Everything came to a head when two of the girls brought their new boyfriends into the house; a pair of young black guys who dressed hip-hop. Had they met Tony and Jimmy randomly in a bar they’d probably all have had a couple of drinks together and shared a few stories. However, the girls set them up to fight by playing victim and asking their boyfriends to stand up for them.

Tony and Jimmy sussed immediately that the boyfriends weren’t violent men. They were just full of bravado and ghetto talk, accompanied by a little bit of pushing and shoving. It was clear that that was as far as it was going to go. Tony would’ve probably de-escalated a confrontation but it was catnip for Jimmy. He loves provoking others and isn’t averse to kicking off either, especially when drunk. So when the girls goaded their boyfriends into action, it didn’t go as planned.

“You should leave this place. You’re not wanted here.”

“Sorry pal, I’m just not scared of you. You couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding.”

As the repartee flowed, the two boyfriends got so worked up they started shouting threats, informing Tony and Jimmy in vague terms about the many kinds of doom that would befall them if they didn’t cease their taunting forthwith, retire to their rooms, and lock the doors. It was at that point that Tony got his mobile phone out and started recording the scene on video.

“Can you say that again? What did you say?” he inquired. The angry boyfriends told him in explicit terms that they intended to do him in.

“Perfect. And how would you do that exactly?” Tony asked, gaining a few more valuable seconds of angry footage. The impassioned threats went on for a while longer until the boyfriends could see that nothing positive was going to come out of the confrontation, and they slinked off.

The next day, Tony and Jimmy went back to the agency.

They sat down and, in grave tones, Jimmy said, “Look, we’ve had death threats from the boyfriends of the tenants.”

“Yes,” Tony added, “we feel unsafe there.” As he showed the agent the video, Jimmy put his head in his hands as he tried to keep a straight face. “So you can see why we’re upset. We fear our lives are in danger.”

Jimmy looked up at the agent with a sigh, and then with just the right hint of desperation in his voice, asked, “Do you have any other property?”

Visions of litigation danced in front of the agent’s eyes. In its desire to avoid a lawsuit, the agency was ready to propel Tony and Jimmy all the way to the top of the queue for a prime property. Their response was immediate. “Well, actually, next week we have this really good place coming up in Hampstead. Why don’t you guys have a look at that?”

Tony and Jimmy looked at each other, and then back at the agent. “Yes. That could work,” they conceded.

****************

They drove out to the property that same day. It was a stunning twenty-five room building in a leafy suburb. As they looked around, Jimmy and Tony could hardly stop laughing.

“Fuck me, this is absolutely incredible. We have to jump on this!”

They then began to negotiate with the agent, saying, “Look, given our bad experience of sharing with people we don’t know, we no longer feel safe with strangers. Could we perhaps fill this place with our friends?”

Agencies view properties as problems to be solved, and whether they are filled with guardians or friends of guardians didn’t matter as long as the buildings were filled and the paperwork filed. Nobody wants a lawsuit.

“This is really quite irregular,” he moaned, straightening his Next polyester tie and shuffling his papers unhappily. “We can hold the property back until the close of business today and no later.”

Which is how I came to receive a phone call from Jimmy while standing in the tiny backyard of my flat, eating a Curly Wurly I’d bought from the corner shop. I was renting my flat from a friend’s wife on a verbal agreement that I could leave with just a month’s notice. There were no contractual issues to moving out quickly.

“Look, we’ve got this amazing place. The location is perfect. It’s massive. It’s cheap. And if any gypsies do come around, you can take first crack at them. But you’ve got to sign up today if you want it. Are you in?”

“Of course I am,” I said. We all were.

Sitting in the office in Islington, my pen poised over the contract, I was given a rundown of our tenancy terms: we would be on two weeks’ notice and could be thrown out at any time, real estate agents could come through with prospective buyers, and we were expected to keep the property clean. I signed contracts, exchanged keys, and walked out into the office lobby where the rest of the RSG gang was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on rickety chairs each clutching their own signed contract and pair of house keys.

“To Hampstead!” announced Jimmy then strolled out the door like Captain Cook leading his explorers up a mountain trail. The great adventure at Château RSG was about to begin.

If you thought that was awfully long for one chapter, just imagine how long it’ll take you to read the book. It’s got thirty-eight of the fuckers. It’ll take you FUCKING EONS, if you’re dumb enough to try it here.

The Château RSG experiment owes its genesis to a side of Tony’s character that always aggravated me. He’s a cheapskate. In all the time I’ve known him, he’s never had a real job. Every time we had team meals, he’d insist on a happy hour or a restaurant accepting the Taste London discount card. It jarred with me because I’d spent the last few years in a $100K office job and couldn’t fully appreciate the minimalist lifestyle Tony adopted.

