The Game

voice. He was wearing a tweed sportcoat with large brown buttons, straight-legged polyester black slacks, and a black skullcap.
    I hadn’t talked to Dustin in more than a year, since before I had joined the community. Last I’d heard, he was managing a nightclub in Russia. He had sent me photos of his girlfriends: one for each night of the week. He actually referred to them as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on.
    “How’d you get in here?”
    “Your landlady, Louise, let me in. She’s really a sweet person. Her son’s a writer too, you know.”
    He had a way of making people feel comfortable with him.
    “It’s good to see you, by the way,” he said as he gave me a big bear hug. When he pulled away his eyes were misty, as if it really were good to see me again.
    The feeling was mutual. Dustin had been on my mind every day as I learned the pickup arts. Where Ross Jeffries needed spoken hypnotic patterns to convince a woman to explore her fantasies with him, Dustin was able to achieve the same result without uttering a word. He was a blank male canvas for a woman to project her repressed desires onto—even if she didn’t consciously know what they were before meeting him. I never had the resources to understand how he operated before; but now, with my new knowledge, I could watch him work, ask questions, and eventually model his process. I could usher a whole new school of thought into the pickup community.
    “I don’t know if I told you what I’ve been doing the past year,” I said. “But I’ve been hanging out with the world’s greatest pickup artists. My whole life has changed. I get it now.”
    “I know,” he said. “Marko told me.”
    He looked at me with big, wet brown eyes, the ones that had gazed into the souls of countless beautiful women. “I don’t…” He paused. “I don’t really do that anymore.”
    I looked at him—incredulously, at first. But then I noticed that the skullcap on his head was a yarmulke.
    “I live in Jerusalem now,” he continued. “In a yeshiva. It’s a religious school.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. I haven’t had sex for eight months. It’s not allowed.”
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: The king of the naturals had gone celibate. It couldn’t be true. Wasn’t that why prisons were invented? They offered men food, clothing, shelter, television, and fresh air but deprived them of the two things that really mattered—freedom and women.
    “Are you allowed to masturbate, at least?”
    “No.”
    “Really?”
    He paused. “Well, sometimes when I sleep, I have wet dreams.”
    “See. God is trying to tell you something. It has to come out.”
    He laughed and patted me on the back. His gestures were slow and his laugh condescending, as if he had spiritually bypassed toilet humor. “I go by my Hebrew name now,” he said. “It was given to me by one of the highest rabbis at the Yeshiva. It’s Avisha.”
    I was stunned: How could Dustin transform so suddenly from nightclub player to rabbinical student—especially now that I needed him most?
    “So what made you give up women?” I asked.
    “When you can get any girl you want, every guy—even if he’s rich or famous—looks at you in a different way because you have something he doesn’t,” he said. “But after a while, I’d bring girls home, and I didn’t want to have sex with them anymore. I just wanted to talk. So we’d talk all night and bond on a very deep level, and then I’d walk them to the subway in the morning. That’s when I started to leave it behind. I realized that I got my entire validation from women. Women became like gods to me, but false gods. So I went to find the real God.”
    Sitting in his Moscow apartment, he said, he searched the Internet for guidance, until he came across the Torah and started reading. After an eyeopening trip to Jerusalem, he returned to Russia and went to a casino party, where the mafia, corrupt businessmen, and materialistic hangers-on sickened him in comparison with the people he’d met in Israel. So he packed his bags, left his week’s worth of girlfriends, and arrived in Jerusalem on the eve of Passover.
    “I stopped by,” he said, “to ask your forgiveness for some of my past actions.”
    I had no idea what he was talking about. He’d always been a great friend.
    “I idealized a lifestyle and behavior that were corrupt,” he explained. “I abhorred kindness, mercy, human dignity, and intimacy. Instead, I used,