What would you do for a Friend?

Westley Chow
March 5th, 2009

What would you do for a friend?
The house was a disaster

This wasn’t a normal kind of crying. Ordinary tears are understandable. But Mystery was beyond understanding. He was out of control. For a week, he’d been vacillating between periods of extreme anger and violence, and jags of fitful, cathartic sobbing. And now he was threatening to kill himself.

We never used our real names – only our aliases. Even our mansion, like the others we had spawned everywhere from San Francisco to Sydney, had a nickname. It was Project Hollywood. And Project Hollywood was in shambles.

“This living thing.” He was speaking again. “It’s sp pointless.”

I couldn’t let Mystery die on my watch. He was more than just a friend. He was a mentor. He’d changed my life, as he had the lives of thousands of others just like me.

I needed to get him Valium, Xanax, Vicoin, anything. I grabbed my phone book and scanned the pages for people most likely to have pills – people like guys in rock bands, women who’d just had plastic surgery, former child actors. But everyone I called wasn’t home, didn’t have any drugs, or claimed not to have any drugs because they didn’t want to share.

I gave Mystery the pill and a glass of water, and waited until the sobs slowed to a sniffle.

He was docile now, like a big baby.

“I’m taking you to get some help,” I told him.

“I want to learn martial arts,” he said docilely, “so when I want to kill someone, I can do something about it.”

I brought him into the lobby, signed him in, and together we waited for a turn with one of the counselors.

She looked at him with feigned sympathy as he continued. To her, he was just one of a dozen nutjobs she saw a day. All she needed to figure out was whether he required medication or institutionalization.

She didn’t know. How could she? But this sobbing giant with the crumpled tissue in his hands was the greatest pickup artist in the world.

There was only one person alive who could possibly compete with him. And that man was sitting in front of her also. From a formless lump of nerd, Mystery had molded me into a superstar.

Together, we had pulled off spectacular pickups before the disbelieving eyes of our students and disciples in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, London, Melbourne, Belgrade, Odessa, and beyond.

And now we were in a madhouse.



With excerpts from The Game by Neil Strauss