The Game

“I need trust, comfort, and connection first.”
    Heidi and I walked away together. She clapped a hand on my shoulder and smiled. “If I left here right now,” she said, “they’d follow me out like a line of ducks.”
    Seconds later, she was in another two-set. I dashed in after her, and the competition was on again. She was sitting with a balding man who said he was a stand-up comic and a heavily peacocked woman with long gumballblue hair, an impish voice, and a wickedly smart sense of humor. Her name was Hillary, and she said she was performing a burlesque show the following night at a club called the Echo. She was so interesting, I hardly needed to game her. We just talked, and I took her phone number right in front of her date. Then Heidi invited them to a party and gave Hillary her number. She wasn’t going to let me walk away victorious.
    “I could have her working in a day,” she said. She always had to get the last word in.
    Some people are born to be rock singers. Others are born to be teachers. “I was born to be a madam,” Heidi said. “I’ll always be one.”
    Every time she left a set, she was convinced she could have turned the girls into hookers or extracted them to her house—even though those days were now behind her. By the time we left the bar that night, we had competed for every girl in the place. And I’d learned that there’s a fine line between pimp and player.
    Grimble and his date came up to me laughing afterward. “That was the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I can’t believe how much you’ve changed. You’re like a new man.” He gave my forehead a slimy kiss and then negged me. “You held your ground pretty well, especially considering she had an advantage because everyone recognized her.”
    “Well,” I replied. “Let’s see if you do any better on Elimidate tomorrow.”

It was a red-letter day for the seduction community. Tonight on Elimidate, Grimble would be paired with three other eligible bachelors to compete for the favor of a lingerie model named Alison. Our entire lifestyle was at stake. If he won, it would prove that the community really did have a social edge over the jocks and studs we’d felt inferior to all our lives. If he lost, then we were just self-delusional keyboard jockeys. The fate of PUAs everywhere was in his hands.
    I sat on Grimble’s couch and watched the episode with Twotimer. Where the other guys on the show tried to suck up to Allison, Grimble leaned back and acted as if he were the prize. Where the other guys bragged about how successful they were, Grimble took the advice of his new guru and claimed to be a disposable lighter repairman. He made it past the first elimination.
    During the second round, a waitress brought a bottle of champagne to the table for Alison, courtesy of Grimble. She was shocked, especially since Grimble hadn’t been trying as hard as the other guys. He made it past the second elimination.
    The final round was on the dance floor, which I knew would seal it, because Grimble and I had taken salsa-dancing lessons together. When he dipped her to the floor and scooped her back up, taking her breath away, I could see it in her eyes. He had won.
    “Congratulations,” I told him. “You have vindicated the good name of PUAs around the world.”
    “Yeah,” he said, with a cocky smile. “Not all models are stupid.”
    We went out that night to see Hillary perform. Since my crush on Jessica Nixon in sixth grade, one-itis had been a regular part of my life. But in the past eight months, I hadn’t felt even a tremor of one-itis. In fact, every woman I met seemed disposable and replaceable. I was experiencing seducer’s paradox: The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women. Success was no longer defined by getting laid or finding a girlfriend, but by how well I performed. The bars and clubs became, as Mystery had coached me atthat first workshop, just different levels on a video game I had to get through.
    I knew Hillary, in particular, would be a challenge. Not only was she sharp and cynical, but she’d seen me run around picking up women all night with Heidi Fleiss.
    Grimble and I sat in the back of the Echo and watched Hillary strip. She was dressed as a gangster, with a machine gun water pistol and a formfitting pinstripe suit over a garter and matching panties. She had a classically curvy body that suited the art form. When she saw me in the back of the room, she sashayed over, sat