But, eventually, spending so much time on a campus infested with feminist hysteria did have its effect. I became convinced it was my duty to feel bad about these encounters. Or at least to act as if I felt bad.
I gave up sex for a while, but women were always around me, always flashing their smiles and widening their eyes. There were so many women, so many signals that needed responding to. How could I ignore it? I did, though. I felt holy, like a priest. I lived a pure life.
I stopped going out. I locked myself in my dorm room. I paced and paced. I lay on my bed and thought of a song I heard once in a sad girl’s dorm room. I fucked this girl after a poetry book launch. She was the poet. She had a small face, rat teeth, a purple cloud of hair. In her room, we sat on the floor. A skinny dog named after a flower tried to nip at my ankles and she locked it in the bathroom. She drank vodka and smoked. She said she knew I would fuck her and never call her again. She played the song that went like this: “Is that all there is?”
That was the line that kept playing in my head: Is that all there is? I felt embarrassed about having it play in my head, but at least I wasn’t doing it in front of another person like the poet girl. Also, I thought it was a good sign that I still cared about things like that – about embarrassing myself.
Eventually, because of my confusion, I began to think I was going crazy. The campus posters suggested seeing therapists. I went to see one. She said I was stressed, possibly needed a break. I was okay – academically – but I felt unsafe. I listened to the suggestion. I reported myself as if I was a person reporting another person.
I went to a hospital. It didn’t seem like a terrible idea. I enjoy new experiences.
I spent two days talking to mental-health professionals, reading magazines and eating Jell-O. I told one of the psychiatrists about feeling embarrassed about a song playing in my head, but also how I thought that was a good sign.
“What kind of song?”
“An old classic. A song from my childhood that my mother used to play. I miss my childhood,” I said.
“Why is it a good sign? To hear this song?”
“I think it shows that I’m invested,” I said, and the psychiatrist nodded. She had straight black hair, dyed, harsh. I imagined holding it in fistfuls, pulling it like reins.
I left that session and slid around the hallway in my slippers. It was the first time I wore slippers round the clock since childhood. As predicted, there was a certain sense of adventure to it all.
I was not crazy, and I didn’t want to die. If I’d wanted to die, I’d have known it. It was time to re-evaluate. I had no religion, but there were things I believed in. Like my nature. I talked to psychiatrists about that. How I wanted to re-evaluate, how I wanted to live in accordance to my nature.
“What is your nature?”
“I like people. Ultimately, I like people. I want to find a girlfriend.”
“This doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you hurting anyone? Your guilt is only hurting you.”
“You’re right. That is very perceptive.”
It was perceptive. I hoped it showed in my face that I was getting better already. It did show. The psychiatrist was pleased, I could tell. She leaned back in her chair. I thought how the pink blouse was a great colour on her, how it offset her brown skin. I wanted to lick her, taste her skin. It was impossible to tell what kind of tits she had. I was sure she was wearing one of those shield bras, round and padded.
“I look forward to finishing school,” I said.
The psychiatrist smiled. I was saying all the right things.
I left the hospital without the burden of guilt. I would say I even felt optimistic about life.
4
AROUND THAT TIME, MY FRIEND JASON JOINED A PICKUP artist group, where men talked about strategies for hitting on women. This movement was probably a kind of reaction to the rabid man-hate that was everywhere. The men exchanged tips and stories on message boards. Occasionally, the PUAs – as Jason called them – would meet in real life. He took me to their meet-up one night. There were twenty men in a basement, most of them young like me and Jason.
A paunchy man got up and talked nonsense. He wore a T-shirt that read Tool. He had black spacers in his ears. The name of the band combined with his overall dweebiness and the circumstances he was in did not escape my sense of irony.
Tool said he went sarging for HBs. He approached a warm-up set of two. He locked in, but then he got locked out by a third HB before he managed to give his number to a set.
Jason whispered “hot babe” when the HB term came up again. Other than that, I was on my own. My phone vibrated. It was a text from some girl that she must’ve sent drunk. Something about me being a dick. The PUA chief kept prattling on about his various failures with women. He recited acronyms with a forced casualness.
I looked around at all the other pasty basement-dwellers who would one day crawl out like the sad, wormy things they were and – armed with tips from message boards from other dweebs – crawl to their shopping malls. There, they would spread their slime around until some sad victim got stuck in it long enough for them to recite their lines. The humiliations they put themselves through – attacking women in shopping malls, bragging about their attacks, whining about being shot down, their language full of hurt and vitriol. It was horrifyingly stupid. Absurd. Unsophisticated.
I was not absurd or unsophisticated.
After Tool, another tool got up to speak. He was attractive, blond like a Viking. Why was he here? My guess was it had something to do with the size of his penis. The Viking looked around the room and smiled: “Men, remember, women want to be seduced, and a well-done pickup is a gift to women.”
“He is sooo good,” Jason said in a squeaky whisper.
The Viking told an anecdote about sleeping with a woman and telling her he had to leave to make it back to the bar before last call. All the men laughed. I didn’t get a chance to find out if this was a cautionary tale or a practice that was advocated because I got up and left. Jason told me later that during the break, the men joked that I was probably a fag or a feminist.
The truth was, despite its ridiculousness, that meeting reminded me how thrilling the pursuit of women actually was. I didn’t need a workshop. I didn’t want motivational speeches telling me how to seduce a woman. I didn’t have to read books about it, listen to tips about how it was best to fire in all directions because it was statistically guaranteed that I’d eventually hit something. I’ve always hit the bull’s eye anyway.
I decided to start dating. This time, I wanted to date beautiful girls. I don’t mean dogs in clingy dresses, with plucked eyebrows, Marilyn Monroe delusions, fake lashes and duck pouts.
Only dweeby PUAs would fall for that.
By beautiful, I mean actresses, models and club girls. I knew the methods of picking up beautiful girls were barely more sophisticated than methods of picking up one-nighter girls. The truth was most girls liked you to be direct, and most girls liked to be degraded. There’s a subtlety to it all that escapes amateurs like my friend Jason, who only offends girls by saying things like, “I like your moustache” to tease them, or by coming on too aggressively, saying, “We should go to my place and fuck.”