The Game

confident, intelligent, and socially comfortable. I knew that in order to become a pickup artist myself, I would somehow have to internalize everything I had seen Mystery do. This would happen only through practice—through hitting the bars and clubs every night until I became a natural like Dustin, or even an unnatural like Mystery.
    The day my report on the workshop hit the Internet, I received an e-mail from someone in Encino nicknamed Grimble, who identified himself as a Ross Jeffries student. He wanted to “sarge” with me, as he put it. Sarging is pickup artist jargon for going out to meet women; the term evidently has its origin in the name of one of Ross Jeffries’s cats, Sargy.
    An hour after I sent him my phone number, Grimble called. More than Mystery, it was Grimble who would initiate me into what could only be described as a secret society.
    “Hey, man,” he said, in a conspiratorial hiss. “So what do you think of Mystery’s game?”
    I gave him my assessment.
    “Wow, I like it,” he said. “But you have to hang out with Twotimer and me some time. We’ve been sarging with Ross Jeffries a lot.”
    “Really? I’d love to meet him.”
    “Listen. Can you keep a secret?”
    “Sure.”
    “How much technology do you use in your sarges?”
    “Technology?”
    “You know, how much is technique and how much is just talking?”
    “I guess fifty-fifty,” I said.
    “I’m up to 90 percent.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah, I use a canned opener, then I elicit her values and find out her trance words. And then I go into one of the secret patterns. Do you know the October Man sequence?”
    “Never heard of it, unless Arnold Schwarzenegger was in it.”
    “Oh, man. I had a girl over here last week, and I gave her a whole new identity. I did a sexual value elicitation, and then changed her whole timeline and internal reality. Then I brushed my finger along her face, telling her to notice”—and here he switched to a slow, hypnotic voice—“how wherever I touch…it leaves a trail of energy moving through you…and whereveryou can feel this energy spreading…the deeper you want to allow your-self…to feel these sensations…becoming even more…intense.”
    “And then what?”
    “I brushed my finger along her lips, and she started sucking it,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Full-close!”
    “Wow,” I said.
    I had no idea what he was talking about. But I wanted this technology. I thought back to all the times I’d taken women to my house, sat on the bed next to them, leaned in for the kiss, and been deflected with the “let’s just be friends” speech. In fact, this rejection is such a universal experience that Ross Jeffries invented not just an acronym for it, LJBF, but a litany of responses as well. 3
    I talked to Grimble for two hours. He seemed to know everybody—from legends like Steve P., who supposedly had a cult of women paying cash for the privilege of sexually servicing him, to guys like Rick H., Ross’s most famous student, thanks to an incident that involved him, a hot tub, and five women.
    Grimble would make a perfect wing.
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    3 One such response from Jeffries is, “I don’t promise any such thing. Friends don’t put each other into boxes like that. The only thing I’ll promise is never to do anything unless you and I both feel totally comfortable, willing, and ready.”

I drove to Grimble’s house in Encino the following night to go sarging. This would be my first time in the field since Mystery’s workshop. It would also be my first time hanging out one-on-one with a stranger I’d met online. All I really knew about him was that he was a college student and he liked girls.
    When I pulled up, Grimble strode outside and flashed a big smile that I didn’t quite trust. He didn’t seem dangerous or mean. He just seemed slippery, like a politician or a salesman or, I suppose, a seducer. He had the complexion of barley tea, though he was actually German. In fact, he claimed to be a descendent of Otto von Bismarck. He wore a brown leather jacket over a silver floral-print shirt, which was unbuttoned to reveal an eerily hairless chest thrust out further than his nose. In his hands was a plastic bag full of videotapes, which he dumped into the back of my car. He reminded me of a mongoose.
    “These are some of Ross’s seminars,” he said. “You’ll really like the DC seminar, because he gets into synesthesia there. The other tapes are from Kim and Tom”—Ross’s