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 School For Seduction
Friday night and the Circle Bar inside the Hard Rock Hotel pulsates with music and energy, jammed with so many people that movement is sometimes difficult. Our group of six or seven guys has found a little corner, where we huddle together and nervously wait for our professor.
When he arrives, he's impossible to miss. At 6 feet, 5 inches tall, his head rises above to crowd and he's dressed like a rock star. He wars a black Australian raffia cowboy hat-with a star pendant and little black feathers on the front-and it covers his long dark hair. He is clad in a loud pink-and-black, leopard-print T-shirt. Around his neck is a feathered boa. He wears a pair of retro black-framed rectangular eyeglasses, without lenses. His fingernails are painted black. Heads, literally, turn as he makes his way through the bar, which is exactly the effect he sought. He calls it "peacocking," dressing to draw attention to yourself.
We have all spent the previous eight hours with him in a hotel conference room on the Strip on his "bootcamp" seminar on how to meet and pick up women. We have heard his stories- how he seduced the Penthouse magazine Pet of the Millennium; how he's dated 15 exotic dancers; how he can not only strike up a conversation with the hottest woman in the room, but make her pursue him. He even has his super-hot girlfriend on-hand to help establish credibility. He says it's all due to a system he calls "The Mystery Method" because it's his method and his stage name is "Mystery." He has spent the afternoon teaching us the basics, and tonight at the Hard Rock, we are going to watch Mystery put his method into practice.
"I can pick up a girl without even thinking about it," he told us at the seminar. "It's like driving a car; after a while, you don't think about driving, you just do it. But it takes practice. Why be scared to approach a woman? It's just a game. And I'm going to catch you up to speed on a game I enjoy playing."
It was all enough to raise a skeptic's eye. The beautiful girlfriend could be a plant. The Penthouse Pet and the exotic dancers, inventions. The skepticism lasts right up until the moment he turns to scout the Circle Bar.
He spies a group of three attractive women sitting on stools by the wall. He walks up to them, smiles and strikes up a conversation as we mill around behind the women and eavesdrop. The first thing you realize is that Mystery's voice has changed - it has turned noticeably feminine. He is playful. He laughs. He flirts. He wraps his scarf twice around his neck, then tugs at both ends, and it appears as though the scarf magically passes through his neck- a trick he learned in his career as a magician. He then wraps it around the neck of one of the women to let her try his trick; she giggles because when she tugs the ends, the scarf only tightens around her neck.
Mystery coaxes one of the women off her stool, and the somehow steals her seat. He leans back on the bar stool, and the women now lean in toward him. When the prettiest woman of the group asks what his sign is, Mystery throws his hands up in a dismissive motion. "you want my sign?" he says incredulously. "You're losing me, you're losing me." It's a technique he calls "throwing a neg," and it works in textbook fashion: The woman who asked the question steps even closer to him and now seems willing to work to keep his interest. The tide has changed; she is now trying to impress him- just like he planned it.
Within 15 minutes, she has given Mystery her number and pleads with him to let her return to Vegas the next weekend to see him again. Over the course of the next three hours, he will utter almost the exact same lines to at least three other groups of women. And every time he approaches a group, he gets at least 20 minutes of conversation and banter out of it. He almost always gets a phone number. Not that he plans to call; it is, after all, just a demonstration for our benefit.
Late into the night, he sends us out to make our own first tentative approaches using the Mystery Method. We have none of his verve or panache. He is a silver-tongued devil; we are simply tongue-tied. For us, approaching a group of women means an awkward 30-second conversation that ends abruptly and crashes with a thud.
"That's OK," Mystery says. "I've been where you are. This isn't a quick fix. It takes practice. It's going to take you six months to get this system down. It's all about having a game plan. I'm giving you the gift to get women."
It's after 3 a.m. when Mystery dismisses us. He looks at me. "Do you want to come back tomorrow?" This is supposed to be a one-day assignment, but how can I leave now? "Can I?" I ask. "OK," says Mystery. "See you tomorrow."
Mystery insists that he was once like all of us other AFC's (Average Frustrated Chumps): he, too, found it difficult to approach a pretty woman in a bar or at a party and strike up a conversation.
