America Unzipped

by Brian Alexander

  Of course, this was exactly what I had been doing in Tempe, Arizona, assiduously promoting obscenity by trying my level best to sell vibrators, dildos, and porn where genitals were most lewdly displayed. When the grand jury was convened, it found the same thing was happening right there in Topeka.

  Phillip Cosby, the Kansas City–area director of the National Coalition to Protect Children and Families, an organization devoted to moving “the people of God to embrace, live out, preserve and advance the biblical truth of sexuality,” hailed the change in the state’s obscenity laws and the Topeka indictments. (His biblical truth, apparently, is somewhat different from Joe Beam’s or the Penners’.) He rallied his troops, telling the faithful of Wichita, “I predict your current obscenity trial against Priscilla’s porn outlet will soon stop treading water in pretrial continuances and be moving forward.” He then told his Topeka followers that Hecht was chomping at the bit to get some grand jury indictments. “The scriptures, the Federal and Kansas law[s] agree,” he told his followers statewide. “Obscenity is illegal and immoral and should be exposed for the danger it is…the only variable is our resolve. If not you, Who? If not now, When? If not here, Where? I am only a phone call away to help. STAY STRONG!”

  The indictments and the organized campaigns against adult stores are just the sorts of things that would seem to prove the people of the Heartland, my former peeps in the fly-over states, the states annoyed by the liberalism and arrogance of the coasts, were firmly opposed to American sexuality as practiced by the people I have met so far. But the press release from Robert Hecht hardly seemed that of a DA eager to launch a small war on “obscenity”:

  Our citizens, speaking through their representative legislature, have decided that obscenity, and obscene material or devices, should be, and are, outside the reasonable protection of the First Amendment and should be prohibited. Clearly, where to draw the line, and how to so define the material is not easy which is why, in my opinion, such charges should not be brought only by a District Attorney exercising his/her discretion, but by a Grand Jury as the bulwark between government and citizens and the best expression of community standards and values.

  Call me cynical, but to my mind, this required very little insight to gloss. “Our citizens” (a group of religious zealots), “speaking through their representative legislature” (state politicians who would never want to be seen opposing a “morals” law), “have decided that obscenity, and obscene material or devices, should be, and are, outside the reasonable protection of the First Amendment and should be prohibited.” (When this gets overturned by the Supreme Court, don’t blame me.) “Clearly where to draw the line and how to so define the material is not easy” (why don’t you just let me prosecute crooks?), “which is why, in my opinion, such charges should not be brought only by a District Attorney exercising his/her discretion but by a Grand Jury as the bulwark between government and citizens and the best expression of community standards and values.” (Like Pilate, I wash my hands.)

  Maybe Hecht really was eager to start prosecuting, but if he was, and if he was sincere in that release, he worried me. I’ve never trusted a jury of my fellow citizens to tell me what is legal to say or write or what art I can create, and what isn’t.

  In 1973 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “To many the Song of Solomon is obscene. I do not think we, the judges, were ever given the constitutional power to make definitions of obscenity. If it is to be defined, let the people debate and decide by a constitutional amendment what they want to ban as obscene and what standards they want the legislatures and the courts to apply. Perhaps the people will decide that the path towards a mature, integrated society requires that all ideas competing for acceptance must have no censor. Perhaps they will decide otherwise. Whatever the choice, the courts will have some guidelines. Now we have none except our own predilections.”

  Douglas lost that battle, Miller v. California, which upheld a California obscenity law by a reasoning that has proved so unworkable in real life that California is now the porn capital of the world. From what I have seen so far on this journey around America, though, Douglas has been vindicated. As he suggested, many Americans have decided. They like sex toys, especially sex toys “marketed for the stimulation of human genital organs.” The more stimulation, the better, thanks. A lot of people seem to like porn, too.

  Still, maybe it’s different in the Heartland.

  Missouri and Kansas have many signs making sure you never forget that you are, in fact, in the Heartland. You start seeing them soon after leaving the Kansas City airport, located on the Missouri side of the Missouri River: Heartland Propane, Heartland Presbyterian Center, Heartland Barbecue, Heartland Humane Society, the American Heartland Theater.

