How to Archer

by Sterling Archer

  Which is why I don’t gamble.

  Because it’s not gambling if you have a foolproof system!54 Which I do! And which I can’t believe I’m sharing with you people, but it kills me to think of you dopes stuffing your hard-earned Hamiltons into the pockets of some mobster’s silk-lined Brioni suit.

  And so here, for the first time ever, is a step-by-step guide to the Sterling Archer Triple-A Power Play55:

  1. Get $100,000 from somewhere.

  2. Deposit it with the casino.

  3. Have a drink with the charming personal concierge the casino will assign to you. Let him know you’re interested in some female companionship after you have dinner and take in a show. (Note: If your personal concierge is a woman, this is a good time to bang her. And then let her know you’re interested in some different female companionship after you have dinner and take in a show, Regardless of the gender of your personal concierge, this is also a good time to mention any food allergies you may have: he or she will be sure to let the chef know.)

  4. Invite your personal concierge up to your comped suite, which is so mind-blowingly awesome that Frank fucking Sinatra would be nervous about walking around in there with his shoes on. The reason for doing this is so your personal concierge can use his own money to tip the bellhop. Just pat your pockets and look momentarily horrified, and the concierge will leap at the chance to do you this small kindness, as he is expecting a huge tip on the back end. (Oh, and if your personal concierge is a woman, this is a good opportunity to bang her again.)

  5. Dismiss everyone and walk over to the bar by your suite’s floor-to-ceiling windows and, as you watch the setting sun bathe the desert in hues of cinnamon and gold, start pounding the shit out of that free high-end liquor. Go nuts: Make a Long Island Iced Tea with sixty-year-old Armagnac. Then throw it on the floor; it’s gross. Then call housekeeping. Then strip naked.

  6. When the maid knocks, just yell for her to come on in, She may be startled by your nudity, but just offer her a drink while reassuring her that everything is, in fact, totally cool.56 Then ask her if she’d like to have sex. If you look like I do naked, then yes, yes she would.

  7. Have sex with the maid. Then, as you head to the bathroom, politely remind her about all that sticky broken glass over by the bar. (Note: It is not acceptable to offer her money. This will make her feel like a whore, and she’s probably incredibly Catholic. It is acceptable to offer her five or six bottles of the casino’s high-end liquor. This avoids any appearance of impropriety, plus she’ll be able to trade it for tortilla flour, cooking oil, and safety matches.)

  8. Shower, take a short nap, and get dressed for the evening.

  9. Have an amazing, and totally comped, dinner in the casino’s VIP restaurant. Then order an entirely separate meal, which you will instruct your waiter to have delivered to that cinnamon-skinned maid, down in whatever steamy sub-basement laundry room she’s currently toiling. The waiter will recognize this for the totally class move it is, and comp this second dinner as well.

  10. Take in a show. I prefer magicians, but I’m also pretty crazy about endangered species. Luckily this is Vegas (oh, yeah, I forgot: this is Vegas), and you can’t swing a dead hooker without hitting some magic act built almost entirely around the majestic white Bengal Tiger.

  11. Head back to the casino. At this point, your personal concierge will inquire, very politely, if you’re ready to try your luck at the tables. Tell him that you’re dying to gamble, but that you don’t think you could concentrate until you blow a few hot, salty loads all over at least two top-tier prostitutes. Definitely comped, preferably while tearing through the desert in the back of a comped stretch limousine with the stereo blasting Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

  12. Go do that.

  13. Now comes the tricky part, because you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of a corner here. Your personal concierge has satisfied his part of the implied oral agreement: at this very minute, two sexy hookers have one foot up on a sink in the lobby bathroom and are using lemon-scented moist towelettes to wipe your seed from their various female nooks and/or crannies. He is—and rightfully so, I might add—expecting you to walk over to the cage, withdraw a stack of those cool, black, rectangle-y chips, and then go sit down at a table and gamble them away. And while he’s being incredibly polite about it, his Mafia colleagues probably won’t be. So:

