The Game

effective.”
    Ross’s face turned purple. “Stop!” he said. It was a hypnosis word, a pattern interrupt. “Do not share anything with him. I don’t want that guy taking my best work, stealing it, and making money off it. This is disturbing.” He stabbed a fork into his chicken. “I knew something was wrong. If you’re going to be this deeply involved with Mystery, then I’m going to have a problem. If you’re going to learn privately with me, I forbid you from telling him the details.”
    “Listen,” I tried to appease the angry guru. “I haven’t told him anything in detail. I just let him know that you were the real deal.”
    “Fine, then. Just tell him you saw me get a chick hot as hell and wetting her panties just by asking a couple of questions and making some gestures. Let the arrogant fuck figure it out for himself!”
    I watched his nostrils flare and the veins in his forehead bulge as hespoke. He was clearly a guy who’d been beaten down early in life. Not by the brutality of his father like Mystery; Ross’s parents were a smart, goodhumored Jewish couple. I knew because they’d arrived at the seminar a few minutes after me and instantly started teasing him. Rather, Ross had been beaten down socially, which probably took a great toll on his psyche when combined with the constant teasing and high expectations of his parents. His siblings must have been overwhelmed as well. His two brothers had turned to God and became Jews for Jesus. As for Ross, he had turned to to a religion of his own making.
    “You are being led into the inner sanctum of power, my young apprentice,” he warned, wiping the gray stubble on his chin with the back of his hand, “and the price for betrayal is dark beyond measure of your mortal mind. Keep quiet and keep your promises, and I will keep opening the door.”
    Ross’s severity and anger, though unconscionable, were understandable. The fact was that Ross had built the seduction community almost single-handedly. Sure, there’d always been a stable of men giving pickup advice, like Eric Weber, whose book How to Pick Up Girls helped start the trend that culminated in the movie The Pick-Up Artist with Molly Ringwald and Robert Downey Jr. But there had never been a community of guys before Ross. The reason was fortuitous timing. As Speed Seduction was developing, so was the Internet.
    In his twenties, by all accounts, Jeffries was an angry man. His ambition was stand-up comedy and screenwriting. One of his scripts, They Still Call Me Bruce, was even produced, but it flopped. So Jeffries drifted between paralegal jobs, lonely and girlfriendless. That all changed when he was in the self-help section of a bookstore and his hand, he claims, involuntarily reached out and grabbed a book. That tome was Frogs Into Princes, the classic book on NLP by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Ross went on to devour every book on the subject he could find.
    One of his heroes had always been the Green Lantern, who was endowed with a magic ring able to bring the desires of his will and imagination to life. After using NLP to end a long streak of involuntary chastity by seducing a woman who’d applied for a job in the law office where he worked, Ross Jeffries believed he had found that ring. The power and control that had eluded him his whole life was finally his.
    His professional pickup career began with a seventy-page self-published book. The title pretty much summed up where he was coming from emotionally at the time— How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed: A Down and Dirty Guide to Dating and Seduction for the Man Who’s Fed Up With Being Mr. Nice Guy. He sold the book through small classified ads in the back of Playboy and Gallery. When he added seminars to his repertoire, he began marketing on the Internet as well. One of his students, a legendary computer hacker named Louis DePayne, soon created the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast. Out of that forum, an international cabal of PUAs gradually came into being.
    “When I first came out with this stuff, I was savagely ridiculed,” Ross said. “I was called every name in the book and accused of the worst things. I was really angry for a while. Very pissed off. But gradually the argument went from ‘Is this real?’ to ‘Should they be doing it?’”
    And that is why every guru owes at least a pledge of allegiance to Ross Jeffries. He laid the groundwork. It’s also why every time new teachers pop up, Ross tries to shoot