Tales from Mexico: That Girl with the Vaginal Piercing

One night after dinner and a show, the four of us went down to the beach and stared out into the dark ocean. It was lovely. It was peaceful. There were a few other people on the beach--a few older couples, a few parents with their little kids--but everyone was being quiet, serene.

After a couple minutes, the Boy From Work decided he was going swimming. He asked if anyone wanted to go in with him. At that moment, no one did, so he dove into the still-warm waves by himself. We watched him tumble head first into the salty foam for a few minutes before a tipsy group of college kids came and crashed down in the chairs right next to us. There were a million other places to sit on the beach--practically every single chair was free--but this threesome decided to sit on top of us. In fact, one of the girls sat in the chair the BFW had been sitting in before he stripped out of his T-shirt and ran to the water.

"Hi, ya'll!" one of the girls--the pretty one--chirped.

"Hi," we all said.

There were two girls, one guy. The pretty girl was tall, dark, thin, pretty. And quite obviously southern. The other girl was blond, chunky, giggly, and squrimy. She was the girlfriend of the guy, a frat boy with a capital F who was wearing a graphic tee and backward hat. He had a puffed-up chest. He walked like he had something lodged in his ass.

"Where ya'll from?" the pretty one asked.

Katy took over answering, which was fine by me. I didn't really want to sit around and make pleasantries with college kids who had already funneled more booze into their systems than I would all week. The girl kept asking questions, and Katy kept answering. And then there was silence for a beat or two before the pretty girl snapped upright and said, "I want to go swimming."

The girls were wearing dresses. The other one drew the pretty one's attention to that fact.

"Oh, I don't care!" the pretty one said. "I'll go in naked!"

A couple yards away from us, a little boy was making sandcastles while his parents rested against their own reclined chairs. Beyond them was another couple that was walking its baby through the sand for what looked like the first time. I stared at them and back at the girl. Did she see them? Did she see the other people on the beach?

"There are some kids over there," the chubby one said.

The pretty one slumped back in her chair and was quiet for a handful of seconds before snapping up again and saying, "I don't care! It's my birthday, and I'm gonna get naked!"

She turned to us again. "Ya'll wanna get naked with me?" she asked.

Katy giggled. Matt laughed. I said, "I think I'm gonna have to pass."

"Okay," she said, and shrugged. Then she was out of her chair and unwinding the ties of her dress, shrugging out of it, pooling it at her feet. And there she was, a naked girl standing a few feet from me.

I hadn't planned on being that close to a naked girl on my vacation. I'd been surprised by some topless sunbathers on our beach earlier that day ("Where does it say this is a nude beach?" I asked, to which Matt sagely replied, "Jess, there is a different culture down here. Nude sunbathing is standard." And then he--and every other man on the beach--ogled their bronzing nipples.), but that was as close to nude strangers as I wanted to get over the course of our stay. But then the southern girl and her very fake breasts were bouncing up and down next to me.

"Come on, come on, come on!" she shrieked and then took off running. She ran right into the water, right out to where my boyfriend was playing chicken with the waves. And then the chubby blond was naked and chasing after her. The guy gave a little shrug and jogged after them, still clad in shorts.

Katy watched the girls with big, surprised eyes. There was something kind of beautiful about that moment--all that shrieking, giggling, splashing. The other people on the beach were grinning and needling each other with elbows.

"I think I want to go in," Katy said, and then she was up and out of her chair and pulling off her clothes.

"Oh my God," I said.

"I'll go too," Matt said, "but I am keeping my clothes on. All the guys have their clothes on."

"My boyfriend is going to see your boobs," I informed Katy, who was already nude. But she didn't care. She was going in, and she was going in naked. She dashed toward the shoreline with her hands trying to cover the important points. She and Matt joined the others who were rising and falling with the swell of the waves. They shrieked and giggled and splashed. They screamed and jumped and dove. They were bright white forms cutting through all that dark, all that night.

And I sat in my chair, tapping my toes, laughing at them, and knowing that the easiest part was over. The getting in--the quick dash to the water, where people could only see their naked butts--had gone surprisingly fine. But now, now they were going to have to drag themselves out of the surf and face the beach and everyone on it--including those couples with the kids, including the couples old enough to be our grandparents--and sprint toward the chairs, where they would have to wiggle awkwardly into their clothes. Trying to get dry clothes over so much wet is not easy, so there would be several tenuous seconds where they would struggle, struggle, struggle to get their slick bodies inside clothes that got stuck, got damp, got tangled in the haste. And I knew it was going to be funny. And, oh, was it ever.

