With a folding knife in my pocket, I set out to search the dark, rutted streets of southern Bogota. I was in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of one of the most dangerous cities of the world. And, of course, I was half drunk and fueled on false bravado.

Even though I had just successfully fought off an armed attacker and turned the tables on him – at least for a while – I felt I still had something to prove to myself. Looking back, I can laugh at how pathetic it was. But, at the time, it was deadly serious, and potentially fatal.

I spotted a figure coming down the other side of the street. He was just a shadow as few of the streetlamps worked. Even in the darkness, my clothing and my gait marked me as a foreigner. He crossed the street and headed straight toward me.

At perhaps 20 meters away, I could make him out clearly. He wasn’t one of my muggers. But he did have the same drug addled, desperate look. No doubt, under the right circumstances, he would try to mug me too. The right circumstances being, of course, if he ever found me alone in a dark area of southernBogota.

I reached into my pocket, unfolded my knife, and picked up my pace toward him.

He slowed, stopped, and then made a beeline across the street.

I was obviously even a madman in silhouette.

I visited the bar the thieves were supposed to frequent, and then another, and another, until I decided my attackers were probably stoned on my money and passed out somewhere.

Then I talked to the two policemen I found on the corner, giving them the descriptions of my attackers and telling them I was out searching for them. They laughed but said they would help.

Earlier that night, not far from my neighborhood, drug dealers had bombed a police bus, killing 16 officers. The police that night, like many others, were out for blood.

The two cops hatched a plan that would best work with the cooperation of a half-crazy North American. They would take me to the most dangerous bars in the neighborhood. I would walk in, make my presence known, and walk out, hoping I would get attacked outside, where the police were hidden.

We struck out in bar after bar. Perhaps it was the way I looked at my potential attackers – as prey rather than predators. Or perhaps it was the general climate of police rage that was hitting the streets that night.

By dawn, we gave up, and I went to work. The adrenalin had long since faded into a self-conscious giddiness. By the time I sobered up and was out of any danger, I felt more foolish than I had ever felt in my life – at least until then. I no longer saw myself as the adventurer who braves the wilds of the world’s most dangerous places to tell its tales in moving color. I realized I might be the idiot who gets bumped off early in the movie – maybe even as comic relief.

At work, Jhon called and told me he wanted more guarantees from the DEA before he would agree to leave Bogota and meet them in a safe house. If he left for a day, his absence would certainly be noticed by the police who were supposed to be watching over him.

He left me with a plea.

“Please make them understand,” he said. “The trial is ending and I could be killed any time. They have to hurry up.”

I never again heard from Jhon. He never called to collect his diary or to bargain or plead again. I imagine he was killed, like he said he would be. In Colombia in the middle of the drug wars, it was all too common.

Playboy Magazine, which had agree to pay $10,000 if I delivered on the story, instead paid me an ironically named “kill fee” – the payment a writer receives when, through no fault of his own, the story doesn’t work out.

Growing tired of covering only the drug war, I used the kill fee to buy a one-way ticket to the heart of the Amazon, on the border of Colombia and Brazil. I would return to the country of my dreams – the mulattas, the samba, Copacabana. My plan was to travel by boat down the Amazon and by bus south to Rio de Janeiro.

I had saved up to buy a Lonely Planet’s guide to Brazil and, for months, I wore out its pages dreaming.

When I had set out for adventure with a one-way ticket to El Salvador 2.5 years earlier, I never really thought about how long I would be out of Canada. Perhaps six months, maybe a year. While packing my backpack to leave Colombia – my home for the past 10 months – I realized I was growing weary of that instability.

Brazil just may be a place for me to settle down.

When I was a kid, the dinosaurs a la mode were T Rex and the brontosaurus. Now kids have Quetzelcoatlus. It’s the funnest of all the dinosaur names to say. And it was as tall as seven kids stood on top of each other.

Such are the factoids I’m learning on the summer holiday.

I have my daughter-saurus in my exclusive care for a month – starting this morning. And she’s on holiday. And she’s irresistible. And cute as all heck. And newly obsessed with dinosaurs.

I’ll have to rethink the posting schedule over the next couple of weeks and may have to post only once a week until late August.

Next one is coming Thursday though. By then, I’ll announce whether I need a longer period of slow posting.

