Rules of the Game (48 page)

He sat in silence, listening, so I continued. I'd never articulated it before, either out loud or to myself. This was several years ago, just after I had discovered the Rosetta Stone of attraction in the form of an underground society of master pickup artists. “I want to corrupt young virgins, reawaken passions in bored housewives, seduce and be seduced by stars, students, centerfolds, businesswomen, and Tantric goddesses. And then, from amongst these women, I will choose one to love.”

“How will you know when you've found her?” he asked.

“I guess I'll just know, because I won't want to be with other women anymore.”

“Well, that sounds like a good plan. And it makes sense to a point.” I waited. I knew he was about to find the flaw in my logic. “But what happens after a year or two years, and the sex isn't as exciting anymore? What happens if you have a child with her, and she becomes less available for you emotionally and sexually? What happens if you go through a rough patch and start fighting all the time?”

“If those things happened, I'd probably want to sleep with other women.” I watched him as he lifted his legs off the floor and crossed them on the couch in a position of spiritual superiority. “But I'd just have to control myself. I suppose I could think of other women like cigarettes. Even though I desired them, I would refrain from indulging because I'd know it was bad for the health of the relationship.”

And then I waited for it, the inevitable question. He was a music producer, yet he never seemed to work. Instead, I'd meet him at his house in Malibu, and we'd spend hours discussing the meaning of life while his Indian houseboy brought us bottles of water and plates of vegan food.

“So,” he said, “you'd be okay spending the next fifty years sleeping with only one woman?”

He had walked me into the weakness in my romantic strategy, and probably in most men's. I love women's laughter. I love their lips, their hips, their skin, their touch, the way their faces look when they're in the throes of sexual ecstasy. I love the way they nurture, feel, care, intuit, understand unconditionally. I yearn to create that bubble of passion, which draws us into the moment and connects us to the energy of the universe. And I cherish, more than anything, the moment in bed right after the first time, when all that there is to hold on to has been given. “Well, that would be difficult for me,” I admitted. “Ideally, I'd like to be able to have my cake and eat it.”

“I think that's a reasonable request,” he said. “After all, cake was meant to be eaten. Who actually orders a cake, then doesn't touch it?”

“So what you're saying is that there's a way to be in a committed, loving relationship, yet still sleep with other women?”

“I didn't say that. All I said is that there's a way to have a cake and eat it.”

“How? Even a monogamous relationship is a challenge. That's why twenty-five percent of all crimes are domestic violence, that's why the divorce rate is fifty percent, that's why the majority of men and women have cheated. Maybe the relationship paradigm that's been forced on us by society isn't natural.” He looked at me disapprovingly. I continued anyway. “Even if you're faithful for those fifty years, you still may check out a woman walking by or leaf through a copy of
Maxim
or look for porn on the Internet one night. And this is going to make your partner feel like she's not enough for you.”

“This is true. You can't have a healthy relationship if your partner doesn't feel secure.”

“Exactly. So, considering the nature of men, how is it possible to make a woman feel secure in a relationship?”

“Probably by not wanting to have your cake and eat it,” he said.

“But that's not natural. You just said that cake was meant to be eaten.”

“Well, then,” he said, “you'll have to find a way to eat it without hurting someone you love.”

I hated him sometimes. For being right.

In the days that followed, I sifted through the conversation in my mind, searching for answers. I talked to men and women everywhere I went, asking each the same question: “If you didn't have to worry about having children and you didn't need someone to take care of you when you were older, would you still get married?”

Most men said no. Most women said yes. And that was when I realized that the traditional relationship model is defined by a woman's needs, not a man's.

Then I started asking a new question:

“Let's say you met someone, clicked on every level, and wanted to date this person. But the person said that after two years, he or she would disappear from your life forever and there was nothing you could do about it. Would you still date this person?”

Most women said no. Most men said yes—some even said the scenario would be ideal.

So where does that leave the “one woman, one man, happily ever after” myth that is the basis of our entire civilization? Apparently, on an unbalanced scale, because the natural instincts of men seem to be to alternate between periods of love relationships and periods of hedonistic bachelorhood, with some traumatized kids thrown in as an evolutionary imperative.

When I next met my friend, I shared my conclusion. “That's kind of a sad way to live one's life,” he said.

“Yeah, and the problem is that's exactly how I've been living mine. Except for the kids part. I don't want to traumatize them, so I'm waiting until I figure out a solution to this whole relationship dilemma that satisfies the needs of both sexes.”

“You'd make a good politician,” he said, not as a compliment. ‘You're the type of guy who can't kill a fly, a bee, or a cockroach himself, but has no problem hiring an exterminator to kill a whole swarm of them.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” he said, setting down his bottle of water, “that your ethics are fucked up.”

We live in a society that likes to make clear-cut judgments—between good and bad, right and wrong, successful and unsuccessful. But that is not how the universe works. The universe does not judge. Since the dawn of time, it has operated on just two principles: the creative and the destructive. We have come to terms with the creative impulse—that, after all, is why we're here—but we live in fear of the destructive because that, one day, will be our reason for going.

I don't want to just offer you a self-help book and tell you that, if you follow it, in thirty days your life will be perfect. There's another side to the game: the destructive side. And, the more successful you are, the more you're going to rub against it. Especially since, more than any other instinct we have, the sexual impulse contains both the creative and the destructive.