It's an affliction that affects most men. A man wants to be clever in that situation, he wants to say something to spin a woman's head; usually he comes up with some line that either makes him look dumb or too nice to be interesting. So, most often, he does nothing. Every man can rattle off at least a dozen moments when his eyes locked with a woman's, and he knew she was interested and yet he was paralyzed. That means at least a dozen women who may have been "the one" are now forever lost because he failed to meet his destiny.
And even if a man does summon enough courage to approach, how does he impress her before he bones her? A man who tries to be polite by asking her questions about herself might as well be greeted with a yawn. Mystery decided to figure out why that happens and, more importantly, how to beat the system.
His real name is Erik Von Markovic, and he was born in Toronto 33 years ago. He was a tall, skinny kid who grew up feeling alienated and lonely. His life was transformed when he saw David Copperfield perform. Markovic go videotapes of all 15 of Copperfield's television specials and obsessively watched them over and over, dissecting Copperfield's act until he had figured out the basic secrets behind the illusions. "My sister kept asking me why I couldn't simply enjoy them like everyone else," he says. "But I wanted to understand, I wanted to know what he was doing."
After high school, Markovic began to perform magic tricks outside nightclubs in Toronto and parlayed that into paid engagements using the stage name "Mystery." Mystery was everything Eric Von Markovic wasn't-bold, confident, outgoing and the center of attention. Yet, even as Mystery, he was still an AFC. Women remained, well, a complete mystery to him.
So he decided to put the same effort he had used to unlock the mysteries of magic into unlocking the mysteries of women. He drew on basic common sense, and combined that with some social history and reverse psychology. He them threw in a few performance principles, and came up with his Mystery Method.
"A lot of it comes from observing how a beautiful woman acts," he says. Example? He was once picking up a woman who was all over him. He said something she didn't like, and she dismissed him by saying, "You're losing me." She got up, walked back to her friends and turned her back to him. Mystery was astonished. Wow, he told himself, what a beautiful move; I'm going to use that. Then he went and won her over.
He has so good at being a pick-up artist that it has eclipsed over his career as a magician. Mystery left Toronto in 2000 and moved to Los Angeles, hoping to bread into television. When that didn't pan out, he began to teach the Mystery Method in seminars. Men pay him $1850 to learn his secrets; his website (mystrerymethod.com) thrives with a members-only area where men trade stories and pickup lines and give one another support.
The New York Times has anointed him as "one of the most admired men in the world of seduction" in a long feature story. The writer of that article, best-selling author Neil Strauss, will publish a book on the pick-up artist culture in May (The Game: Undercovering the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists, Regan Books) that focuses on Mystery. More than one television network has approached Mystery to star in a reality series; he's also at work on his own book project explaining his techniques.
Oh, and he also wants to attempt his greatest illusion: jump off the top of the Stratosphere, and survive.
Mystery moved to Las Vegas a few weeks prior to our boot-camp seminar, and he hopes to land a gig as an illusionist at one of the casinos. But he's barely had time to pursue that, or even move into his new place, because his Mystery Method seminars have kept him on the move from across the country each weekend.
The Vegas seminar has attracted eight men from as far ways as New Jersey and Louisiana. It is an eclectic group of students who range in age from early 20s to mid 50s. There is an investor, a developer, a shoe-store owner and several computer programmers.
The first lesson in the Mystery Method? Go out. "Girls don't come knocking on your door," Mystery says. "Why are you staying in like a hermit in a cave?" Lesson Two: The old saying "be yourself"? Forget about it. If being yourself mean you aren't getting women, then you need a change.
The Mystery Method is aimed directly at meeting HBs (Hot Babes), and based on the premise that nice guys will finish last. "Women have strategies to get rid of bores, nice guys, " he says. "If you introduce yourself and say, ‘Hi,' you're probably the fifth guy who's done it that day. They have a protective shield. And the nicer you are, the more that shield rises. For a woman who gets his on 15 times a day, it's a different reality."
That's why Mystery directs us to throw a "neg" in the first few moments of conversation, such as: "A lot women are pretty; what have you got going for you other than your looks?" It's intended to throw her off-balance, to entice her to pursue you.
Excerpted from Las Vegas Life Magazine. |
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May 23 - 25
June 20 - 22