Like most things I’d learn about game and life, I resisted it in the beginning. Watching Tony live, I’d gradually pick up on his soft, easy-going vibe, his unwillingness to be rushed or buffeted, his deep passion for the emotional pay-off of seduction, and his continuous effort to challenge and suppress his own ego. Looking back I can appreciate the profound impact he had on my eventual success. But at the time I thought he was a sanctimonious cunt and we frequently clashed.

He’s one of those guys who has always managed to get by on whatever crazy idea he’s had, sometimes much better than merely getting by. He was a competitive salsa performer and milked his salsa classes as an “ecosystem” to score girls. Being a good-looking man who kept himself in shape at the gym helped, but he still had to be able to dance and make the whole thing work… which he did with great success.

Tony’s a masculine guy and very much a hustler. He stretches each idea until it stops paying him or it starts to feel like work and then he finds something else. After the salsa became humdrum, he started selling himself to medical experiments – drug trials specifically. Those paid well, but it was feast or famine. We always knew he’d been at a trial because there’d suddenly be a plush leather recliner in his room, a new flat screen TV, and M&S food on his fridge shelf. Then he’d be back to scrutinising itemized bills at restaurants and clipping Asda coupons from newspapers to stock up on value-brand beans. Easy come, easy go. Tony very much lived for today.

At the time, I thought it was dissolution. Madness, even. I was brought up as a saver, not a spender. Later, as I continued to extricate myself from the rat race, I came to empathize with his laid-back attitude to money. Why wait for retirement before enjoying it?

Not this madness

I suppose the best way of summing up Tony is to say that he’ll always look for the edge in any situation. If there’s a dodge, he’ll take it. He’ll do virtually anything to make money, except getting a job. That mindset led him to hit upon the idea of property guardianship.

At any given time there are thousands of properties sitting empty in London. Perhaps the tenant has moved out and his replacement is delayed, perhaps the building is to be re-purposed and remains empty in the interim, or perhaps it’s to be rebuilt but the developers need planning permission. Amazingly, for a country with so many vacant properties, England’s legal system is very much biased against landlords. This has created an entire class of predatorial rent-seekers, be they gypsies or anarchists, who move in and steal the place.

There are all manner of sections, sub-sections, clauses and sub-clauses in English common law dating from hundreds of years ago which give squatters (i.e. Occupy Wall Street-type characters) legal rights that you wouldn’t really expect. Often, there isn’t much a landlord can do to kick him out. That makes it very easy for hustlers to move illegally into an empty property against the owner’s permission, and as long as they don’t cause any damage that can be construed as the criminal offence of “breaking and entering” the police can’t evict them. The law deems it a civil not criminal matter, thus the landlord is on his own and a squatter’s downside risk is capped at simply leaving the house and trying it on again elsewhere. Within the eviction process there are also all sorts of odd time limits and human rights laws that further complicate matters. In fact, in some cases, squatters who manage to stay put for ten years are awarded legal title to the property as “adverse possession” under the 2002 Land Registration Act.

The scammers in England, mostly Irish or Romanian gypsies, took this as a green light to break into empty properties, scam the legal system to get title to the property, sell it, make money and move on to the next score. Continental Europe’s solution to the gypsy squatter problem has, historically, been murder and mass expulsion. Being fair play, cricket-loving English, we came up with a rather less extreme solution. It’s called property guardianship.

Anyhow, I digress. There are specialist letting agencies who deal in vacant properties. They promise the owner that they’ll take over management and then introduce tenants (“guardians”) to live there. These tenants have agreed to restricted rights, including exclusions from all those laws that squatters take advantage of. An occupied building keeps the squatters out, both as a deterrent and also because if squatters enter, it’s a clear case of criminal entry and thus the police can be involved.

If they looked like this, we wouldn’t need to keep them out

The only downside for guardians is the lack of choice over where you stay. Many properties are shitholes and the plum properties go to those the agency know and trust. Tony and Jimmy were in that boat when they signed on with one of the two main agencies in London. They first moved in to a massive residential care home way out east. I visited Jimmy one evening and felt it was Project Auschwitz. It was good forty-five-minute ride on the Underground just to get a sniff of civilization from a Starbucks or Pret-A-Manger. Not only that, the place was horrible. It may have been massive, with about a hundred rooms in the whole place, but only a tiny part of it was habitable. The ceiling had fallen in and there was rubbish strewn all around.

