The Game

working for Mystery, and Papa keeps moving in guys I don’t really like.”
    “What’s Katya doing?”
    “She’s moving to Austin with me.” I suppose if Katya were using him solely for revenge, she would have dumped him by now.
    “Um, by the way, what should I do when your wallaby arrives?”
    “I’ve already arranged to have it sent to Austin.”
    Watching Herbal pack his possessions into the moving truck, I was struck by a much more profound sadness than when Mystery had left. With Mystery, I had lost a friend and former mentor. But I had thought that perhaps without the drama, the house could unite. However, between Tyler Durden’s plotting and Herbal’s imminent departure, Project Hollywood was truly dead.
    Outside of Papa and Tyler Durden, everyone seemed to be waking up from the spell the community had cast on them. Even Prizer—the sarger who had lost his virginity in Juarez—had stopped selling his pickup DVD course and become a born-again Christian. In his last post, he warned, “Snap out of your trance and stop handing your salary over to a bunch of losers who are only able to seduce gullible guys. There’s more to life than sarging.”
    If the stupidest sarger of us all had outgrown the community, what was I still doing here?
    Behind Herbal and me, a beer bottle shattered on the street, scatteringfragments of green glass everywhere. I looked up and saw a teenager with a dyed-blond Eminem crewcut and a white tanktop sitting on our steps.
    “Who’s that?”
    “I don’t know,” Herbal said. “He’s been staying up in Papa’s room.”
    I was alone here now. It was just me in my bedroom against the borg in the rest of the house trying to force me out. I was tired of fighting. I was tired of being disappointed in people. I didn’t need to be here anymore. Besides, I had a girlfriend.
    Still, I couldn’t help thinking, “If I was so smart, how did Papa end up with the house?”
    Lisa answered that question as we lay in bed together that night.
    “Because you didn’t want the house,” she said. “It’s not a life. It’s a subculture you dipped into. How could something be good that’s based on a false reality and a learned behavior? Walk away. These guys aren’t helping you anymore. They’re holding you back.”
    Watching The Wizard of Oz as a child, I was always disappointed when Glinda the Good Witch told Dorothy that she’d possessed the power to return home since the moment she had arrived in Oz. Now, twenty years later, I understood the message. I had possessed the power to leave the community all along, but I hadn’t reached the end of the road until now. I still believed that these guys had something I didn’t. Yet the reason all the gurus latched on to me—the reason Tyler Durden wanted to be me, even though he hated me—was that they thought I had something they lacked.
    We were all searching outside ourselves for our missing pieces, and we were all looking in the wrong direction. Instead of finding ourselves, we’d lost our sense of self. Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde 10 in a twoset at the Standard didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within.
    To win the game was to leave it.
    Even Extramask had discovered that. After staying at a Vipassana meditation center in Australia and an ashram in India, he was coming home to, as he put it in an e-mail to me, “the way things were before.”
    In the morning, I was awakened by noises downstairs. Three new recruits for Real Social Dynamics—replacements for Playboy, Sickboy, and Extramask—were hauling boxes from Ikea into Herbal’s room. Like those who came before them, they were former students turned interns and employees, working for free in exchange for pickup lessons and a closet tosleep in. They had quit their jobs; they had dropped out of school; they had left their hometowns for this.
    I sat in the living room in my boxer shorts and watched them as they worked. They were diligent. They were efficient. They were automatons. Wordlessly, they set up three bunk beds with matching sheets, blankets, and mattresses. Herbal’s room was being converted into a barracks to house this growing army. The troops would be sent to the Sunset Strip nightly to do battle—armed with my clothes, my stories, my mannerisms—while the generals in the bathroom plotted the last stages of their conquest of the community. Even Mystery’s Lounge would soon be theirs, with Mystery himself purged.
    There