Rules of the Game

by Neil Strauss

  And this completely confused me, because I wasn’t sure if she was offering me a blow job using the only English words she knew as a synonym, or if she was simply sharing her thoughts on American politics.

  Assuming the best, I decided to try to remove her sari. Never having actually removed a sari before, I wasn’t sure where to start.

  She shivered with pleasure as I fumbled around her neckline, then she yanked my hand away. “I good girl,” she said. “It is okay. I like you.”

  Translation: “I don’t normally do this, but actually I do normally do this. I just don’t want you to think I normally do this.”

  She unbuttoned my shirt and ran her fingers along my chest. Her other arm leaned directly against the bulge in my pants. Then she began whispering, over and over, sensually. At first I thought she was saying “cholo.” But the tenth time around, I sounded it out as “chulatay.”

  Every cell in my body was vibrating with desire for her, while every cell in my brain tried to compute how and why this was happening.

  Three chulatays later, she disentangled herself, straightened her sari, and stood up as if nothing had just happened. “No person,” she said as she put a finger to her lips.

  Translation: Either “Don’t tell anybody” or “I will kiss no one else because we’re now engaged.”

  Then she said the two words that struck fear in my heart, “Ali Raj,” and made a slashing motion over her neck.

  “Good girl,” she repeated.

  I knew I was in over my head. Yet something inside propelled me to proceed. Perhaps it was the same impulse that compels a child, when someone draws an imaginary line in the grass with the toe of his shoe and orders him not to cross it “or else,” to gingerly dip his foot on the forbidden side of the line in response. It’s not just an act of defiance, it’s a call for adventure. His side of the line is boring; the other side contains the unknown, the “or else.” The Ali Raj.

  While waiting for the festival to begin that night, I made it my mission to find out what chulatay meant. I eventually narrowed it down to one of two interpretations: either “hanging” or “I’m hungry.” Hopefully, the latter interpretation was correct.

  That night, the streets around the magic show swarmed with police and reporters. The theater was in a university neighborhood, the center of Islamic radicalism, and there had been several bomb threats. Every time someone bicycled past with a package in his handbasket, I imagined the next day’s headline: “Terrorists Make Magicians Disappear.” Nonetheless, I headed inside. Who wants to live in a world without magic?

  I found Tripti walking through the foyer and led her to the back row. As an illusionist from Spain named Juan Mayoral performed some sort of magical love soliloquy to a wire mannequin, Tripti took hold of my inner thigh. She squeezed it and, her breath wet in my ear, whispered, “How is Babu?” She then began rubbing Babu through my pants.

  I looked around the theater: there were Bangladeshi men everywhere and a few scattered families. Everyone was staid, mannered, reserved, intent on the show, and I had this Muslim girl moaning in my ear. Every man has his secret fantasy: This, I realized, was mine.

  As happens with most fantasies, however, reality soon intruded. The fanny pack-wearing Ali Raj henchman from the press conference plopped down in the seat next to me. Tripti quickly withdrew her hand.

  “Are you married?” he asked. He knew exactly what was going on.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Will you marry her?”

  “I just met her.” I couldn’t tell if he was cockblocking, or if this was all some kind of plan to marry Tripti off to an American.

  Between acts, I decided to try to find a secluded place to take Tripti. There were all kinds of stairwells and rooms backstage. But when we stood up, Fanny Pack rose with us and cleaved closely to our sides.

  “My friend,” a voice greeted me as I walked into the foyer with my growing entourage. It was her cousin. My enemy. All men here were my enemies.

  He threw his right arm around my shoulder. “This is the American writer,” he said to three nearby men, who were either family or Ali Raj henchmen or both. They circled me and all began friending me at once. Whenever I craned my head to look for Tripti, they redirected my attention to their conversation: “Is this your first time in Bangladesh?” “How do you like Bangladesh?” “You must come to my home for traditional Bengali dinner.”

  Finally, I caught sight of Tripti, who seemed either oblivious to her protective barrier or pretending to be in order to preserve her honor. I whisked her into the theater, but the phalanx of Bangladeshi men followed, tripping to get ahead of us, between us, alongside us.

