By the time he’d reached his mid-30s, author Neil Strauss felt like one of those asocial bedroom nerds who can name the DP on every Jim Jarmusch movie but can’t chat up a girl to save his life. Here was a guy who spent months on the road with the Crue, an access all areas laminate around his neck, and the only living creature to plant a smacker on his lips was Tommy Lee. He felt doomed to play the role of the leading lady’s platonic pal. He was, as the acronym went, an AFC – Average Frustrated Chump.

So when Strauss was alerted to the existence of cult community of pick-up artists (or PUAs) whose lives were dedicated to gathering, assimilating and road-testing data on how to master the mating game, he was intrigued.

What followed was a two-year undercover investigation into the realm of seduction that went way beyond the limits of professional distance and into full-blown lifestyle immersion. Strauss, under the tutelage of various mentors, chiefly his partner in crime and semi-neurotic cruising partner Mystery, morphed from socially inept bookworm to full-on lady-killer, replete with polished patter, better posture, updated wardrobe, new identity and even a new name (‘Style’) – anything he could use to strengthen his chick-blitzing armoury. He became One Of Them.

“I really went in at first to fix this problem in my life of not knowing what to say to women and always being friends with them,” the author explains, sipping a beer in the Clarence Hotel during a rare breather in a whistle-stop publicity tour. “And along the way as it started to unfold and I saw these characters like Mystery or Ross Jeffries, they were such characters, they had to be written about. I thought maybe I’d just do a book that was a history of the seduction community and each chapter would be a profile of the main gurus. But along the way I realised that whatever I was going through, it was a journey.”

Strauss may not be Johnny Depp, but his time in the PUA community has definitely resulted in a radical transformation. Once a bespectacled, balding, scruffily bearded nerd, he’s now a shaven-headed, goatee sculpted, nattily threaded apparition sporting gold cowboy boots.

Joining us is his girlfriend Lisa Leveridge, a native New Yorker resident in LA for the last ten years, currently playing guitar with Courtney Love’s band. Strauss met Leveridge in the latter stages of writing the book when he was assigned an interview with her boss, and she became the catalyst for his ditching the pick-up lifestyle and settling into a monogamous relationship.

One can hardly blame him; she’s a classic American blonde beauty with warm eyes and a sharp wit. They make a good couple. Over dinner with various folks from Repforce Publicity and the book business, the conversation meanders from the arthouse (Pasolini’s ‘Salo’, John Fante’s ‘Ask The Dust’) to the toilet (a discourse on sexual slang which educates your innocent reporter on the meaning of terms such as Playing The Rusty Trombone (tonguing someone’s butthole while performing a reach-around) and The Blumpkin (getting fellated while taking a dump). Lisa, after consultation with her tablemates, decides to form a side project C&W band called the Country Blumpkins.

The reason they’re here is to promote Strauss’s book ‘The Game’, a crisply written and rather fascinating piece of first-person New Journalism, and a much bigger and deeper book than its subject matter might initially suggest. The PUAs’ methodology encompasses tips on posture, conversation, body language, room positioning and even magic tricks, gleaned from various sources including self-improvement cults, advertising, and pop psychology.

Throughout the story, Strauss logs a mind-boggling number of brief encounters, toilet stall blowjobs and ménages a trios, but by the book’s second act, the obsessive nature of The Game appears to have spiralled out of control, with the various community members’ lives being swallowed up with online blogging, coaching sessions, seminars and nocturnal search and destroy missions on the Sunset Strip. The irony being that these guys – Strauss included – are doing little but behaving like trained monkeys performing set tasks designed to stimulate responses in females they’ve just met. As they become more and more addicted to scoring, they adopt ever more automatic flight-simulator approaches to human interaction. Spontaneity goes out the window and they end up trotting out the same old lines and routines.

“That was exactly my journey,” Strauss admits. “Seriously, it really became robotic. Some people will over-train and they start getting negative results. I wish you could see them, because they put out this needy, creepy energy. If you define yourself as a pick-up artist, well, what makes a good pick-up artist? The reactions of women. So your definition of yourself is completely dependent on what others are thinking, and it’s so counter productive. So in some ways, the better I got, the harder it got to approach sometimes, because I had so much to prove. Before, I was happy just to make an approach and not get rejected. At the end, as Style, I’d have to walk into a room, make everybody laugh and love me and make out with the most beautiful woman in the room; otherwise they’d be disappointed.

