew out the candles, stopped the music, turned on the lights, and checked my e-mail.
    She climbed into my bed, curled up under the covers, and went to sleep.
    Finally I joined her, and we slept on opposite sides of the bed.
    I still had one trick left: going caveman. In the morning, without a word, I started massaging her leg, working my hand slowly up her thigh. If I could just turn her on physically, her logic would disengage and she would no doubt submit.
    My intention