LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SIX PICKING UP

      Things are picking up. Thank God.

      This morning, after a good healthy breakfast of eggs and bananas, I boarded the number 3 bus to Oxford Circus to give blood. I hadn’t been on a bus in quite a while, and I have to say, it really took me by surprise. What really amazed me, moved me even, was the intimacy. I guess what I’m really talking about here—really—is the proximity of the other human beings, many of whom—and I feel like a colossal pervert even mentioning this, but if you take the bus yourself sometimes you’ll know it to be true—many of whom are women.

      Good God in heaven. All I wanted to do was give an armful of blood, maybe save the lives of a few desperate children. But things are never that simple. Instead I was forced to bear witness to a cavalcade of sumptuous young ladies, getting on the bus, getting off the bus, ceaselessly brushing past me with their clothes and their flesh and their fresh feisty smells.

      I thought of Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, that scene at the Orchid Show, trying and failing to concentrate on the orchids he must write about, distracted by women. ‘One looks like a school teacher,’ he muses. ‘One looks like a gymnast.’ Well, that’s pretty much exactly how I felt as we sailed through South London, heading north. One looked like a Polish waitress. One looked like a human-rights lawyer. One looked like that girl on Grange Hill who had a brief career in pop. One looked like a New Cross intellectual with whom you could go to the Tate Modern and kiss passionately in the Turbine. One had eyes like a cavern under the sea in the deepest darkest dead of night. One had large hoop earrings and a saggy-faced dog in a bag.

      You see all sorts on public transport.

      One looked like Ange.

      I looked away.

      I found myself thinking about the Japanese too. People point to the Japanese—with their weird cartoon erotica, their soiled-knicker vending machines, their schoolgirl obsessions, and their pixellated private porn parts—and they snicker and think, ‘My oh my, what an inscrutable race of smiling, damned perverts they are,’ but I really think that any race insightful enough to have commuter-train simulation rooms in brothels is way ahead of its time. You may find it offensive, but it taps right into a lot of men’s fantasies, and in an ideal world, not just men’s.

      So, I must confess that my journey was filled with thoughts of this nature, and by the time I arrived to give blood, most of it was lodged in my nether regions.

      Once inside the blood clinic, I had to fill in a form, just to make sure my blood was good. Do I have HIV? they wanted to know. No, I do not. Do I have hepatitis B? Nope. C? Nope. Have I ever received payment for sex? Oh, come on. Have I had sex in the last twelve months with any of the following: needle-wielders, fudgepackers, Third World backpackers? No, no, no. Have I in fact had sex at all? Oh, leave me in peace, for God’s sake. I just came here to save children’s lives. Why must I be made to feel inadequate at every single turn?

      I heaved a sigh, made for the couch.

      But as I lay there, opening and closing my fist, being leeched, I felt positive. Things were picking up. I could feel it in my water.

      Outside, on the way back to Oxford Circus, I was approached by a pretty young chugger. ‘How would you like to help a deaf child?’ she asked.

      ‘Pardon?’ I said.

      I chuckled. She must get that all day.

      Sweet though she was, with her lips and her hair and her eyes full of hope and drama-school training, and sympathetic though I am to deaf children, and indeed deaf people of all ages, on this occasion I had to decline. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve saved enough children for one day, don’t you think?’

      She smiled pitifully, thinking, ‘London is full of loonies.’

      Speaking of things picking up, I’ve spent the last week reading a book called The Game. It is, after all, time to move on.

      The Game is the story of how journalist Neil Strauss went from AFC to PUA, then found an LTR with an HB10.

       AFC = Average Frustrated Chump

       PUA = Pick-up Artist

       LTR = Long-term Relationship

       HB10 = Hot Babe with a high rating on the physical-appearance scale

      As you can see, there is an awful lot of jargon in pick-up, and as you can see, much of it is excruciatingly embarrassing.

      The story goes like this: after years of fearing rejection to the point of not even being able to talk to women without stammering and blushing, Strauss is commissioned to write a piece on America’s burgeoning pick-up community. Consequently he becomes immersed in this world; eventually he becomes addicted. In the course of his research, he meets all of the pick-up gurus—including (allegedly) the guy on whom Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia is based. He learns all their tricks of the trade—their demonstrations of value, their false time constraints, their peacocking, their NLP tricks and traps—and basically he transforms himself into some kind of RoboStud—a bald, ripped, soulless, pre-progammed seduction machine.

      The game in question—also branded by other PUAs as Real Social Dynamics—is basically an attempt to make a science out of seduction. Furthermore, naturally, it is an attempt to make a profit out of that science. The money-making aspect is important. This is not philanthropy, as many of the gurus attempt to imply. It’s business.

      So I read the whole thing with a very jaded and cynical eye, but there was one paragraph which hooked me despite myself. It described a meeting Strauss had with a PUA called David X. Now David X was apparently one of the best in the business. No shitty stick in the world could protect this guy from a constant deluge of enthusiastic muff. And the bit that caught my eye was Strauss describing X as the ugliest PUA he’d ever met. He was ‘immense, balding, and toadlike’, with a rash of warts covering his giant face. It was at that point that I thought, ‘OK. Maybe I can give this game a go. Maybe it’s time I got Game.’

      So. Apparently, the first thing I need is a name that is not my own. A seduction name. A pulling name. This is because, essentially, ‘the game’ is all about manipulation through deception. Strauss is told early on in his journey, ‘It’s not lying. It’s flirting.’ It’s something he repeats to himself every now and then, usually before he tells some great big horrible lie. ‘It’s not lying,’ he says. ‘It’s flirting.’ No, it’s not, Neil. It’s lying. And you know it.

      Just as I know, of course, that I’m never going to be able to do this. Certainly not to the extent of the various characters in the book. Not to the extent whereby the attempted seduction of a woman becomes instinctive, an habitual reaction to seeing an HB in the street.

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