What's the quickest way to get a title?

I rarely play OTB in person and I've never been in an official tournament of any kind.  Also I'm in the US and not a member of USCF or FIDE.  I've decided a want a title though because I want free membership on chess sites and my posts to be gold-tinted on chess.com. 

Where do I begin?

No, I meant what do I actually have to do and how quickly can I do it.
I think I'm already just below really low master strength.  It's hard to say though since I've never had an official rating.

Alright, alright! I really try to refrain as much as possible from doing this. But right now for a limited time, I'm having a sale. Ok, just go ahead & send me 39.95 & I'll send you a certificate giving you a title. What would you like your title to be? Duke of wherever? Grand, exalted, all powerful, omnipotent one? Just let me know. 

FromMuToYou, as soon as you are a member of USCF you are automatically a member of FIDE. The two ratings, and titles, are independent though. The titles aren't equivalent - a USCF NM is lower than a FIDE FM is lower than a FIDE IM is lower than a USCF GM is lower than a FIDE GM, I think. A USCF NM is 2200+ USCF, a FIDE FM is 2300+ FIDE. There are no norms to be completed to become a USCF NM, so as soon as your rating hits 2200 USCF you're titled!

Okay those two posts were the kind of information I was looking for, thanks. 
How often are the tournaments in New Orleans, LA and San Angelo, TX?
I tried finding schedules on the USCF but what I was looking at was an unorganized mess that was hard to make sense of.  Where do you see the schedules at?

Being from the middle of nowhere in Colorado, I only have the opportunity to go to a tournament (at all) once or twice per month at most, and maybe a major rated tournament twice a year. That's the primary reason I myself am not rated.

If you can find a club in your area, whoever runs the club will probably be able to tell you when and where the local rated tournaments are held. If the club itself does rated tournaments, say, every week or two, then I'd join the club and go to those.

This page:

http://www.uschess.org/assets/msa_joomla/AffiliateSearch/clubresultsnew.php?st=TN&pg=1

looks so bad I found it hard to even take it seriously.  I think I tried emailing and calling some names on the list and never got a response so I assumed most of it was outdated.

"Should I go with USCF or FIDE?  Are the titles equivalent and/or transferable?  I don't really get it."

It does not matter. Of course if you just go for getting titles then USCF is better, since you will get titles sooner. For example, you are an NM with a rating of 2200, while you are FM with a rating of 2300. 

I'm pretty sure the club directory will not show any affiliates that are not current. That said, once you become a USCF member they will send you either a magazine (with the premium membership) or a tournament publication (with the non-premium membership) that will list tournaments that organizers have paid to have listed.

The USCF tournaments page lists a lot of stuff and the Nashville Chess Center has a calendar of events. It looks like a lot of their events are scholastic oriented but not all:

http://www.nashvillechess.org/content.aspx?page_id=2&club_id=164844

and

http://www.nashvillechess.org/content.aspx?page_id=70&club_id=164844&item_id=3582&cat_id=-1 (last link in that section has events listed)

Also, the TN Chess Association pages should have upcoming tourneys in the state: http://tnchess.us/?page_id=273 (link goes to the caledar)

You could also pay people to play under your name. For example some poor russian GMs could come to the European "open" type tournaments, where no one knows their face, register to the tournament under your name (we don't have passport checks here in the registration process) and FIDE ID and get you quickly a decent rating, which will lead to FIDE FM title (automatically granted at 2300 FIDE ELO). Tell him not to win any prizes, otherwise someone might recognize him on photos ("Hey, this is not John Smith from NY, this is Igor Schachmatowsky from Archangelsk !!").

What will this cost ? Let's say 1000 € for travel costs, 500 € for the hotel, another 1000 € as "salary" for his efforts, makes 2500 € per tournament. You'd need 2-3 tournaments to get the ELO, so the title could be yours for under 10k €.  The downside is that you shouldn't ever play OTB tournament games with your real name or ID, it's suspicious if a 2300ish player starts losing to 1900s all the time.

