The Game

Sweater exclaimed when we pulled into his driveway. He looked nothing like the insecure middle-aged man I had met in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel. He was tan, healthy, and, most extraordinarily, an irresistibly welcoming smile was now plastered constantly to his face.
    Helena Rubinstein once said, “There are no ugly women; only lazy ones.” Since society holds men to less rigid standards of beauty than women, this is doubly true of guys. Give a man like Sweater—or any man—a tan, better posture, whiter teeth, a fitness regime, and clothes that fit, and he’s well on his way to handsome.
    “I just spent the week in Sydney with my girlfriend,” Sweater said, walking us into his house. “We talk on the phone about seven times a day. I asked her to marry me before I left. It’s sick, isn’t it? And on top of that, I made half a million dollars this week on a real-estate seminar. So life is just amazing. Thanks to the community, I have health, fun, money, love, and great people all around me.”
    Sweater’s place was a sunny, airy bachelor pad overlooking Brisbane River and the City Botanic Gardens. He had a large pool and Jacuzzi; there were three bedrooms upstairs; on the ground floor, four employees—all enterprising, fresh-faced Australian boys in their early twenties—sat at a large horseshoe-shaped desk, each working on his own computer. Sweater had not only trained each of them to sell his products—books and courses on real-estate investing—but he’d turned them onto the seduction community as well. By day, they made Sweater money; by night, they went sarging with him.
    “I’m still having fun helping the guys here get girls, but I’m off the market,” Sweater said when we asked how he felt about his decision to settle down with one woman. “And as far as I’m concerned, I’m getting out at the top. I’ve come to understand that without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it’s a relationship, a business, or a hobby.”
    In many ways, I was jealous. I hadn’t met any woman yet I could say that about.
    Mystery’s workshop had changed all of our lives. Sweater was filthy rich and in love; Extramask had recently moved out of his parents’ house and finally orgasmed in coitus; and I was traveling the world teaching men a skill I’d never even possessed a year ago.
    Mystery was even more blown away than I was by Sweater—less by his engagement than by his home office. When he wasn’t grilling Sweater and his employees on how they ran their business, he was silently watching them work.
    “I want this,” he kept telling Sweater. “You have a good social environment, and it creates a good working environment. I’m rotting away in Toronto.”
    As we drove to the airport, tan and flush with excitement, Mystery and I plotted our next adventure.
    “I have a one-on-one workshop booked in Toronto next month,” Mystery said. “The guy is paying me fifteen hundred dollars.”
    “How’d he get the money?” Most of Mystery’s clients were college kids who could barely scrape together the standard fee, which he’d raised to six hundred dollars while reducing the number of nights from four to three.
    “His dad’s rich,” Mystery said. “Exoticoption, from the Belgrade workshop, told him about me. He’s a student at the University of Wisconsin. He just started posting online under the name Papa.”
    Most conversations with Mystery involved plans: organizing workshops, performing a ninety-minute magic show, creating a porn website in which we’d have sex with girls disguised as clowns. His latest scheme was the PUA tattoo.
    “Everyone in the Lounge is going to get the tattoo,” he said as we parted ways at the airport. “It’ll be a heart on the right wrist, directly over the pulse. It’ll allow us to identify each other in the field. And it’ll be great for an illusion; I can teach you how to stop your pulse for ten seconds.”
    A couple of PUAs had already run out and gotten the tattoo—including Vision, which was somewhat of a surprise considering he’d moved to Los Angeles to make it as an actor. He’d e-mailed us a photo. But there was a problem: He’d put the tattoo in the wrong place and upside down. The heart was supposed to go over the vein where the pulse can be felt. But he had put it in the center of his wrist, an inch too high, and facing inward.
    Nonetheless, it was a vote of affirmation, a pact that this PUA society was for life.

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