The Game

What else?”
    “Strength?”
    “No.”
    “Body odor?”
    He turned to Sweater and me. We were also clueless.
    “The number one characteristic of an alpha male is the smile,” he said, beaming an artificial beam. “Smile when you enter a room. As soon as you walk in a club, the game is on. And by smiling, you look like you’re together, you’re fun, and you’re somebody.”
    He gestured to Sweater. “When you came in, you didn’t smile when you talked to us.”
    “That’s just not me,” Sweater said. “I look silly when I smile.”
    “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. It’s called the Mystery Method because I’m Mystery and it’s my method. So what I’m going to ask is that you indulge in some of my suggestions and try new things over the next four days. You are going to see a difference.”
    Besides confidence and a smile, we learned, the other characteristics of an alpha male were being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room. No one bothered to tell Mystery that those were actually six characteristics.
    As Mystery dissected the alpha male further, I realized something: The reason I was here—the reason Sweater and Extramask were also here—was that our parents and our friends had failed us. They had never given us thetools we needed to become fully effective social beings. Now, decades later, it was time to acquire them.
    Mystery went around the table and looked at each of us. “What kind of girls do you want?” he asked Sweater.
    Sweater pulled a piece of neatly folded notebook paper out of his pocket. “Last night I wrote down a list of goals for myself,” he said, unfolding the page, which was filled with four columns of numbered items. “And one of the things I’m looking for is a wife. She needs to be smart enough to hold up her end of any conversation and have enough style and beauty to turn heads when she walks into a room.”
    “Well, look at you,” Mystery said. “You look average. People think if they look generic, then they can seduce a wide array of women. Not true. You have to specialize. If you look average, you’re going to get average girls. Your khaki pants are for the office. They’re not for clubs. And your sweater—burn it. You need to be bigger than life. I’m talking over the top. If you want to get the 10s, you need to learn peacock theory.”
    Mystery loved theories. Peacock theory is the idea that in order to attract the most desirable female of the species, it’s necessary to stand out in a flashy and colorful way. For humans, he told us, the equivalent of the fanned peacock tail is a shiny shirt, a garish hat, and jewelry that lights up in the dark—basically, everything I’d dismissed my whole life as cheesy.
    When it came time for my personal critique, Mystery had a laundry list of fixes: get rid of the glasses, shape the overgrown goatee, shave the expensively trimmed tumbleweeds on my head, dress more outrageously, wear a conversation piece, get some jewelry, get a life.
    I wrote down every word of advice. This was a guy who thought about seduction nonstop, like a mad scientist working on a formula to turn peanuts into gasoline. The archive of his Internet messages was 3,000 posts long—more than 2,500 pages—all dedicated to cracking the code that is woman.
    “I have an opener for you to use,” he said to me. An opener is a prepared script used to start a conversation with a group of strangers; it’s the first thing anyone who wants to meet women must be armed with. “Say this when you see a group with a girl you like. ‘Hey, it looks like the party’s over here.’ Then turn to the girl you want and add, ‘If I wasn’t gay, you’d be so mine.’”
    A flash of crimson burned up my face. “Really?” I asked. “How is that going to help?”
    “Once she’s attracted to you, it won’t matter whether you said you were gay or not.”
    “But isn’t that lying?”
    “It’s not lying,” he replied. “It’s flirting.”
    To the group, he offered other examples of openers: innocent but intriguing questions like “Do you think magic spells work?” or “Oh my god, did you see those two girls fighting outside?” Sure, they weren’t that spectacular or sophisticated, but all they are meant to do is get two strangers talking.
    The point of Mystery Method, he explained, is to come in under the radar.