The Game

day had arrived. This would be the most monumental trip of my seduction career. First, I was going to Toronto for Papa’s one-on-one workshop with Mystery. Then we were going to get our PUA heart tattoos, take the bus to New York for Mystery’s first classroom seminar, and finally, fly to Bucharest so Mystery could implement what he called Project Bliss. He wanted to return to Eastern Europe, find two young bisexual women searching for a better life overseas, and seduce them. He planned to get them student visas, take them back to Canada, and train them to become strippers, girlfriends, and, eventually, magic assistants.
    Tattoos and white slavery: That’s where self-improvement had led me.
    On my way out of the house, I checked my mailbox. Along with the usual overdue bills and raised car insurance notices was a postcard of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. “Your Hebrew name is Tuvia.” The writing was Dustin’s. “It comes from the word Tov, or good. Its opposite is Ra, or evil. And in Hebrew, Tov also means that which endures and Ra is that which is short-lived. So your essence is connected to a desire to search out and connect to that which endures—the good. But sometimes you get stuck at the bad along the way.”
    On the flight, I reread the postcard. Dustin was trying to give me a message from God. And maybe he had a point. But, on the other hand, I’d had an enduring wish ever since adolescence for the power to seduce any woman I wanted. Now I was getting my wish. This was good. This was Tov.
    Mystery had recently gotten his own place in Toronto with a PUA named No. 9, a Chinese software engineer who, thanks to Mystery’s everpresent advice, had turned himself into a relatively cool-looking guy. They lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment above a cybercafe near the University of Toronto.
    Since No. 9 was out of town, I put my bags in his room and joined Mystery in the kitchen. Patricia had broken up with him, for good this time. And he’d been staying in his room a lot, playing a video game called Morrowind and downloading lesbian porn. Getting out of the house for these upcoming workshops would be good therapy for him.
    There were three types of people who signed up for the workshops. There were guys like Exoticoption from Belgrade, who were normal and well-adjusted socially, but wanted to have greater flexibility and choice in meeting girls. There were guys who were uptight and set in their ways, like Cliff, who couldn’t even handle having a nickname like everybody else. They tended to gather as much knowledge as they could but had trouble making even the smallest behavioral change. And then there were people like Papa—approach machines who compensated for a lack of social skills with a lack of social fears. Approach machines tended to improve the fastest, simply by following the flowchart of material they were given. But once they ran out of material, they floundered.
    And this was going to be Papa’s challenge. He was a soft-spoken Chinese pre-law student. He wore a checkered button-down shirt and jeans that were a size too large. They always seemed to arrive in a checkered button-down shirt and oversized jeans. And they always left in a loud shiny shirt, tight black synthetic pants, silver rings, and sunglasses pushed up on their heads. It was the player uniform, designed to convey sexuality, which was evidently synonymous with cheesiness.
    Mystery and I sat down with Papa at a café and asked the usual questions: What’s your score? What would you like it to be? What are your sticking points?
    “Well, I used to be the social chair of my fraternity,” he began. “And I come from a lot of money. My father is the president of a major university.”
    “Let me cut you off right there,” I said. “You’re qualifying yourself to us. Instead of gaining our admiration, all you’re doing is displaying lower status. A rich man doesn’t have to tell you he’s rich.”
    Papa nodded stupidly. His head seemed to be surrounded by a dense invisible fog, which made his reaction time just a little slower than most people’s. It gave the impression that he wasn’t all there.
    “Is it okay if I record everything you’re saying?” Papa asked, struggling to pull a small digital recorder out of his pocket.
    There are certain bad habits we’ve groomed our whole life—from personality flaws to fashion faux pas. And it has been the role of parents and friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to