America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Topco makes My First Butt Plug under the Hustler brand. It has such deals for other labels, too, like Adam and Eve, Penthouse, and the first sex retailer of all, Beate Uhse.

  When I spoke with Marty back at the factory, I had made a comment: “Looks to me that you have a license to print money.”

  “We do,” he said. As I sat down at the counter to my free soda, I knew why he couldn’t repress his smile.

  As I am working in Tempe, Arizona, a man named Asher “Jerry” Sullivan is trying to open the Cafe Risque adult supercenter just outside Waldo, Florida. “Supercenter” is a tad grandiose. The building, a former bar, is made of cinder block, and Waldo, situated north of Gainesville, not far from the Georgia border, is tiny. But any size is too big for some of the town’s residents. While being remodeled into a store, it has been heavily protested by local church groups. According to reporter Tiffany Pakkala writing in the Gainesville Sun newspaper, approximately 150 people picketed in April 2006. A sign read “Americans for Morality.”

  At the same time, five bikini-clad women danced nearby in a truck with a Cafe Risque logo on the side. Guys in cars drove by. They honked and waved.

  Construction continued until one night when a forty-one-year-old man using a combination of swamp water, yeast, rotten eggs, and detergent sabotaged the building. State officials called the attack domestic terrorism. The fire department wore hazmat suits.

  In Knoxville, Tennessee, a twenty-year-old Bible student set fire to the Town and Country Bookstore, motivated, he claimed, by a desire to serve God. He was dressed as a ninja.

  Other opposition to stores like mine is more organized. Morality in Media, for example, an organization founded by a Catholic priest, has been lobbying and advocating to close up the adult industry for decades. In 1983 it met with President Ronald Reagan and takes credit for convincing Reagan to launch the new antiporn drive that ensnared Adam and Eve.

  Clearly, such efforts haven’t worked, but people keep trying. Actor Stephen Baldwin, star of movies like The Sex Monster (“What would happen if your wife said yes to a ménage à trois…and loved it!”) and Mercy (“Venture into a world of deadly sexual pleasures”), has sworn to single-handedly prevent the opening of the Nyack Video Store outside of New York City. Baldwin, who says he is now a born-again Christian, has promised to shame workers building the store, and future customers, by photographing their license plates, tracing the numbers to their names and addresses, and then publishing the information in the local paper.

  But Baldwin has latched on to a dubious strategy. Many of my customers don’t seem to care if anybody knows they shop in an adult store. Apparently I have worried for no good reason at all. Far from being embarrassed, the patrons are actually pleased with themselves for investing in a little slice of life.

  Jennifer, for example, whose friend asked me about the rabbit vibrator, was in town visiting. She asked her friends if they wouldn’t mind coming along to Fascinations so she could stock up on sex equipment because where Jennifer lives, in Logan, Utah, there’s just one tiny adult store.

  “It’s a pretty Mormon area,” she explained.

  “Are you Mormon?”

  “I used to be, but I converted to Catholicism. My husband’s a Methodist. He’s back in Utah, serving as a marine recruiter.”

  Jennifer used to be a marine, too, which somehow didn’t surprise me. She was part of a helicopter flight crew flying off the USS Bataan. In Afghanistan she became the first female door gunner to see combat. So, no, she’s not afraid anybody will see her buy a sex toy. She and her husband used to visit a store outside Camp Lejeune in North Carolina where everybody knows everybody, and those stores were sleazier than this one. She’d happily shop in Logan if there were any selection. Hell, she and her friends back at Camp Lejeune used to talk about which toys worked and which didn’t. I’m pretty sure Stephen Baldwin wouldn’t get very far intimidating Jennifer about anything.

  Now another woman, about thirty-two, shouts, “Can you help me?” She strides across the store, holding a long purple vibrator as if it is the Olympic torch.

  “Hi,” I say, my body momentarily seizing. An awkward beat elapses. “I see you’ve got the Slimline G there.”

