How to Pick Up Girls (and other false promises)

Will Ferguson

When people ask me why I am such a twisted and bitter man, I answer with two simple words: "self" and "help."

Granted, my contact with the world of self-help is limited to the purchase of one (1) book. But so traumatic was the effect of this book and so long-lasting were the problems it created that I fear my experiences have, like the bound roots of a bonsai tree, permanently warped me in ways I can barely imagine.

It was long ago and far away, in those heady madcap days now known as "the Eighties." I was seventeen years old, fresh out of high school, but not yet ready for college. I had secured a rewarding career in the field of minimum wage and a shared basement apartment ripe with musk and manly aromas (old pizza and stale beer, mainly). This should have been my "carefree sowing of wild oats" phase, but things weren't going as planned. I had wild oats aplenty, but not many furrows in which to plant them, if you get my drift.

Taking a scientific approach, I sent away for a self-help book entitled How to Pick Up Girls, which was advertised at the back of some sort of magazine. Scientific American, maybe.

I waited breathlessly for the book to arrive, knowing as I did that it would unlock for me the innermost secrets of the female psyche. In my view, women were a code that needed to be deciphered, a safe that had to be cracked. All I needed was the right piece of advice, the right sequence of numbers, and the tumblers would fall into place and the doors would swing open.

The faith I put in this mail-order guide was, sadly, a testament to my desperate and dogged belief that the problems I was having vis-a-vis girls was not due to any flaw on my part, but rather on the inscrutable nature of the subject matter.

So. When the book arrived, I barricaded my door and pored over its pages. Literally. I was sweating with anticipation at this point.

Well. This book was amazing. A real eye-opener. It contained a wealth of advice, a veritable plethora of profound insights. Did you know, for example, that women are slaves to subliminal suggestion? It's true. You need only work in a surreptitious allusion to the word "sex" and they will swoon right into your arms. For example, you don't say "It's nice meeting you." You say, "It'S EXtra nice meeting you." Cunning, eh?

How to Pick Up Girls covered everything you would ever need to know: body language (hands-hooked in your jeans pockets, fingers subtly pointing towards your crotch--sock-stuffing being optional), handy tips (always lick your lips before you approach a woman; women [hate] dry lips)and several sure-fire pick-up lines ("If I told you that you had a nice body, would you hold it against me?"). There was even a seven-point program of erogenous zones. You start with the nape of the neck, proceed to the earlobes and then the elbows, and so on, in a descending checklist of "hot spots" which--and here I quote from memory, double punctuation and all--"No woman can possibly resist!!"

Alas, there was a small typo in that last sentence. It should have read "Which every single woman on the face of this planet can resist without even the slightest hesitation."

I failed to pick up anything other than a few strange looks when I went loping through my local supermarket in a predatory manner, lips pre-moistened, fingers pointing (subtly) to my groin, asking every girl I came upon "Say, can I buy you an O'Keefe'S EXtra Old Stock?"

Suffice to say, I failed miserably without even getting to the earlobes, let the elbows of my would-be conquests. So, sharp consumer that I was, I decided to take advantage of the book's 100 % Iron-Clad Guarantee! and I mailed it back to the publisher ("Fly By Night Productions out of San Diego," I believe) and requested a refund. The reply I received, and here I'm paraphrasing for the sake of brevity, was HAHAHAHAHAHA.

And thus ended both my career as a professional ladies man and my belief in self-help books.

I tried plunging out on my own, unprepared and unadvised, into crowded hormonally-laced bars, throbbing with music, but the conversations inevitably went like this:

"Good crowd tonight."

"WHAT?"

"I said, 'Good crowd tonight.'"

"WHAT?"

"I said--"

"WHAT?"

"I said, 'It'S EXtra hot in here.'"

My roommate, meanwhile, had developed a fool-proof technique of his own. He'd amble into a laundromat and, with a great flourish and in clear sight of the cutest girl there, he would prepare to pour Mister Clean floor wax onto his laundry. The girl would rush over to stop him. He would give a boyish smile and say, "But I though cleaner was cleaner." And next thing you know, they're in bed together.

It was that last step I found tricky. I had no problem dumping Mister Clean all over my clothes, and I had no problem looking like an idiot; it was translating this into a night of wild passion that I found difficult.

"Try it again," my roommate would urge. "But look more puppy-doggish. Play on their maternal instincts."

But when I went tramping back down to the laundromat for a second attempt, the fetching young female at the next washer saw through the ruse immediately. "Is this some lame attempt at meeting girls?" she asked.

"It was my friend's idea," I said. "You're supposed to fall madly in love with me at this point."

And then something remarkable happened. She laughed.

So I kept going. I told her about the book I had ordered on picking up girls and the advice it had given and the notable lack of success I had made whilst following said advice. And she kept laughing. She laughed herself all the way out of the laundromat and up to her room, where she invited me in and closed the door, still laughing.

"Someone should write a book about this," I thought.

Flare
November 2003