And ofc. FIDE won't be amused, if they find out ;)

Just below master strength with live ratings in the 15/1600s and an online rating of 2k seems very unlikely.

A quick way to get a NM title although perhaps not the absolute quickest is to play 5 different weekend tournaments of 5 rounds each that are USCF rated.

Just try to achieve a 2200 rating and poof that only took 5 weekends usually all day Saturday 3 games and 2 games on Sunday.

This of course assumes he has the understanding to achieve it.  What endgame books would you recommend?  I think starting with 100 Endgames You Must Know by de Villa (I think that's his name), graduating to Fundamental Chess Openings, Shereshevsky's Endgame Strategy, some Comprehensive Chess Opening volumes (new editions came out this year), and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual is a good progression program. 

Spend at least a month on one book (if you finish early refresh it so the skills are automated), then move onto a middlegame book, the more basic to start with the better, preferably a comprehensive one that covers basics such as weak squares, pawns, color complexes (bishops guard weak squares), bishop vs. knight strengths and weaknesses, bishop without a counterpart, rooks need open lines (as Carsten Hansen says don't occupy a file unless you seek to benefit from it and have viable potential entry points.  His positional chess book was my first on the topic), etc. 

Tactics of course are important too, but if you don't know what to look for when calculating you'll just take wild guesses.  Can't evaluate a position as clearly better if you don't understand the positional elements at the end of the variations that make it better after all.  So your months of study could go 1 month 100 Chess Endgames (or unrated through class C in Silman's Endgame Book as I hear that's a good one) then Logical Chess Move by Move, then Fundamental Chess Openings (will take over a month), then Hansen's Positional Book, then Endgame Strategy or Soltis' Turning Advantage into Victory in Chess, then Nimzovich's My System, then Chess Strategy and Muller's Secrets of Pawn Endings, then Bronstein or Najdorf's Zurich Tournament book, etc. 

Sounds like a lot of work, but remember it's spread out over a year of training.  There's no need to buy all these books at once, take them a month at a time.  Thinking system, positional understanding, calculation, and endgame technique are critical.  Before each study session do 10 minutes of basic tactic training.  Key word basic, so don't even bother logging into Chesstempo and just do their guest puzzles, which are all basic.  Signing in will give you basic ones at first then they'll become too involved for a casual warm up session.  Signing in is good for training tactics on its own however.  Chess.com also has tactic puzzles, but they penalize you for taking your time, which is important because if you think you have a winning move slam on the breaks and make sure your move is actually winning. 

IM Pfren last I checked was 1900 live.  Considering he's an IM he should have a 2700+ live rating (adjusting for internet inflation of course). 

What does an exception prove? He loses 5 minute blitz games on time after 20 moves, it's clearly just the pace he can't handle. There are 2300 live players without titles.

try to play him OTB to know if he is an IM

Maybe that's out of date, they only have NM and SM I believe.

:') !

Also keep in mind that during a training program one can develop imbalances in their understanding so it needs to be comprehensive over time to fix them.  I played a 1900 guy at a club and we were equal for most of the game, I had a clear advantage at some point in the middlegame after equalizing and it went away.  He seemed to know his way around a reversed Dragon as white (I recall from studying some Petrosian games so the opening wasn't alien to me although I was on the black side in the game whereas I studied from the white side since Petrosian played it) and 1...e5 is my choice against it as it's principled and has potential for all sorts of imbalances. 

Then in the endgame he flopped, as if take your time and the principle of two weaknesses were concepts he was unaware of.

  The game was said to be positional according to a random expert and there wasn't much contact between the pieces.  Equality with a 1900 in a positional middlegame, he tanks the endgame, but how is he 1900?  I'm logically concluding that this guy is a tactical beast since at 1900 what he was strong in didn't show up in the actual game apart from the opening.