  I am headed to Shawnee, Kansas, a place that was once a pioneer outpost, then a small manufacturing and agricultural town. Now it is part of the suburb-o-plex of Kansas City. I am driving to Brooke Reinertsen’s place. She and her husband, Tracy, and their children live in a new subdivision on the western edge of town, beyond the Applebee’s and the Boston Market and International House of Pancakes and the T.G.I. Friday’s.

  Brooke’s neighborhood is brand new. Some of the lots, carved out of what used to be farmland, are flat spots of dirt waiting for a building. Some of the houses are empty, ready for their first occupant. The Reinertsens live in one of these brand-new houses, and when I pull up to it late in the afternoon, the place looks grand with antebellum touches like soaring rooflines and columns. An enormous carnival-colored play center dominates the backyard. An equally enormous Cadillac Escalade fills the front driveway.

  I ring the doorbell and a boy in a peewee football uniform answers. He is Brooke’s stepson on his way to practice. When I walk into a small foyer with marble-tiled floors, a male voice, Tracy’s, tells me to come on into the living room. Tracy is sitting on the couch watching the PGA Championship on a big, flat-screen TV. We make our introductions and Tracy says, “You’re really doing this, huh?”

  “I sure am.”

  “Oh, man.”

  Tracy is about thirty-five, a good-looking guy with short dark hair. He’s wearing sweat socks. He looks like the kind of guy who might object to another man he has never met accompanying his wife to a party, but instead he is sympathizing because the party I am attending tonight with Brooke is a special kind of party. Brooke is a Passion Consultant (everyone in America being a consultant—are there no more salesmen?). During tonight’s event Brooke will sell sex toys, lotions, and lubes to a house full of women. Tracy has no desire to be within ten miles of such a gathering. He foresees my testosterone draining away into a puddle on some woman’s kitchen floor. I’m not too sure of the wisdom of the idea myself. Eventually, I did warm up to romance consulting at Fascinations, but I have been trying to convince Brooke to let me become one of the very few men to sell Passion Parties products, in the Heartland, mind you, while prodding women to tell me about their own sex lives. Now, thanks to the Kansas legislature, there is the added worry of committing a crime. I doubt I’ll be arrested, but at least one woman in Texas has been. Cops in Burleson charged a Passion Consultant there with obscenity. After a court fight, the charges were dropped.

  “She’ll be down in a minute,” Tracy says. “You want a beer?”

  “No, thanks,” I say. And then, looking at the big screen TV, “Who’s leading now?”

  We talk about a relative unknown golfer named Chris Riley and speculate how long it will take before he collapses and Tiger Woods does what Tiger Woods always does. Standings, though, are really beside the point. Tracy is helping me man up before my first party, a form of inoculation, I guess.

  Passion Parties is a Las Vegas–based multilevel marketing home party company organized along the same basic line as Tupperware, Avon, and Mary Kay Cosmetics. Brooke is a leading light in the network. Tracy sells construction materials and makes a decent living at it, but Brooke, who has just turned thirty, makes hefty coin, over $100,000 per y
ear. She and her “downline,” the women she has brought into the Passion Parties fold, will sell well over $1 million worth of adult joy, mainly in the states of Kansas and Missouri. This may be the Heartland, but some people in the buckle of the Bible Belt must have an appetite for the devices the Kansas legislature has declared obscene.

  Brooke’s shoes clack onto the marble tile in the foyer. She seems frazzled, a little out of breath. Beads of perspiration are rising on her forehead. It is a hot afternoon, and Brooke is rushing to be on time for the party, but the house is air-conditioned. The real problem is that she gave birth to a little girl seven months ago and the pregnancy played havoc with her body. She gained weight she is struggling to lose, and her hormones have gone completely haywire. But even with the extra weight Brooke has a pretty, uncomplicated moon face surrounded by blond hair she has tied up off the back of her neck in an effort to stay cool. She’s wearing business attire with a long-sleeved blouse, which isn’t helping with her overheating, and low heels.

