He wanted to be a millionaire. He wanted to have sex with underwear models in outer space . . . to hell with Viagra(tm), zero gravity should work. He wanted to have a 31 inch waist. Below the waist was big enough, or so he was told. Still might be smaller than some porno movie pricks, but hey, maybe with the right kind of lens...

And he had a plan for all this and more. He was going to solve the biggest mystery of all time. Get famous. Become a talk show, infomercial, book/video promotion industry unto himself. He was going to use a giant computer (that he picked up on Ebay from the burned down Los Alamos nuclear plant for $99) to figure out the one limpid thing that women want. Reduce it all down to the logos that supersedes all other womanly wants and desires.

In poker, it’s called “having the nuts.” The ultimate, unbeatable hand that you can raise the roof on. He wanted to have that hand. He wanted to have any hand. He was getting tired of his hand. But first, he needed to determine what the hell the highest hand is in the game of love. For a man.

Bad car. Badder bike. Tight round ass like two hard underripe cantaloupes. Dangerous. So dangerous, you’re wanted in fifty states. Danger itself. Cool band. Signed band. Touring band. Band of Gypsies. Soul of Jimi Hendrix (without the heroine habit). $5000 a day drug habit that you supply with your record royalties. Ten dollar a day beer habit that you cater with your neighbor’s welfare check (‘cause she thinks you might ask her out sometime if she ever got a babysitter).

He put all these variables into his GIANT Los Alamos rescued-from-the-fire-and-brimstone computer. Then he dropped clippings into the equation from what women write and say in magazines like Glamour, Seventeen, W, National Enquirer, Exotic and TV shows like Ally McBeal and The Practice (because David E. Kelley is married to Michelle Pfeiffer). And he hit enter...And he hit enter...AND HE HIT ENTER GOD DAMN IT!

And it crashed. The whole program corrupted beyond repair. His monitor fried out like a bleached bottle blonde in curlers on a hot Chicago night yelling at her bloated husband to buy a new air conditioner.

He picked up the computer with his Herculean strength and hurled it out his third story run-down tenement window onto the cracked asphalt below. Splat. All his dreams hit bottom. He thought about following it out the window, too, but then realized the odds of killing himself with a fall from the third story were only fifty-fifty. With his luck, he’d probably wind up in a wheelchair. Drool bucket hangin’ off his unshaved chin, leering at fat PN’s in frumpy gray uniforms, saying, “No, I’m not gonna play that porno movie for you again. Besides, you can’t feel a thing down there anyway, so what’s the point.”

Disgusted, he turned back inside himself. Checked his paunch in the mirror forwards and sideways. Let out a hearty belch. He looked into his frightened soul and saw the first time he kissed a girl when he was only five years old. Dressed up as cowboys and cowgirls, they were playing “Sleeping Beauty” after getting rid of all the Indians (otherwise known as every other kid in the neighborhood of red brick duplexes that stretched from here to eternity). She leaned down to kiss him, role reversal as she was about a half a foot taller than him, and gazing up into her baby blues and pigtails he said, “Do you wanna eat some ice cream? I think my mom’s got some strawberry we could put Hershey’s on.”

“Okay,” is all she needed to say. And they ate that ice cream just like husband and wife watching game shows on TV in the summer when it’s too hot to kiss, unless you’re fortified with lots of puffy pink clouds of ice cream.

And then it hit him... like a building falling on him. What women want is so simple that any child knows it. First, it’s just geography. All you—the idiot monkey-headed male—has to do is fall out of your tree (be that a giant corporation or the convenience store around the corner) and land next to her long enough for her to notice. Next you play some silly game of make-believe to distract her from what you really want and to divert you from your terror of being castrated by Mom. Then you can come together as the person that the other one wants you to be... which is easy, because everyone is dying to believe in the Delusion. And last, you give her something that will refresh her spirits and prolong the dream. Any bauble or morsel will do. And she’s hooked. Yours forever. Until she wakes up one day and sees you scratching your balls in front of the TV watching the playoffs, and when she says something, you just grunt, “Ungh.”

The law of proximity. That’s all it is. If his computer had fallen next to some pretty girl who just broke up with her boyfriend and then he said he threw it out his window in disgust, owing to what his ex-girlfriend just emailed him, he and that woman would already be dating. All he had to do now was to fall from this low-place-like-home and land next to someone who was waiting and willing to play make-believe. And then give her that one special thing in that true moment of make-believe bliss.

He crawled out on the window sill, teetering on the old chipped wood splintering his knees like an ancient sandbox ledge. Looked down again. There she was, that blond who works nights and always comes home at odd hours. Works where? He didn’t care. He was going to get to know her real fast. Feet first, out the window. Faith without works is dead. Baby blue roof of her car to break his fall. Hanging from the windowsill, now only two and a half stories to drop. Let go. Just let go. A team of monkeys working around the clock couldn’t have come up with a better plan. This was not desperation. This was how to get a date in the year 00.

Splat.