Katy realized all those troublesome things when she started swimming back toward shore. That's precisely why she demanded Matt take off his shorts and give them to her, so no one saw her lady bits. He had underwear on, at least, and could walk out with a little less terror than she would if completely naked. And they scuttled through the wet sand that way--Katy with her husband's pants bunched around her waist, her other hand desperately trying to cover a chest that was too big to be covered with one hand; Matt dripping and laughing and wearing only a pair of underwear.

And it was funny. It was the funniest thing ever. Until later, after the frat boy and his two girls--dripping, squirming, wondering how they were going to dry off and not drip all the way up to their room--said goodbye for the night. When they left, Matt turned to me and opened his eyes wide. "She," he said conspiratorially, "had a piercing... on her vagina."

Which is a sentence I was pretty sure I would not hear on my Mexican vacation.

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.

Leg warmers? Oh, Sleeves!

A fake smile for your lady dance partner? Oh, Sleeves!

Poufy sleeves? Oh, Sleeves!

A crotch CLEARLY stuffed with some sort of padding? Oh, Sleeves!

Tales from Mexico: The D.S. Chronicles

I don't think it would surprise anyone if I admitted that, along with being obsessed with feces, my friends Katy and Matt are also obsessed with being, well, sort of mean. They like to mock. They are mockers. They are spring-loaded with sarcasm. They can cut a person down in a hot second just by finding and exploiting that person's insecurities. This is often how they show love. If, for example, you decide to divulge to them--your dear, dear friends!--how insecure you are about that barely-there patch of dark hair in the small of your back (a thing you have taken to calling your "mammal patch"), you can be sure that the first time you zip down to your bathing suit in front of them, they're going to raise their voices to Carry over the Ocean Wind Volume and ask you--and the rest of the beach--how that hairy mammal patch is doing.

This is how they love. This is also how they entertain themselves and anyone they are with.

When you're staying at an all-inclusive resort, you tend to run into the same people over and over again. The Boy From Work and I, after we'd taken a day-long excursion to the town of Tequila, where real tequila is fermenting round-the-clock, kept running into one of the couples from our hotel who joined us on that tour. We were at the ocean at the same time. We were at the steak restaurant at the same time. We were eating crepes in the gourmet restaurant at the same time. We were using the swim-up bar at the same time. They were our shadows, but they weren't the only ones.

On one of our first nights in Mexico, we were drinking at the open-air theater and waiting for the night's show to begin. A few minutes before the lights dimmed, a few minutes before the sketchily talented performers loped onto stage to perform a number called Latin Fun! or Broadway-Broadway-Broadway! or International Delight!, two blond girls came into the theater and sat a few tables away from us.

One of the girls was sour-faced and bored-looking. She looked about as fun as a visit to the gynecologist. Her friend, though, was twitchy and giggly and goosey. She had a long fall of curly blond hair and a short dress. She looked like a good candidate for a Girls Gone Wild video.

We might not have thought much of them after that had the twitchy-giggly-goosey one not gotten called up to the stage in the nightly presentation of awards. The entertainment directors played all sorts of goofy games at the pool during the day, and this girl had apparently won one of them. She was the only person who had showed up to collect her prize, and so she wandered toward the stage looking lost and confused. She shuffled like she was wearing slippers, like she was really enjoying her stay at the Whispering Oaks Rest Home.

"What's wrong with her?" I asked.

We all narrowed our eyes and watched her navigate the stairs up to the stage.

"Oh my God," Matt whispered. "I think she's--you know--special."

"Oh, no she is not," I said.

"Matt!" Katy said.

"No, seriously," he said. "She looks like she has Down Syndrome or something."

"Matt!" Katy said.

"Matt!" I said.

"What?" he asked. "She does!"

"That's just mean," I said, "and untrue."

And that's when the Boy From Work chimed in. "She does look like she has Down Syndrome," he said.

"BFW!" I said.

"BFW!" Katy said.

