The Game

have to find a way to flip the same attraction switches a celebrity does—chiefly validation and bragging rights—without being famous.
    I suppose a lesser man would have taken advantage of the situation and continued the charade. But I never called the girl. I got into the game not to deceive women, but to make them like me for me—or at least for the new me.
    In the clubs that followed, we watched Papa work. Every piece of material we gave him, he used. Every error we pointed out, he corrected instantly. With each successful set, he seemed to grow an inch taller. Instead of summer school, he told me, he’d spent three months working on Speed Seduction skills. He was even studying to get a hypnotist’s certification with one of the field’s most respected teachers, Cal Banyan. But until this workshop, he’d never seen real PUAs in the field before. He was so blown away he signed up for another workshop on the spot.
    On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment. I pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers, routines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him. And women were responding to him now. It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines could be—and it was also a little depressing. The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any audience. But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at the exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being so easily manipulated. Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the same side effect.
    When Papa left to get some sleep before his flight home, Mystery and I stayed at the club to continue sarging. Grimble had recently given me the idea of taking all the scraps of paper with phone numbers I’d collected and putting them under glass on a coffee table for decoration. But as I was sharing the idea with Mystery, he cut me off. “Proximity alert system!” he announced.
    When women stand near a man but facing away from him, especially when there’s no real reason for them to be hanging out in that particular spot, it trips what Mystery calls the proximity alert system. It means they’re interested; they want to be opened.
    Mystery wheeled around and started talking to a delicate blonde in a strapless dress and a muscular brunette in a do-rag. When he introduced me, he told them I was an amazing illusionist. We’d been winging together for months now, so I knew just what to do: fake them out with a couple of the practical jokes and pseudomagic tricks I’d learned in elementary school. In the field, one quickly learns that everything that was funny at age ten is funny all over again.
    Mystery had brought along a video camera, so he began taping the interaction. The girls didn’t seem to mind. As he isolated the brunette, I talked to the blonde. Her name was Caroline; her friend was Carly. Caroline lived in the suburbs with her family. Her goal in life was to be a nurse, but she was currently working at Hooters, despite having breasts the size of SweeTarts and a shy, withdrawn personality.
    From two feet away, Caroline’s face seemed alabaster; from one foot away, I noticed it was dappled with pinprick freckles. One of her teeth was crooked. She had a red mark on the skin over her collarbone, as if she’d been itching it. She smelled like cotton. She had gotten a manicure in the last twenty-four hours. She weighed no more than one hundred pounds. Her favorite color was probably pink.
    I observed all these things as my mouth moved, reciting the routines I’d told to hundreds of girls before. What was different about Caroline was that the routines didn’t seem to be working. I just couldn’t reach what I call the hook point, which is when a woman you’ve approached decides she enjoys your company and doesn’t want you to leave. Though I stood just a foot away from Caroline, a mile-wide chasm separated us.
    After watching the movie Boiler Room, about ruthless cold-calling stockbrokers, Mystery had decided that phone numbers were wood—in other words, they were a waste of paper. Our new strategy was no longer to try to call a girl for a date, but to take her on a date right away—an instant date—to a nearby bar or restaurant. Changing venues quickly became a key piece in the pickup game. It created a sense of distorted time: If you went to three different places with a group you’d just met, by the end of the