  “I feel sort of underdressed,” I say after our hellos, referring to my jeans and buttoned shirt. Exactly what does one wear to a suburban sex toy party?

  “No, no, that’s okay,” Brooke says pleasantly. “Everybody else will be casual, too. I try to wear business attire to project a professional image.”

  The image is very important to Brooke because she wants to communicate how much fun a woman can have with the products she sells, without veering into sleaziness. Like wearing a maroon shirt and khaki pants and a name tag at Fascinations, wearing business attire says, “I’m not one of the creepy people and so neither are you.” More “permission giving,” as the folks back at Phil Harvey’s place would say.

  Tracy has already loaded Brooke’s bags of samples into the back of the Escalade, so Brooke urges us to hurry because we have a long drive to make. We’re headed for Missouri. Brooke and I hustle to the Escalade, ascend into it, and drive off into the early Kansas evening.

  Tonight Brooke is presenting in a small town on the other side of the river, Grain Valley, Missouri, another farm community turned Kansas City suburb. Brooke thinks the trip will take longer than it does and she hates being late, but I wish she’d slow down a little. A Cadillac Escalade is a cruise ship of a vehicle. Brooke is driving it like a ground-hugging Formula 1 machine even while searching for the correct off-ramp in downtown Kansas City to hit Interstate 70. The headline will read:

  RUBBER PENIS PYRE, SEX LUBE IMMOLATES ESCALADE OCCUPANTS

  I try making small talk meant to relax Brooke, but she’s pretty serious when it comes to her business and won’t be distracted. Brooke has done hundreds of these parties since she started three years ago, but she operates like a strict sea captain with no lollygagging permitted. If it weren’t for the bags of gear in the back, I could see her as a driven attorney, a hedge-fund manager, or a head nurse.

  Brooke grew up in a nominally Christian household in Topeka, but church was not a big part of her childhood. She’s not a churchgoer now. Many of her customers are, though, and she’s perfectly comfortable with whatever anybody else wants to believe. Sometimes people who would like to join her downline tell her they’re worried about what fellow church members might say if they found out the woman in the pew across the aisle had started selling lotions and toys and oral sex how-to books. One prospect told Brooke she would love to be a Passion Parties lady, but she was the daughter of a preacher. Brooke told her about the parties she’s done for a church-affiliated Christian book club.

  When Brooke was a student at Kansas State out in Manhattan, west of Topeka where she grew up, she majored in family studies and thought about being an educator. As a senior project, she developed a program to teach parents how to speak to their children about sex, sex ed in Kansas schools being pretty ineffective, she thought, because it was all about abstinence and Brooke didn’t think telling a teenager not to have sex meant they really wouldn’t.

  After graduation, she went to work for the state of Kansas as a child abuse investigator. Then she and Tracy married, and she became a mother to Tracy’s son. Soon she had one of her own and found the day-care bills barely kept pace with her social worker salary. Finally she decided to stay home, but living comfortably is difficult on one salary when you have a young, growing family. Financial pressure and Brooke’s inherent ambition led her to explore ways to make a little money and get out of the house. “I was looking for something to do and my sister-in-law, who lives in Baltimore, called me and said she had just seen these women on TV who make all this money doing something called Passion Parties.” She researched the company online, made contact with a local representative, and trailed along to observe a party.

  “I had no idea what it really was,” Brooke recalled one afternoon while we were driving to another party at a somewhat less death-defying pace. “I was freaking out. I totally didn’t know what I was expecting, but it was something I could see myself doing. That week I jumped in and it pretty much took off.”

  Brooke buys her samples from Passion Parties and orders the products she sells to individuals from the national organization. She pockets the markup. Plus, Brooke gets 5 percent of sales from every woman in her downline. When she reaches certain sales levels, she becomes eligible for car allowances, bonuses, trips. Still, she thinks she has not entirely left her social work behind.

