by Greg Dybec
Phil and I would spend nights repeating rules as if they were biblical:
Never buy a girl a drink, make her buy you a drink.
Never give a girl your number, make her give you hers.
Always approach from the side, not directly from the front.
Make sure your body language makes it appear as if you’re going to leave at any moment.
By the time mid-July rolled around, we considered ourselves highly skilled at winning the attention of pretty much any girls we wanted. When we told our friends they laughed at the idea, until we’d prove it to them. The first time I brought a friend out to game I ended up with an invite home from a thirty-year-old woman, who moments before was showing me pictures of her kids and “baby daddy.”
Another night, a friend challenged Phil and me to game in a restaurant. Phil intercepted a woman dining with her boyfriend when she got up to go to the bathroom. I got a text later the same night from the girl I met after joining her and her friends at their table. It read, “I can’t pick out a bathing suit for tomorrow. If I send pictures will you help me pick one out?”
Once in a salsa club downtown, I approached a stunning professional dancer who had a line of men waiting for a trial run with her. After I asked her if she was an amateur dancer just learning the style, we ended up on the dance floor, laughing as I tried to learn the steps. I found myself meeting girls while waiting for the girl I was supposed to be on a date with. I spent nights under the stars on strange rooftops, and one morning woke up in an apartment in Greenwich Village with a note that read, “I trust you,” on top of a key.
That summer, gaming became the only form of interaction with the opposite sex Phil and I knew. Though our methods were a peculiar combination of the many philosophies we’d adopted, one guideline truly drove the success: have no fear of rejection.
We forced ourselves to confront rejection using the three-second rule: we’d commit to approaching beautiful women within three seconds of seeing them, which forced us to engage in conversation immediately, never allowing our minds enough time to develop excuses and worst-case scenarios. By embracing rejection as a normal part of life, we, in turn, exuded an undeniable aura of confidence. Plus, we were armed with enough openings, negs, and closing lines to fill a novel.
The routine became mathematical. I could critique a girl’s nail polish and she’d end up all over me. Phil became a master at spending nights strategically chatting with the friends of the girl he was interested in, completely ignoring her altogether. This, of course, resulted in the girl fighting for his attention. We could predict when girls would let their guards down. We knew exactly when they’d provide a touch or a laugh. We spent the entire summer with the women that the guys around us wished they could be with.
It was sublime. It was transcendental. And by the time the summer was over and the chilling fall breeze made itself known, I’d realized it was terrible.
What was intended to be experimental and harmless had become a programmed and systematic habit. Phil couldn’t walk outside or ride a train without approaching a new target. My phone book had become a dense collection of numbers with names I didn’t remember. Some of the girls we’d meet with again, but most were one-time results of the game at work.
Worst of all, my view of women had become severely skewed. While the confidence I had gained was a great and important feat in itself, it was depressing that the tactics I was using were delusory. I had learned how to get women to fall for me within minutes of speaking to them, but the success was fueled by dishonesty, rudeness, and characteristics I had never intended to acquire. The line between seduction and deception was dangerously blurred.
In the beginning, Phil explained that attraction lies in the idea of pursuit, which is why so many of the women we intentionally didn’t show attraction toward so greatly desired us. But the entire concept became meaningless once I realized that through gaming, I had lost the excitement of the pursuit. Even when we did meet girls we were interested in getting to know on a personal level, we couldn’t help but put on the disguises we’d become so comfortable wearing. I was living in New York City with a roster of more willing girls than I knew what to do with yet I felt lonelier than I ever had.
By October, I had stopped myself from going out as much. I figured alone time could help remedy the whirlwind experience of the summer. I needed my cube to be small.
One night I was walking into the gym when I ran into a familiar face. It was a girl from my hometown, though we’d never said a single word to each other despite going to high school together for four years. We shared an awkward hello and that night I decided I’d reach out to her on Facebook and ask her to grab a drink sometime soon.
We ended up getting together a week later, catching each other up on our lives, and in a strange way, meeting for the first time. On our second date, we ended up on the couch in her apartment. I explained to her that I had the ability to tell her everything about her personality and instructed her to put her hands in mine. She did, but with hesitation. As I went through the motions, asking her the series of obscure questions, it became increasingly obvious that she could see right through the entire bit. Suddenly the whole act sounded stupid and contrived, because it was. By the end of my performance I admitted to her that it was just a dumb pick-up artist trick I had learned from a friend.
For the rest of the night we laughed together, equally astonished at how I ended up in her apartment six years after high school. Nerves shot through my body and butterflies tore through my stomach—something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I could have gone in for the kiss right then and there, but I decided not to. I figured there was no rush. And as I crawled in bed solo that night, I noticed that for the first time since the beginning of the summer, I didn’t feel so alone.
Bridging the Gap
Growing up, I had the straightest teeth of anyone I knew. I’d receive compliments all the time from strangers who would stop to admire my smile as if it were something rare and mythical. So I was shocked the day the orthodontist told me I’d need not only braces, but a palate expander, too. The palate expander, he explained, was a device that would be mounted to the roof of my mouth and, using a manual crank, would gradually widen my upper jaw. In turn, a gap the width of my pinky finger would appear between my two front teeth.
