Consider your average young nimrod just starting out in his quest to outshine Don Juan. Having enough notches on his belt, he is utterly convinced that he must teach the world a thing or two about the permutations of debauchery. Mark how he swaggers like a gunslinger into the sexual arena. Boomstick throbbing in wild anticipation of yet another conquest, he picks out his prey. He springs for the kill…

     Crash and burn. He watches as his nubile quarry is spirited away by a Neanderthal with a pimpmobile. Sad but true, there comes a time when it dawns upon the virile adventurer one of the harder truths to swallow: the ugly guy with the car gets the chick.

     It makes one think there’s no justice in this universe when some fellow who looks like an abortion gets the cheesecake girlfriend titties-up by virtue of his mode of transportation. What then is left for our young lecher?

     Let me tell you a tale, grasshopper.

     Back in college, having napalmed too many brain cells in too many strange parties, I decided to join a commune of neo-hippies. It was in this sad and pretentious collection of potheads and acid philosophers that I met the poster boy of bohemian dementia: Jake.

     Jake was dirt poor with style. What he lacked in financial girth he made up for with audacity and exuberance. To indulge his odd sense of avant-garde adventurism, we once attempted to break into a hospital morgue carrying a video camera. One night, he dragged me down the more opulent districts to yodel Marxist slogans at well-heeled barmongers, expats, and idle rich urbanites. We sounded our retreat before the cops arrived, dashing madly into back-alleys, laughing our heads off like jackals. Another time, he dragged me into a minor drug deal. With some cops. I felt like shitting nails.

     Listen. In a university where frat boys annually run buck-naked around campus as their homage to academic freedom, these are practically virtues.

     But did such flamboyance actually get him royally laid? You decide:

     A) Yes. There are women of eccentric appetites out there who, for kicks, prefer their men lean, hungry, and bizarre.

     B) No. One could just imagine the sort of women who fancy such men.

     Jake’s particular qualities repeatedly led him to stranger situations than usual. “Situations that,” he admitted, “often left me wondering afterwards if getting some under such degenerate circumstances actually count.”

     Apparently, he wasn’t talking about blushing coeds.

     He seemed to have had a good run at it, though. When he finally met the girl of his dreams, he never more than ogled another bird.

     “Besides,” he liked to say, “when a sweet young thing could bring tears of joy to your eyes when making boom-boom, believe me, others pale by comparison.”

     Inevitably, though, the ugly guy with a car came and took his girl away. The dude looked like something a dog wouldn’t even piss on.

      “That bites,” I told him one night over gin bulag. We were both smashed by then.

     “It’s the car,” he explained. “I should’ve realized she’s the type who’d roll down the windows of a Lexus to be seen riding in it. It was there all along. Potential energy.”

     “And what galls you most is that, at this very moment, she’s probably nailing herself with that baboon’s salami on squeaky leather seats, right?”

     He finally socked me. We stopped speaking to each other.

     Years later, we met at a mutual friend’s party and laughed at the whole incident. I asked him whether he’d found any sort of closure with the girl. With a pearly dog-smirk, he said he’d tell me the rest of the story if I buy him some drinks.

     And so, some nights later, I found my old pal Jake in this beat bar in Intramuros, nursing his fifth bottle of ridiculously overpriced beer while heckling an androgynous poet on the microphone. It was two in the morning and he’d accomplished the momentous feat of getting drunk by his lonesome.

     Jake gestured for me to sit beside him and ordered foo-foo drinks for the both of us. Evidently, he’d forgotten that I was the one who’d promised him the drinks. I wasn’t inclined to remind him.

     I learned that he’d made a pass at a pretty lesbian feminist (having mistaken her for a bar floozy, no doubt) and had ended up being ostracized like a leper for his pains. I could’ve told him beforehand, one does not pick up chicks in beat bars. I had recalled, however, how Jake’s generosity grew in proportion to the decline of his self-esteem. It simply had been in my best interest to orchestrate our meeting such that he’d be feeling about as dignified as a toilet seat by the time I show up. Payback for that shiner he’d given me some years back.

     Having knocked down a few more drinks, he told me the rest of the story.

     “For eight months after my angel of fornication left me,” Jake began, “I was wretched. But I swore vengeance. Little more than a year later, she had her tongue around my cock again. Of course, after all that’s happened I couldn’t consider her as anything other than a fuck buddy.”

     I started inspecting the soles of my sneakers. “Will you look at that? I think I stepped on some bullshit.”

     He laughed. “It’s all true. Apparently, the ugly bastard’s dad gave the girl a spiffy position in the family’s corporation; a position so spiffy, in fact, that the little social climber was driving a plush company car and raking in the moolah in less than a year. Losing the advantage of both car and money, the ugly boyfriend was demoted into ‘unavoidable nuisance’ status. What would you have done in my place?”

     He’d always been most truthful when he was happily inebriated. Jake was slurring by then. “One of the high points of that affair was the time we were testing the shock absorbers under her car, so to say. Furiously cussing in my ear with her newly-found faux American accent, she screwed herself senseless on my happy little pecker.”

    I forgave him his exaggerations.

     “Mostly, I relished the ego trip,” Jake continued. “Bitch was speaking in tongues, telling me how she couldn’t stand being seen with the bastard, with people knowing that she’s getting fucked by that freak!”

     “But she couldn’t dump him because she’s working for his dad,” I added.

     “Some weeks later, I sent the ugly dude’s father a nasty amateur video of the girl and I shagging. She left for the States. Not that I was sad to see her go. Anything I had ever felt for her died the day she ditched me for that bastard.”

     Trying to digest the implications of my friend’s story, I seriously wondered if it was Jake (his revenge on the chap with the car notwithstanding) who had been the discount card pussy to the girl all along, and not the other way around. Of course, I didn’t tell him that. It really wasn’t the point.

     What concerned me was how the entire sordid affair looked ultimately like another fucked-up throwback to the demolition derby of Natural Selection. In spite of the advances in human civilization, would-be alpha males still strut around displaying their affluence like plumage. It’s all ritual combat designed to figure out who gets to bang the chick. Disagree if you will, but a mean set of wheels is to the chick what a huge pair of antlers is to the randy doe. And a flashy car is the ugly, rich bloke’s technological edge in the art of chest thumping. Flip the coin and you have legions of drooling schmucks in pursuit of the ditzy blonde with the silicone tits. Clearly, it hasn’t been all that long ago since Adam fell down his tree.

     But take heart. While the ugly guy with the car may get the snatch as a reminder of where we are on Darwin’s ladder, keeping said snatch is a different matter altogether. Eventually, women tire of the lack in substance. Besides, chicks usually don’t start out with gold fever.

     The way I figure it, the odds are in your favor, grasshopper, because for every girl who chooses the squeaky leather seat instead of your thermonuclear love, another two will find their way into your arms. Two out of three isn’t a bad score at all. It’s for you to decide between the overly enthusiastic novice and the jaded connoisseur. But why pick between twats when you could shag them both? At the end of the day, it is still the wild conquistador who’d get laid more often and more delightfully than all the ugly motherfuckers out there and their cars put together.

     Happy hunting.