  14. Go get your chips, bitch: it’s time to gamble. Now, I’m personally attracted to the games with the most paraphernalia: roulette, pachinko, or anything with a light-up tote-board. If I gambled, and if a casino would let me, I could probably spend hours happily betting on the board game Mouse Trap. But since I don’t, and they won’t, and I’m just trying to get the hell out of here with my money and my thumbs, I head for the pai gow tables, These are usually pretty easy to spot: just look for the cloud of cigarette smoke that doesn’t speak English, You will be the only white person at the table, and you may get a few dirty looks when you sit down, but that’s just because Asians can be kinda racist sometimes. Wave to (or snap your fingers at) a waitress and tell her to bring a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for the table. Hey, look who just made a bunch of new friends! Gesture toward the tabletop and shrug, like you don’t understand how the game is played. Then start pouring shots of scotch for all those guys—and a woman you wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn is Madame Chiang Kai-Shek—as they try to explain the rules by jabbering nonsense at you, waving their cigarettes around, and quickly getting bombed on scotch (remember: they’re tiny). Just keep playing dumb, order another bottle, and don’t be alarmed if everybody’s face turns bright red: they’re not mad at you. This condition is called Oriental Flush, and it happens to some Asian people when they drink. Off-putting, but harmless. Okay, once everybody is totally shitfaced (which should probably take about eight minutes), throw your hands up like you’re just too dumb to ever learn the subtle nuances of pai gow (which you probably are). Then indicate, with lots of pointing and tummy-rubbing, that you’d like to take them all out to dinner. (Note: getting Asian people to voluntarily walk away from any type of gambling is obviously going to be a tough sell, but don’t take no for an answer: this next bit is the crucial part of The Sterling Archer Triple-A Power Play.) Shepherd the whole drunken, red-faced, smoking, shouting lot of them over to the cage and tell the cashier you wish to cash out your chips. Your personal concierge will come sprinting over to the cage at this point—trying to catch the eye of a few Mafia goons as he does so—and ask how he may be of assistance. You’ll both have to shout over your drunken little herd of Asians because now they’re arguing about where to eat and are thus louder and angrier sounding than normal. Tell him you’re taking your new friends out to dinner, and that you don’t feel comfortable leaving a hundred thousand dollars in the casino vault. He knows—hell, even Madame Chiang Kai-Shek knows—that this is complete bullshit, because it was sitting there the whole time you were out scarfing down Lobster Thermidor and pressure-washing hookers and watching tigers magically disappear, But the shouting, arm-waving, beet-faced Asians (who appear to have agreed on barbecue) will have him so flummoxed that you’ll be able to withdraw your hundred grand, go eat a bunch of short ribs with the gang, and be in a cab to McCarran before he realizes what the hell just happened.

  15. Rinse.57

  16. Repeat.58

  And there you have it: the Sterling Archer Triple-A Power Play.59

  ARCHER FUN FACT: ROULETTE

  Here’s a fun fact: Add up all the numbers on a roulette wheel, one through thirty-six. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Are you adding the last number right now? What did you get? Creepy, right?

  ARCHER BY THE NUMBERS: CASINO ODDS

  • Odds against being dealt a royal flush in poker: 649,740:1

  • Odds against making a “Hard Eight” in craps: 10:1

  • Odds against getting a 00 in roulette: 35:1

  • Odds for seeing some Asian people there: 1:1

  • Odds for those Asians smok
ing: 1:1

  • Toll-free gambling addiction hotline: 800-522-4700

  SURVEILLANCE

  Wow. I kinda shot my wad with the Sterling Archer Triple-A Power Play. Not sure if I’m in the mood to get into a whole big thing about how binoculars work.