  When we sat down, they arranged themselves everywhere around us. Fanny Pack motioned for Tripti to move over, took her seat, and spread his legs until his knees touched mine. It all felt malevolent. As if, instead of fighting, they just got real friendly here.

  “So you like Tripti? Maybe you meet her mother and father?”

  Just then, I felt a sharp kick in my abdomen. I doubled over with pain.

  The spicy rice had done its damage.

  That night, I returned to the hotel in defeat. I spent the next hour on the toilet letting go of my need to get laid in Bangladesh. In the morning, I popped an Imodium so I could visit the miracle village with Harary later that day.

  In the lobby, I saw Tripti in her usual spot at the ticket table, looking radiant in a heavily beaded all-black sari.

  “Ali Raj say no leave table,” she said fearfully.

  I was dumbfounded by the degree of effort these men were making to keep us apart. It was as if we’d been swept up in some epic romance: two lovers from different cultures separated by family—and an evil magician.

  These obstacles only served to intensify my desire for her. So, like a fish compelled by hunger toward the worm of its own doom, I made a desperate move and did one of the most clichéd things I can lay claim to in a long tradition of clichéd behavior in pursuit of women: I handed her the key card for my hotel room.

  “Tonight, no magic,” I told her. “Come here. I wait.”

  “But Ali Raj,” she protested. I was sick of hearing those two words.

  “No Ali Raj,” I said. “You. Me. Tonight. Last chance.”

  I sounded less like I was seducing her and more like I was having a going-out-of-business sale.

  After a moment of reflection, she responded slowly, gravely, “Okay, I come.”

  To give her a plausible excuse to visit me, I purposely left my sunglasses lying on the ticket table. It seemed romantic in a sleazy sort of way.

  Then I walked out of the hotel to join Harary in the van scheduled to take us to the miracle village. The only problem was that the trip had been arranged by Ali Raj. Everything was arranged by Ali Raj. So the van was full of my new friends. The only one I felt I could trust was a sweet older magician wearing a polyester suit two sizes too large for him. His name was Iqbal.

  Fanny Pack took a seat next to me, threw his bullying arm around me, and asked, with a slow smile and wink, ‘You sleep well, my friend?”

  “Fine,” I muttered. I wanted to get away from him. This friend shit was clearly the Bengali equivalent of Chinese water torture.

  “What is this?” Fanny Pack asked, reaching across with his other arm to touch the zipper on my jeans.

  “Dude, what is your problem?” I leapt up and took a seat next to Iqbal. Cockblocking I understood, but cocktouching was completely new to me.

  “If we were in America, I’d smash his face in,” I told Iqbal. Their head games were clearly getting to me.

  “The men here like to control the women,” he said patiently. “There are more acid attacks in Bangladesh than any other country.”

  Acid attacks?

  “Yes, when men throw acid in the faces of women who reject them. It is better now because of strict laws.”

  Bangladesh had successfully beat me. Scared me away from its women. It wasn’t worth risking Tripti
’s disfigurement just so I could have a local girlfriend I’d never see again. I was in no shape for sex anyway: My stomach felt like it was trying to digest a sea urchin shell. I needed to find her when we returned and call off tonight’s escapade.

  After another hour and a half of bumpy, bowel-jiggling roads, we arrived at the village, a collection of crudely painted shacks in a barren field of dirt. No one had digital satellite TV or a subscription to InStyle, so we were the entertainment—especially since Harary had brought a film crew to capture him fraternizing with the locals.

  The women were beautifully made up and covered head to toe in jewelry. As we walked around, I noticed a group of teenage girls following me and staring. Eventually, a few worked up the courage to approach and began gesturing to my earrings, bracelets, rings, and shaved head.

  I asked Iqbal to talk to the women and find out what they were up to. “All the women, they like you,” he came back and told me. Then he pointed out a pair of barefoot, bejeweled beauty queens and said, “Those girls want to marry you.”

  “Why don’t they want to marry Harary? He’s the one all the cameras are following.”

  Iqbal talked to them a moment, then turned and smiled. “They like you.”