"Look at her face," Matt said. "Look!"

I looked. The girl was pretty. She was thin, tall, and appropriately dressed for a Mexican vacation with her sour-faced best friend. Her hair would make any girl jealous. She was a little chunky in the teeth area, though. "She's a little horsey in the tooth," I said, "but that's it. She's really cute, Matt!"

"Down Syndrome," he said.

And what she did next didn't really support my position. The girl accepted her award from the entertainment director and stood there, staring straight out into the audience with vacant eyes and a look that, in a movie about a mental institution, would've been accompanied by a long curve of drool. She didn't move until the entertainment director and his compatriots tried leading her in a special Award Winner Dance, which she herky-jerkied through as she tried to get her friend's attention by wave-wave-waving in her direction.

"See?" Matt asked.

"She's FINE," I said.

Still, that girl became our shadow for the rest of the trip. She and her bored-looking friend went everywhere we went. They were at the buffet, the ocean, the pool, the theater, the bar exactly when we were. And every time Matt saw her, he'd jerk his head in her direction and say, "D.S. is here!"

D.S. was short for Down Syndrome.

D.S. really was a normal, pretty girl, but she was suffering from a little bit of Blond Syndrome. We figured that out during karaoke night (which the Boy From Work suffered bravely through) when D.S. clomped up to stage to sign up for a song while Sour Puss rolled her eyes and drank her pina colada. D.S. chose to sing the YMCA, which was a pretty bad choice on her part. Turns out she didn't really know the words--except, of course, the chorus. When she realized she wasn't an expert on the sagely words of the YMCA, she did what she could: she shimmied and galloped around the stage. She tossed her hair. She performed some gangly moves that Christina Aguilera might have thrown down if she wasn't, you know, a trained dancer.

Still, D.S. was the highlight of the night. When the guy who had signed up to sing last at karaoke night didn't show, the entertainment director called D.S. back up on stage to do another song. She looked a little stricken at first, but she shrugged her shoulders and called for Genie in a Bottle, which, it turns out, she didn't really know the words to either. But you know what? I kind of liked her. She was willing to do everything I wouldn't do. There was no way in hell you could've paid me enough money to get up in front of that half-drunk crowd and sing something, even if I have been working up the nerve to get up and do Ashlee Simpson's Pieces of Me since the song came out during grad school. But the effervescent D.S. got up there and did two numbers, just to please the crowd, which was hooting and shrieking with every stilted movement she threw down.



There was a sort of delight that ran through our group every time we ran into D.S. and S.P. They were always doing something a little bizarre, a little blond, a little ditzy. In fact, I once passed D.S. on the way to the bathroom and she had cornered a set of complete strangers--sweet old ladies who were clutching their flowered beach bags close--and she was telling them, "You know, people have asked me why I'm not getting more wild down here, but I told them, 'What do I look like? Some skank from Girls Gone Wild?'"

And the old ladies nodded their heads furiously and I thought, Oh, honey. Yes, yes, yes. You do. But I so would've gotten drunk with her any day of the week.

Muy Bien, Part Two

And here are more of my favorite pictures from Mexico:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Muy Bien, Part One

I have so many stories to tell from our trip to Mexico, but before I get around to that, here are some of my favorite pictures from our heavenly week in salty, sun-soaked Puerto Vallarta:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

A Letter to That Sucky TSA Lady at the JFK Airport

Dear Sucky TSA Lady at the JFK Airport,

Yesterday morning I woke up at 4:15 AM. I showered, dressed, zipped up my luggage and then, with the Boy From Work, had one last early-morning dance out on our ocean-facing balcony. I was leaving Mexico. I was leaving heaven, and I was sad about it. I might've cried a little bit. And then I got in a taxi and went to the Puerto Vallarta International Airport, where I was hustled through security checkpoints and onto a plane that would take me to Mexico City, then New York, then home. Over the course of the day, I would pass through multiple checkpoints, have my carry-on rifled through by all sorts of grim-faced people, and pass my bag through many X-ray machines.

