The Game

bring any piece of it back. See? You can’t.”
    I couldn’t tell whether it had worked or not, but I was reeling. He’d definitely taken my mind and body on some kind of one-minute trip.
    He took a step back and scanned my face, as if reading a diary. “A guy named Phoenix offered to pay me two thousand dollars to follow me around for three days,” Steve P. said. “And I told him no, because he wantsto make women his slaves. You seem like you may care about women: You don’t just want to stuff your meat bat in some hole. You’re willing to explore shit.”
    Suddenly, we heard a commotion behind us. Two sisters and their mother had made the mistake of walking down a hotel hallway full of pickup artists, and the vultures were descending on the carrion. Orion the uber-nerd was reading one of the girls’ palms; Rick H. was telling the mother that he was Orion’s manager; Grimble was moving in on the remaining girl; and a crowd of wanna-be PUAs had gathered around, trying to see the masters at work.
    “Listen,” Steve P. said, in a rush. “Here’s my card. Call me if you ever want to learn some inner-circle shit.”
    “I’d love to.”
    “But this is classified,” he warned. “If we let you in, you cannot share these techniques with anybody. They’re very powerful, and in the wrong hands they could really screw a girl up.”
    “Got it,” I said.
    He twisted a piece of white paper into the shape of a rose, then bounded off in the direction of the carrion. He approached the girl Grimble was sarging, told her to smell the flower, and within thirty seconds she was passed out in Steve’s arms. This was inner-circle shit. And I was about to learn it.

And so began the weirdest phase of my education.
    Every weekend, I’d drive two hours south to San Diego and stay at Steve P.’s small, squalid apartment, where he raised two sons the same way he talked to his students—with compassionate obscenity. His thirteen-yearold was already a better hypnotist than I would ever be.
    In the afternoons, Steve and I drove to see Rasputin. They’d sit me in a chair and ask what I wanted to learn. I had a list: to believe that I was attractive to women; to live in my own reality; to stop worrying about what other people thought of me; to move and speak with an air of strength, confidence, mystery, and depth; to get over my fear of sexual rejection; and, of course, to attain a sense of worthiness, which Rasputin defined as the belief that one deserves the best the world has to offer.
    It was easy to memorize routines, but mastering inner game after a lifetime of bad habits and thought patterns was not easy. These guys, however, had the tools to fix me in time for Mystery’s next workshop in Miami.
    “We’re going to reframe you to where you’re not glad to have some boopsy sucking your dick,” Steve explained. “It will be a privilege for her to get to drink from the nectar of the master.”
    At each session, they’d put me under, and Rasputin would tell complex metaphorical stories into one of my ears as Steve P. issued commands to my subconscious in the other ear. They’d leave open loops (or unfinished metaphors and stories) in my mind that they’d close a week later. They’d play music designed to elicit specific psychological reactions. They’d put me into trances so deep that hours went by in the blink of an eye.
    Afterward, I’d go back to Steve’s house and read his NLP books while he screamed lovingly at his kids.
    I have a theory that most naturals, like Dustin, lose their virginity at a young age and consequently never feel a sense of urgency, curiosity, and intimidation around women during their critical pubescent years. Those who must learn to meet women methodically, on the other hand—like myself and most students in the community—generally suffer through highschool without girlfriends or even dates. Thus, we’re forced to spend years feeling intimidated by and alienated from women, who hold in their sole possession the key to releasing us from the stigma blighting our young adult lives: our virginity.
    Steve fit in with my theory on naturals. He was initiated into sex when he was in first grade. An older girl wanted to give him a blow job; he responded by trying to hit her with a rock. But she eventually convinced him, and the experience set off a lifelong obsession with oral sex. When he was seventeen, he said, a cousin hired him to work in the kitchen of a Catholic girls’ school.