Vacationland: Tales from Mexico: All About Sleeves

Anyone who knows me understands just how much I love gay men. It's just that we have so much in common. I am, after all, one of the boy craziest girls in the known universe. The essence of my life, my reason for being, my je ne sais quoi, revolves around loving boys. I love everything about them. Their hair, their eyes, their smiles. The way they look when they're concentrating, the way they look when they're eating, the way they look when they're sleeping. The only poetry I ever see fit to write is about boys! boys! boys! Their knuckles, their ankles, their knees, their earlobes.

I understand gay men. I understand them completely.

Which is why I immediately understood and loved one of the dancers who would sashay out onto the stage every night when it was time for the evening show to begin. He would eventually be called Sleeves (we were not feeling incredibly creative on the trip; we named another guy Hat), and he was a member of the questionably talented troupe of "dancers" that put the shows on for us. I loved them all for their questionable talent. It was clear that some members of the troupe had gotten themselves a spot on stage by, say, being related to the casting director or by providing the casting director with sexual favors.

One of the girls was so much bigger than the rest of them. In real life, she would be a regular sized girl, but you know dancers--they're sprites, waifs, pixies. They weigh under 100 pounds and look like they've never even dreamed of a plate of chicken wings. The bigger girl, though, looked like she was quite the fan of plates of chicken wings. And that showed up in her dancing. She was always a step and a half behind the other girls in spins, leaps, and slides. Most of the time lifts were being done, she was suspiciously absent from stage. Or, if she wasn't, whichever guy had the task of lifting her grimaced just a little bit more during the initial push into the air. You could tell they were wishing someone would perform an intervention and take the bigger girl's churros away from her. (And if I were that girl, I would've put up quite a fight if someone tried to take away my churros. I tried them for the first time on our trip, and I had to be stopped before I consumed an entire vat of them.)

Still, that bigger girl could shake her ass like no one's business. Every night after the performance was done, each of the dancers was called to the front of the stage for an introduction, and they got to do a little dance of their choice. That girl always turned to the side and shook her ass and boobs until it looked like she might actually fall apart from the shaking. Oh, the crowd loved that. And I won't lie--I might've given her a few ow-ow-ows! when she was doing her thing.

I loved her, but the love I had for her or any of her other fellow dancers (including the one that was wearing a cowboy hat and had enough oil on his chest to fill several hundred bottles of Johnson & Johnson Baby Oil) did not even come close to the one we would eventually call Sleeves.

Sleeves was the gayest one on stage. And that's saying something. As soon as he bounced onto stage, I knew here was someone who loved boys as much as I did. Everything he did was sassy, but every move he made bordered on manic. It was evident that he loved dancing so much that he wanted to make love to it. All. Night. Long.

But that's not what threw me over the edge and straight down into a swampy pond of love for him. No, no. On that first night we watched the dance show, Sleeves glided out from behind the curtain in this magnificent outfit:

Katy and I both squealed at the exact same time. Oooooooh! I said. Oooooooh! Katy said.

It was the craziest, most asinine costume I had ever seen--I mean, really! A shirt that was JUST SLEEVES and a FLOUNCY LITTLE COLLAR?--but you could tell that he just loved it.

"Sleeves!" Katy shrieked.

"Sleeves!" I shrieked.

And every night after that, I kept my eyes peeled for Sleeves and whatever crazy get-up he had zipped himself into. I was not disappointed.