I’m not joking when I tell you it reminded me of a Vice documentary I’d seen about Liberia – that tiny West African rat-infested toilet engaged in civil war. Part of the documentary visited the old Hilton Hotel of Monrovia. During European colonial times, it had had a top-quality restaurant, a glittering swimming pool and a roaring tourist trade, but since being handed back to the Africans it had become a crack den, not safe to walk through without armed guards. And that’s exactly how Tony and Jimmy’s first guardian property looked.

But that wasn’t the worst aspect. Already in residence were six horrendous women. They were a mix of English, American, and Dutch girls, ranging in age from their mid- to late-twenties. They didn’t like the idea of new tenants moving in to share their place, having nurtured the idea that it was their place. Rather than make the best of it with the new tenants, they wanted to drive Tony and Jimmy out. They started blanking them, locking doors on them, complaining all the time, and even hiding shower gel. It was Mean Girls in Zone Six.

Unfortunately for the girls, Jimmy and Tony are strong, resourceful characters, and they certainly weren’t about to be pushed around by a pack of soap-stealing hags. The script was soon flipped. The boys stood their ground with cocky smirks, knowing this would prompt the girls to double down on their annoying antics to no avail.

It couldn’t go on.

If you can’t bear to wait for the next instalment, buy the full book here for a reassuringly expensive £25. Otherwise, wait a few days for the next post.

Jimmy and Tony were clearly the leaders of RSG and not just because they were the founding members. Both had amassed immense experience picking up girls. Jimmy had rattled over a hundred girls since going to university. A phenomenal number for late-90s and early-00s England that simply didn’t have the “hook-up culture” of modern USA universities and metropolitan bar scenes. He also had high standards, which really depresses a man’s lay count.

Jimmy was a smart methodical man in all areas of social dynamics, and he’d work a bar with the same precision as Mystery advised. At university his creativity and strength of character had established him as leader of his small pack of bad lads, then he’d take them out drinking, causing a ruckus, then see which girls gave him the eye. In many respects, RSG was just a more grown-up version of his bad lads gang.

Tony was a sniper with women and deeply immersed in romantic fiction. He worked out, was an excellent salsa dancer, and dressed like a modern-day Valentino. He’d shaped himself into the smouldering masculine archetype women fantasise about while reading novels. He didn’t like cold approach but had learned how to ease into sets in bars or on the dance floor. Often, the women came to him. By the time I met him he’d rattled three hundred women and kept copious notes on each seduction.

The penny wouldn’t drop until much, much later, but the innovation of RSG’s coaching was our ability to blend the mechanical systematic style of Mystery Method (via Jimmy) with the masculine polarity and seductive vibe of romance fiction (via Tony). The West Coast PUA movement that had inspired us was almost entirely the former, and it felt unbalanced and hollow.

A douchebag, yesterday

RSG would grow and evolve. Ace brought in his love for the douchebag game of Hank Moody in Californication. I took a one-one-one with him in Jewel bar in early 2010 and was amazed with his playful arrogance. Midway through the evening, I brought over a pair of Chinese English girls who told me they worked in city law firms. Ace sat in a chair, legs wide open, a whiskey glass dangling precariously from his hand as I approached him.

“Who are these bitches?” he asked.

Both girls cracked up laughing and couldn’t keep their hands off him the rest of the night. He never fucked them but it felt like watching a glitch in the matrix; he was so rude and they lapped it up. Later that night as we stood outside in the smoking area I said to him, “if there was anyone in RSG whose game I want to emulate, it’s yours.”

I’d learn incredible things from being surrounded 24/7 by talented seducers. “Project London” would be a pivotal period in my life and this is its story.

*************************

“We’ll each have an en-suite room,” Jimmy enthused over the phone, one month prior. “The location is amazing. It’s probably a third of the market rate, with all utilities included.” Standing in the tiny backyard of my grotty south London flat, I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.

“It’s £300 a month.”

“How?” I replied, “How is that possible?”

There had to be a catch. I lived in a ground floor one-bedroom flat in an old Victorian building, a thirty-minute walk from my office at St Paul’s on the river. I had a lounge, bedroom, small dining room, kitchen, and tiny enclosed yard. It was £900 a month rent, and another £200 to pay off the council tax and bills.
This sounds OK, right? A decent-sized flat in a central area.

No. I lived in Kennington, which is next to Elephant & Castle. The price is low (for London) because it’s a majority black and Muslim area and thus, absolutely disgusting. South London is like a suburb of Monrovia or Mogadishu. Every time I went outside I was reminded that my country was under foreign occupation, and I was being taxed to feed, cloth, house, and educate the invaders. It wasn’t good for my vibe.

“Well, it’s not exactly a typical renter’s agreement,” he responded. “We have to keep the gypsies and squatters out.”

