The Game

them down; in a few cases, he has even threatened to reveal a young competitor’s online seduction activities to his parents or school administration.
    Worse than Mystery, in his mind, was a former Speed Seduction student named David DeAngelo. Originally, DeAngelo called himself Sisonpyh—hypnosis spelled backward—and worked his way into the Speed Seduction hierarchy. But the two of them had a falling out when Ross supposedly hypnotized a girlfriend of DeAngelo’s into fooling around with him.
    According to Ross, DeAngelo had brought the girl to him to seduce. It wasn’t uncommon, he said, for students to bring him women as a sacrifice of sorts. According to DeAngelo, Ross was in no way given permission to touch the girl. Whatever the case, the result was that the two stopped speaking and DeAngelo set up a rival business called Double Your Dating. It was based not on NLP or any other form of hypnosis, but rather on evolutionary psychology and DeAngelo’s principle of cocky funny.
    “You know, my cheapjack imitator David DeAnushole is having his first seminar in L.A.,” Ross said. “The guy is so fucking good-looking and well-connected in the nightclub scene it just astounds me that people think he could ever understand their situation and the difficulties they encounter in dealing with women.”
    I made a mental note to sign up for the seminar.
    “There’s a certain view of women that David DeAnushole, Gun Bitch, and Misery have,” Ross continued, working himself into a rage. “These guys are focusing on the worst tendencies of some of the worst women out there and spreading it like a cloud of fertilizer on all women.”
    Ross reminded me of an old rhythm-and-blues artist who has been ripped off so much that he trusts no one. But at least there are publishing companies and copyrights in place to protect songwriters. There is no way to copyright a woman’s arousal, to declare certain authorship over her choice of a partner. His paranoia, sadly, made sense—especially when it came to Mystery, the only seducer with the ideas and skills to supplant him.
    The waiter cleared our pasta. “I am so passionate about this because I care about these kids,” Ross was saying. “I think that 20 percent of my students have been abused. They have been severely impacted. Not just with women but with all people, male and female. And a lot of problems in society come from the fact that we all have such strong drives, but live in a culture that discourages us from exploring them freely.”
    He turned around and noticed three businesswomen eating dessert a few tables away. He was about to freely explore his sex drive.
    “How’s that berry cobbler?” Ross yelled at them.
    “Oh, it’s good,” one of the woman replied.
    “You know,” Ross said to them, “people have signal systems for dessert.” He was off and running. “The signals say: This is sugar-free; this melts in my mouth. And the signal system fires up your body’s responsiveness to get ready for what comes next. It’s tracing an energy flow through your body.”
    He had the women’s attention now. “Really?” they asked.
    “I teach courses in energy flow,” Ross told them. The women ooohed in unision. The word energy is the equivalent of the smell of chocolate to most women in Southern California. “We were just talking about whether men really understand women. And we think we’ve figured it out.”
    In a flash, he was at their table. As he spoke, the women forgot completely about their dessert and stared at him rapt. I couldn’t tell sometimes if his patterns really worked on the sophisticated subconscious level he claimed, or if most conversations were so boring that simply saying something different and intriguing was enough to trigger attraction.
    “Oh my God,” one of the women said when he finished running a pattern about the qualities women look for in a man. “I’ve never heard it said like that before. Where do you teach? I’d love to know more.”
    Ross collected her phone number and returned to the table. He turned to me, smiled, and said, “Now do you see who’s teaching the true way?”
    Then he rubbed his thumb on his chin.

In Sin’s eyes, I was a pawn.
    “Ross is a seductionist and a plotter,” he said when I called him in Montgomery, Alabama, where he’d been stationed. He was living with a girl he’d met who liked being taken out on the end of a leash and collar. Unfortunately, the military frowned on such