The Game

someone, I can do something about it.”
    I stepped on the accelerator.
    Our destination was the Hollywood Mental Health Center on Vine Street. It was an ugly slab of concrete surrounded day and night by homeless men who screamed at lampposts, transvestites who lived out of shopping carts, and other remaindered human beings who set up camp where free social services could be found.
    Mystery, I realized, was one of them. He just happened to have charisma and talent, which drew others to him and prevented him from ever being left alone in the world. He possessed two traits I’d noticed in nearly every rock star I’d ever interviewed: a crazy, driven gleam in his eyes and an absolute inability to do anything for himself.
    I brought him into the lobby, signed him in, and together we waited for a turn with one of the counselors. He sat in a cheap black plastic chair, staring catatonically at the institutional blue walls.
    An hour passed. He began to fidget.
    Two hours passed. His brow furrowed; his face clouded.
    Three hours passed. The tears started.
    Four hours passed. He bolted out of his chair and ran out of the waiting room and through the front door of the building.
    He walked briskly, like a man who knew where he was going, although Project Hollywood was three miles away. I chased him across the street and caught up to him outside a mini-mall. I took his arm and turned him around, baby talking him back into the waiting room.
    Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty. He was up and out again.
    I ran after him. Two social workers stood uselessly in the lobby.
    “Stop him!” I yelled.
    “We can’t,” one of them said. “He’s left the premises.”
    “So you’re just going to let a suicidal man walk out of here?” I couldn’t waste time arguing. “Just have a therapist ready to see him if I get him back here.”
    I ran out the door and looked to my right. He wasn’t there. I lookedleft. Nothing. I ran north to Fountain Avenue, spotted him around the corner, and dragged him back again.
    When we arrived, the social workers led him down a long, dark hallway and into a claustrophobic cubicle with a sheet-vinyl floor. The therapist sat behind a desk, running a finger through a black tangle in her hair. She was a slim Asian woman in her late twenties, with high cheekbones, dark red lipstick, and a pinstriped pantsuit.
    Mystery slumped in a chair across from her.
    “So how are you feeling today?” she asked, forcing a smile.
    “I’m feeling,” Mystery said, “like there’s no point to anything.” He burst into tears.
    “I’m listening,” she said, scrawling a note on her pad. The case was probably already closed for her.
    “So I’m removing myself from the gene pool,” he sobbed.
    She looked at him with feigned sympathy as he continued. To her, he was just one of a dozen nutjobs she saw a day. All she needed to figure out was whether he required medication or institutionalization.
    “I can’t go on,” Mystery went on. “It’s futile.”
    With a rote gesture, she reached into a drawer, pulled out a small package of tissues, and handed it to him. As Mystery reached for the package, he looked up and met her eyes for the first time. He froze and stared at her silently. She was surprisingly cute for a clinic like this.
    A flicker of animation flashed across Mystery’s face, then died. “If I had met you in another time and another place,” he said, crumpling a tissue in his hands, “things would have been different.”
    His body, normally proud and erect, curved like soggy macaroni in his chair. He stared glumly at the floor as he spoke. “I know exactly what to say and what to do to make you attracted to me,” he continued. “It’s all in my head. Every rule. Every step. Every word. I just can’t…do it right now.”
    She nodded mechanically.
    “You should see me when I’m not like this,” he continued slowly, sniffling. “I’ve dated some of the most beautiful women in the world. Another place, another time, and I would have made you mine.”
    “Yes,” she said, patronizing him. “I’m sure you would have.”
    She didn’t know. How could she? But this sobbing giant with the crumpled tissue in his hands was the greatest pickup artist in the world. That was not a matter of opinion, but fact. I’d met scores of the self-proclaimed best in the previous two years, and Mystery could out-game them all. It was his hobby, his passion, his calling.
    There was only one person