  Trista informed us that the Slimline G—a Topco product, by the way—is a popular vibrator because it is both inexpensive and bent at one end to stimulate the G-spot, an area inside the vagina that, say believers, can produce strong orgasms. All my female trainee buddies claimed they had G-spots, loved having G-spots, made good use of their G-spots—more detail than I wanted to know, but sharing goes with the sex store territory.

  “That one’s designed to hit your G-spot.” I tuck my arms behind my back, lean forward slightly and knit my brow, trying to appear professorial. “Are you interested in G-spot stimulation?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, we have several vibrators you might find helpful.” We walk along the Love Bar, picking up a few models so she can try them out on the palm of her hand. I look to see if she’s blushing. She’s not. I might be.

  “Shopping during a lunch break?” I ask, partly to change the subject from her G-spot and partly to find out why there’s a guy trailing one step behind us. Yes, she says. She and this fellow are software developers at a nearby company.

  “You guys dating?”

  No, they are not dating. They are not married. He’s just a work buddy.

  “I came with her to give my two cents,” he says.

  “Gee. Close friends,” I say.

  “Oh, I know a lot of people who come in here,” she replies offhandedly. “It doesn’t bother me.” Family members, a few friends. They all know she shops here. What’s the big deal?

  “A place like this is clean, it’s well lit; this is not a sleazy atmosphere,” he observes. “And you know everybody does this stuff, it’s just that some people try to hide it.”

  Next, Sarah, a twenty-three-year-old receptionist, tells me she likes shopping in adult stores like Fascinations because although some mall stores, like Spencer Gifts, have started carrying a limited supply of sex toys, “there are little kids in the same store and that makes me uncomfortable.” She is happy to tell me that she has a vibrator at home. Sometimes she uses it with her boyfriends, sometimes not. She and her girlfriends talk about what gadgets work best. They complain about how much they cost. “People my age are just much more comfortable talking about this stuff than maybe people were in the past,” she says.

  “I am proud of my vibrators and the trips I make to Fascinations!” Kimberly Pikna-Nyhof tells me. Kimberly, thirty-two, a business consultant, compares her new sex toys with the Easy-Bake ovens of childhood. “You know how when you are young, and get a new toy, you are excited to play with it and show it off? As an adult it’s the same thing.”

  Not everyone is quite as open as Kimberly, but those who aren’t think they should be able to be. They aren’t shy or embarrassed; they just don’t want any blowback from people who think sex shops, and the people in them, are deviant. Jonas, for example, is a twenty-one-year-old mechanic for the sheriff’s department and he’s studying to become a deputy. He owns a couple of vibrators already because when he sprang one on his girlfriend a few months ago, she sort of freaked out at first but then thought it was a blast. “She just exploded in a very good way and from that time on, she’s been, like, ‘Let’s try a couple of others.’”

  Being the accommodating chap he is, Jonas is looking for new gadgets. Nothing wrong in that, is there? No. Hell, no. But there’s that hoped-for career with the sheriff’s department and so he thinks discretion is in order. He brought along his buddy, Ryan, who has decided a little backup in the bedroom could come in handy.

  “You guys doing a little male bonding over dildos?” I ask.

  “We’ve known each other for a long time,” Ryan says.

  “We were raised in a predominantly religious community just outside Orem, Utah, where the rules about sex were very strict,” Justin explains. “It
was a Mormon community. That could be why some guys would be afraid of it, not sure if it was good or bad or weird. People can be afraid of change.”

  Don’t get the wrong idea, he volunteers. He’s not some liberal. Quite the opposite. “I always vote Republican.”

  “I’m a school-board official,” another customer, a middle-aged woman, tells me when I use Trista’s sales strategy of making conversation to ask what she does for a living. “That’s funny, huh?”