Thanks,

Adam

I was just telling my wife this morning about working in Kandahar, Afghanistan during the US invasion and one of my favorite interviews there, with Capt. Malali Kakar, one of the city’s two female police officers. She was one of the few women that I actually saw in Afghanistan, the rest being covered by burqas. She was later murdered.

Another one of my favorite interviews in Kandahar was with the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Googling to find the interview today, I just saw that The Associated Press recounted it – in his obituary. He was murdered last week.

Charlie Arbogast, the AP photographer I was with during the interview, recounts our visit with him here.

Every once in a while, I have a day of reminiscing like this. I invariable stumble on news of more people I knew murdered. It adds a sense of urgency to the idea of getting some of their stories out.

I caught the man’s arm and halted his knife inches before it reached my throat.

With the world of hit men and drug lords dominating my life at the time, I fought for my life. A knot of hands struggled for control of the knife, which was now perilously close to both of our faces.

My attacker was now, no doubt, as afraid as I was.

My fingers gripped his, prying them apart as we tousled in the street. Already, a crowd of onlookers was starting to form a ring around us.

By some twist, my hands were now on the knife’s handle and his hands were overtop mine. I was stronger, but not strong enough to completely take the knife away from him. The fray of white-knuckled fingers gave the knife indirection.

Until, bit by bit, I gained control.

As soon as I was able, I thrust the knife toward his throat with all the strength I could muster. His hands still on top of mine, he managed to misdirect it and dodge the blade.

We struggled more. Again I thrust the knife at his throat and again he dodged.

From behind him, I spotted two men breaking through the crowd and running toward us.

Police! I thought. I’m saved!

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first man poked a knife blade against my kidneys. The second placed his knife at my throat.

They were accomplices of the man I was trying to stab.

I still gripped the knife toward my attacker’s throat, but moved my hands backward slightly. And then I let go.

The knife, again firmly in my attacker’s hands, whipped down my chest, tearing open my shirt but causing little physical damage.

I had no choice but to raise my hands in surrender. I braced, expecting the penetration of steel.

What happened next overpowered me with relief – almost joy.

The three men stuffed their hands in my pockets.

I only then realized I was being attacked by petty muggers – Thank God! These were not professional killers out to get me because of my discussions with the DEA and Jhon the assassin.

By the time they found the equivalent of about $20 and my passport, I was almost giddy with the realization that I would live.

I started to even get a little cocky.

“What could you do with my passport?” I said to the man who, moments earlier, I had tried to stab in the throat. “It’s useless to you.”

He hesitated for a second, looked at my passport … and gave it back to me.

The three ran off through the crowd.

A half a dozen bus drivers from the nearby bus stop approached me. One of them said he knows where the three attackers hang out. He named the bar.

The significance of the attack only hit me when I got back to my hotel room.

I had just tried to kill a man – twice.

I sat on my bed and let the thought wash over me in waves of surreality.

I had been raised on my great uncles’ and grandpa’s stories of World War II. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I was fascinated by the romantic tales of combat and life and death struggles.

Since I was old enough to remember, I had always posed the question – Would I kill somebody if it came right down to it?

Now I had an answer.

At the hotel bar, I dulled the feeling with one beer after another until it faded. In its place came a drunken, stupefied, euphoric bravado on top of an anger at being robbed. It merged into a feeling that would crop up again and again in coming years and lead me to battles. I felt I needed to know just how far I could push myself – at what point would fear paralyze me?

I decided, drunkenly, that I would seek that point tonight. I put my own knife in my pocket and decided to visit the bar the bus driver had said was frequented by my attackers.

My pride demanded my $20 back.

I remember stumbling out onto the dark streets and thinking that, if I found just one of my attackers alone, I would only mug him for his share – about $7.

After all, I was the good guy.

“I’ve got a story for you that will make world news,” a man rasped on the other end of the phone line. “I can’t talk on the phone. You come. No police. Bring a tape recorder.”

The address he gave was in one of the more dangerous parts of Bogota, which was one of the more dangerous cities of the most dangerous country in the world at the time. I was unwilling to go meet an anonymous caller with a potential news tip without a guarantee of a decent story. I asked for more details.

“I used to kill people for Pablo Escobar,” he said. “I’ll bring proof.”

Pablo Escobar was the world’s biggest cocaine dealer. Few in Colombia would use his name under false pretences.

