The Game

would have to hide all that if he joined the military. But his mind was made up. “I was talking to Mystery about you,” he said, leaning low over the metal latticework of the table. His tone, as always, was deadly serious. “He wants to schedule his next workshop in December. Since I’m not going to be around to wing him, he wants you to do it.”
    As I thought of another weekend with Mystery and all his secrets, like the triple-stacked patterns he used to move girls to tears, I tried to control the excitement in my voice. “I think I’ll be free,” I said.
    Out of all the potential pickup artists in the world, I couldn’t believe that Mystery was choosing me. He must not know that many people.
    There was just one small problem: I wasn’t going to be free in December. I’d booked a flight to Belgrade to visit Marko, the schoolmate who had introduced me to Dustin and his natural ways. It was too late to cancel on Marko, but there was no way I was going to miss the opportunity to wing Mystery either.
    There had to be a solution.
    That night, I called Mystery in Toronto, where he was living with his parents, his two nieces, his sister, and her husband.
    “Hey, buddy,” Mystery said when he answered. “I’m bored out of my mind here.”
    “I find that hard to believe.”
    “Well, it’s raining and I want to go out. But I have no one to go out with and no clue where to go.” He paused to tell his nieces to shut up. “I’ll probably just get some sushi alone.”
    I’d assumed that the great Mystery would have girls lined up every night of the week and a wait-list of sargers eager to take him out clubbing. Instead, he was stagnating at home. His father was sick. His mother was overburdened. And his sister was separating from her husband.
    “Can’t you go out with Patricia?” I asked. Patricia was Mystery’s girlfriend, the one pictured in her negligee in his pickup resume.
    “She’s mad at me,” he said. Mystery had met Patricia four years ago, when she was fresh off the boat from Romania. He tried to mold her into his ideal girl—he talked her into getting a boob job, giving him blow jobs (which she’d never done before), and taking a job as a stripper—but she drew the line at bisexuality. For Mystery, this was a dealbreaker.
    Everyone has their own reason for getting into the game. Some, like Extramask, are virgins who want to experience what it’s like to be with a woman. Others, like Grimble and Twotimer, desire new girls every night. And a few, like Sweater, are searching for the perfect wife. Mystery had his own specific goal.
    “I want to be loved by two women,” he said. “I want a blonde 10 and an Asian 10, who will love each other as much as they love me. And Patricia’s heterosexuality is affecting my sex life with her, because unless I imagine another girl there, I can’t always keep my boner.” He moved the phone to another room because his sister and her husband were arguing, and continued, “I’d just break up with Patricia, but there aren’t any 10s in Toronto. No outrageous glitter girls. It’s all 7s, at best.”
    “Move to L.A.,” I urged. “This is where all the peacocky girls you like live.”
    “Yeah, I really need to get out of here,” he sighed. “So I want to schedule a bunch of workshops. I’ve got people interested in Miami, Chicago, and New York.”
    “How about Belgrade?”
    “What? Isn’t there a war going on there?”
    “No, the war’s over. And I have to visit an old friend. He said it’s safe. We can stay with him for free, and Slavic women are supposed to be the most beautiful in the world.”
    He hesitated.
    “And I have a free companion ticket.”
    Silence. He was considering it.
    I pushed further. “What the hell. It’s an adventure. At the very worst, you’ll have a new picture for your photo routine.”
    Mystery thought like a flowchart. And if he agreed to something, his assent was given instantly and always with the same word, which he spoke next: “Done.”
    “Great,” I said. “I’ll e-mail you the flight times.” I couldn’t wait for the six hour plane ride. I wanted to vacuum every piece of knowledge—every magic trick, every pickup line, every story—out of his head. I wanted to mimic exactly what I’d seen him do, word for word, trick for trick, simply because it worked.
    “But wait,” he said. “There’s something else.”
    “What?”
    “If you’re going to be my wing, you can’t be Neil Strauss,”