The inspiration for this book was the preceding series of conversations, which point to a seemingly irreconcilable disparity between the sexual and emotional needs of men and women—not to mention a reluctance to admit and express them. They also underscore a similarity that transcends gender: the fear of being alone—and the dramas and comedies that occur because, as the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder put it, “we were born to need each other, but we haven't learned how to live with each other.”

The eleven stories that follow are true, and all except two happened during the period in which I immersed myself in the pickup artist subculture and was given the alias Style, as chronicled in
The Game
. Unlike
The Game
, however, these stories are less about getting the girl and more about the nature of desire itself. They loosely trace the metaphorical arc of a man's dating life, building toward the question that none of the pickup gurus I met while learning the game was able to answer: What do you do after the orgasm?

Fiction writers are lucky: They can hide behind the flawed characters they create. Here, the only flawed character is me. In the process of approaching thousands of people to master the game and myself, the three engines driving my behavior—hereditary instincts, family upbringing, and social forces—came into constant conflict. As a result, I hurt people's feelings, made bad choices, took unhealthy risks, missed important opportunities, and committed irreversible blunders.

I also had some amazing sex.

And therein lies the conflict.

From each of these experiences, I've tried to extract a lesson. And that hasn't been easy. Because some of these experiences never should have happened in the first place.

I am sitting on her couch and she is waiting for an answer.

She is offering me French lessons.

She is sitting too close. She is talking too slow. She is accidentally on purpose grazing my knee with the back of her hand.

She wants me.

She has to be at least sixty.

And, somehow, I feel myself drawn in.

I know the symptoms: dizzy, light-headed, eyes defocusing, room melting, PC muscle contracting.

I look at her: she is old, man. And not a good old. Just plain old. And worn-down. Brittle black-gray hair piled sloppily atop her head. Pea-size pores freckling her face. Body like a bag of gravel. Blood-pressure socks. Varicose veins. Granny glasses. Mustache.

I have to get out of here. Before it's too late.

“Gotta get back to writing … me, too … well, bye then … sure, a French lesson would be… I'm not sure when … work and all … but, yeah, definitely … and give my best to Josh … thanks … you, too.”

Jesus. That was close.

We have lived on the same floor of the same apartment building in Pasadena for six months. We've passed each other in the hallway many times. She's always with her autistic son, Josh. I feel bad for her. She's a single mother, and
has sacrificed her entire life to take care of her son and nurture his autistic musical genius. He knows the name, lyrics, chords, recording date, and catalog number of every Beatles song and is not too shy to recite them to strangers. He never forgets a face or a fact. He has aged her prematurely.

Yet every time I run into her in the hallway or the elevator, there is this tingle. This energy. I feel drawn in and hypnotized. I can't describe it any better. But I know it's attraction. I want to kiss her. It makes no logical sense. The only older women I've slept with were ones any red-blooded boy would go for: long legs, workout bodies, spray tan, shampoo-commercial hair. I've never been drawn to a woman like this before. Yet, sometimes, at night, as I prepare to sleep, my hand will lazily drift into my boxer shorts. And I'll find myself thinking of her.

I live in Los Angeles. I see some of the most gorgeous women in the world on a daily basis. They're everywhere: carrying their crappy little show dogs, sitting in Starbucks on a Tuesday afternoon because they're too pretty to work a day job, jogging along the beach like they're auditioning for
America's Next Top Model
.

And what do I do? I masturbate to the sixty-year-old crone in my building.

I could have anyone in my fantasies. And by this point, I could have just about anyone in real life, too. Why do I keep choosing her?

Two days later, I'm taking the elevator to the garage with the previous night's companion, Darcy. She is sexy but shady. Claims her job is throwing parties for men in Las Vegas. I would like to go to one of those parties sometime.

“Hi, Neil,” a loud, nasal voice greets us when we step out of the elevator.

It's Josh. He met Darcy in the building once before, about three weeks ago. He just turned fifteen. He's starting to get acne and feelings around girls he can't explain. He likes to talk to me about masturbation and how he hates his mom.

“Hi, Darcy. You're twenty-six and from Newton in Massachusetts, right?” He knows he's right. Show-off. “You're pretty.”

Nancy weak-smiles at us. “I'm sorry. Josh, come on.”

I look at Darcy. She is tan from a bottle. She is buxom from a Beverly Hills doctor. She is rail-thin from crystal meth. She is a porcelain doll of youth, sexuality, and doom.

I look at Nancy. She is pasty from indoor lighting. She is saggy from age. She is lumpy from lack of exercise. She has given up on youth, on sexuality, on
herself. The autistic cross she's had to bear for so many years has consumed her, broken her, wrecked her.

What was I thinking?

“Hey, Neil, ‘The Long and Winding Road' is a good song. Do you like that song?”

“It's great,” I tell Josh.

“It was written on the same day as ‘Let It Be,'” he informs me. “It's the only song on the album that just has Paul McCartney on piano and not Billy Preston. What do you think he means when he says, ‘crying for the day'? What day is he crying for?”

That's the tragedy of Josh. He knows facts. But metaphor is too vague.

“The day when things were better.”

“Don't you think he could just mean the day before?”

He is too literal. He doesn't realize that if words only represented their dictionary definitions, they would no longer serve the purpose of expression. There would be no Beatles, no literature, no poetry. There is something underneath each word that affects its expression and interpretation. That thing is called emotion. The inability to recognize it is something both Josh and Darcy have in common.