I was calm after the man hung up the phone. The tension only hit me minutes later – when I realized that it was in my very nature to go to a mysterious meeting such as this. I knew I would force myself to go. I now realize that my brain had been wired to associate risk with reward – and this was a huge risk. At the time, though, I simply thought of myself as an adrenalin junkie who didn’t like parachuting or motorcycle racing.

After I gained some respect within The Associated Press in Lima working part time, I had taken a three-day bus ride through the Andes on a half-promise of a full-time job in Bogota with the world’s most respected news agency. When I arrived, however, I was told the budget had been cut. I was only offered a part-time spot. I supplemented the income with another part-time job as a reporter for the Colombian Post, the country’s only English-language newspaper.

It was at the Colombian Post that I received the call. I persuaded a fellow Post reporter, an Eton-educated young Englishman, to accompany me.

Jhon, as he spelled his name, approached us on the crowded street wearing a preposterous afro wig. His wasted physique and worn face spoke more of a junkie than a professional hit man. He glanced around the streets and then led us to a filthy sidewalk bar for a beer while he told his story.

Jhon, now 26, was originally from the western city of Medellin, Escobar’s home base. As a teenager with a gift for selling pilfered merchandise, the drug dealers in his barrio offered him a job processing cocaine in a factory hidden away in the jungle. From there, he worked his way up the ranks.

Nervously eyeing his watch, Jhon pulled out an old photo of himself – some 30 pounds heavier – drinking beer with a partially visible and vaguely familiar figure on a verandah of a ranch. Horses were saddled nearby. The horses were the first clue. They were branded with the notorious G – they were the famous racehorses of Rodrigo Gacha. And then the face of the other man in the photo became clear. Jhon was sitting with Gacha himself, the maniacal right-hand man of Escobar and one of the most feared drug lord’s in the world.

We listened.

“I was one of the first people in the world to do the motorcycle drive-by shootings,” said Jhon, seemingly irritated at having to provide background details before getting to his point.

In a mirthless monotone, Jhon said he had killed 16 police officers for Escobar. Jhon spoke matter of factly. He sought, and wanted, no reaction from us.

He was eventually promoted to a teacher position at one of Escobar’s infamous assassin schools. There, his mission was to prepare murderers for export to the United States. We started to question the man’s sanity as he told us he had trained 10 assassins specifically to shadow major U.S. figures.

More than anything, Escobar feared extradition to the United States if he were ever recaptured after his spectacular daylight break from prison the year before. Jhon said Escobar planned to start killing prominent U.S. officials if he were even under threat of extradition.

Jhon said he could pinpoint at least four of the assassins – in Miami, Los Angeles and New York and list all of the U.S. personalities targeted.

Then Jhon launched into his request.

Jhon had recently turned state’s witness out of fear that Escobar would kill him for knowing too much about the scheme. Now, he feared his usefulness to the government was ending and his knowledge of high-level corruption and his history as a cop-killer would end with his death at the hands of the police or the death squads.

Jhon asked me to secure him a spot on the U.S. witness protection program. If I did, The full story would be exclusively mine. My Post colleague had to return to the U.K., leaving the story entirely in my hands.

I continued meeting with Jhon over the coming weeks. He fed me a little more information each time until I felt I had established his credibility. Then he trusted me with his hand-written diary. I became convinced.

But how can a lowly Canadian freelance reporter guarantee a cop killer a spot on the U.S. federal witness protection program?

I turned to the two sources for help that first sprang to mind – the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency … and Playboy Magazine.

I approached the DEA for help and advice on the witness protection program. I turned to Playboy Magazine and its well-paid, respected journalism section to sell the story.

I arranged a meeting with the head of the DEA in Colombia who, on reviewing all my evidence, said it was convincing enough that they wanted to meet with the guy. The evidence apparently jived with other bits of information the DEA had.

One problem – they wanted me to escort the man out from his current safe house and to a countryside meeting place. Only then would they determine whether he warranted a spot on the program. Stealing Jhon from the Colombian police mid-trial was politically risky business.

As for Playboy, they offered me $10,000 for the story.

I took the bus home, watching the city decay from the affluent north to the poverty wracked south. I had descended from the bus for my five-minute walk from the bus stop to my dingy residential hotel when a scruffy man in his mid-twenties approached me.

In an over-friendly tone and pidgin English, he asked me for a dollar.

“Oh my friend. Please. One dollar my friend.”

Sensing danger, I tried to make my way to a crowded fried chicken joint across the street.

“I don’t have a dollar,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder, feigning friendliness.

