The Game

advice.”
    I climbed out of the pool, threw a towel over my shoulders, and walked into the living room. Xaneus, Playboy, and Tyler Durden were sitting there. As soon as I entered, they walked up to Papa’s room without even acknowledging my presence. It was odd behavior, but nothing unexpected after living in Project Hollywood this long.
    I went up to my room, showered, and paged through a copy of the medieval legend Parsifal I had recently bought. People often read books to search for themselves and find someone who agrees with them. And, right now, the nature of Parsifal agreed with me a lot more than the nature of the scorpion.
    As I interpreted the legend, it’s the story of a sheltered mother’s boy who meets some knights and decides he wants to be just like them. So he goes off into the world, has a series of adventures, and progresses from legendary fool to legendary knight.
    The country, at the time, has become a wasteland because the grail king (who guards the holy grail) has been wounded. And it just so happens that Parsifal is led to the grail castle, where he sees the king in terrible pain. As a compassionate human being, he wants to ask, “What is wrong?” And, according to legend, if someone pure of heart asks that question of the king, he will be healed and the blight on the land will be lifted.
    However, Parsifal does not know this. And as a knight he has been trained to observe a strict code of conduct, which includes the rule of never asking questions or speaking unless he is addressed first. So he goes to bed without talking to the king. In the morning, he wakes to discover that the grail castle has disappeared. He has blown his chance to save king and country by obeying his training instead of his heart. Unlike the scorpion, Parsifal had a choice. He just made the wrong one.
    When I walked through the living room to get a drink from the kitchen, I saw Mystery nursing another cocktail in front of the TV. He was watching a video of The Karate Kid and crying. “I never had a Mr. Miyagi,” he sobbed, wiping tears off his reddened cheeks. He was drunk. “My dad didn’t teach me anything. All I wanted was a Mr. Miyagi.”
    I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we needed to win at life, the knightly code of conduct, the ways of the alphamale. That’s why we found each other. But a sequence of maneuvers and a system of behavior would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage.

Lisa and I spent the next day together, and the day after that, and the day after that. I kept worrying that I was going to ruin it, that we were spending too much time with each other, that she was going to get tired of me. Rick H. had always said, “Give her the gift of missing you.” But we couldn’t seem to part.
    “You are so perfect for me,” she said as we lay in my bed for the fourth night in a row. “I’ve never had sex with a guy I liked this much before. I’m afraid I’ll get attached.”
    Beneath that tough exterior, she was scared. All her push-pull wasn’t a pre-planned psychological tactic; it was her heart warring with her head. Perhaps the reason she’d been so reluctant to open up was that she was protecting something fragile inside. Like me, she was afraid to actually feel something for somebody else—to love, to be vulnerable, to give someone else control over her happiness and well-being.
    When I slept with all those other girls, I just had sex with them once a night—and, if I liked them enough, a second time in the morning. But something amazing happened with Lisa when we had sex for the first time. After I had an orgasm, it didn’t go down. It remained, as the old Extramask would say, rock-hard and luscious.
    I did it with her a second time.
    “Feel it,” I said afterward. It was still ready to go.
    We did it a third and a fourth time that night, and it never went soft. I couldn’t understand it. My dick, which I had thought was a completely mindless animal desperate to stick itself in any hole, actually responded to emotion. It had feelings too. And it wasn’t just built-up anticipation. It stayed up through three or four orgasms every time Lisa and I made love. We fucked in cars, in alleys, in restaurant bathrooms, and in the vendingmachine room in a hotel hallway, where a maintenance man caught us and tried to extort twenty dollars from me.
    When I’d gone impotent in the