As far as Trista knows, folks don’t talk about sex in Detroit Lakes, a town that still boasts about the fact that rocker Bobby Vee got married there in 1963 to a local girl. Well, that’s not entirely true; Trista knows people talk about sex everywhere. Her own mother had tried to have a birds-and-bees sit-down with her daughter, but Trista thought the idea was freaky. “No, Mom! Shut up! I don’t care! I don’t care.” Way, way too weird to talk to your mom about that stuff.
What Trista means is that there was not a lot of conversation about sex beyond the basic in-and-out fact of it. “When you had sex with somebody from Detroit Lakes it was just plain sex like everybody else has, unless you had it with somebody from Fargo who knows something.”
I’m not sure on what Trista is basing this conclusion, but her neighbors in Detroit Lakes probably have not read The Good Vibrations Guide. “If you say you own a vibrator, they are, like, ‘Oh my God! Are you kidding me!’ and they’d be laughing because sex”—by which Trista means sex as she has come to know sex through working in a romance superstore—“is so, like, down low there.”
Trista was not entirely ignorant of the subject when she came to work here. She had experienced sex. Exactly which time was her first is open to debate. Maybe it was a thirty-second encounter in the closet of a friend’s house, but that time she barely knew what happened. They had gone into the closet at the instigation of other boys and girls, zippers were unzipped, and she just sort of ended up doing it, but as soon as he stuck that thing in, she shoved him off and said, “Go away, go away,” because nobody told her that sex hurts. So does that count?
The second time Trista had sex was a little better, but the boy still didn’t come or anything. The third time it was better still. Really, though, Trista’s sex life began last year when she moved to Phoenix. That’s when the world opened up.
Soon after she arrived, she and Eric were driving by the store and he suggested she get a job here. He told her it was a lingerie store and maybe he thought it was just a lingerie store, but Trista thinks he tricked her. Okay, not really. I mean, twenty feet into the store you see sex toys, so she knew she wasn’t applying in any Victoria’s Secret. Still, she likes to tell the story this way because otherwise it sounds like she came all the way to Phoenix to sell dildos and porn.
Trista had seen porn back in Minnesota. Sometimes a friend would slip a DVD into the player and run it when parents were away, but she thought porn was crazy. Even after she was hired, she vowed she would never watch a blue movie, never use a toy. Why would she even want to? After her fifth day of training, though, a manager gave her a handful of DVDs from the various genres and suggested she take them home and watch so she knew what she was selling. At first she felt dirty. She couldn’t watch them. But she and Eric persevered. Same thing with sex toys.
Now Trista can hardly believe her metamorphosis. “This job has opened me up completely!” she tells me. The girl who once blushed and stammered when speaking to customers casually details how she rented movies with G-spot play in them, took home the Slimline G, “and made Eric watch. I said, ‘Do this! Try it! Do this,’ and it worked! It was a different sensation. For a while I wanted to just do that because before it was just plain sex like everybody else has.” Even if Trista isn’t sure what she wants to be, she does know she would rather not be like everybody else.
As much as she enjoyed the G-spot breakthrough, though, squirting has become her forte. Trista always thought it was unfair men could ejaculate and be done and “feel like you accomplished something.” When she saw teen porn idols like Cytherea squirting, it was a revelation. Squirting on cue is not easy, though. “It hurt like hell for a while,” but once she got the hang of it, she became a squirting missionary, evangelizing female customers at every opportunity. “I wish everyone could watch squirting DVDs to know what it is and try it.”
That’s the thing about working in a store like Fascinations. You learn so much about human sexuality. When she went back to Detroit Lakes for a visit and told her friends where she works, “they were like, ‘Sweet!’ Can you get us porn? I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and that’s all they care about. They think this store is just movies like a Blockbuster with porn.” The store is so much more. It has helped her to grow. She knows how to please Eric now, and he knows how to please her. Sex doesn’t have to be normal and boring. It can be Red Bulled. “That makes life more enjoyable.”