  In that moment, I learned that the game is universal. Peacocking—the rule of standing out rather than fitting in, of embodying a more exciting lifestyle instead of the one people are used to—seems to work in every culture. I was now officially doomed to dress ridiculously for the rest of my single life.

  When we met the miracle-working village elder, I discovered something else that was universal: the principles of magic. Her miracles were just sleight-of-hand tricks, originally and masterfully executed using chicken bones. We then watched a snake charmer antagonizing a snake that had been devenomed, and a man performing an old fakir trick in which he swallowed a string and then appeared to pull it out of his stomach.

  So what we discovered was not people with powers we couldn’t explain, but a village of magicians who’ve passed down tricks from generation to generation—and who travel door to door in other villages, performing these tricks for money. In other words, we found a village full of beggar Franz Hararys.

  When we returned to the hotel, the ticket table was abandoned and Tripti was gone. I had no way to get in touch with her and cancel our illicit rendezvous.

  So here I am, at 8:25 p.m. in Dhaka, sitting in my hotel room, waiting for Tripti to arrive, killing time by crapping out my intestines and researching acid attacks on Google. There are as many as 341 attacks in Bangladesh a year, most of which involve women. The weapon of choice is sulfuric acid, usually poured from a car battery into a cup and then thrown on the woman’s face. The disfigurement that results is more hideous than anything I’ve seen in a horror film. And these women are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are forced to drink the acid.

  Of course, I could be horribly wrong about Ali Raj and his men. Perhaps they’re actually on my side and protecting me from Tripti. Maybe they want to save me from a marriage trap she is laying.

  Or maybe they’re not actually cockblocking but hitting on me. According to one Website, five percent of Bangladesh’s population is homosexual.

  I wish she’d get here already. The Internet is a dangerous tool in the hands of a paranoid man with time to kill.

  Five Google searches later, I hear footsteps in the hall. Getting closer. A knock. Why doesn’t she just use the key I gave her?

  I hear her voice. There’s a man’s voice, too. She’s with someone. This is not a good sign.

  “Be right there!”

  I’m going to e-mail this to myself. Hopefully, someone will check my account and find it if anything happens to me. Maybe I should copy Bernard just in case.

  Wish me luck. Or don’t. I probably deserve whatever’s coming to me.

  ... AND THEN ...

  RULE 4

  KNOW THE TERRAIN BEFORE TAKING THE JOURNEY

  MAGGIE

  Maggie climbed, dripping, out of the backyard swimming pool, perfumed in gardenia and chlorine. The water pooled in small bulbs on the ridges of bone in her neck, the shelves of young muscle in her abdomen, the disappearing baby fat of her thighs.

  She strode toward me, as fast as happiness, and I led her upstairs, my steps heavy on the white plush carpet. I was envious of the way she existed so completely and freely in each moment, and fought to clear the maelstrom of anxieties that circled my mind like wolves hunting a deer.

  I flipped her onto the bed and, as she hit the mattress, a giggle dislodged, filling my bare white room with the sound of female. She lay there and waited for what she knew would come next. If I could just press my body tightly enough against hers, thrust myself deeply enough into her, slow my heartbeat enough to match hers, then I, too, could feel young and free and happy.

  I’m not sure what she wanted from me, a man twelve years older, out of shape, and consumed by worry over another deadline in an endless series of deadlines. Perhaps she wanted acceptance, unaware that the need for it is not only insatiable but the cause of most mistakes made in life. Perhaps she wanted maturity, unaware that it’s just a cage adults make children race toward so that they may one day be as miserable as them. Or perhaps she was so carefree that she didn’t want anything except to give.

  LINDA

  Linda wiped away a snail track of sweat running down her temple, biting her lower lip for my benefit. She straddled me cautiously, her legs and arms tense against the bed to prevent full surrender. Her body was long and agile, like a ballerina’s but with a woman’s hips, and thick brown hair flowed over her flat curves, hiding a nakedness that still felt dirty to her. Her lips were swollen with kisses, her cheeks flushed with the hours of passion it took to get her to this point. Every particle of air in the sparse bedroom—the one she’d grown up in, cleared of childish reminders of who she’d been—was filled with her energy, her intensity, her nervous excitement. This was it.