His demeanor suddenly changed.

I twisted my body around and stepped backward as the corner of my eye saw the knife rapidly rise out his pocket and toward my throat.

(This is Part 20 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

Throughout my troubles and misadventures around the world, and throughout Project SuperMe, I often took for granted the one person who literally made it possible – my mom. As I have freshly returned from a visit back home, I wanted to interrupt my musings about South America and re-visit the third pillar of Project SuperMe – the pillar of relationships.

 To those of you who complained about the lateness of this post – sorry.

“You got stroked,” my mom said last week to Ross, her significant other. As usual, mom spoke with a joke in her voice.

I hadn’t seen her for a year when I went back to Canada this month – and she remarked on how little time had passed since our last meeting. I once went seven years without seeing her – and 12 years without seeing my brother – while I was in Peru, Africa, Kosovo, the Philippines and elsewhere. When my dad died, I was in Pakistan, making my way via land to Afghanistan. I hadn’t seen him in years either.

It was certainly no family falling out. I loved them the whole time but it seemed I was always too busy, or distracted, to make a trip work. In fact, I was often distracted from what was truly important.

As I stated near the start of this blog, Project SuperMe was about strengthening all three pillars of life – health, wealth and relationships. Health for me was covered by dieting and exercise. Wealth meant the professional side of my life – writing. The third pillar was harder to tackle.

The relationships side, for me, meant reconnecting with my family, half a world away. During Project SuperMe, I made a firm commitment to visit them regularly, perhaps even move back to Canada after 20 years abroad. As I was busy hibernating while working on the other pillars during Project SuperMe, I just managed this month to make the Bucharest-Vancouver light.

Which leads me back to my mom and her off-color jokes.

Yes, Ross had just gotten “stroked” – three weeks before my visit, which coincided with his 70^th birthday. By stroked, mom meant that he was left paralyzed on his left side by a stroke. Around the same time as Ross got stroked, mom discovered that she had a heart problem requiring serious surgery.

And then I arrived, weeks later, into the happiest home I have ever visited. Mom, of course, can’t sit still and hauls bags of dirt around in the garden that represents one of her passions. Ross was on his way to a remarkably recovery.

The two would take turns pushing each other in a wheelchair while giggling like a teenage couple.

And my brother, Jesse Robin, and my sister-in-law Tammy, who just lost their son Callum to cancer last year, would pitch into the merriment. My brother with his goofy faces and his jokes about ending it all by shooting himself in the head – with his BB gun. “Ouch.” Reload. “Ouch.” Tammy with an optimism that is hard for others to believe, until you get to know her.

And then there’s Ross’s son Jeremy, something of a brother to me, who is living downstairs there. Jeremy is striking in his complete lack of spite, anger malice or any of the other emotions that everybody else can feel from time to time.

These people are all happy simply because they chose to be happy.

During the self-examination period of Project SuperMe, I repeatedly heard the advice to stay positive through tough times by thinking that “one day I’ll look back at this and laugh.”

Well, my mom, Ross and the rest of the family have beat that. They skip the wait altogether and just laugh now.

Throw into the mix my crazy wife Roxana, who fell in love with her mother-in-law and even tattooed the Canadian maple leaf on her leg while we were there, and I had the perfect closure to my quest for a family connection.

As Roxana frequently points out, my mom’s home is full of nooks and crannies that invite one to lounge – the dog’s chair in the bay window, the hammock in the garden, the sofas both upstairs and downstairs. It’s hard to walk more than 10 feet in that house without the temptation to stretch out and relax.

It’s not the layout of the house that has that effect though. It’s the people – the pillars.

I returned to the makeshift bedroom I had rented after making that first disappointing phone call to The Associated Press. Under the bare bulb, I prepared for bed and continued studying Spanish. I contemplated the mess I’d gotten myself into – I would run out of money in six weeks or so and the invitation from The AP to call them if I chanced upon something interesting seemed just a polite way of fobbing me off.

Shortly after 9 p.m., a massive boom cracked out from nearby, swinging my light bulb and bashing my ears. I jolted upright, wondering what to do. I had never heard a bomb before. I stood frozen for perhaps a minute and then made for my door.

A second blast then smashed all the windows out of the attached house, cracked the foundations and knocked me flying against the wall, stealing my breath and turning my vision a foggy red.

