The Game

He must also avoid asking for it directly, because she could always say no, and instead lead her to suggest the idea herself.
    “I could give you my number,” she offered.
    She wrote down her name, followed by her number and e-mail address. I couldn’t believe it.
    “I don’t go out much, though,” she warned, as an afterthought. Maybe she was already having regrets.
    When I returned home, I pulled the scrap of paper out of my pocket and placed it in front of the computer. Since she was supposedly a model, I wanted to look for a picture of her online. She had only given me her first name, Dalene, but fortunately her e-mail address contained her last name, Kurtis. I typed the words into Google, and nearly a hundred thousand results came up.
    I had just number-closed the reigning Playmate of the Year.

I sat in front of my phone and stared at Dalene Kurtis’s number every evening. But I couldn’t bring myself to call. I wasn’t confident and goodlooking enough for this perfect specimen of femininity. I mean, what was I going to do on a date with her?
    I remember meeting a girl named Elisa for lunch at a summer job when I was seventeen. I was so nervous, I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking or my voice from quavering. And the more awkward I became, the more uncomfortable she grew. By the time the food arrived, I was too self-conscious even to chew in front of her. It was a disaster—and it wasn’t even a date. So what hope did I have with the Playmate of the Year?
    There’s a word for this: unworthiness. I felt unworthy.
    So I waited three days to call, then put it off to the next day, and then decided that calling on the weekend would sound like I had no social life, so I figured I’d call her Monday. And by then a week had passed. She’d probably forgotten about me. We’d talked for ten minutes at most, and it had been, admittedly, a soft close. I was just some weird, interesting guy she had met in an office-supply store. There was no reason this woman, who could have her choice of any man in the hemisphere, would want to see me again. So I never called.
    I was my own worst enemy.
    My first legitimate success didn’t come until a week later. Extramask, from Mystery’s workshop, dropped by my apartment in Santa Monica unannounced one Monday night. He was very excited because he’d just made a fascinating discovery.
    “I always used to think jerking off and pain came hand in hand,” he announced the moment I opened the door.
    Extramask looked different. He had dyed and spiked his hair, pierced his ears, and bought rings, a necklace, and punk-looking clothes. He actually appeared cool. In his hands, he had an Anthony Robbins book, Unlimited Power. We were clearly on the same path.
    “What are you talking about?” I asked.
    “Okay. I beat off, clean up, and then pull up my underwear, right?” He walked inside and flopped onto my couch.
    “I guess I follow.”
    “But what I didn’t realize until yesterday was that I still had cum in my penis hole. So I’d go to sleep, and the cum would harden in my cockhole. Then I’d wake up in the morning and take a pee, but the pee wouldn’t come out.” He put a hand on his crotch and wiggled it to illustrate the point. “So I’d push harder and a chunk of jizz would fly out of my penis and smash into the wall or some shit.”
    “You’re out of your mind.” I’d never experienced or even heard of this phenomenon before. Extramask was the strange result of a repressive Catholic education and an expansive stand-up comedy ambition. I could never tell if he was experiencing serious angst or just trying to entertain me.
    “It hurt like a fucker,” he continued. “It was so bad I even stopped jerking off for a week because I didn’t want the pain. But last night I squeezed that shit right out of the cock as soon as I blew a load.”
    “And now you can masturbate to your heart’s delight?”
    “Exactly,” he said. “And I haven’t even told you the good news yet.”
    “I thought that was the good news.”
    He raised his voice excitedly. “I can pee beside people now! It’s all about confidence. So the stuff I learned in Mystery’s workshop isn’t just for chicks after all.”
    “That’s true.”
    “It’s used for pissing too.”
    We drove to La Salsa for burritos. At a table nearby, there was an attractive but slightly unkempt woman stuffing receipts into a bulging Filofax. She had long, curly brown hair; tiny ferret-like features; and