The Game

on my lap, and sprayed me in the face with the water pistol. I wanted her.
    Afterward, I joined Hillary, her sister, and two of her friends for drinks at a Mexican bar called El Carmen. As we talked, I took Hillary’s hand in mine. She squeezed back. IOI. Grimble was right: A new me had evolved.
    She took a step closer to me. My heart began to hammer against my chest, as it always does during the two parts of a pickup that give me the most anxiety: the approach and the kiss.
    But just as I was about to tell her about animals and evolution and hairpulling lions, disaster struck. Andy Dick walked in the bar with a group of his friends. One of them knew Hillary, so they joined us at the table—and suddenly my game evaporated. Our connection was eclipsed. There was a brighter, shinier object in her field of vision. When we rearranged ourselves, Andy Dick somehow ended up between us, separating me from Hillary.
    He was all over her in an instant. It happens in Los Angeles: Celebrities hit on your dates. In my AFC days, I stood by helplessly and watched one night at the Whiskey Bar as Robert Blake slipped my date his phone number. But I was a PUA now, and a PUA wouldn’t stand by helplessly and watch a celebrity molest his date.
    Why was I constantly battling tabloid stars for this girl?
    I stood up and walked outside. I needed to think. I’d given Heidi Fleiss a run for her money the night before, so I ought to be able to take out Andy Dick. It wasn’t going to be easy, though, because he was so loud and obnoxious. It was clear from the moment he arrived why he’d become a star: He loved attention.
    The only chance I had was to become more interesting than he was.
    Grimble was outside, talking to a woman with curly, unkempt brown hair. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a pen and paper. He was about to number-close.
    Suddenly, the girl broke away from Grimble. “Style?!” She peered at me, incredulous.
    I looked at her: She seemed familiar. “It’s me,” she said. “Jackie.”
    My jaw dropped. It was the stinky-footed comedian whose hotel room I had run out of. My first semi-success story. Either this was a miraculous coincidence, or we were running out of fresh women to sarge.
    I talked to her for a while about her comedy class, then excused myself. I couldn’t lose any more time; every minute was an inch higher up Hillary’s thigh that Andy Dick’s hand was moving. And I had a plan to stop it.
    I walked back to the table, sat down, and ran the best-friends test on Hillary and her sister, which diverted the attention to me. Then, after discussing body language, I suggested we play the lying game. In the game, a woman comes up with four true statements and one lie about her house or her car. However, she does not say them out loud; she merely thinks them one at a time. And by looking for a variation in her eye movements, you can usually tell which is untrue because people look in different directions when they lie than when they’re telling the truth. All through the game I teased Hillary mercilessly, until her body language closed off to Andy Dick and opened up to me.
    Andy asked me what I did for work (I didn’t realize this at the time, but it was an IOI), and I told him I was a writer. He said he was thinking of writing his own book. Soon he completely forgot about Hillary and started barraging me with questions, asking if I’d help him. He was my fan. And, as Mystery says, own the men and you own the women.
    “My biggest fear is being thought of as boring,” he told me. That was his weakness. I had beat him by being more interesting than him—and by having value to him. The tactics had worked, even better than they had the night before with Heidi Fleiss. Only I didn’t realize just how well they had worked.
    Andy slid closer to me and whispered: “What are you? Straight, bi, or gay?”
    “Um, straight.”
    “I’m bi,” he said, breathing in my ear. “That’s too bad. We could’ve had a lot of fun.”
    After Andy and his friends left, I cozied back up to Hillary. She instantly gave me the doggy dinner bowl look. I took her hand under the table and felt the warmth emanating from her palm, from her thigh, from her breath. She would be mine tonight. I had won her.

When I came home from Hillary’s in the morning, Dustin was waiting in my apartment for me. The king of the naturals had returned.
    But what was he doing in my apartment?
    “Hi,” he said in his soft, effeminate