I knew then that I had just heard my first car bomb attack. I dashed out my door and onto the night-time streets. They were lit by twin infernos where the neighboring apartment blocks had been on Tarata Street, only 100 meters from my bedroom.

As I jogged to the scene, crowds of dazed and injured were running away, telling me to run as they passed.

“Run away,” a man yelled at me in Spanish. “The shooting will start.”

I ran toward. As I arrived at the scene of the car bombings, I tripped on something and fell to my knees. When I looked back in the darkness, I saw I had stepped on somebody’s foot. It had been severed from his body, which lay mangled a couple of meters away.

And then, as my breathing steadied, I saw more.

I was on the ground amid the local street money changers who had earlier harrangued me to change dollars with them. They were all dead.

A hollow-eyed, shocked old man yelled at me, blaming we foreigners for the mess his country was in as he stumbled off.

Then the ambulances and police started to arrive. I stood, unnoticed, as people trapped in disintegrating apartment buildings screamed. A mother three an infant boy down three stories into the arms of rescue personnel.

Hours after that call to the AP, I did chance upon something the news agency would find interesting. But I was stunned, frozen.

The Action Hero

To move myself to action, I chanced upon a trick that I used repeatedly in coming years when facing shocking or dangerous situations. It was the pull of a movie –Salvador– that had brought me into this situation. A movie, then, would get me out.

I pictured myself the star of an action film, majestic music crescendoing to a heroic conclusion.

In movies, nobody was really killed. They were all just acting.

Much later, at the start of Project SuperMe in February of 2011, I found out that I was using a neuro-linguistic programming tactic to inspire myself. That realization would prompt me to create dozens of movies of seconds-long movies of myself in my head to tap whenever I needed inspiration or motivation.

The movie in my head, I walked up to the police officer who seemed to be leading the operation and identified myself as a journalist. It was the Sendero Luminoso, he confirmed. Two vans had been packed with explosives and set off on Tarata Street. It was the long-expected start of the terrorist war in the city, he said.

Investigators would later reveal that each of the two vans was packed with 1,000 kilograms of high explosives. They were intentionally detonated in the late evening when the apartment buildings would be full of people finishing dinner and readying for bed.

I half-stumbled around the streets, looking for a pay phone to call The AP. It took me more than 20 minutes to find one. I had walked for several blocks and still the sirens wailed and broken glass crunched beneath my feet.

I called the office again.

“I’m very busy,” said the journalist, who was listening to radio reports of the bombings.

“I know. I just came from Tarata Street. I live there.”

He listened. And I filed my story.

It was the start of my career with The Associated Press.

I repeatedly dashed between Tarata Street and the pay phone, filling in more and more details for The AP until dawn broke. Somewhere on one of those mad dashes, I realized I had gotten what I had come for.

Three days later, another bomb exploded in the other direction of my dingy bedroom, again smashing the newly replaced windows out.

As I took notes from that scene, I felt drops on my head and cussed that it was starting to rain and it would wet my notepad. Until a drop fell directly on the page. It was blood. From a body part blown into the tree above me. It filled my hair and started to bleed down my face.

And so on. Twelve more times I covered the ruins of the Sendero Luminoso bombing campaign inPeru, working part-time for The AP.

Until the bureau chief in Lima told me that I may be able to get an opportunity came up and I may be able to get a full-time job with The AP – but not in war-torn Lima. That opportunity, he said, was in Colombia. Bogota was at the height of the cocaine wars triggered by Pablo Escobar, the world’s biggest drug boss. And The AP bureau there had just gotten the budget to hire another writer.

I bought a one-way ticket for the three-day bus ride through the Andes from Lima to Bogota.

(This is Part 18 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

Throughout my professional life, most of my career advances were made by taking risks. In fact, I can’t remember a single major advance that didn’t involve risk. It was only when I started playing it safe that my career started to stagnate, and even decline.

During the solo mornings of Project SuperMe, I relived many of my past risks, and past successes, and realized that there was a connection between the two. My purpose was to learn from my younger self. I wanted to teach myself when and where to take risks and exactly how much planning would be required.

In my early days, I was perhaps too eager to take serious risks and, by my mid-30s, I was reluctant to take any risks at all. With that shift had also come a change in planning methods. At the beginning I would sometimes sabotage myself by doing no planning whatsoever and instead acting solely on impulse. Later, I would spend weeks, or even months, planning things and never actually get anything done.

If I could capture the right mix of my two selves, I just may have the answer to my career blahs.

