Over spring break I took a trip to California, and while I was laid-over in Chicago I overheard these three guys talking at the gate near me. They were all in college, very gangly, and aside from one kid with a flat-top, all had gelled side-parts. From listening I learned the three of them were going to Puerto Rico. It was spring break time, and they — aww, yeah — had their minds on the women.

“The girls on spring break are nothing like MIT girls,” said one of them. “Trust me, your average spring break chick just wants to get DOWN.” The three of them giggled while one made a Wayne’s World “schwing” motion, and another one quoted the Simpsons. In their minds, the deal was already sealed. These boys had boarded the laid-train, and nothing was going to stop them.

It’s the same story on nearly every guy’s spring break trip — the fabled search for the land of very hot girls with very low standards. MTV’s “Spring Break,” “Wild on E!,” and milfhunter.com make it look easy. Everywhere except New Haven, it seems, is brimming with unbelievably hot people who are just dying to flirt with you, freak with you and then accompany you back to your room/bus, while here at Yale we all look like ass. And we all have the suitemate that talks about this incessantly — he has the “friend who’s not that cool” who gets tons of “quality play” at University of Southern Miami or wherever, which is the “best ever.”

So I have to say I was pretty excited when I learned that while in California we were spending a night at the Mecca (OK, maybe more the Medina) of easy hook-up party schools — UC-Santa Barbara. UC-Santa Barbara is like the college in every frat movie you have ever seen. It’s the school you imagine at 3 a.m. when you’re on the third page of your 10-page paper. It is warm all the time, everyone is extremely hot and tanned and rides a skateboard, and the weekend starts on Wednesday morning. The dorms are right on the beach, and classes don’t seem to exist, and um, also, parts of “Girls Gone Wild” were filmed there.

When we arrived that afternoon, everything looked just as I’d imagined. The sun was shining; hot girls were riding bicycles; Blink-182 could be heard in the distance. We met up with my friend Fasir who we were staying with, and went to his house — a trashed party-place known on campus as the “Bob Marley House” (it has a huge peeling mural of Bob Marley on the side). Things were looking pretty sweet.

We ate dinner, and as evening settled in we sat on the porch of the Bob Marley house, and Adam, Neil (the two other guys I was traveling with), Fasir and I worked on finishing off the 30-pack of Bud light we’d started the night before. Pretty soon, we had our buzz solidly on, and it was time to go out and see what this place had to offer. We asked one of the guys in the house where we should go, and although he said finals were about to start, “not too much is going on tonight (a Thursday) — only like five or six parties — but don’t worry dude, you’ll definitely get some puss!” Relieved by his synecdochic assurance of “puss” we headed out. But “puss,” however, is not what we encountered.

What we did encounter were dudes. Lots and lots of dudes. Everywhere. None of them particularly attractive or unattractive, tall or short, fat or slim. Just dudes. The few girls at the party stood in twos and threes, and the dudes congregated around them at every possible angle like hydrogen atoms around a saturated carbon chain (Group IV, holla!). Almost all of them had backwards baseball caps, and none of them seemed to have any expression on their faces. They just drank their warm keg beer, smoked their Marb lights, and took up space, while “Back that Ass Up” played in the background.

This is what is known as the “Cancun Phenomenon.” For some reason party schools and spring break spots widely advertised as having tons of hot girls with poor judgment often turn out to be nothing but sprawling sausage fests. Perhaps dudes show up to places like Cancun and Panama City purely on account of the advertising, while the girls head elsewhere. Perhaps Quddus, Carson Daly and the entire MTV production staff are secretly gay.

Here’s the thing: the attractive girls are definitely there at those places, their numbers are so few, and the guy-count is so high, that a man’s chances are abysmal. Why don’t more girls show up and take advantage of the favorable ratio, you ask? Answer: because all the guys there are schmucks. Poll of the women — who wants to hook up with the guy with gelled hair, the visor, the Mardi Gras beads he bought off the Internet and who starts his sentences with “Yo ladies –“?

But what’s even stranger is that word never gets out about these places — and few people will even admit to it. MTV still does spring break in Cancun, carefully editing out the huge numbers of male drones to focus on the few beautiful people (actually on most of the shows now, they pay to fly specific hot girls there and follow them around, rather than having to search for them). When we got back to our house in Santa Barbara our host wouldn’t even admit the party was bad.

The laid-train had derailed. I was looking forward to at the very least striking out gloriously with some hot chica, but the opportunities just weren’t open — they were blocked by dudes with hemp necklaces and frayed cargo shorts. And the myth at these party places continues, almost as a matter of reputation. At Yale, do you tell a pre-frosh that you hate all your classes? Of course not. Academics here are great. And the Santa Barbara guy keeps his secret — that parties at the “best-ever” places often suck the dinkus.

Burt Helm is one of those dudes, and he dances awkwardly at parties.