The Game

After he gave oral sex to one of the girls, word spread and he soon became the sexual go-to guy on campus. In addition to giving the girls pleasure, however, he also gave them guilt. And after a few too many confessions that involved the boy in the kitchen, Steve was fired.
    He ran with a bike gang for a while but left soon after accidentally shooting a guy in the nuts. He now devoted his life to a self-styled mix of sexuality and spirituality. And for all his crude talk, he was at heart a good person. Unlike many of the other gurus I’d met, I trusted him.
    After Steve’s kids went to sleep each night, he taught me inner-circle magic he’d learned from shamans whose names he’d sworn never to pronounce. The first weekend I stayed over, he gave me a lesson in soul-gazing, which is when you look deep into a woman’s right eye with your own right eye as you breathe together.
    “Once you do this with her, she’s going to bond real strong with you,” he warned. His cautionary speeches were often longer than the actual teaching process. “When you do this, you become anamchara, which in Gaelic means friend of the soul. A soul friend.”
    The following weekend I learned about ménage-à-trois management, and how to train a woman to eat another woman’s pussy by having her put a dried nectarine in her mouth and chew erotically on it during sex. The next weekend he showed me how to throw chi through my hands into a woman’s abdomen. And the next weekend he taught me to contain and cycle orgasmic energy, so that a woman can stack one withheld orgasm on top of another—until, as Steve P. put it, she’s “shaking like a dog shitting peach seeds.” Finally, he shared what he considered to be his greatest skill: guiding any woman, through words and touch, to a powerful orgasm that “gushes like Niagara Falls.”
    This was a whole new level of game. He was giving me super powers.
    I was in a whirlwind of learning. I didn’t call my friends. I barely talked to my family. I turned down every writing assignment that came my way. I was living in an alternate reality.
    “I told Rasputin,” Steve said one night, “that more than all the other seduction boys out there, I’d like you to become one of our trainers.”
    It was an offer I’d have to turn down. The seduction world was a palace of open doors. Walking through one, no matter how tempting the treasures inside, would mean having to shut the rest.

I returned home one Sunday night from San Diego to find a message on my machine from Cliff, of Cliff’s List. He was in town, and he wanted to take me to meet his latest PUA discovery—a biker turned construction worker who called himself David X.
    Cliff had been in the community since its inception. He was in his forties and was as nice as he was uptight. Though he was conventionally handsome, he was also the living embodiment of the word square. He looked like he’d stepped out of a 1950s family sitcom. He had a closet in his home, he claimed, with more than a thousand pickup books. There were issues of the Pick-Up Times, a short-lived magazine from the seventies; an original edition of Eric Weber’s classic How to Pick Up Girls; and misogynist obscurities with titles like Seduction Begins When the Woman Says No.
    David X was one of half a dozen PUAs Cliff had discovered over the years and promoted on his list, which he’d started in 1999 after Ross criticized him on the Speed Seduction mailing list for discussing a pickup technique that wasn’t related to NLP. Every PUA had a specialty, and David X’s was harem management—juggling relationships with multiple women without lying to them.
    When we walked into the dim sum restaurant, I was shocked by what I saw waiting for me. David X was quite possibly the ugliest PUA I’d ever met. He made Ross Jeffries look like a Calvin Klein underwear model. He was immense, balding, and toadlike, with warts covering his face and the voice of a hundred thousand cigarette packs.
    My meal with him was like so many I’d had before. Except the rules were always different. His were:
Who cares what she thinks?
You are the most important person in this relationship.
    His philosophy was to never lie to a female. He prided himself on bedding women by trapping them with their own words. For example, on meeting a girl at a bar, he’d get her to say that she was spontaneous and didn’t have any rules; then, if she was reluctant to leave the bar with him, he’d say, “I