I don’t like gypsies, their travelling parasitical lifestyle being very much at odds with the host culture in Britain. Vlad Dracul had the right idea when he invited them all to a feast then barred the door and torched the place with them still inside.

“You’ve got an hour to decide. The letting agency said they’ll hold it for us until 4pm, and after that they are calling their waiting list. Really, you don’t want to miss this.”

The chateau

I looked around my pokey little flat with its chipped paint, rising damp, and bad memories. It was where my ex-wife and I had first moved in together after the wedding and where things had all fallen apart three years later. Every room held memories that scaled the full range of emotion. There was the kitchen that she’d once lovingly kitted out with red pots, pans, and other assorted utensils, and which she’d used to cook me a different meal every evening, always delicious. Now it was bare and unused as I tended to get takeaways on my way home from work. Then there was the dining room with the walnut-shaped table around which my old friends would gather every second Thursday for a poker night, until they all quietly disassociated themselves from me after my divorce. I barely saw my old friends now. Rock Solid Game was my new social circle.

I visualized my walking home every evening from the investment bank where I worked, just across the Thames; a brisk half hour’s walk ending at my 1930s-era apartment block, where I stepped in off the street and knocked on my door with an expectant smile. My wife would always be waiting for me, wearing her make-up and a beaming smile, and then stand on tiptoes to welcome me with a kiss before ushering me through to the dining room, where dinner was on the table. That felt great every single time.

But I also remembered making the same walk home in February 2009, after we’d separated, to find she’d come by in the afternoon to strip the apartment of every single one of her possessions, including all the cute accoutrements that had added life to it. She’d left £400 in an envelope with a note that it should cover the shared property she’d taken.

My flat now seemed like a dilapidated old prison. In spite of that, since becoming a player, I’d managed to fuck a bunch of new girls on the same bed (and couch, floor, and walnut-shaped table).

However, the apartment was part of my old life. I needed a clean break, so the decision wasn’t hard to make. I tipped all my bank statements into a bag, grabbed my chequebook and passport then took a tube to the agency’s offices in Islington. I was taking the room sight-unseen.

When I finally moved out a week later, as I closed the door for the final time, it felt like a grand symbolic gesture. I didn’t so much feel that I was finishing a chapter of my life, more that I was opening a brand new book.

If you liked this, then you’ll like my book. Seeing as this is in fact just a copy/paste of my book, so it’s literally the same thing.

Regular readers will have noticed how little I blog nowadays. You’ve all had a tip-off as to the reasons why with the release of my latest book A Deplorable Cad. It’s a mammoth 150k+ words, the second such behemoth I released in less than a year. Those two projects combined mopped up every last bit of energy I had for writing. The creativity required for writing is finite and must refresh, lest the writer just churn out insipid trash. I could feel this while doing the memoir so I didn’t risk blogging too much. There’ll be another announcement soon enough for the third reason I had nothing left over to put on the blog. Wait and see!

In the meantime, just as I did with Balls Deep, I’ll be serialising the first few chapters of the new book. That’ll whet the appetites of those of you thinking of buying, and placate the freeloaders too. I’d guess the early-buyers will be getting their paperback copies through the post any day now so we’ll soon see how the word of mouth is on the quality.

Chapter One – Rock Solid Game
Jimmy Jambone thumped the long dining room table and said, with an air of finality, “We will call it Château RSG.” As if defying anyone else to disagree, he crossed his long, gangly legs at the ankles and leant so far back in his chair he was almost horizontal.

We liked the name. It was grandiose, mythological, and it spoke to an inherent style. Everything we did was designed to make ourselves larger than life, both to others and in our own minds. Thus we’d hit on a name for our rickety, old house in Hampstead, London, a cavernous former residential care home that had leaking pipes, a collapsing roof and which frequently flooded during heavy rain.

“RSG” came from abbreviating the name of the pick-up coaching company Jimmy had created: Rock Solid Game. Back in 2008 Richard LaRuina’s PUA Training company was the market leader in London and Jimmy had gone along as a student to check it out. He’d been thoroughly unimpressed and considered his own game tighter than every coach bar Rob Beckster. In his typically self-congratulatory style he’d decided, “I can do better than them.”

So Jimmy hunted around the local PUA forums and arranged meet-ups with fellow aspiring pick-up artists until he’d hand-picked the founding members of Sarge School; Tony T, Diamond, Ace, Tomas, and himself. The new group soon built an underground reputation for doing free boot-camps every other month, and by the time I encountered them in the summer of 2009 they were still only charging £99 for two days of coaching. Sarge School would expand to bring in Johnny Wisdom, Mick, Fernando, Lee, and eventually myself. By late 2010 we’d re-branded as Rock Solid Game and presented ourselves as a hybrid of a dating company and a group of rock stars.

