“I’m getting laid off,” Nick tells me. We are sitting in the hot tub.
“What?”
“A bunch of us are.”
I’m looking at Nick. I want to think he’s joking, but his face tells me he’s serious.
“I’ll be okay, but I won’t be able to keep up the house payment. Maybe it’s time to sell.”
“Is it a certainty that you’re getting laid off?” I say.
“Three weeks.”
“Wow.”
“I know,” Nick says pushing foam on the surface of the water aside with his hand.
“I can’t imagine getting rid of Rendezvous at this point.”
“I doubt I’ll be able to find work here. I’ll have to move.”
We look at each other. Then Nick looks down and brushes more foam aside.
“I suppose I can buy your part from you and keep Rendezvous alive,” I say, “but what would be the fun in that? I love that we’ve made this place what it is together. I can go out and meet girls by myself, no problem, but it’s so much more fun with you.”
“I know.”
“You can get into real estate investing. I’ll show you the ropes. I’ll help you along the way.”
“I don’t have enough capital,” he says.
“You don’t need much. You use borrowed money.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Are you afraid?”
He looks at me.
“Yeah.” There is a pause. “I’m not like you. I like knowing that I’ll have a paycheck every two weeks. I like having my employer take care of my medical insurance and benefits. I like security.”
“Security,” I say. “You just got laid off.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s a false security, man. Security is knowing that you’ll never be laid off. Knowing that you’ll have passive income coming in month after month.”
“You know there are risks.”
“Of course. But look at you now. What do you have to lose? How much less security can you have?”
“I know what you’re saying, but I know I can get a job. I’m an engineer. I can get a job. There’s security in that. I have a skill there is demand for.”
We’re both quiet.
“So three weeks?” I say.
“I need to start looking for something.”
Silence again. I’m trying to find a way for Nick to stay, a way for him to make money. It’s been great being with so many girls, but a lot of the fun is being able to share it with Nick. We were both nerds in school. We always struggled with girls. And now that we’ve transformed ourselves into ladies’ men, and we’ve done much of it together, it would be sad to see him go.
“Maybe it’s time to stop,” he says. “What about Nanda? It was great doing all this, something that most men only dream of. But you’re married, man. What about Nanda?”
“Nanda. Things will never be the same. I’m a different man now. I used to be afraid to lose her. I’m not afraid anymore. I love her. I know it sounds crazy to say it, but I do. If she finds out about all this, she’s the one who’s going to have to decide. She can take it or leave it. Things changed when she slept with that guy. I forgave her. I did. I just couldn’t get past it. I was stuck. I did what I had to do and now I’ve changed. I’m the same guy, only better. I have options with women. She made me what I am. If she had never cheated on me, I’m sure I never would have done what I’ve done.”
“It’s sad. I remember how you guys used to be. You guys were inseperable. You were madly in love.”
“I know. Do you really think things could ever be that way again? I don’t see how. I don’t think I can ever trust her the way I used to. I used to have complete faith in her. Now how can I?”
He doesn’t have an answer.
“So no, it’s not time to stop. I’ve known you longer than I’ve known Nanda. I don’t know how things will end up with her, but I know that whatever happens, you’ll be there in the end and I’ll always be able to count on you.”
“Of course, and I know you’ll always be there for me.”
“That’s why it’s not time to stop. Tell me this hasn’t been a blast.”
“It’s been a fucking blast, man, no doubt.”
“There has to be a way.”
“How?” he says.
“I was thinking that if you and I were able to teach ourselves all of this, we could probably teach others. How much would a guy be willing to pay to learn this shit?”
“I know some guys would give it all.”
“It’s just a matter of systemizing the process. We need to break it down into teachable steps,” I say.
“You were able to teach me.”
“But that was all very inefficient. I had all the time in the world with you. If we teach other guys, we’ll only have a few days to get the system from our brains into theirs.”
“How much could we charge?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Five hundred for a weekend?”
“Easy.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah. A thousand. More even.”
“How many guys can we teach at a time?” he says.
“I think we can each have two at a time. So four all together. And I mean teaching out in bars and parks and bookstores—the real world.”
“We can do this, man.”
“For sure,” I say. “At least we have three weeks to try. If we can’t get any students in three weeks, we’ll sell the house.”
“Dude, we have the perfect classroom. We can teach a bunch of guys theory at Rendezvous during the day. We’ll have simulations and run-throughs. We can drill them over and over. Then we can take them out at night and show them what it looks like in the real world.”
“We’ll have a workshop. The first one will be free, just to see how it goes. We’ll learn as we go.”
Nick and I are excited about this. We go up to his room and take out notebooks and start writing down everything we’ve learned about meeting women—everything from mindset, to getting phone numbers, to kiss tactics, to body language. After we fill the notebooks with everything we can think of, we try to make sense of it all, to find patterns, to turn the mess into a system.
“Let’s look at things chronologically,” I say. “First you have to start an interaction with a woman or a group of people. What are the ways we do that?” We list as many as we can think of and break them down into categories. We call all these “openers.” “What happens after you open?” Now we write down all the different directions one can go in after opening. We break down the courting process into steps. That way, at any moment, you can stop and ask yourself, Where am I in the process and how do I proceed?
We work away for hours and just as a sliver of orange light emerges from the eastern horizon we have a system for meeting women from the first word to getting her contact information to setting up a date to the first kiss to getting laid.
“I’ll place an ad on craigslist,” Nick says. “We’ll see how many guys turn out.”
Chapter 32
