The Game

clingy and needy and blows it. And, sure enough, I blew it.
    The next night, Lisa left town to play a festival in Atlanta with Courtney. She called three times while she was gone.
    “Are you free for dinner when I get back?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I told her. “It depends on whether you can behave yourself or not.”
    “Fine, then,” she said. “If you’re going to be like that, I don’t need to go.”
    I was just trying to tease her and bust her balls, like David DeAngelo had taught me. And in doing so, I had destroyed the moment. I sounded like an asshole.
    “Don’t be a troublemaker,” I said. It was time to be straightforward. “I want to see you when you’re back. I’m leaving town for two weeks, so it will be our last chance to hang out.”
    In the background, I could hear Sam speaking. “You’re talking to him like he’s your boyfriend,” she told Lisa.
    “Maybe I want him to be my boyfriend,” Lisa said to her.
    So I hadn’t been LJBF’ed. I couldn’t wait for her to come back. I wanted her to be my girlfriend too.
    I spent the entire day of Lisa’s return plotting the perfect seduction. I would pick her up from the airport in the limo. Herbal would drive, and I would wait for her in the backseat. Then I’d take her to the Whiskey Bar at the Sunset Marquis Hotel—walking distance from Project Hollywood.
    Because women don’t respect guys who pay for them but at the same time are turned off by guys who are cheap, I went to the Whiskey Bar ahead of time, gave the manager $100, and told him to make sure whatever we ordered was on the house. Afterward, I planned to take her home. On mycomputer, I wrote down all the patterns and routines I would use to combat her LMR. Now that I knew she liked me, I had the confidence to push this thing to the end.
    If she still resisted, then she clearly had intimacy issues and I’d have to be the one to LJBF her.
    Her flight was scheduled to arrive at 6:30 P.M . As Herbal drove the limo past the Delta terminal looking for her, I mixed Cosmopolitans at the bar in the back of the car.
    When the flight arrived, however, she wasn’t on it.
    I was confused, but not disappointed—yet. A PUA must be willing to change or abandon any plan when confronted with the chaos and chance of reality. So Herbal drove me home, and I left a message for Lisa.
    When she didn’t call back, I left another message and then waited all night in vain to hear from her.
    At five o’clock that morning, I was awakened by my cell phone ringing.
    “Sorry to wake you up, but I need to talk to someone.” The voice on the other end was a man’s. The accent was Australian. It was Sweater.
    Since I’d last seen Sweater, he had left the community and gotten married. I thought about him often. Every time someone asked if guys in the community were learning these skills just to have sex with as many women as possible, I pointed to Sweater as an example of someone who had gotten into the game for all the right reasons.
    “I tried to kill myself today,” he said.
    “What happened?”
    “My wife is expecting our first baby in ten days, and I’m miserable. I do everything for her, but it’s not enough. She’s driven me away from my friends. My business partner is leaving me. She spends all my money and all she does is complain.” He paused to choke back his tears. “And now that she’s having this baby, I’m trapped.”
    “But you were in love with her. How can she just change?”
    “No. The problem is that I changed. It was too hard to be that person who Mystery and David DeAngelo taught us to be. That person wasn’t a good guy. And that’s not the kind of person I wanted to be. I like doing nice things for people. So I got her whatever she wanted. I sent her flowers three times a week. I tried it her way, but it didn’t work.”
    I’d never heard grown men cry as much as I had in the last two years. “I sat in the garage today with the motor running and the windows up,” hecontinued. “I haven’t thought of suicide since 1986. But I just got to the point where I was like, ‘Fuck.’ I didn’t see any purpose in living.”
    Sweater didn’t need to be saved. He just wanted a friend to talk to. He had pretended to be someone he wasn’t just to seduce a woman, and now he was suffering the consequences.
    “When I first got in the community, I wrote down everything I wanted,” he said. “And now I’m living the life I imagined. I have the money, the big