Working here has dramatically changed her life for better and for worse, she says. The better is easy to list; she’s just done it. The worse isn’t. The truth is, Trista would like to find another job. She thought about selling cell phones in a mall.
“I wish I would have worked here, learned all this stuff, and then quit. I watch porn now, and it’s not enjoyable after a year straight.”
She doesn’t have any close friends in Arizona. Eric has a few, but they talk about stuff that doesn’t interest her. Mostly, she works and then goes home to Eric and they play some porn. “My boyfriend thinks more of it. I watch porn all the time, too, but I critique it like a movie. A lot of times we watch it and have sex at the same time. He likes that, but it’s also, like, he says, ‘Do we have to watch porn every time we have sex?’”
The sex toys also worried her for a little while. At first, she only used a vibrator when Eric wasn’t around, but then she would use it as foreplay and “then it got to where I’d have to use it, and then have sex. Eric was, like, ‘God, could you just put it away? Am I not good enough?’ There for a while I was kind of scared.”
She can talk to any customer about any sexual subject you could ever imagine, yet “I almost wish I was more naive.”
“You know,” she says, looking at me, “there is a lot to think about there. I never really thought about it.”
By my second shift I begin to hit my stride. Whiling away the time during a slow period, I picked up a tester bottle of sex lube from Germany called Pjur Eros. I drizzled two drops onto my fingertips, rubbed them together, and as if I had just dropped acid, began hallucinating about sex. It felt that good. The stuff is also absurdly expensive at $41 for a small bottle, so I figured that I had found a product I could fully endorse while increasing my dollar volume to boot. Since the wall o’ lubes is on the way toward the front door and the checkout line, my strategy is to snag customers after they have visited other parts of the store and make a pitch for this one product to enhance whatever else they’ve bought. I’m roaming, too, netting customers who seem to be wandering without any particular purpose and walking them over to the lubes to try my favorite.
Oh, and I have also begun referring to myself as the store’s lubrication specialist, as in “Hello, I’m Brian, the Fascinations lubrication specialist.” I am résumé plumping. Sue me.
My plan works surprisingly well. The Topco chemist was right: women are looking for a longer ride and a sweeter slide. Men, too, for that matter. Sometimes I grab them by the arm and say with near-religious fervor, “No kidding, you have to come over and try this!” When they rub their two fingertips together as I did, their eyes get the same glassy look. True, some balk at the price, and no matter how much I argue that this one bottle will last months, making it more cost effective in the long run, they refuse. There is no reasoning with some people.
That’s when I pull out my secret weapon: “But this will work even in water!” I smirk and leer mischievously, a look I intend to communicate, “Huh? Know what I’m saying? Huh? Phoenix has a million swimming pools by my unscientific estimate. This place practically runs on chlorine. Having sex on the pool float, or in the spa, drinking a glass of wine, I mean, come on, man, do I have to spell it out? I’m a romance consultant. I am a professional. Just trust me.” This converts a few of the reluctant and boosts my batting average to about .300. Not bad for a rookie.
As I contribute to the store’s daily totals, I begin to feel a closer kinship with my coworkers. We talk a lot during slow periods. Christine tells me about a time a couple of weeks ago when she sold a
strap-on to a concerned mom whose son had been born without the normal complement of male equipment. “That way he could hang out with his friends and not feel strange,” thanks to his new bulge.
Shona is about to quit for a higher-paying job but is sorry to be leaving her regular customers—the female transsexual who comes in all the time, the man who had spent years fighting the feeling he was supposed to be a woman, the married couples looking to stoke new flames. “I feel like I can help them work out some things in the bedroom, make them closer so they can have more intimate moments, more kissy-I-love-you moments.”
Every customer has a story.
