The Game

night, helped convince DeAngelo to spend three weeks turning his manifesto into an e-book, Double Your Dating.
    While we were talking, Rick H. joined us. He was one of the friends DeAngelo had cultivated and was now his roommate in the Hollywood Hills. I’d heard a lot about Rick H. He was supposed to be the best, a master PUA who specialized in bisexual women. His garish style of dress, like that of a Vegas lounge lizard, was one of the inspirations for Mystery’s peacock theory.
    Rick H. was short, slightly stocky, and dressed in a large-collared shirt and a red blazer. Trailing behind him were six attraction adepts eager to soak up his wisdom. I recognized two of them: Extramask, whose eyes were swollen nearly shut, and Grimble, who was beginning to have doubts about his application of Speed Seduction. Hypnotizing women into being groped in clubs wasn’t getting him any girlfriends. So after spending time with Rick H., Grimble had turned cocky funny. His new approach was to stick his elbow out whenever a woman walked past, bump her, and then yell “owwww” loudly, as if she’d hurt him. When she stopped, he’d accuse her of grabbing his ass. It was much more rewarding, he realized, to be funny in a bar than creepy.
    Rick took a seat at the table and spread himself out comfortably. While students crammed around him, he began holding court.
    He had two rules for women, he said.
    The first: No good deed goes unpunished. (A phrase, ironically, that was coined by a woman, Clare Boothe Luce.)
    The second: Always have a better answer.
    One of the corollaries of Rick’s second rule was to never give a woman a straight answer to a question. So if a woman asks what you do for a living, keep her guessing: Tell her you’re a cigarette lighter repairman or a white slave trader or a professional hopscotch player. The first time I tried this, it didn’t go so well. In a five-set in a hotel lobby one night, a woman asked what my job was. I told her the response I had written on my cheat sheet for the night: white slave trader. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized I probably wasn’t going to get a number-close. Everyone in the set was African-American.
    One thing I noticed as Rick talked was that people who liked the sound of their own voice tended to do better with women—except for soft-spoken Dustin. Cliff, of Cliff’s List, called it big mouth theory.
    “Why is this shit so fun to talk about?” Rick H. asked DeAngelo.
    “Because we’re guys,” DeAngelo said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
    “Oh, yeah,” Rick said. “That’s what we do.”
    When the gurus left, I sat with Extramask. He was sipping apple juice from a small can. He had a barbell-shaped piercing in the back of his neck now and if it weren’t for his swollen eyes, he would have been the coolest looking guy at the seminar.
    “What happened to you?” I asked.
    “I went out with that moon-faced girl and got my second lay ever,” he said. “But even though we fucked three times, I didn’t blow my load again. Either condoms fucking suck or I have mental anxiety and need to calm down—or Mystery’s right and I’m a homo.”
    “But what does that have to do with your eyes? Did she punch you?”
    “No, she had a feather pillow or some shit, and I got an eye infection because of my allergies.”
    He said he met her for coffee. They sat together and he ran the ESP test, a psychological game called the cube, and other demonstrations of value. When she started laughing at all his jokes—even the ones that weren’t funny—he knew she liked him. They rented the movie Insomnia, went back to her house, and cuddled together on the couch.
    “I had a pretty legit boner going on,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You know, that kind of rock-hardness where you get the pre-cum dabbing your Underoos.”
    “I know. Do go on.”
    “And it was cool because one of her legs was pressed up against my juicy, rock-hard cock. She definitely felt the hardness. I took off my shirt, and she started kissing me and feeling my chest. It was cool.” He paused and took a sip of apple juice through a narrow straw. “Then I took her shirt off, so she was wearing just a bra. I felt her boobies. But when we went to the bedroom, I had a problem.”
    “An erection problem?”
    “No. She still had her bra on.”
    “So what’s the problem? Just take it off.”
    “I have no clue how to take off bras. So I just left it on.”
    “I guess