  INTERROGATION

  In today’s political climate, “interrogation” has been become a very sensitive issue. And I put it in quotation marks because, by now, even tiny little kids know that “interrogation” is just grown-up talk for torture. But in my opinion, we’re doing our children a grave disservice by refusing to engage in an open dialogue about torture. Which is the same thing we do with sex. And then the next thing those kids know, they’re of barely legal age and someone is trying to put his penis in them, and they’re all like, “What the fuck, dude?! Jesus, hang on a second! What? No, I’m not mad, I just wasn’t expecting that, because my parents never engaged in an open dialogue with me about it. But let’s do a bong hit, and you can maybe walk me through it.”

  And that’s your child. I mean, obviously they’re not still a child when they get brusquely introduced to sex by a stranger they just met in a bar like, an hour ago; they’re a young adult. A young adult with his or her underpants around his or her ankles, hunched over a bong in the back of this guy’s pick-up, and the only even remotely non-appalling thing about the whole situation is the truck has a camper top, the windows of which are illegally—yet mercifully—over-tinted. Because there is a grammar school right across the street, for God’s sake.

  Hang on—I lost my thread a little bit. What are we doing? Oh, right. Torture. Yes.

  Torture is one of those things that Americans constantly whine about (e.g., the inhumane treatment of cows), but then they go out and exhibit the exact behavior (e.g., gobbling down a big platter of delicious sliders) that perpetuates the necessity of that thing in the first place.

  Americans are repelled by the very thought of their government’s sanctioning torture, and yet they demand to not be blown up by terrorists. But it’s the exact same principle. Except that the cows are now terrorists—a chilling thought in and of itself—and national security is now a steaming plate of hot, juicy mini-burgers. And you can’t have your sliders and eat ’em too, folks.

  Also, they don’t actually torture the cows: they just pack them in feedlots, knee-deep in their own excrement, until it’s time to blow a hole in their foreheads with a pneumatic bolt, slam a big steel hook into their hind leg, yank them up into the air, slice them into various steaks, chops, ribs, butts, and rounds, and then macerate whatever’s left over into ground chuck, which is then formed into delicious little patties, grilled with a bit of Vidalia onion and topped with a small slice of cheese and a bread-and-butter pickle, slipped into a tiny steamed bun, and then carried to your table by a smiling, apple-cheeked waitress who’s working her way through college so that one day, God willing, she can become a veterinarian. And thus continues the circle of life.

  My point is, I personally don’t torture people.60

  INTERROGATION RESISTANCE

  The key to resisting interrogation techniques is, as with many things, mental preparation.

  Because have you ever broken a fingernail, way down past the quick? Or gotten an electric shock while using two forks to get a pre-buttered English muffin out of the toaster? Or stubbed your pinky toe really badly on the metal leg of your bed frame?61

  Great. Now imagine a guy using a pair of Vise-Grips to actually pull your fingernails out, one at a time. Then imagine being stripped naked, lashed to a set of metal bedsprings, doused with water, and that same guy running a set of jumper cables from a 4000-watt generator directly to your testicles, Then imagine a second guy—the first guy, having just lit a cigarette off your still-smoldering scrotum, is taking a smoke break—using a ball-peen hammer to smash each and every one of your toes into amorphous, pulpy little bloblets.

  And those are just things I made up just now. I don’t torture people for a living. But torturers do—hence the name—and they have countless ways of inflicting the most unimaginable pain that you could ever possibly imagine. If it were even imaginable. So I don’t care who you are, sooner or later you’re going to tell your torturers everything they want to know, whether it’s true or not. And when you do, you won’t care that you’re betraying your friends and colleagues and countrymen. Because you’ll be too busy trying not to look at—with your one remaining eyeball—your other, non-remaining eyeball. Which is staring up at you from the gore-spattered floor.

  You are going to talk.

  And your torturer—if he’s good at his job, which he probably is; there’s probably tons of competition—will make this very clear to you at the very beginning. As he removes his woolen tunic, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and hands the assistant torturer his wristwatch:

  You are going to talk.

  He will repeat this fact a few moments later. As he lays all the various and horrifying tools of his black trade on a rolling cart built for the express purpose of torture-tool-holding:

  You are going to talk.

