The Game

body to her neck and her breasts. Though I was surprised by Paula’s quiet compliance, for Dustin this seemed to be business as usual. He turned to me and asked if I had a condom. I found one for him. He pulled off her pants and moved into her while I continued lapping uselessly at her right breast.
    That was Dustin’s gift, his power: giving women the fantasy they never thought they’d experience. Afterward, Paula called me constantly. She wanted to talk about the experience all the time, to rationalize it, because she couldn’t believe what she had done. That’s how it always worked with Dustin: He got the girl; I got the guilt.
    I chalked this up to a simple difference of personality. Dustin had a natural charm and animal instinct that I just didn’t. Or at least that’s what I thought, until I read the layguide and explored the newsgroups and websites it recommended. What I discovered was an entire community filled with Dustins—men who claimed to have found the combination to unlock a woman’s heart and legs—along with thousands of others like myself, trying to learn their secrets. The difference was that these men had broken down their methods to a specific set of rules that anybody could apply. And each self-proclaimed pickup artist had his own set of rules.
    There was Mystery, a magician; Ross Jeffries, a hypnotist; Rick H., a millionaire entrepreneur; David DeAngelo, a real estate agent; Juggler, a standup comedian; David X, a construction worker; and Steve P., a seductionist so powerful that women actually pay to learn how to give him better head. Put them on South Beach in Miami and any number of better-looking, musclebound bullies will be kicking sand in their pale, emaciated faces. But put them in a Starbucks or Whiskey Bar, and they’ll be taking turns making out with that bully’s girlfriend as soon as his back is turned.
    Once I discovered their world, the first thing that changed was my vocabulary. Terms like AFC, PUA (pickup artist), sarging (picking up women), and HB (hot babe) 1 entered my permanent lexicon. Then my daily rituals changed as I became addicted to the online locker room these pickup artists had created. Whenever I returned home from meeting or going out with a woman, I sat down at my computer and posted my questions of the night on the newsgroups. “What do I do if she says she has a boyfriend?”; “If she eats garlic during dinner, does it mean she isn’t planning on kissing me?”; “Is it a good or a bad sign when a girl puts on lipstick in front of me?”
    And online characters like Candor, Gunwitch, and Formhandle began replying to my questions. (The answers, in order: use a boyfriend-destroyer pattern; you’re overanalyzing this; neither.) Soon I realized this was not just an Internet phenomenon but a way of life. There were cults of wanna-be seductionists in dozens of cities—from Los Angeles to London to Zagreb to Bombay—who met weekly in what they called lairs to discuss tactics and strategies before going out en masse to meet women.
    In the guise of Jeremie Ruby-Strauss and the Internet, God had given me a second chance. It wasn’t too late to be Dustin, to become what every woman wants—not what she says she wants, but what she really wants, deep inside, beyond her social programming, where her fantasies and daydreams lie.
    But I couldn’t do it on my own. Talking to guys online was not going to be enough to change a lifetime of failure. I had to meet the faces behind the screen names, watch them in the field, find out who they were and what made them tick. I made it my mission—my full-time job and obsession—to hunt down the greatest pickup artists in the world and beg for shelter under their wings.
    And so began the strangest two years of my life.
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    1 A glossary has been provided on page 439 with detailed explanations of these and other terms used by the seduction community.

THE FIRST PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US,
MEN AND WOMEN, IS NOT TO LEARN,
BUT TO UNLEARN.

    —G LORIA S TEINEM ,
commencement speech, Vassar College

I withdrew five hundred dollars from the bank, stuffed it into a white envelope, and wrote Mystery on the front. It was not the proudest moment of my life.
    But I had dedicated the last four days to getting ready for it anyway buying two hundred dollars worth of clothing at Fred Segal, spending an afternoon shopping for the perfect cologne, and dropping seventy-five bucks on a Hollywood haircut. I wanted to look my best; this