He assured me that even though my teeth appeared straight at the moment, they’d shift later in life. As a seventh grader with limited time to establish a lasting reputation before high school, I demanded to know what “later in life” meant. Would I be thirty years old? Forty? I made every effort to convince my parents I’d be married by then, and would have a binding agreement that assumed my wife would stay with me for better or worse. I figured if my teeth shifting a little would be the worst problem in this hypothetical marriage, I’d be in pretty good shape.
My parents ended up listening to the man with the PhD and intellectual-looking bald spot. My determined fate was several gap-toothed months with the palate expander followed by three years with braces. In my mind, I was a perfectly good car in the hands of a mechanic with nothing better to do than tamper with parts just so he had something to fix.
The most astonishing thing about braces is how suddenly they become part of your life. One day you’re playing outside with friends, then the next day you’re strapped to a reclining chair getting metal cemented into your mouth. It’s a stark reminder that life isn’t all fun and games. After all, braces are never a kid’s choice. This is funny considering plenty less fortunate people in the world would kill for even one trip to the dentist. Luckily, once we kids who grew up with braces reach a certain age, we realize there’s no point in complaining about the fact our parents spent thousands of dollars to ensure our teeth fit society’s staunch standards of beauty. When you’re a kid, though, braces have no positive outcome. They are social suicide, and that is all.
Of course, before I even got my braces I’d have to survive life with its much
less talked about cousin, the palate expander. Hearing the phrases “gap tooth” and “facial alterations” slip out of the orthodontist’s mouth as if they were everyday words in a casual conversation made me feel sick. Though in his defense, there’s no easy way to tell a kid entering the most crucial stage of puberty that his face is about to resemble David Letterman’s if he were to get stung by a hundred bees and punched repeatedly in the mouth by Mike Tyson.
Once the palate expander was in place, talking and eating immediately became a struggle, and it wasn’t long before I pretty much gave up both altogether. My face thinned out noticeably after a few weeks, and I resorted to nods and closed-mouth grins as my primary forms of communication. Other parents would approach my mom at church and after-school events, wondering if I’d become ill. It wasn’t the easiest question to ask a mother, but there was no denying that I looked like I was withering away, struck by a rare disease or depressed.
What was even worse was the fact that any food I did try to eat would get stuck in the small space between the palate expander and the roof of my mouth. My parents alternated shifts scraping out the food remnants by hand. It wasn’t easy to get excited about much knowing that later in the day my own mother’s fingers would be halfway down my throat as she struggled to see how much half-chewed hamburger meat was rotting between my palate and the jagged metal surface.
Though there was nothing I dreaded more than the manual crank. The way the device actually did its job and expanded was by placing a thin metal key into a tiny screw hole on its bottom side and completing one full rotation. This cranking shifted my teeth and expanded my upper jaw, and each time it left a stinging pressure that floated along my top row of teeth like a dense fog. It was also a task my parents had to complete twice a day. They’d apologize sincerely each time another rotation was completed, and I did everything in my power not to blame them.
By the time the gap reached its full potential I’d become a full-blown mute. My grades suffered and my social life was depleted. My parents held meetings with my teachers to explain why my participation had gone from stellar to nonexistent. I’d spend nights in front of the bathroom mirror examining my gap, hoping it wouldn’t widen any more than it already had. I even scribbled down the names of all the Egyptian gods I’d learned about in history class on a piece of paper so I could recite a prayer to each. Though I backed out at the last minute, afraid that word would somehow get back to my Catholic parents.
Navigating the school hallways was like walking through a minefield. I’d do my best to avoid the girls I thought were cute and the guys the cute girls thought were cute. It wasn’t like I could hide the fact my face had changed shape and I could use a sock to floss between my two front teeth, but I tried anyway. Most of the kids were respectful of my unfortunate circumstances. They’d make obvious attempts to hold eye contact or leave me with sympathetic pats on the shoulder. A few would try to lighten the mood with jokes, but often that would backfire. My lowest point came when a friend told me that my new mouth was cool because it looked like the Predator’s. I hadn’t seen the movie, but once I searched pictures online I was devastated, especially since the comparison wasn’t too far off.
When I was even younger, in fifth grade, I experienced a full year of having terrible stomach pains every morning before school. My parents took me to a therapist who described what I was feeling as social anxiety. I’d sit with the therapist once a week. During most visits she’d ask me to create scenes using the various toys she had stockpiled in her office. Eventually, by what I assume to have been exercises to address the scenarios and fears that existed in my head, and not necessarily the real world, I was able to get over the stomachaches and even get excited about going to school. It was shortly after the Predator comparison that I started to feel the familiar sharp pains cut across my torso again.
This pain caused me to constantly beg my parents to take days off from school. “I just don’t have it in me today,” I’d say, but most of the time I was given a stern “no.”
My parents had always told me that if I really wanted something, I’d have to make a strong case for it. So when I had the idea of being homeschooled for the rest of the year, I presented a well-thought-out list with the pros outweighing the cons. Again, I received a quick “no.”
“Just own it,” they’d tell me. “It’s just one very small part of your life.”