Assistant manager Nikki Gavin tells me about growing up in Mississippi, how she was active in her church group, and how she learned how to have anal sex with her boyfriend when she attended a sex toy party back home. She married the boyfriend and they live here now. She works in the store and he goes to graduate school for a degree in religion. He hopes to provide wisdom and guidance to people one day, and in her way, she is already doing the same. “I am happy to talk about what I do, good sex techniques. Eighty percent of my conversations with friends turn to sex. I know this confuses people. I don’t smoke, I drink only occasionally. I do not do drugs.”
My coworkers could be working at other retail jobs, but they say they are proud of helping people. Many customers won’t talk to their doctors about sex, or see therapists, but they’ll walk through the doors of a store and tell their most intimate secrets to a twenty-one-year-old romance consultant.
A woman about sixty rushes into the store on one of my day shifts and heads straight for the dildos made of Pyrex glass. I’ve been trying to sell some of these since I started working here, because at a hundred bucks, they are one of the more expensive items.
I start a small sales pitch, but I needn’t bother. “Yes, yes, these are great,” she tells me as I struggle with the keys to the case in which they are kept. “They last forever if you don’t drop them on the tile of the kitchen floor.” Seems she fumbled hers after warming it up in the microwave. I don’t imagine she tells this story to her bridge club.
I wait on a mother and daughter shopping for their son/brother’s birthday party. He’ll be twenty. They’ve decided porn and a couple of sex toys are exactly what a twenty-year-old man would want. “What’s on these DVDs?” the mother asks me as we stand by the bins.
“Lots of sex.” I half expect her to recoil.
“Well, duh! But what kind?”
I do my best to explain wall to wall, gonzo, couples, interracial, mature, BDSM, anal, fetish, Japanese, alternative, retro, gay, cream pie, voyeur.
“What do you think he would like?” the mother asks the daughter.
“How should I know, Mom! Ones with girls.”
I pick out three DVDs at random and hand them to the mother, saying, “These. He’ll love these.”
People come in harried, sometimes, like the young couple rushing to get home after having a meal out. I am showing them a butterfly-shaped strap-on vibrator (Joani Blank invented the first one) when their cell phone rings. “Is Brendan in his pajamas yet?” the husband says. “Okay, we’ll be home in about fifteen minutes.”
“Babysitter. Look, this’ll be fine.” And off they run, leaving me to wonder about the emergency vibrator purchase.
One or two regular customers make a habit of visiting the store late, near closing time so they can jabber with the employees. Artie comes in about three nights a week. One night we stand around the porn bins and he leafs through the DVDs, rattling off more porn trivia than I had ever hoped to know. Artie coaches baseball and looks the part with his athletic shorts and T-shirt. He’s about thirty, short and square with black hair shaped in a military-style cut, and he really does have an astounding mind for porn. Artie can tell you, if you want to know, what video featured Janine’s first girl-girl scene, when Tera Patrick made her first movie and who directed it, when Devon first went anal and with whom. He owns over two hundred DVDs. Currently he is working on placing every one of his DVD covers in plastic slips so he can assemble them in three-ring binders.
“You know, Artie,” I say, “it’s possible you are getting a little carried away.”
“I was just thinking about that today. I guess this is my fetish,” he answers as if everybody has a fetish, has a right to have a fetish, and this may as well be his.
On those late shifts, groups of couples sometimes come in after eating and drinking at nearby restaurants. Something about tequila seems to convince a lot of people that a naughty excursion is a wonderful idea. I come close to selling a love swing to a woman who is part of one such group. She eyes it as I lean back in it, looks at her husband, eyes me, and starts laughing a little too loudly.
“Interested?” I ask.
“Oh, I would never!”
“Tonight she almost had enough to drink,” her husband whispers to me. She is just one tequila shooter away. They’ll be back.
Another woman seems interested in the vibrators. “Isn’t this the one from Sex and the City?” she asks, holding the rabbit vibe.
But she can’t buy, she says. She coaches kids in a sport. If a few of the parents ever found out she was even in this store, they would ask questions she would rather not answer.
I don’t think she has to worry. I don’t think the school-board member or the aspiring deputy or the firefighters have to worry either.