  We are sitting at a table in the middle of the store where I have just demonstrated the Hitachi Magic Wand, the powerful, plug-in vibrator Joe Beam recommends. (“Whoa!” she said, watching her hand jiggle as she held it. I’d love to sell her one of these babies, but she had that granny-behind-the-wheel-of-a-Ferrari look on her face in reaction to all that horsepower.) If somebody were to know she shops at a place like Fascinations, no matter how clean and shiny it is, she could be seen as something less than upstanding, or worse, a danger to the community. Sex disturbs people and that’s too bad. Personally, she thinks buying sex toys is healthy. She owns a few and even asks her nineteen-year-old son to return items for her because that’s a good way for him to learn a little more about sex, you know, “in case he’s curious.”

  I say that at nineteen there is a good chance he’s curious and she confesses another motive, too. Returning something to this store is a chore because it is located far from her home and she’d rather he make the trip. There is a Fascinations branch closer to her own neighborhood, but it has been picketed and she doesn’t want anybody to see her walking in and then make a fuss at the next school-board meeting.

  At this a friend of hers, another woman, volunteers that her “kids are not affected by this store at all. They don’t even know what it is.” Then she adds, “And I’m a Republican!”

  Funny how people seem to blurt this out. Nobody has said, “And I’m a Democrat!” Surely I must have waited on Democrats.

  “What are you?” I ask the school-board lady.

  “I’m a Democrat.”

  There. But she doesn’t wield her political party affiliation like a talisman to ward off any implication that she is immoral or loves her children less because she is sitting with a Hitachi in her hand.

  Like the aspiring deputy and the school-board member, a male–female firefighter couple would rather not be outed as dildo or porn purchasers, but boy does it make them angry that they feel they have to hide it. He is a wounded veteran, for Chrissakes, who grew up in a Pentecostal church in Kingman, so he knows what that’s all about, but when he went in the army his life changed.

  “From that point on it was free game. It opened my mind, exposed me to all sorts of different beliefs all over the country, all over the world.”

  “It is way enlightening to go to Amsterdam,” his girlfriend pipes in.

  “Yeah,” he says. “We’re supposed to be a free country, but just go over there and they’re allowed to do so much more!”

  I’m not exactly sure what they are allowed to do in Amsterdam that we are not allowed to do in the United States except smoke hash and advertise hookers in brothel windows, but I guess he’s referring to the general attitude. Maybe you can do it here, but people expect you to feel bad about it.

  “There’s a museum there,” she says excitedly. “It’s an erotic museum!”

  They look at each other and grin at the word erotic. I am standing two feet away, but I can see their pupils dilating. I wonder if I ought to leave them alone. Then he looks at me. “We are extremely sexual together.” No kidding. Is there a company procedure for dealing with couples in rut? I should have studied my packet.

  His girlfriend is older than he is and though she always figured she was sexually adventurous, she was tame compared to him and his friends. There’s a world of difference. At parties with his buddies, somebody will slip a porn DVD into a player and it will run as background entertainment. “His generation are like, ‘Hey, just let me lead my life,’” she says.

  Their sex life has become one big experiment. “I will see something and say, ‘Oh, let’s give that a shot,’” she explains. “It’s a big thing for us. We don’t draw lines. Well, we did draw one line. Anything that hurts. We have talked about other people, but that depends on how strong we are in our relationship. If we did bring somebody else into bed, it would be like they were a toy.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “we’d treat ’em like a toy.”

  It’s just too damn bad, what with all that American hero BS that “we’re in the public eye and so we have to be completely upstanding,” she says. They’re kind of tired of the whole hero shtick, actually. Being a paragon is a burden. Back at the firehouse, brother, that’s where you get the real story about America’s heroes. “We get back to the house and it gets pretty bad” with the sex talk and the jokes and the porn. “Like, there’s this poster at work? An old-style nurse with a cap, kneeling, and Uncle Sam’s hands on the side of her head, and it says, ‘Take one for America.’ But we have those things behind closed doors so when the public comes in that is not what they see.”

  I mention something liberal and sensitive about sexual harassment and she laughs at me.

  “Hey,” he announces, “maybe I am going to hell, but I’ll be driving the bus!”