Diamond had dropped out, and Ace left for university in his native Poland. The rest of us were now in a house meeting, sitting around a long table in the lounge listening to Jimmy. It was September 2010, and we’d all moved into the big London house a fortnight earlier.

House meetings were as common as a sighting of Lord Lucan, but there’d been a big house party the night before, and we’d all felt the reluctant call of duty to clean up. As the clock ticked on to twelve and normal productive members of society took lunch breaks from their office jobs, the reprobates of RSG emerged one by one from the deep, dark recesses of the house. I suspect several of us lay awake in bed all morning rather than go downstairs and confront the task of cleaning up the mess. It was an entirely different way of life to my previous corporate existence.

Lee was sifting through some lecture notes for an accounting degree he’d started, while Mick picked at his toenails. Tony was at the head of the table, taking slow deep breaths and responding to everything in slow motion as he was wont to do. I was in the kitchen fiddling with the coffee machine and swearing loudly after stepping barefoot onto some mouldy lettuce that had been knocked off the bench where Lee had left it three days earlier.

We all sat around the table and agreed to Jimmy’s suggestion: We’d call our home Château RSG.

**************

The grand-daddy of the PUA industry is Erik Von Markovich, better known as Mystery. Although not the first man to systematise and teach seduction (Ross Jeffries and R. Don Steele were first to market), it was Mystery who shaped the industry into the form we all recognise today. His first book Mystery Method is a coherent, balanced, and beautifully presented total package that draws heavily upon cold-calling sales theory and, oddly, dog training manuals. It displays a degree of rigour and comprehensiveness that earlier writers couldn’t match. He was also the first to move pick-up coaching out of the seminar room and into the live environment of cafes, bars and nightclubs. Mystery invented the “boot camp” weekend in which students are taught early-evening in a seminar room and then taken in-field to watch coaches approach women in bars, then experiment themselves.

Mystery, yesterday

However, the main reason Mystery established himself as the premier pick-up artist of the 2000-2008 era was due to him befriending Neil Strauss, a Rolling Stone writer who would write the seminal The Game memoir where he featured Mystery as his mentor and main supporting character. That book was a New York Times bestseller, thrusting Mystery’s persona into the mainstream.

If there’s one thing Erik Von Markovich is absolutely excellent at, it’s gaming other men to fuel his own rise. He even managed to get a VH1 reality TV show called The Pickup Artist that ran two seasons.

Neil Strauss’s book retold the story of his entering the then underground world of pick-up artists in Los Angeles. Mystery spotted Neil’s utility as a talented writer with good connections and quickly brought him into his world. They’d then feed off each other. Neil would learn Mystery’s game while Mystery leveraged Neil’s LA connections to get into better parties and find richer students. It’s a great book, and I thoroughly recommend it. Prior to the advent of YouTube as a platform for small PUA businesses to market to prospective clients, The Game was every PUA’s gateway drug into the community.

The centrepiece of The Game is when Neil and Erik decide to rent a huge mansion in Beverly Hills where a dozen PUAs would live together and hit on girls en masse. They dubbed it “Project Hollywood” and the legend was born. It’s a habit in the seduction community to invent grandiloquent narratives for occasions when normal people would use everyday words. Project Hollywood was really just a flophouse for male virgins, but Neil’s writing had immortalised it. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in a Beverly Hills mansion with a load of other guys, all of whom were going out to hit on women? Compare that to sitting alone on your sofa in a shit-box studio apartment watching The Sopranos on DVD.

I’d watched the show and read the book back in early 2009 when I was a nervous office drone first toying with the idea of becoming a pick-up artist. For me Project Hollywood was living the dream; a gang of expert seducers and hot bitches every night. Later, RSG felt like a rat pack when we all met up on the weekend to teach boot-camps. We’d lounge in a big private room in the East Rooms or Milk & Honey drinking beer, joking around, waiting for the students to show. It was the camaraderie I’d missed since starting my finance career in London and brought into sharp relief just how uncool my pre-game friends were (and of course, myself too).

The idea of doing a similar project sounded cool; get a big house in London, give it a great name, and move in a bunch of guys. Not only would it be fantastic motivation to build and refine our own Game, it would also bring the rat pack together on a daily basis. We figured we could do Project London better than the original Hollywood version.

The dream came true in September 2010.

The story continues soon in the next serialisation post. If you can’t possibly wait because this writing is simply too compelling, rush over to the sales page and get yourself a pristine premium paperback copy of A Deplorable Cad right now.