“The funny thing is, you were saying earlier, there are the guys who can tell you who the DP was on ‘Apocalypse Now’ and can name every Tarkovsky movie and programme stuff, but they don’t know how to relate to a woman – well, now they had an opportunity to learn about women in the way that you learn how to programme computers, in a very mathematical, factual, coldly scientific way, and that was the appeal. What I still haven’t figured out is can you learn to be cool that way. When I see all these guys, I see them with all the apparatus of cool, the lingo of cool, but they still don’t feel they’re cool. I just wonder if cool can be taught? Lisa says no.”

Lisa is indeed shaking her head. She puts her pint on the table and considers her boyfriend’s question.

“See, I think at your core, you were always cool,” she says, “it’s just it was hard for you to express that in the first ten minutes and give someone the chance to get to know that you’re cool, cos you didn’t come off cool right away. See, that’s the whole thing. If you’re basically cool and knowledgeable and interesting, it’s unfortunate if you’re not necessarily the most attractive person or the most dynamic personality, and you don’t get a chance to get that cool part out the way you are with your friends. But at your core, if you’re not interested in life and you’re not a cool person, you’re not going to get the second date.”

Although a work of non-fiction, the narrative arc of ‘The Game’ resembles nothing so much as Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and David Fincher’s film ‘Fight Club’, one of the most acerbic comments on male psychology of the last decade. Here’s another ritual where a bunch of males lacking role models come together to partake in something that make them feel like vital human beings again. However, as the numbers grow and the individuals become subsumed into the cult, the whole thing goes pear-shaped. In ‘The Game’, there’s even a character that calls himself Tyler Durden, and the PUAs’ mansion HQ was nicknamed Project Hollywood. Chuck Palahniuk “Dude, right on,” Neil exclaims. “It’s almost like me and Mystery were the Brad Pitt and Ed Norton characters. And that whole house, it was this factory of guys. Like in ‘Fight Club’ they had the whole black shirts and shaved heads look. We had the monkeys running around this house. There was a guy who lived in our back yard in a tent, and he paid for all our utilities as well as our cleaning and all the house expenses just to live with us and kind of learn at our feet. Our plan was to have this super rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but instead all we attracted were the needy guys. I swear to god, when they started moving six bunk beds into this room, I thought, ‘Oh my god this is doomed.’ Chuck Palahniuk Lisa: “ It was like a barracks.”

And like the characters in other Palahniuk books such as ‘Choke’ and ‘Survivor’, these were people who concocted dysfunctional and ultimately futile ways of finding love.

“I knew I shouldn’t be hanging out with these guys,” Neil concedes, “but I couldn’t help it ’cos they definitely had the secret of how to fill in that missing piece of my life. So instead of hanging out with the rock stars, I was hanging out with 23 year olds who were going to help me with this. And in a way they did, and I’m grateful that I went through it.”

Mind you, it wasn’t just 20-something dweebs with bad skin and tragic wardrobe issues.

“I actually ended up coaching a huge rock star and a huge producer, really well known people,” he admits. “They were more famous than I could ever hope to be, performing in front of 50,000 people, and they were still petrified to approach a woman. Maybe girls would come to them at shows, but once they were in the real world they had no skills whatsoever. One musician I can mention is Twiggy Ramirez, I turned him onto a lot of stuff, so we would go winging sometimes.”

One unforeseen benefit of the PUA tactics Strauss learned was that they also enhanced his interviewing skills. When he found an encounter with Britney Spears going the way of most Britney interviews (ie deteriorating into monosyllabic blandness), he threw in a couple of mind-reading and personality-gauging techniques to get her attention. He walked out of the interview with her cellphone number. Similarly, a meeting with Courtney Love resulted in her moving into the PUAs LA mansion while she attempted to sort out her life.

“They only really gave me an hour in the Virgin offices, but it was probably partly the rapport skills that I learned at this that convinced her to extend the company,” Neil says.

