The Game

relish. I’mscrewing up my chances of being a cool dad. If I’d married my first girlfriend and had kids with her, they’d be, say, eight and ten now. And I’d be an excellent father, able to relate to them on nearly every level. But it’s too late for me now. By the time my kids are ten, I’ll be well into my forties. I’ll be so out of touch they’ll make fun of my taste in music and beat me at arm-wrestling.
    And now I was really going to screw up my chances of getting married: I was about to brand myself a player for life.
    An hour later, Mystery and I were outside Fineline Tattoo on Kingston Road. I was smarter than this, I thought. But it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, in the hand slap, in the brotherhood.
    I turned the handle of the door and pushed. It didn’t open. Though it was three o’clock on a Monday afternoon, the shop was closed.
    “Damn,” Mystery said. “Let’s find somewhere else.”
    I’m not a superstitious person, but when I’m on the fence about an idea, it only takes a slight draft to push me in either direction.
    “I can’t go through with this,” I said.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “I have problems with commitment. I don’t think I can even commit to a tattoo that signifies a lack of commitment.”
    My neurotic nature had saved me for once.
    The next night, Caroline drove to Mystery’s house, and we all went out for sushi.
    “Where’s Carly?” Mystery asked.
    Caroline flushed and looked into her tea. “She, um, couldn’t make it,” she said. “She says hi, though.”
    I could see Mystery’s body language change. He slumped in his chair and pressed further.
    “Did she say why? Is there a problem?”
    “Well,” Caroline said. “She’s…well, she’s with her boyfriend.”
    Mystery’s face went pale. “And she wouldn’t come?”
    “Carly said you and she were very different anyway.”
    Mystery went quiet. He didn’t speak for another ten minutes. Whenever we asked a question to draw him out, he responded monosyllabically. It wasn’t that he loved Carly; he just hated rejection. He was experiencing the downside of seducing a woman with a boyfriend: She usually went back to him afterward. And seeing Caroline and I enjoying each other’s company so much only rubbed it in.
    “I’m the world’s greatest pickup artist,” he grumbled in my direction. “How come I don’t have a girlfriend?”
    “Well, maybe because you’re the world’s greatest pickup artist.”
    After a long period of silence, Mystery asked Caroline to drive him to the strip club where his ex-girlfriend Patricia worked. She dropped him off in the parking lot, and then took me to spend the night at the house in the suburbs where she lived with her mother, sister, and brother. It would be my first time meeting her family.
    Her mother greeted us at the door. In her arms was a crying baby—my teenage girlfriend’s baby.
    “Do you want to hold him?” Caroline asked. I suppose the stereotypical reaction would be to say that I was scared, that reality sunk in, that I wanted to get out of there.
    But I didn’t. I wanted to hold him. It was kind of cool. This was what I got into the game for—to have these kinds of adventures, to hold a baby in my arms for the first time and wonder, “What does his mother expect of me?”

While I was playing daddy with Caroline, Mystery was spiraling.
    Dropping him off at the club was a bad move. Seeing Patricia had fucked him up. Not only would she not take him back, but she also told him that she’d started dating other people.
    “She’s been working out three hours a day,” he said over the phone. “She lost fifteen pounds and her ass is a 10, dude. The things a chick will do when she’s angry. Damn.”
    “Don’t think about how good she looks,” I advised. “Look for the flaws and blow those up in your mind. It’ll make it easier.”
    “I know that intellectually, but emotionally I’m fucked up. I feel like I’m being raked over coals. It all came crashing down on me when I saw her again. That hot body, the tan lines. She was the hottest stripper in the place. And I can’t have her. Carly’s back with her boyfriend. And I’m beat from trying to make my new place livable. For what?”
    “Dude, you’re a pickup artist. There are hundreds more just like Patricia out there. And you can get them in a night.”
    “I’m not a pickup artist. I’m a lover. I love women. I swear, I don’t even think about threesomes anymore. I