  “I sell lots of people their first vibrator. Last weekend a woman—married for twenty-three years and never had a toy—told me she was getting divorced. I can’t recall if she had orgasms before or not, but she never had a toy and she was married for twenty-three-years.” Brooke shook her head in mystified regret. “She was close to fifty and she told me, ‘I do not know where my clitoris is. I am so embarrassed by that.’ I was like, ‘No, that is very common.’

  “Women are just not getting that education and all of a sudden they are supposed to grow up and get married and enjoy it and they don’t even know where their clitoris is! Now you do get some women who saw the rabbit vibe on Sex and the City, lots of them, usually the more advanced ones. Things like Sex and the City and Real Sex on HBO opened it up and made it all right to talk about sex. And Oprah. It makes it all right to say, ‘I want a Rabbit Pearl, too.’ Women are looking for you to tell them, ‘It’s okay. Everyone else is doing it.’ They want to know they are not the only one.”

  Fortunately, Grain Valley is hard by I-70 and the trip is freeway all the way. So we arrive at the turnoff twenty minutes before Brooke had estimated. Her hands around the steering wheel visibly relax and we take our time on the town’s surface streets, a good thing as it happens, because there is so much new construction, so many new pocket subdivisions, each one looking exactly like the one before, we can’t tell just where we are. Some of the lanes aren’t even marked. Brooke does spot the street sign for the road where Julie Bunton, our hostess this evening, lives with her husband, two children, and a cat. But we can’t find Julie’s house because all the houses look alike and there is no congregation of cars to say “Party here!”

  Brooke’s a little worried about that. Why aren’t there any cars? Will it be a small crowd? “Usually there are at least twenty people,” she says as we crawl up and down the street, looking through the windshield. Sales are better with more people, not just because there are more prospects, but because once a critical mass is achieved, the flying sex talk creates more sex talk and the room heats up. People run off the resulting energy and become brave.

  At last, we spot the house numbers on the Bunton place. Brooke parks and pushes a button to open the rear hatch. I jump out and gallantly grab for a big greenish roller contraption.

  “Watch out, it’s kinda heavy,” Brooke says belatedly. I have nearly dislocated my shoulder. It must weigh well over a hundred pounds. The second bag is lighter but still hefty. “How much stuff do you have in these things?” I ask.

  “You’ll see when I set up inside, but it all gets very heavy.”

  The Buntons’ home is a tidy, squared-away
place, with a tiny front yard covered in grass, a line of stepping-stones leading to the front doorstep, and a wooden American flag screwed onto the wood panel siding by the entrance. A Kansas City Chiefs helmet is etched into a stone near the door. A few women have indeed arrived, though it’s not yet a full house. Folding chairs are set up in the living room, which opens up into the kitchen. A small chocolate fondue fountain is burbling on the kitchen counter guarded by two liter-sized bottles of wine. A platter with cut vegetables splayed over it and a cream-filled dipping cup in its center sits on the kitchen table along with a bowl of potato chips and a pan of brownies. There’s even some thawed shrimp and cocktail sauce.

  Brooke begins setting up her display on a velvet cloth draped over little platforms of varying elevations. She arranges a few bottles and jars, then asks Julie where she can set up the “office.” At these parties, all ordering is done in private so no one will feel embarrassed by having to shout out an order in front of everybody else. Meanwhile, I hover around the shrimp.

  A couple more women arrive and Julie greets them.

  “Who’s he?” one says, pointing at me.

  Until now, as far as guests knew, I was just a guy helping haul Brooke’s gear, but now she decides this is as good a time as any to let them know why I am here. Given the prissy “office” arrangement and the reputation of the Heartland audience, I’ve been a little concerned women will either walk out or want me to walk out.

  “This is Brian, everybody. He’s a writer. He’s working with me for a few days.”

  “You gonna be writing about us?” somebody says.

  I’ve still got a shrimp in my mouth. Well, okay, two. Look, I’m hungry, and anyway, I don’t have a speech prepared.

  “Uh-huh,” is all I can manage.