The Game

perversions, so Sin had to drive all the way to Atlanta to walk her on the downlow.
    “You have a special place in Ross’s plans,” he warned. “You are the marketing tool he’s using to attack Mystery. You are Mystery’s first and best student, the only guy who’s sarging regularly with him. So every time Ross asks you a question like, ‘Are you lying to your guru?,’ and you answer, the presupposition that he’s your guru is affirmed. Every little thing he does is to prove you are a convert and you’ve disavowed your old religion to embrace the true one that actually works. That is his message. So be careful.”
    There was a catch to learning NLP, manipulation, and selfimprovement. No action—whether yours or another’s—was devoid of intent. Every word had a hidden meaning, and every hidden meaning had weight, and every weight had its own special place on the scale of selfinterest. However, as much as Ross may have been nurturing a friendship with me in order to crush Mystery, he also had a reputation for befriending younger students just so they’d take him to parties.
    I invited Ross to his first event the following week. Monica, a struggling but well-connected actress I’d sarged, had invited me to her birthday party at Belly, a tapas bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I thought it would be a good scene full of beautiful people for Ross to dazzle with his skills. I was wrong.
    I met Ross at his parents’ place, a middle-class red brick house on the west side of L.A. His father, a retired chiropractor, school principal, and self-published novelist, sat on a couch near his mother, who clearly wore the pants in the family. On the wall were a purple heart and a bronze star that Ross’s father had won during World War II in Europe.
    “Style’s very successful,” Ross told them. “He gets a lot of chicks using my material.” Even pickup artists in their forties still seek the approval of their parents.
    I talked to his mother for a while about her son’s line of work. “Some people think if he talks about sex and women, it’s terrible,” his mom said. “But he’s not crude and vulgar. He’s a very bright boy.” She stood up and ambled to a wall of shelving. “I have a book of poetry he wrote when he was nine years old. Do you want to read some of it? One of them says he’s a king and he’s on a throne.”
    “No, you don’t want to read that,” Ross interrupted. “Jesus Christ, this was a mistake. Let’s get going.”
    The party was a disaster. Ross couldn’t handle himself around classy people. He spent most of the night thinking he was flirting by acting as if he were my gay lover and crawling on all fours behind Carmen Electra, pretending to be a dog sniffing her ass. When I was talking to another girl, he interrupted to brag about a pickup he had just done. At 10:00 P.M., he said he was tired and demanded that I drive him home.
    “Next time, we should stay later,” I said.
    “No, next time we have to arrive at the right time,” he scolded me. “I can stay out late, provided I get about twelve hours notice so I can take it easy and nap in the afternoon.”
    “You’re not that old.”
    I made a mental note never again to take Ross anywhere cool. It was an embarrassment. Since I’d started spending so much time with PUAs, I’d lowered my standards for people I hung out with. All my old friends had fallen by the wayside. Now my social life was monopolized by a caliber of nerd I’d never associated with before. I was in the game to have more women in my life, not men. And though the community was all about women, it was also completely devoid of them. Hopefully, this was just part of the process, the way cleaning a house often makes it messier first.
    For the rest of the drive back to his apartment in Marina del Rey, Ross harangued me about his rivals. Of course, Ross’s detractors weren’t any kinder to him. They had recently nicknamed him Mine ‘99, claiming that whenever Ross took someone else’s tactic and made it his own, he liked to insist it was something he had developed at his 1999 Los Angeles seminar.
    “That traitorous creep David DeAnushole,” Ross seethed as I dropped him off. “His seminar is tomorrow, and I just found out some of my students are scheduled to speak. They didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know.”
    I didn’t have the heart to tell Ross that I’d be going also.

Attraction is not a choice.
    Those were the words David DeAngelo