Take Good Vibrations. Joani Blank is no longer a part of the operation. For a long time it managed as a co-op, a few hippie women and lesbians and sex activists fighting a good fight. It’s a regular California corporation now, the Ben & Jerry’s of sex toys and porn with a values statement that says, “Sexual pleasure is an important part of all of our lives…everyone should be able to live the sex life that’s right for them. We take it as our mission to respond to all forms of sexual shame and support people as they discover their authentic sexual selves.”
Good Vibrations used to be more Birkenstocks than Ferragamo, but new bus ads show a well-dressed suburban woman swishing a signature Good Vibrations shopping bag. The marketing director used to work for Restoration Hardware. The new merchandising manager was formerly at Pottery Barn.
About eight months from now, the Arizona Republic is going to ask the mayor of Tolleson, the nearby town where Mr. de Santiago accused the store of endangering his kids, how the city feels about the presence of a romance superstore. Adolfo Gamez will declare himself a fan.
The store will have made donations all over town, become “a model for others to follow.” “As controversial as they were when they came in, you don’t hear a lot [of negativity] anymore.” Hizzoner will claim he’s not actually been in the store but he’s, you know, “heard” the store is very nice and that it sure seems to do a lot of business.
“They’ve been nothing but good for us.”
CHAPTER 4
From the Bedroom to the Bank
I CADDY FOR A SEX TOY SALES TITAN
I see a definite spiritual revival that is touching the standards of conduct of the entire society, which has gone too far toward sexual freedom.
—Pat Robertson, 1986
Six days before I arrive in Kansas the Shawnee County District Attorney has indicted adult stores in Topeka with multiple counts of promoting obscenity. The indictments resulted from a campaign called Prairie Wind by a group of fundamentalist Christian ministers. They used a Kansas law mandating a grand jury be impaneled whenever enough petition signers want something investigated. With the collective mass of their followers, the ministers reached the minimum number of signers; the jury set to work, and soon arrived at the indictments.
Something similar had already happened in Wichita, where Operation Southwind, another project of conservative churches, forced the convening of a grand jury in 2005. But Southwind ended somewhat disappointingly for the ministers there, because, though the petition called for his office to investigate just about every adult store in the city, the local district attorn
ey handed down only one indictment, against a Priscilla’s:
The grand jury charges:
That in the County of Sedgwick, and State of Kansas, and on or about the 9th day of September, 2005, A.D., one KELLOG GIFT SHOP, INC. d/b/a PRISCILLA’S and ROBERT FLOYD did then and there unlawfully or recklessly possess obscene materials, to-wit: a DVD entitled “Sucking Cock Is Good for Your Health” a/k/a “Sucking Dick Is Good for Your Health” with the intent to sell, lend, or deliver said obscene material.
There is no mention in the indictment of whether or not sucking cock really is good for your health.
The fundamentalist constituency was not satisfied by a single indictment over a single DVD making a dubious health claim. It became even more disgruntled as the trial date receded into the far future thanks to procedural maneuverings.
The indictment yield was paltry, apparently, because the state’s obscenity statute had earlier been ruled unconstitutional for being so broad it could be interpreted as criminalizing sex. So the ministers persuaded the state legislature to change the law. The new law was passed in July, the Topeka indictments handed down in August. In his statement announcing the indictments, Shawnee County DA Robert Hecht summarized the rule changes:
The statute criminalizes selling, giving, delivering, or distributing obscene material which is material, taken as a whole, [that] appeals to prurient interest, which means material, applying contemporary community standards, [that] would be found to have patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, including sexual intercourse or sodomy or masturbation, excretory functions, sadomasochistic abuse or lewd exhibition of the genitals and which lacks serious literary, educational, artistic, political, or scientific value. Obscene devices, by statute, are defined as dildos, artificial vaginas designed or marketed for the stimulation of human genital organs and not for the purpose of medical or psychological therapy.
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