The Game

forehead, and an expensive cotton dress shirt untucked over jeans. Behind him was the palest non-albino human being I had ever seen. A shock of orangey blond stuck straight up from his ovoid head like a toy troll. His head was cocked upward; his smile seemed like a plastic snap-on attachment, and his features were flattened as if pressed back by an invisible stocking. Though he claimed online to be an avid weight-lifter, his body and face were doughy. Technically, he was a small person. He just had a certain genetic softness.
    This was Tyler Durden. He reminded me of Heat Miser from The Year Without A Santa Claus.
    He nodded at me when he walked in. No word of greeting—and, a pet peeve, no eye contact. I don’t trust people who don’t look me in the eye when they meet me. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was nervous about making a good first impression. In his writings, he constantly referenced my posts and techniques. He looked up to me. They all did. But most were humble about it. Tyler Durden reacted to being uncomfortable by acting aloof and arrogant. Fine. Bono from U2 does that too. That’s their thing.
    When we went out to dinner, Tyler opened up. In fact, he talked nonstop, without even pausing between sentences. It was difficult to get a word in edgewise. He liked to talk in circles around a point rather than getting directly to it. He was the victim of a disease called thinking too much. My head spun listening to him.
    “I was busting on this girl Michelle,” he was saying. “I was busting on her hard. Hard fucking busting, dude.” And here he pulled his head back, pursed his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and started nodding. The gesture was meant to convey how hard the busting was, but it looked strange and artificial. “Then this dude comes up to her and is like, ‘Michelle, you are so cute. You are the bomb.’ And she looks at me and goes”—here he smirked and spoke in a whiny falsetto to imitate her—“‘I hate it when guys do that. Now I will never ever like him. I only want a guy who doesn’t want me. I hate guys who want me. I hate it.’”
    After an hour of blather, I started to understand Tyler Durden. Human interaction to him was a program. Behavior was determined by frames and congruence and state and validation and other big-chunk psychological principles. And he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz: the little guy behind the curtain, pulling the strings that made everyone around him think he was a big and powerful master of the realm.
    I got it. I liked getting it.
    Now here’s the context: He grew up physically small and mentally slow for his age, he said. His father, a football coach, imposed high standards on him that he could never meet. This was all thet biographical detail I was able to gather. It felt like a lot of hard information coming from him. And I still didn’t know if it was truthful.
    Every time the waitress came to the table, Tyler Durden wanted me to demonstrate a routine on her.
    “Do the jealous girlfriend opener,” he’d say.
    “Show me an IVD,” 8 he’d say.
    “Do Style’s EV,” 9 he’d say.
    I thought about how Tyler Durden had constantly pestered Vision for routines and material. Now I understood why Vision had kicked him out of the house. He didn’t seem to see the humanity in us. He didn’t care about what we did for work; where we were from; or what our thoughts on culture, politics, and the world were.
    There was a distinction he didn’t seem to understand: We weren’t just PUAs. We were people.
----
    8 An acronym for interactive value demonstration. See glossary.
    9 An acronym for eliciting values. See glossary.

After dinner, I had a special evening planned for Tyler Durden and Papa. Hillary, the blue-haired burlesque dancer I’d battled Heidi Fleiss and Andy Dick for, was performing at the Spider Club in Hollywood. So I called a few other women to join us there, including Laurie, the Irish girl who had inspired me to invent the evolution phase-shift routine. I figured Tyler would want to meet Grimble, so I invited him as well.
    When we arrived, Laurie and her girlfriends were sitting at the bar. Nearly every male in the room was staring at them, trying to work up the courage to approach. I introduced them to Tyler. After saying hello, he proceeded to sit down and not speak another word. For ten minutes, he sat there in uncomfortable silence. It was the first time he had shut up all night.
    When I introduced them to