And then I came to you. I'd made it through customs, successfully claiming my one substantial purchase: a small and glittery snow globe for Diana, who has a collection of snow globes. When I booked my trip to Mexico, she had only one request: I was to bring her back a snow globe. And I did. I sifted through the horrendously ugly (think: dolphins that looked suspiciously like they were humping as they were suspended there in the soupy, glittery liquid) and I sifted through the so-so (boring sombrero-ed figures having a siesta under slow-falling snow chunks) until I found a seashell-bedecked globe that was the right mix of cute and gaudy--just what a snow globe should be.

I purchased that snow globe and didn't think about it again until I was in line for security at JFK. Unbeknownst to me, I'd accidentally packed it in my carry-on because it was in the same bag as snacks I'd purchased for the trip home (M&Ms, Snickers, and other chocolate-y delights). I'd just thrown it in my carry-on so that the BFW and I would have something to eat on our five hour flight to our layover at JFK. We weren't sure if we were going to get food from Air Mexico because we hadn't gotten anything except a lousy glass of pop from our American Airlines flight on the way down to Mexico. Turns out Air Mexico rocks. They fed us a full lunch (with a cupcake for dessert!) and snacks a few hours later. Also, in the middle of the flight, the smartly-dressed stewardesses wheeled around a cart filled with free booze. And they gave us a movie to watch! It was an experience, let me just tell you. It was like flying Jet Blue, but even a little better. And now it seems so silly that I feared hunger. And it makes me all the more angry about what happened. If I hadn't anticipated pangs of hunger, I wouldn't have raided the gift store before I left the hotel. If I hadn't purchased all that chocolate, I wouldn't have thrown that gift shop bag into my carry-on. And, and, and, you and I would've never met.

After we arrived at JFK, we had to dance between terminals until we found where we needed to re-check our bags and go through our umpteenth security checkpoint of the day. And then, as I was scuffling through the metal detector, I saw my bag being tugged off the line. A lady--not you, not yet--told me I needed to follow her to the dreaded Rifle Through Your Things Corner. I went, and I watched as she pawed through my things. "Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?" she muttered to herself. She examined every inch of the bag before shrugging and sighing. "I need to run this again," she said. "I need to find it."

I wasn't sure what it was, but I didn't want to ask. I figured it might seem pushy or snarky or mouthy if I said something like, "If you tell me what you think you see, I'll tell you where it is."

The lady came back and went through the bag again. She went through every pocket and every bag and fingered my gift shop bag--stuffed with chocolate--one more time. It was then that I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. The snow globe. The SNOW GLOBE.

She found it, unwrapped it. "Nope," she said.

I wanted to vomit.

"What's wrong with the snow globe?" I asked. It was small and certainly under three ounces. I felt confident even though I had forgotten about it and neglected to put it in my quart-sized bag, I would still be okay because it met the carry-on requirements.

"Can't take it," she said.

"Why not?" I said.

"Just can't," she said. "No snow globes."

Now, listen. I've read the rules. I've made myself familiar with the picky TSA stuff you need to know before you travel. I know what I can take and what I can't. I know how to take it. Nothing I've ever seen posted has ever, ever, ever said anything about snow globes. Nowhere in the TSA rules does it say NO SNOW GLOBES.

I mentioned this to the lady. I said, "It doesn't say you can't take snow globes."

She shrugged, and that's when she motioned behind her to you. You were wearing a boxy, ill-fitting suit, and you looked angry. You had a walkie-talkie in your hand. You were glaring at me. "SARAH," you said to the first lady. "NO SNOW GLOBES, OKAY? NONE."

The first lady nodded. "I know," she said. She turned back to me. "You can try to maybe go back to the desk and check this in your luggage, or you can throw this out right here." And then she motioned to a box of abandoned items.

I wanted to cry. My luggage was so long-gone it wasn't even funny. It changed hands earlier, way back in our international wing. It wasn't even in this terminal. I knew there was no way a Delta employee was going to try to track down my luggage and pack a seashell snow globe away for me.

I tried to explain this to the woman holding my snow globe--the snow globe that was so close to becoming Diana's snow globe--but she had no sympathy. "Sorry," she said, but it was clear she wasn't. It had probably been a slow day. She probably hadn't had anyone violating the rules all day, and you could tell she felt a certain thrill at finally having the opportunity to tell someone NO.

By this time, the Boy From Work had sailed through the checkpoint and was standing past the barrier. He had the saddest look on his face. I knew he knew what was going on, and seeing him look so regretful made the tears that I was desperately blinking back double in quantity.