The end of my university days and the start of my career as a globe-trotting correspondent were fraught with risk-taking and completely devoid of planning.

The first risk, I suppose, was leaving steady employment in Ottawa and flying south on a one-way ticket to El Salvador in 1991. I lacked the money for a return ticket and could only survive for a few months by staying in the cheapest of hotels – always less than $5 a night – and eating the cheapest of street food. Plus, I would be flying – without even medical insurance – into one of the most dangerous areas of the world at the time.

Poor planning on my part, as usual, had worked against me. I had hoped to cover bits and pieces of the war in El Salvador for major media in Canada and the U.S. by assuming risks that others wouldn’t take or by focusing on areas that the established journalists would be too busy to cover.

In my hurry to realize my dream of living the movie Salvador, I had failed to acknowledge the obvious flaw in my plan – by the time I had arrived in El Salvador, the war was over. 

News from Central America was starting to slow down and the major media had a surplus of veteran, ace journalists in place – there was nothing left for an eager cub reporter to cover.

I had to leave and, again, did it on a whim. A well-established foreign correspondent in San Salvador had mentioned off-handedly that Peru would be the next hot spot in Latin America. “You might want to check it out,” he said.

Shitty Welcome to Peru

Two months later, after a slow, halting crawl through overstuffed buses through the Andes and a stay in an Ecuadorian mountain village, I alighted in central Lima with my Lonely Planet guide to South America and, by now, about $800 to my name. Tanks of the Fujimori regime lined the streets as I made my way to the cheapest hotel I could find in my guide book – $3.50 a night for a seriously stained mattress with no sheets.

The tense military presence in the streets and desert-like chill to Lima was giving my travels a bit more of a cinematic feel. However, I knew nobody in the country, had made no advance contacts, and had no clue how I would survive past the next month.

The welcome I received in the hotel, though, was cinematic only in the Three Stooges sense. After paying a week’s stay in advance, I was directed to my room upstairs. A monkey chattered noisily from his perch on the open beams above my head. He grew more frantic as I approached.

Just as I was about to walk under him, he shit in his hand and flung it at me – hitting me squarely on the top of my head. When I managed to get into my dingy hotel room, I turned on the tap to clean myself off – only to find that the water oozed out in a thick, red sludge.

Compelled to find other dwellings fast, I managed to rent a single bed in the storage shed of a once-famous and now-declining Peruvian soap opera actress for $120 a month. 

At that place, I was about to receive a much ruder welcome.

After dropping off my backpack and calling the shed home, I visited a local telephone company office to use a pay phone to call The Associated Press.

For me, The Associated Press was the pinnacle of success of a foreign correspondent. It represented all the glamour, importance and raw realness that I hoped the profession would bring me. It was also one of my only shots at gaining any sort of income outside of occasional freelance pieces peddled to magazines and newspapers in Canada and the United States.

“We don’t have any openings right now,” the AP correspondent told me in our five-minute phone conversation. He must have sensed my crushing disappointment because, moments later, he added: “Well, if you happen to see anything really interesting going on, we could take a look at your work. It’s good to know there’s another journalist in town anyway.”

I starting walking home, unaware that, less than a block away, Maoist terrorists were stealthily parking a car bomb near my new home. The Sendero Luminoso guerrilla group was only hours away from launching their terrorist war in Lima.

Once again, misfortune was to mingle with fortune in my path to becoming a foreign correspondent.

(This is Part 17 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)

While I’m on semi-holiday in Canada, I’ll be posting on Mondays only. I’ll return to the normal schedule on my return, after July 9.

The loud smack of leather on flesh rang out from the bedroom next to mine, breaking the 4 a.m. silence. And then another, followed by a female giggle.

Then I heard a male voice and realized what was going on. Something dressed vaguely like a malevolent mad hatter with multiple piercings and a forked devil’s beard was whipping the backside of something vaguely vampirish in fish net stockings.

I coughed to remind the Mad Hatter and the Vampire that they weren’t alone in the four-bedroom apartment. It did little to curb the noise, though. Such behavior was considered fairly normal in the place we had come to dub the Rockstar Mansion, which had been my home in London for the past two months.

In my drive to learn more about the pickup techniques that had so transformed my personal life, I had moved in for two months with six men who survived an international selection process to train intensively in the pickup arts at the hands of some of the world’s best.

