The Game

house, and the beautiful girl. But I wasn’t specific enough about the beautiful girl. I never wrote that she had to treat me with respect and kindness.”
    Later that morning, Courtney returned to the house. I could hear her screaming at Gabby in the living room.
    I walked downstairs to discover Courtney carrying Gabby’s bags out of the house, and I found myself saying the same three words that seemed to come out of my mouth every time I entered the living room: “What’s going on?”
    “Gabby got into a fight with Mystery, and she’s moving out,” Courtney said. “So I’m helping her.”
    Courtney could barely conceal her smile.
    “Did the rest of the band get back from Atlanta yet?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
    “Yeah. They came home on an earlier flight.”
    I turned away quickly. I knew if I said anything in response, my voice would betray my disappointment.
    After Gabby left, Courtney threw a bundle of sage on the coffee table. “Let’s clear the air in here,” she said. Then she skipped off to the kitchen, explaining, “We need some rice for good fortune.”
    Unable to locate any rice, she returned with a package of jambalaya mix and a bowl of water. She poured the jambalaya mix into the water, planted the sage in the middle of it, and then ran to her room. She emerged carrying a blue-and-white-checkered flannel shirt.
    “This will work,” she said. “It’s one of Kurt’s shirts. I only have three of them left.”
    She carefully arranged the shirt underneath the table, safe from harm, so that it could bring good energy to the house. After lighting the sage, she sat Mystery, Herbal, and me down next to her makeshift altar, and we joined hands. Her grip was bone-crushing.
    “Thank you God for this day and all that you have given us,” sheprayed. “We ask that you clear the energy of this house of all evil. Please bring peace and harmony and friendship under this roof. No more tears! And help me win my court case in New York and help clear up all my other problems. I will work with you, God. I really will. Give me strength. Amen.”
    “Amen,” we repeated.
    The next day, a driver came and whisked Courtney to the airport to go to New York. There, her prayers for herself would eventually be answered, but the atmosphere in the house would only grow darker in her absence. Courtney and Gabby, it soon became clear, weren’t the cause of any problems: They had merely been the symptoms of something much larger that was eating away at our lives.

That afternoon, Lisa left me a short voice mail. “Hi, it’s Lisa. I’m back. We took an earlier flight.” That was it. No apology, no tenderness, no mention of the plans she had completely blown off.
    I called her back, but she didn’t answer. “I’m leaving town in a few hours to go to Miami with Vision,” I told her voice mail. “I would really love to talk to you before I leave.” It was an AFC message, and I never heard back from her. I checked my voice mail every day while I was away. Nothing.
    I wasn’t a plower, like Tyler Durden. If she were interested, she would have called. I’d been blown off. And by the first woman I had felt something for in a while. I figured she’d probably started dating someone else, someone who had been able to break through her LMR.
    First I was angry at her, then I was angry at myself, and then I was just sad.
    The PUAs had always advised that the best way to get over a one-itis is to fuck a dozen other girls. So I went on a rampage.
    I didn’t want to end up like Sweater, anyway. I had almost let myself get caught.
    I went sarging every night in Miami, with more fire, drive, and success than I’d ever had. I’ve never been a fan of one-night stands. Once you’ve gotten that close to someone, why throw it away afterward? I’m more a fan of ten-night stands: ten nights of great sex, each one getting steamier, wilder, and more experimental as two people grow more comfortable together and learn what turns each other on. So after I slept with each woman, I mixed and matched them like jellybeans.
    It was my reality.
    The girls I was most looking forward to getting together were Jessica, a tattoo-covered twenty-one-year-old I’d slept with a few times in Los Angeles, and another Jessica, who I’d met at Crobar. She was also twenty-one, but the exact opposite of Jessica I. She was innocent looking, with a touch of baby fat. I knew they both liked porn, so I thought things might get