Easy to say when you don’t have a medieval-style torture device cemented to the roof of your mouth, I’d think to myself.
Shortly after my denial of homeschool, I was sitting in the cafeteria at school when a friend at my table asked me what it felt like to all of a sudden turn ugly. He didn’t ask the question in a spiteful way. He seemed to be generally interested more than anything, but the question still hurt. Mostly because it was the question I’d been asking myself since the first day I noticed a slight separation appearing between my teeth.
Years later, when my palate expander would eventually be removed and I’d finish my three-year prison sentence with braces, I started to acknowledge all the lessons I’d learned from that period of my life. It’s easy to talk about how difficult times made you a stronger person long after those difficult times are over. Though, I like to think I was onto something in that moment at the cafeteria table, because instead of answering my friend’s question, I stood up from the table and motioned for everyone to do the same. Without hesitation I filled my mouth with chocolate milk and forcefully filtered it back out through my gap. The steady brown stream shot through my teeth like a faulty sprinkler head and splashed gracefully across the table. This provoked an eruption of applause from my friends, along with echoing chants of “Do it again.”
Before I could raise the milk carton to my mouth for a refill, a teacher that had seen the whole thing ran over and pulled me aside.
“You’re going to have to come with me to the dean’s office,” he instructed. “But not before you clean that up.”
Then he leaned in close and admitted, “That was pretty cool though.”
I headed back to the lunch table with a handful of paper towels and a gap-toothed smile that lit up the room. I wasn’t worried about receiving detention. After all, it would just be one very small part of my life.
For the Kids
I’m one of those people who are overcome with fear the moment something good happens. It’s a fear tied to the idea that in any natural cycle of life failure follows success, the way death supersedes life. All great empires fall. Every star burns out. No sports dynasty can win forever. So when I do accomplish something worth celebrating, I tend to contain my excitement to the point people urge me to let loose and celebrate. But I can’t. If anything, I grip on to my invisible rope even tighter, preparing for the floor to crumble beneath my feet.
To be clear, I’m aware becoming fearful after success is not a healthy way of existing. But if you’re wondering, I’m working on it. Living in the moment is essential. It’s all we’ve really got. Though, prior to any of that self-awareness, I used to think filling the space after an accomplishment with good deeds would buy me more time before something tragic occurred.
As a child, I volunteered often. Not by choice, but because my parents dragged me along with them. Every year around Thanksgiving we’d help collect food for underprivileged families at my local church. I’d spend hours organizing all the food people dropped off. My mouth would water as I separated cans of green beans from corn, made toppling mountains of cranberry sauce, and carried giant turkeys to a freezer. At that age, it didn’t necessarily feel rewarding, but as I got older I learned to appreciate the experience. It’s also when I started to believe that all that childhood volunteering had something to do with my life turning out pretty smoothly up to that point, as if I’d done the opposite of sell my soul to the devil. Can you sell your soul to the patron saint of volunteering for the guarantee of a halfway decent life? I doubt the good guys barter like that, but it didn’t stop me from believing that carrying
all those turkeys back and forth had a positive effect on things.
Once I moved away to college, it became difficult to make it back home to the Thanksgiving food collection. Though one year, just before a particularly challenging round of finals, I got the urge to volunteer on my own. It was a combination of the holiday spirit and the feeling of needing to refuel my good-deed gas tank, which really means that I thought it’d bring me luck on my finals. I ended up volunteering at a soup kitchen in Harlem later that week through a program offered at my college. It was a fulfilling experience, and at the same time, I felt more confident going into my finals.
After the soup kitchen, I didn’t volunteer for some time. I graduated from college, moved back in with my parents, and worked a string of terrible retail jobs (including a clothing store and a vitamin shop, though nothing in my life will ever be more trying than working at Toys “R” Us, where kids really do extend their arms airplane style and knock every piece of merchandise off the shelves). When I finally landed a job writing for a website and moved into my own apartment in Astoria, Queens, my life finally felt like it was going well enough to consider volunteering again. With my new successes came the fear of impending failure, creeping in as slow and steady as a soup-kitchen line.
Picking where to volunteer isn’t easy. There are the obvious choices like soup kitchens and clothing drives, and you could of course always just donate money somewhere. But I wanted something different. Something that I could call my own. Granted, you probably shouldn’t consider a charity based on how it will make you look, but it was my first time volunteering without the help of my family or university, and I wanted it to represent the person I’d become. Or at least the person I thought I’d become.
As fate would have it, I was reading an interview with James Franco one day and he mentioned an organization he was heavily involved with called The Art of Elysium. The organization has volunteers—all artists of some fashion—visit children’s hospitals in New York and Los Angeles. Singers would sing with the children, actors would put on shows, and painters would lead elaborate arts and craft sessions. It was like the Hollywood of charity organizations. A list of celebrities who had volunteered or supported the organization in some capacity included Kanye West, Julianne Moore, Matthew McConaughey, Johnny Depp, Jimmy Fallon, Eva Mendes, and too many more to name. Yet I couldn’t help but notice there were no writers going to the hospitals to write with the children. What better way to give back than with what I loved to do anyway? I decided to apply as a volunteer.