The Game

he said with the same air of finality with which he had spoken the word done. “It’s time for you to change, to just snap and become someone else. Think about it: Neil Strauss, writer. That isn’t cool. Nobody wants to sleep with a writer. They’re at the bottom of the social ladder. You must be a superstar. And not just with women. You are an artist in need of an art. And I think your art is actually the social skills you’re learning. I watched you in the field; you adapted quickly. That’s why Sin and I picked you. Hold on a minute.”
    I heard him rustling through some papers. “Listen,” he said. “These are my personal development goals. I want to raise the money for a touring illusion show. I want to live in posh hotels. I want a limo to and from shows. I want specials on TV with big illusions. I want to levitate over NiagaraFalls. I want to travel to England and Australia. I want jewelry, games, a model airplane, a personal assistant, a stylist. And I want to act in Jesus Christ Superstar —as Jesus.”
    At least he knew what he wanted in life. “What I’m really after,” he finally said, “is for people to be envious of me, for women to want me and men to want to be me.”
    “You never got much love as a child, did you?”
    “No,” he replied sheepishly.
    At the end of the conversation, he said he was going to e-mail me the password to a secret online community called Mystery’s Lounge. He had created Mystery’s Lounge two years before, after an enterprising bartender he’d slept with in Los Angeles found an Internet post he’d written about her on a public seduction newsgroup. After spending a weekend poring through the rest of his online archive, she e-mailed Mystery’s girlfriend, Patricia, and told her about her boyfriend’s extracurricular activities. The fallout nearly destroyed his relationship, and in the process taught him that there was a downside to being a pickup artist: getting caught.
    Unlike the other seduction boards I had been reading, where hundreds of newbies were constantly begging for advice from just a few experts, Mystery had cherry-picked the best pickup artists in the community for his private forum. Here they not only shared their secrets, stories, and techniques, but also posted pictures of themselves and their women—even, on occasion, video and audio recordings of their exploits in the field.
    “But remember,” Mystery said sternly. “You are no longer Neil Strauss. When I see you in there, I want you to be someone else. You need a seduction name.” He paused and reflected: “Styles?”
    “How about Style?” That was one thing I prided myself on: I may never have been socially comfortable, but at least I knew how to dress better than those who were.
    “Style it is. Mystery and Style.”
    Yes, it was Mystery and Style giving a workshop. It had a nice ring to it. Style the pickup artist—teaching lovable losers how to meet the women of their dreams.
    But as soon as I hung up, I realized something: First, Style needed to teach himself. After all, it had only been a month since my workshop with Mystery. I still had a long way to go.
    It was time for a motherfucking change.

One of my teenage heroes was Harry Crosby. He was a poet from the 1920s, and, frankly, his poetry sucked. But his lifestyle was legendary. The nephew and godson of J. P. Morgan, he hobnobbed with Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence, was the first person to publish parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, and became a decadent symbol of the lost generation. He lived a fast, opium enhanced life, and swore he would be dead by the age of thirty. When he was twenty-two, he married Polly Peabody, the inventor of the strapless bra, and persuaded her to change her name to Caresse. For their honeymoon, they locked themselves in a bedroom in Paris with stacks of books and just read. At the age of thirty-one, when he realized that his lifestyle hadn’t killed him yet, Crosby shot himself.
    I didn’t have a Caresse to lock up with me, but I shut myself in the house for a week Harry Crosby-style, reading books, listening to tapes, watching videos, and studying the posts in Mystery’s Lounge. I immersed myself in seduction theory. I needed to shed Neil Strauss and rewire myself to become Style. I wanted to live up to Mystery and Sin’s faith in me.
    To do so, I’d have to change not just the things I said to women, but the way I acted around them. I needed to become confident, to become interesting, to