  “Go slow,” she said. “Be gentle,” she said. “Only maybe for a second,” she said. Everything a girl would say after making the decision to have sex for the first time, she said.

  And then she hesitated, like an orange bobbing on the branch one last time before breaking off its stem. Over the years, she had imagined this act in so many variations of scenery and colors of emotion, denying suitor after suitor who wanted to take it from her because they were like bounty hunters who wanted to put an outlaw in jail not to serve justice, but so they could claim the reward. It had to be just right, so that ten or twenty or thirty years later, she could call to mind every sensation and smile with the conviction that she’d done the right thing.

  A giggle—nervous, childlike, womanly, awkward—escaped from her lips as she lifted herself and turned around decisively, sitting astride my bony hips and facing my feet. She set her gaze on a rectangular mirror atop the flimsy pine dresser that had loyally kept her secrets through every age, stage, and metamorphosis. She watched closely as she twisted her torso a little to the left, so that it arced like a model’s, then focused her gaze on her face, so she could see what it would look like in the moment of surrender that she so carefully controlled. This was not about me; it was about her. And, in a slow second, charged with nineteen years of being a daughter and a sister and a child, it was done.

  ME

  And now I sit with them, Maggie on the left in summer dress, Linda on the right in suede skirt, both holding my hand, both thinking I will take them home tonight.

  Their grips mirror their beliefs: Maggie’s hand lies softly over mine, without worry or urgency, because she knows there will be plenty of time for intimacy later. But she is wrong. She is unaware that two feet away, the hand of her younger sister squeezes mine tightly, possessively, in tacit conspiracy. In her innocence, Maggie has allowed her conniving sister to accompany her on this date. And so the plot in the theater seats is thicker than that on the screen. Two sisters torn apart by a worthless man. And just like Esau and Jacob, Aaron and M
oses, Bart and Lisa, the younger must win. That is the way of things.

  And I, who thought I was the great seducer, who boasted of sleeping with model sisters, who validated himself in their embrace like a vampire drinking youth, was nothing more than a doll in their playset.

  “We connected right away on a very deep level,” Linda had told me that first night in bed. “But then Maggie threw herself at you, so I was just like, whatever.”

  But perhaps we’d never connected until Maggie claimed me. Perhaps, like me, Linda envied Maggie’s freedom and spontaneity, and wanted to take away something of her older sister’s. Perhaps she’d decided, on a subconscious level, to lose her virginity with the worst of intentions. And then, with love in her heart, with a smile on her face, with innocence in her eyes, she could once more make her sister feel like the black sheep. Perhaps waiting so long to lose her virginity was never a moral choice for herself, but one intended to make her sister seem like a slut in comparison.

  The weapon of the youngest is never physical strength but emotional cunning. And now I am complicit in this trap. I must play my role: Maggie has slept with twenty-six men; I am just a footnote in her sexual history. But I am Linda’s entire sexual history and its caretaker. I must keep her memory of the moment preserved in a bell glass. If it shatters, and one shard punctures her heart, the damage will be permanent. She is too smart: She chose the right man, one cursed with a conscience, which dictates that I not ruin her—or any woman—for other men.

  And so I have no choice. Someone is going to get hurt tonight, and better the happy slut than the melancholy prude.

  Maggie will never forgive me for this, nor will she ever forgive Linda. As I lie in her younger sister’s bed that night, Maggie consoles herself with an ex-boyfriend.

  A month later, with love in her heart, a smile on her face, and innocence in her eyes, Linda tells me—the one-man army she has used to stage her coup—that Maggie has moved in with him. Three months later, he has gotten Maggie hooked on crystal meth. A year later, Maggie has broken up with him for abusing her. Two and a half years later, Maggie is no longer recognizable as the carefree youth who once climbed dripping out of my swimming pool. She has married him. And, like air bubbles trapped in cement, the decisions we make in a moment haunt us for the rest of our lives.