The Game

is yours? I’m a child robot, a sex robot, and an entertainer robot.”
    On the floor in front of his bed was a half-eaten plate of uncooked spaghetti. Shrapnel from the spaghetti sticks was scattered around the room. Nearby were the remnants of a black cordless phone that had been smashed against the floor. The battery dangled helplessly out of the open back.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “I blew up at my sister and my mom. They wouldn’t shut up.”
    When Mystery—or any PUA—was in a funk, there was only one cure for it: to go out sarging and meet new options.
    “Let’s get peacocked and go to a strip club tonight,” I suggested. Strip clubs were Mystery’s weakness. He had a list of strip club rules that pretty much guaranteed him at least a phone number every time: among them, befriend the DJ; never pay for a dance or a drink; do not hit on, compliment, or touch a stripper; stick to your material; and change the subject whenever a stripper starts reciting the stories she tells every other guy.
    “I don’t want to go out,” he said. “There’s no point.”
    He stopped the movie on his computer and began working on a halffinished e-mail.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “I’m e-mailing the students in New York and telling them the seminar’s canceled.” He spoke as if he were on autopilot.
    “Why are you doing that?” I was pissed. I’d put a month of my life onhold so we could go to New York and Bucharest together. I’d already bought the plane tickets. And now, because of some mixture of Steven Spielberg and codeine after effects, he was bailing out.
    “Not enough people. Oh well.”
    “Come on,” I said. “You’re already making eighteen hundred dollars. And I’m sure more guys will sign up at the last minute. It’s New York, for chrissake. No one commits to anything in advance.”
    “Living,” he sighed, “costs too much.”
    It was all too melodramatic for me. The guy was a black hole sucking up attention. Fuck him.
    “You are so fucking selfish,” I seethed. “What about our tickets to Bucharest?”
    “You can go if you want. I’m canceling all shows, all agents, all seminars, all workshops, all trips. I’m stopping everything. I don’t want to be known for being a Ross Jeffries.”
    I gave his dresser a mule kick from behind. I have a long fuse, but when it hits bottom I explode. Though my father may not have taught me much about women, he did teach me that.
    An orange prescription bottle hit the floor, scattering pills. I picked it up and looked at it. The word Rivotril was on the label.
    “What are these?”
    “They’re my sister’s anti-depressant pills. They really aren’t about dealing with depression so much as making me sleep.” Cold. Clinical.
    I figured they couldn’t be doing much good. So I left three in the bottle and stuffed the rest in my pocket. I didn’t want him overdosing.
    Mystery logged on to Party Poker, an online gambling site, and started playing mechanically. The Mystery I knew was too logical to gamble.
    “What are you doing?” I said. But I didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind.”
    I slammed the door behind me and found Caroline in the front room.
    “Let’s go back to your house,” I told her.
    She smiled weakly, sympathetically. She didn’t know what to say. In that moment, I hated her. She just seemed so useless.

So I went back to Caroline’s house in the suburbs—to her mother and her brother and her sister and her son and her Britney Spears movies.
    I could tell I was becoming a burden to her and a distraction from her son. And she could tell she was becoming a bore to me. It wasn’t her constant fretting over her son I minded; it was her complete lack of initiative. The days and nights spent imprisoned in her house doing nothing were getting to me. I refuse to take time for granted.
    One of the primary rules of pickup is that a girl can fall out of love with you as quickly as she falls in love with you. It happens every night. The girls who start rubbing your chest and making out with you in a club in two minutes will leave you just as quickly for a bigger, better deal. That’s the game. That’s life in the field. And I understood that.
    During a workshop in San Francisco, I’d spent the night at the house of a lawyer named Anne. On her nightstand there was a thin book by a guy named Joel Kramer. Unable to sleep, I picked it up and leafed through the pages. He explained the emotions Caroline and I were