“It’s so funny, ’cos I just missed meeting Neil,” adds Lisa. “I came the next day or a few hours after he left.”

Strauss’s account of how he wooed Ms Leveridge is rather amusing. She didn’t exactly make it easy on him. Is she really as much of a hard-ass as he made her out to be?

“You know what?” she says, “Everything he wrote down is exactly what happened. I mean, sometimes after I would say something he would literally go to the computer and write it down. And my mother read that and she goes, ‘I knew that Neil was telling the truth for the whole book because those are words right out of your mouth and I could tell.’ I’m actually much less tolerant than Courtney is. She’s a much sweeter person.”

Neil: “I wonder what she’s gonna think of the book?”

Lisa: “I don’t know. She’ll probably like it, because as long as something’s real, she’s down for it. The only thing she has an issue with is when things are untrue. But yes, I think I was pretty much portrayed spot on. Was I hard-ass-y?”

Neil: “Well, mmmm, you gave me a hard time…”

Lisa: “Well you deserve it! No, you don’t Neil. But if you’d gone to this house and seen all these guys…”

Neil: “I could not believe it. It was the most beautiful house in the world covered in stains and sperm and guys sleeping there.”

Lisa: “Actually it was cool at first. Courtney and me had fun, we’d watch a seminar and sneak in, but it just changed and started morphing into something less fun. I would never normally have had them in my life had in any way, shape or form were it not for the fact that they lived with Neil.”

Neil: “They tried to push Courtney out of the house and at the same time they were taking photos of her to show off in the clubs. It was so funny man, every day they’d be like ants walking down the hill toward the Sunset Strip in big hats and boas and striped sleeve things, they were so robotic; they didn’t get the idea of fashion. If Tyler Durden or me bought a shirt, they’d all go out and buy the same shirt. I swear to god, people would ask me why I write non-fiction because I have a fiction style, but I couldn’t make this up.”

Interesting thing is, The Game’s most valuable lessons about how to comport oneself in public are to do with self-confidence and stance rather than looks. Stand up straight. Smile. Learn how to dress yourself. And most importantly, learn the true, unforced Zen-like quality of not giving a fuck. Nothing matters; therefore you can’t fail.

“Right,” says Neil. “That’s a cool thing. And as much as they’re clinical, these guys to me are like modern social scientists. I read all those old books on how to flirt before this community, and it was just guys with theories. I majored in psychology at school, but these guys are out there testing out theories hundreds of thousands of times. They’re these amazing researchers, those social robot guys.”

But it’s one thing to pick up girls night after night. The real challenge is how to negotiate the swamp of long-term love affairs.

“That’s such a good point; I really feel like the skills that it takes to have a relationship are completely different from the skills of seduction. I almost wish there was a community that would show you the rights and wrongs of relationships because it’s a whole different minefield and is much more complex. People always ask, ‘Were these guys going around hurting women?’ Well, let’s just say, in the worst example, you hook up for a one-night-stand – you generally don’t hurt somebody, you can only disappoint them. It’s only when you’re in love and in a relationship that you really have the power to deeply, profoundly hurt someone.

“There are a lot of relationship skills that I still need to learn. And all the rules of pick-up such as, ‘Never buy a woman a drink’ or, ‘Never take her on dates’ or, ‘Don’t give her generic compliments’ – in a relationship it’s the exact opposite. Always dates, romance, always give generic compliments! A lot of guys who took these workshops were guys that came out of marriages or long relationships and felt like they needed to learn this stuff all over again. I’d say a third of them.”

The one voice this reader kept hearing over and over as he was reading the book was that of Leonard Cohen, who has always protested his own reputation as a ladies’ man, reasoning that it’s a meaningless title, because the woman always chooses. And no one, male or female, ever masters the heart.

“It’s so true. In London it feels like they’re trying to pull the alarm bells and create controversy and are worried about these guys going out there and manipulating women, and if there’s any lesson I learned, it’s that the woman always chooses the man. As a man all you can do is present yourself in the best possible light to be chosen and do nothing wrong. We’re a very patriarchal society despite the advances made in the past few years, but the power of sexual and relationship choice is one thing women have always had throughout history.”

The Game is out now, published by Canongate

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.