For two months, they had focused on the best ways to pick up women. They trained 16 hours a day with professional dating coaches such as Mr. M, Jeremy Soul, Vercetti and dozens of others. They had approached hundreds of beautiful women through the course of their training – not only in clubs and pubs, but on the subway systems, streets, in the cafes and bookstores and anywhere else that attractive women could be found in London, Stockholm and Las Vegas.

The men underwent fashion makeovers to project more attractive images. They were coached by professional opera singers to project more commanding, masculine voices. They were trained by professional actors to walk more confidently and use their body language as a key tool in seduction. A professional dancer would coach them in the art of seducing women on the dance floor. Hypnotists, psychologists and neuro-linguistic programming specialists worked on tweaking their minds to eradicate any trace of fear of approaching random women. An array of self-made millionaires coached them in their business methods and helped them forge professional connections in an effort to get their finances sorted and help them focus on the art of seduction through lifestyle.

And masters of the game would watch over them, day and night, as they attempted to seduce women, giving them steady feedback that allowed them to change their approach and measure their progress. In the world of pickup, that kind of training would costs tens of thousands of dollars. But these men were getting it for free.

The six men were part of an experiment organized by Mr. M, the international pickup guru whom I had first contacted when I decided I wanted to write about the world of pickup artists. He wanted to see just how far he could take them in the space of two months. He wanted to take six slightly awkward, nerdy men with dating troubles and turn them into seduction masters in eight weeks. And he wanted me to watch him do it, up close. I jumped at the chance and found myself immersed in the experiment he called Project Rockstar.

When I first met the six men – a Canadian, a Frenchman, an Australian, a Brit, an American and an Australian chosen from among hundreds of applicants – I felt I was now hanging with the decidedly uncool crowd.

So Not Cool

On our first night together in London, we all gathered nervously at the edge of the dance floor in an elite London club, gawking at the beautiful women and wondering who would be the first to actually have to approach a woman in that intimidating atmosphere, under the eye of professional dating instructors. The crowd was so out of place, in fact, that we wouldn’t have even been allowed in the club if Mr. M and his co-trainer, dubbed 5.0, hadn’t scored us the coveted invites we needed to get past the burly doormen.

When I first started hanging out with the six, women would reject them without a second thought. The group would prowl the clubs like starving wolves, alternating between repelling their prey and licking their wounds.

By the end of the eight weeks of indoctrination, everything had changed.

When I walked into clubs with these men toward the end of the experiment, we tangibly became the center of gravity of the club. I would regularly catch women checking them out from the corner of their eyes. And the men were now even being directly hit on.

A defining moment, for me, was watching as an attractive young American woman approached Alex, the once-awkward Frenchman of the group, and said, simply “I want you.”

Alex politely rejected her.

He and the others, from that point, would end up rejecting more women than they approached.

They had absorbed the hidden focus of the training – to become better men. Through all the pickup instruction, the hundreds and hundreds of failed pickup attempts, the self-examinations, public criticism periods by juries of their peers, and study of self help philosophy, the men had been transformed.

But all that intense study and focus hadn’t made them into successful womanizers – it had made them into men who people truly wanted to be around.

Through the course of the training, they all came to the key realization that, to be truly successful with women, they had to become better men. In striving to become better men, they had lost their fixation on chasing women.

I was witnessing, I realized, the effect of self-help philosophy when properly and rigorously applied. And that was now far more alluring than the enhanced power to seduce women.

The intensive training seduction had created masterful seducers who no longer had much interest in seducing women. All of the men who participated knew that they would never again face problems in meeting women. They would never again be alone unless they chose to be.

It was now time for all to focus on bigger and better things.

The loud smacks of leather on flesh from the adjacent bedroom that night of Oct. 31, 2009, one of the last nights of Project Rockstar, echoed more like a last hurrah. The unabashed smacks between a pickup artists and his willing Halloween date announced to the groggy household that the desperate phase of their lives was over. And the rest could begin.

It also marked a change of focus for me. I already had a girlfriend whom I knew could be the one. I had stopped dating other women and was now looking for something else – something that would still take me a while to uncover but that would eventually culminate in Project SuperMe.

I would eventually take many of the teachings from the world of pickup, along with other lessons and readings that I had been exposed to along the way, and apply it to myself in Project SuperMe.

Until then, though, I still faced a series of intimidating obstacles, both professional and personal.

(This is Part 16 of a Multi-Part Series. To start at Part 1, click here)