"Fine," I said angrily. "Just throw it out."

And with that, the lady tossed the snow globe into a shallow bin of other items that had to be left behind. It landed with a thunk, and I glared and brushed past her. You watched me go. You shifted from one foot to the next. Your ill-fitting pantsuit looked even more ill-fitting than I had originally thought. You were a mean, wicked woman.

Once I was outside the checkpoint, the Boy From Work put his arm around me. "I'm so sorry," he said, and that's when I lost it. I started crying for real. "Come on," he said. "Let's go talk to them."

But I saw you were watching me. I didn't want to give you the satisfaction of having made me cry. The whole thing was so ridiculous. I'd gotten three hours of sleep. I'd been on umpteen planes and moving walkways and escalators. I'd been patted down and X-rayed and questioned. And now--just when I was in the home stretch, with one more flight to go until I was back to Buffalo--you were going to make my day extra hellacious.

"Let's just go," I said to the BFW. "I don't want them to see me cry."

And so we walked away from you. But fifteen steps into our walk toward our gate, my sadness flipped into something else. It flipped into exquisite and irrational anger. I was pissed. I was consumed with rage. I turned on my heel and hustled back to the checkpoint, where I leaned over the barrier and tried to get your attention. "Excuse me, Ma'am?" I said, loud enough for you to hear me. You ignored me. I raised my voice. "MA'AM!" I said. "EXCUSE ME! MA'AM? MA'AM?"

Finally, you turned. You looked bored. You looked constipated. You looked like maybe your panties--no doubt some cotton affair that crawled halfway up your back until it ended in some bunched elastic--had ridden up into places that had never seen the light of day. It was clear you were not pleased about being flagged down, confronted.

"What?" you said.

"I was the girl just a second ago with the snow globe," I said. "I am a little confused. I've read the rules several times, and I know there is nothing in there that says anything about snow globes being a prohibited item."

You stared at me.

"It was clearly under three ounces," I offered. "I don't understand why it was taken away from me."

You sighed. "I have no way of knowing that was under three ounces," you said.

I blinked. Just by looking at it, the grossest, stupidest, most drool-y idiot in the world would've been able to see that it was under three ounces. Bottles in my zip-top bag contained more liquid than that sweet little seashelled snow globe.

"It's under three ounces," I said.

"No way of knowing that," you insisted. "If the manufacturer doesn't label the items with the liquid measurement, we have no way of knowing for sure, and we can't let them through."

I thought immediately of my cheap travel-size lip gloss and how it had absolutely no label or measurements on it, and how it had just passed through the scan without raising any eyebrows. I wanted to tell you about that, but then I figured you'd take away my lip gloss, too, and I wasn't about to lose two things to your gaping box of "prohibited" items.

"How can you not have a way to measure liquids?" the Boy From Work asked. He was standing behind me, rubbing my back.

You looked at him like you wanted to kill him. "Because I don't," she said.

"It's a simple thing to figure out," the BFW said. "You should have something to calculate it for you."

And then things started getting ugly. The two of you started tossing a few harsh snips back and forth, and I knew this was getting us nowhere. You wouldn't budge. You wouldn't. You didn't care how red my eyes were or how many tears were simmering behind my lids. You didn't care how evident it was that the snow globe met regulations. You didn't even care when I told you about all the other security checkpoints I went through that did not have a problem with the globe. You just told me my snow globe was staying put.

I cannot begin to explain how much I loathed you at that moment. And you know what? I came home yesterday and read the official regulations on the TSA website, and none of what you told me was listed there, so there would've been no way for me to know that I was not supposed to bring a snow globe whose liquid content had not been properly branded onto the underside of its base.

It must have been clear that the snow globe was a big deal. Important. But none of that mattered to you. You just rolled your eyes and spit nasty things at me in your Brooklyn accent and sent me on my way. And I bet--oh, I just bet--that later that night when you went home and walked into your tiny, dingy apartment you poured yourself a glass of cheap wine and listened to your messages--did anyone call? Who would call you?--before you walked over to your table and unwrapped a tiny globe from its packaging, gave it a mighty shake, and settled in to watch its glitter rain down on tiny shells from Puerto Vallarta.

Bitch.

Love,

Jess