The Game

Extramask’s house, where he lived with his parents.
    “I’m confused,” I told him. “I thought you said they did guys together.”
    “Yeah, but I was just joking around. I thought you knew.”
    Extramask had a date the following week with the moon-faced woman he’d been talking to at the party. Women with wide faces seemed to find him attractive.
    We lay on the floor for two hours talking about the game and our progress. Since adolescence, whenever I’d had the opportunity to make a wish (on an eyelash, a digital clock at 11:11, an ever-increasing number of birthday candles), thrown in with the usual pleas for world peace and personal happiness, I’d ask for the ability to attract any woman I wanted. I had fantasized about an incredible seductive energy entering my body like a lightning bolt, suddenly making me irresistible. But instead it was coming in a slow drizzle and I was running around underneath it with a bucket, working to catch each drop.
    In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out. Usually, what you wish for doesn’t fall in your lap; it falls somewhere nearby, and you have to recognize it, stand up, and put in the time and work it takes to get to it. This isn’t because the universe is cruel. It’s because the universe is smart. It has its own cat-string theory and knows we don’t appreciate things that fall into our laps.
    I would have to pick up my bucket and work.
    So I took Mystery’s advice. I got Lasik surgery, shedding my nerdy glasses once and for all. I paid to get my teeth laser-whitened. And I joined a gym and took up surfing, which was not only a cardiovascular workout but also a way to get tan. In some respects, surfing reminded me of sarging. Some days you go out and catch every wave and think you’re a champ; other days you don’t get one good wave and you think you suck. But no matter what, every day you go out and you learn and you improve. And that’s what keeps you coming back.
    However, I hadn’t joined the community just to get a makeover. I needed to complete my mental transformation, which I knew would be much more difficult. Before Belgrade, I had taught myself the words, skills, and body language of a man of charisma and quality. Now I needed to develop the confidence, self-worth, and inner game to back it up. Otherwise, I’d just be a fake, and women would sense it instantly.
    I had two months off until my next workshop with Mystery in Miami, and I wanted to really blow away the students there. I aimed to outdo Mystery’s sarge at Club Ra in Belgrade. So I gave myself an assignment: to meet, in the next few months, every top PUA there was. I planned to make myself a seducing machine, designed from pieces of all the best PUAs. And now that I had some status in the community as Mystery’s new wing, it would be easy to meet them.

The first person I wanted to learn from was Juggler. His posts intrigued me. He advised AFCs to overcome their shyness by trying to talk a homeless person into giving them a quarter or by calling people randomly out of the phone book to ask for movie recommendations. He told others to challenge themselves and intentionally make pickups more difficult by saying they worked as trash collectors and drove ‘86 Impalas. He was an original. And he had just announced his first workshop. The cost: free.
    One of the reasons Juggler rose so quickly in the community, besides his competitive pricing was his writing: His posts had flair. They weren’t the disorganized scrawlings of a high school senior in perpetual conflict with his testosterone. So when I called Juggler to discuss using a field report of his in the book, he asked if he could write something new instead: the story of the day he sarged me at his first workshop in San Francisco.
FIELD REPORT—THE SEDUCTION OF STYLE
BY JUGGLER
    I clicked off the cell phone. “Style talks really fast,” I said to my housemate’s cat, who understands these things and was my longstanding partner in crime when it came to getting girls to the house. (The offer of, “Want to come back to my place and watch the cat do back flips?” hardly ever failed.)
    That was my first impression of Style’s real life persona. Two weeks later I sat in a restaurant in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf waiting for Style to arrive, mentally tallying a list of crazy things that could be wrong with him. I ignored the waiter who was trying to upgrade my beer and