The Game

that.
    You tell her, “Take off your pants.”
    She does. You enjoy yourselves and give each other many orgasms over the course of the night, the morning, and perhaps even for years afterward.
    One morning, she asks you how many women you’ve been with.
    This is the only time you’re allowed to lie.
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    6 This portion of the text has no: been edited in order to preserve its authenticity.

As a community, we had reached a new height of arrogance.
    “I’m starting to feel like I’m hunting rabbits with a howitzer,” Maddash, a former student, told me.
    He had just returned from pulling off one of the most unlikely sarges in community history. A Chicago office worker named Jackie Kim had accidentally forwarded her highly judgmental review of a date to her entire address book. It was just as shallow as the field reports of some PUAs.
    “So where do I stand on…the date,” she wrote. “The car, the money, the job, the cute apartment, the boat—which by the way only seats six people, so I really don’t consider that really amazing—his mannerism, and his great kiss will probably lock in another date. But I can tell you now, unless he cuts his hair and sends me gifts, it won’t lead me to seek anything more than my first thirty-year-old friend.”
    The post became an Internet phenomenon, forwarded around the globe and chronicled in the Chicago Tribune. One person who received the e-mail was Maddash, who promptly sent her a sympathetic response. Jackie wrote him back, saying the e-mail made her day and she read it every time she received a hate letter. A few e-mails, an exchange of photos, and one date later, she was in Maddash’s bed. It took no gifts, no boats, no haircut. Just pure seduction.
    Maddash’s success set off a rash of copycat sarges in the community. Suddenly, just going out to a bar and bringing a girl home seemed too ordinary and easy.
    Vision called an escort and paid her $350 for an hour. His goal was to be so interesting and seductive that she would pay him to spend the next hour together. He managed to tease her out of eighty dollars at the rate of twenty dollars per hour. They continued to see each other afterward, free of charge.
    Grimble seduced a nineteen-year-old girl who came to his door selling magazines. Despite the fact that he was wearing boxers and a dirty sweater, he fucked her within an hour. And he didn’t even buy a magazine.
    After hearing about Maddash, Vision, and Grimble’s latest antics, any PUA who had been disillusioned with the community after Mystery’s breakdown was soon back in the game full throttle. And the most full throttle of them all was Papa.
    Papa’s pledge to study for law school had lasted a month. Then he went on a road trip around the country, visiting all the PUAs he could. Every week he sent me his schedule: He was driving to Chicago on Wednesday to spend time with Orion and Maddash; then he was going to Michigan to meet Juggler; finally, he was spending the weekend in Toronto with Captain BL (a deaf PUA) and No. 9. The next week he was in Montreal hanging out with Cliff and David X. The week after, he was working his way down the California coast, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego. As for PUAs in other countries—London, Tokyo, Amsterdam—he was constantly talking to them on the phone or online.
    After a while, I couldn’t tell whether he was still learning game or just trying to build his social circle. I don’t think he knew either. He was simply imitating what he’d seen me do: travel around the world, meet different PUAs, and become the best.
    There was one fledgling PUA, in particular, whom Papa bonded with: a twenty-two-year-old Canadian who had discovered the pickup scene when his mother stumbled across a seduction website. He called himself Tyler Durden, after the seditious character in Fight Club. And like a virus or a demagogue (choose your simile), he would eventually change the course of the community and everyone in it.
    He was a philosophy student at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Beyond that, not much else was known about him—or would ever be known about him. He claimed to have been one of the biggest drug dealers in Kingston. He claimed to come from a rich family. He claimed to have written rigorous philosophy papers for academic journals. He claimed to have been a bodybuilder. But no one really knew.
    Tyler hit the seduction boards like a hurricane. Before anyone had even met him, one thing was