The Game

bizarre, cryptic comment, but now I had their attention. I could sense it, and my heart began to pump faster. I continued with what I knew all along would be my true opener: “I have to ask you something. Is your hair real?”
    The 10 looked shocked, then recovered her composure. “Yes,” she said. “Feel it.”
    I pulled it gently. “Hey, it moved. It’s not real.”
    “Pull harder.”
    I complied, and yanked it so hard that her neck jerked back. “Okay,” I said. “I believe you. But how about your friend there?”
    The 11’s face reddened. She leaned over the bar and looked me hard in the eye. “That is really rude. What if I’m bald underneath here? That could really hurt someone’s feelings. It’s disrespectful. How would you feel if someone said that to you?”
    The pickup is a high stakes game, and to win you have to play hard. All I had done so far was commandeer their attention and provoke an emotional reaction. Sure, it was a negative one, but now we had a relationship. If I could turn her anger around, I’d be in.
    Fortunately, I happened to be trying to make a point to the students and was wearing a black mod wig and a fake lip piercing—just to show that looks don’t matter. It’s all game.
    I leaned over the bar and stared the 11 down. “Well,” I told her. “I actually am wearing a wig, and I am bald underneath here.”
    I paused, and she looked at me with her mouth open. She didn’t know how to respond. Now it was time to reel her in. “And I’ll tell you something else. Whether I go out totally bald, in this wig, or in some crazy longhaired wig, it doesn’t change the way I’m treated by other people. It’s all your attitude. Don’t you agree?”
    Everything I say in a pickup has an ulterior motive. I needed to let her know that unlike every other guy in the bar, I am not and will not be intimidated by her looks. Beauty to me was now a shit test: It weeded out the losers who got dumbstruck by it.
    “I live in Los Angeles,” I continued. “It’s where the most beautiful women in the country come to try and make it. You look around a club there, and everyone’s good-looking. It makes this VIP room look like a dive bar.” They were words I’d learned, almost verbatim, from Ross Jeffries. And they were working.
    I let her look around, then continued: “And do you know what I’ve learned? Beauty is common. It’s something you’re born with or you pay for. What counts is what you make of yourself. What counts is a great outlook and a great personality.”
    Now I was in. It was the girls who were dumbstruck now, not me. I had entered their world, as Jeffries once put it to me, and demonstrated authority over it. And, to ensure my position there, I threw in one more neg, but softened with a slight compliment, as if they were winning me over: “And you know what? You have a great smile. I can tell that underneath all that, you’re probably a good person.”
    The 10 sidled up to me and said, “We’re sisters.”
    A lesser pickup artist would have thought that his work was done, that he had won them over. But no, this was just one more shit test. I looked very slowly at both of them, and then took a chance. “Bullshit,” I said, smiling. “I bet a lot of guys believe you, but I’m a very intuitive person. When I look at you both, I can tell you’re very different. Too different.”
    The 10 broke into a guilty smile. “We never tell anyone this,” she said, “but you’re right. We’re just friends.”
    Now I’d broken through her programming, moved her away from the auto-pilot responses she gives to men, and demonstrated that I was not just another guy. I took another chance: “And I’d be willing to bet that you haven’t even been friends for that long. Usually, best friends start to have the same mannerisms, and you two don’t really.”
    “We’ve only known each other a year,” the 10 admitted.
    Now it was time to back off my game and fluff a little. However, I made sure never to ask questions; instead, as Juggler had taught me, I made openended statements that led them to ask me the questions.
    The 10 told me they were from San Diego, so we fluffed for a while about the West Coast and Miami. As we talked, I kept my back to the 11, as if I were less interested in her. This was classic Mystery Method: I wanted her thinking more about me, wondering why I wasn’t giving her the attention she was so used to. Nothing in the game is an accident.
    I