  The other customers are equally defiant, if less colorful. They don’t think they should have to apologize to anybody or feel the slightest sense of shame. “This should not be part of any political discussion,” the school-board lady’s Republican friend says. “This is about personal choices. I separate the two. Some politician should not be able to ban this. This is the basis of America! Personal choice!”

  Arizona is a conservative state, but it also has a strong libertarian streak. I wonder if that explains what I am hearing. This is the state, after all, where you can find accountants and housewives and pizza delivery drivers walking around with guns on their hips because the state says any law-abiding grown-up can be Wyatt Earp. The Fascinations in Tucson had a policy of not allowing armed people to enter, fearing, I suppose, a heated discussion over Chasey Lain’s ass could erupt into a shooting match. But local shoppers demanded their Second Amendment right to weaponized porn browsing and Fascinations rescinded its no-guns policy. Now, shoppers and employees are free to wander the dildo aisle with deadlier strap-ons.

  Sex shops may seem like an unlikely place for a battle over liberty, but that’s how mainstream they have become. My store (I think of it as my store), located in a typical spot for the new breed of adult outlets, looks like a smaller version of Wal-Mart, a comparison easy to make since there is a Wal-Mart Supercenter just down the street. There are also gas stations, a dry cleaner, a GE Consumer Credit office, fast-food shops like Quiznos, a Mongolian grill, a Baja Fresh, the offices of home builder T. W. Lewis. The whole street is one long, stuccoed, consumer-cured slice of cheese melting in the brilliant Arizona sun.

  Near the end of my first shift, as I am leaving the gift section, I look across the store and see a fellow employee having a serious conversation with a man in a business suit holding a sex toy in his hand. She is half his age, but his head is bowed low, and he is listening the way you might to your doctor who has just prescribed Lipitor and is explaining why you really need to get your cholesterol down and what foods to avoid, and how you can prevent your heart from seizing up if you really go through with your idea of buying a mountain bike.

  Another employee, who earlier today showed off the twin rows of piercings down her back through which she can run a ribbon so her spine looks like a laced corset, is talking to a woman about fifty years old. They are shopping for DVDs. My colleague is explaining the term gonzo.

  Two women in their twenties walk up to me holding a Clone-A-Willy kit, a system for molding a penis into one’s very own customized vibrator. A steal at $49.99.

  “Does this really work?” they ask.

  I have no idea whatsoever if it really works. But I have decided to stop being so reticent. I am working in
a sex store. Nobody else seems to be giving their own presence here any more thought than they would in the Wal-Mart. Nobody is embarrassed. Hardly. People are here to buy: they have the cash, we have the merchandise—that’s capitalism.

  “Yeah, it works!” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster, reading the label as I speak and thinking back to my day with Marty Tucker at Topco Sales and my visit to the hallowed ground where Aimee Sweet’s sweetness was duplicated. “You mix the powder with water to make the molding stuff. Then you get him hard and spread it over his penis. You’ve got to make sure you keep him hard, though.” I look up at the girl who first asked and say, “That shouldn’t be too tough for you,” and they both giggle. “Once it’s dry you take it off, pour in the liquid rubber stuff, let it sit, and you’ll have two of him.”

  They laugh again, thank me, and go stand in line for the cashier. Though I have had lots of conversations with customers, this is my first sale. Now I am a romance consultant.

  Trista was naive once. When she first started working here a year ago, the manager and the other romance consultants made fun because she had never heard of a G-spot or had an orgasm or used a sex toy. The heavy Minnesota accent probably didn’t help either. And she had only been out of high school for two months, so naturally she was shy, as I have been, about talking to customers. (Though I am a grown man who writes a sex column, so I’m still working on my own excuse.) Somebody would approach her and she would answer questions as she had been trained to do, but then she would become self-aware and think, Oh my God! I am talking to this person about vibrators! and begin stuttering. Finally, she picked up a copy of The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex and read it front to back, which is really saying something because Trista isn’t much of a reader. Her boyfriend, Eric, is the reader.