  He will repeat this fact a few moments later. As he lights a cigarette with a hammer-and-sickle-embossed Zippo. Which he then snaps shut for dramatic effect and tells you, once again:

  You. Are going. To talk.

  And he is absolutely right. So why go through all that blinding, soul-destroying pain from which you will never recover—physically, let alone mentally—when you’re just going to blab your head off anyway? Just go ahead and tell him whatever the hell he wants to know. Now, before he slides a rectal thermometer up your urethra and smashes your dick with a tire iron, filling your now-ruined penis with a thousand tiny shards of glass and a shitload of mercury.

  Because now is when that mental preparation will prove itself so invaluable. Because if your torturers don’t shoot you in the back of the skull when it’s over (which they probably will, which is even less reason to sweat all this stuff), you’re going to have to deal with a ton of guilt for being responsible for the deaths of so many of your friends and colleagues and countrymen. But because you have mentally prepared yourself for the weight of this crushing guilt, you will be able to walk out of that torture chamber with your head held high. You will walk out like a man.

  Because your testicles are still attached your body.

  ESCAPE AND EVASION

  Given the overall tone of my writing style, this may sound like I’m just being a dick:

  Don’t get caught.

  But it’s actually the first thing they tell you at the ISIS Escape and Evasion seminar. And it’s actually very sound advice: it is much, much easier to avoid capture than to escape once you are captured. And even though you planned ahead and inserted a tactical suppository into your pre-buttered rectum, in all likelihood, you won’t be able to rely on it. Because thirty seconds into your first torture session (see above), you’re probably going to fear-poop it out.

  But sometimes, often through no real fault of his own, an intelligence agent simply cannot avoid capture. Strong winds may cause his parachute jump to miss his drop zone, for example. The smallest mistake in a regional accent of a foreign language, or perhaps even a tiny detail in the exquisite cut of his suit, may betray the agent’s true identity to an alert and well-trained enemy agent. Or he might just blab it out when he’s drunk in a bar somewhere.

  The point is far better men than you have been exposed, captured, tortured, and summarily executed in a damp cellar by a fat, drunken NKVD noncom, whose bonus for putting a 7.62mm slug into their brain stem was a liter of lukewarm potato vodka. Far, far better men.

  So if you are captured, try not to beat yourself up. Someone else will do it for you.

  Oh, and no matter what anyone tells you, do not bury your parachute at the drop zone. Because—especially if you’ve parachuted behind the Iron Curtain, where even mundane items like soap or hot cabbage can be a luxury—do you have any idea how laid you can get with eighty yards of silk?

  DID YOU
KNOW…?

  That the arteries of a blue whale are so large that a leopard can crawl through them?

  WILDERNESS SURVIVAL

  The topic of wilderness survival could probably be a book unto itself. In fact, I bet it already has been. And since I pretty generally get to pick my assignments, and since I pretty generally pick assignments which require me to go somewhere non-wildernessy like Monte Carlo or Gstaad or the Netherlands Antilles, which means I pretty generally don’t spend a ton of time in the wilderness, why don’t we just leave this topic to one of those books? I’m sure anything with “wilderness” or “survival” or any combination of those two words in the title will be perfectly fine for what you’re trying to do. Which is apparently starve to death in a forest.

  COBRAS

  [THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]62

  SECTION TWO

  HOW TO DRINK

  First and foremost, before we continue I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear: A martini is made with gin. If your martini is made with vodka, it is not, in fact, a martini. And odds are that you have a vagina.

  There. Now we can move on. To the drinking. Of which many of you readers may think that I do too much, And I can’t honestly say that opinion is entirely unfair. But what many people fail to consider is that a large part of my drinking is done professionally, not socially. It’s a very real, very important part of my job description. (As the world’s greatest secret agent.)

  Because I never know, for example, when I’ll be required to down shot after shot of pepper vodka with a smoke-and-body-odor-filled roomful of KGB agents while also remembering that I’m supposed to be speaking Russian.63 And so yes, I drink a lot. But only because I need to keep my alcohol tolerance at the highest level humanly possible.