The Game

be broken. He found feisty girls who were fun to play with. He didn’t see a path of random obstacles. He saw an opportunity to explore new territory. Together we were the Lewis and Clark of seduction.
    When the workshop ended at 3:00 A.M., Style and I decided to share a hotel room with some of his family who were in town. We talked in hushed voices so as not to wake them. I teased Style’s fashion sense. He made fun of my midwestern sensibilities. We shared stories from our experiences with the community and counted up the loot—a couple of kisses for Style, a couple of telephone numbers for me.
    The mood was giddy. We felt on the edge of something.
    “It’s really amazing, man,” Style said. “I can’t wait to see where all this leads.”
    He was so full of wide-eyed optimism in the power of pickup, in the benefits of self-improvement, in the belief that we—the community—had the answer to the problems that had plagued him his whole life. I wanted to tell him that the answer he was seeking lay elsewhere. But I never got around to it. We were having too much fun.

When I returned home from San Francisco, where the only person I spent the night with was Juggler, I received a phone call from Ross Jeffries.
    “I’m having a workshop this weekend,” he said. “If you want, you can come sit in for free. It’s at the Marina Beach Marriott hotel on Saturday and Sunday.”
    “Sure,” I told him. “I’d love to go.”
    “There’s just one thing: You owe me parties. Good Hollywood parties with hot chicks. You promised me.”
    “Got it.”
    “And, before we hang up, you can wish me a happy birthday.”
    “It’s your birthday?”
    “Yes, your guru of gash is forty-four. And my youngest this year was twenty-one.”
    I had no idea he was inviting me to his seminar not as a student, but as a conquest.
    I arrived on Saturday afternoon to find a standard hotel conference room, the kind that’s so brightly lit and mustard yellow it seems designed as a habitat more for salamanders than for human beings. Rows of men sat behind white rectangular tables, facing the front of the room. Some were greasy-haired students, others were greasy-haired adults, and a few were greasy-haired dignitaries—top-ranking officials at Fortune 500 companies and even the Justice Department. In the front was our porous, bony guru of gash, talking into a headset.
    He was telling the students about the hypnotic technique of using quotes in a conversation. An idea is more palatable, he explained as he paced the room, if it comes from someone else. “The unconscious thinks in terms of content and structure. If you introduce a pattern with the words, ‘My friend was telling me,’ the critical part of her mind shuts off. Do you follow me?”
    He looked around the room for a response. And that was when he noticed me, sitting in the back row between Grimble and Twotimer. He stopped speaking. I felt the heat of his glare on me. “Brothers, this is Style.”I smiled wanly. “He has seen what Mystery has to offer and decided to become my disciple. Isn’t that right, Style?”
    Every greasy head in the room turned to look at me. The reviews of Mystery’s Belgrade workshop had hit the Internet, and my skills in the field had been soundly praised. People were curious to meet Mystery’s new wing—or, in Ross’s case, to own him.
    I stared at the thin black headset coiling around his face like a spider. “Something like that,” I said.
    That was not enough for him. “Who is your guru?” he asked.
    It was his room. But it was my mind. I didn’t know what to say. Since the best way to deflect pressure is with humor, I tried to think of a joke response. I couldn’t come up with one.
    “I’ll get back to you on that,” I answered.
    I could see that he wasn’t happy with my response. After all, this wasn’t just a seminar he was running. It was a cult.
    When the meeting broke for lunch, Ross pulled me aside. “Why don’t you join me for some Italian?” he asked, twirling his ring, a replica of the one worn by the superhero Green Lantern.
    “I wasn’t aware that you were still a big supporter of Mystery,” he said over lunch. “I thought you had come over to the good side of the force.”
    “I don’t think your two methods have to be mutually exclusive. I told Mystery what you did with the waitress at California Pizza Kitchen, and he flipped out. I think for the first time, he saw how Speed Seduction could really be