America Unzipped (9 page)

“Thank you, Lord!” shouts a man.

What about sex toys?

“Well, I usually get the question like this,” he begins. “What does the Bible say about vibrators?”

Some of us laugh uncomfortably and I notice about half the couples hugging each other a little closer.

There is a long history of sex toys, he says. Why, around the turn of the last century doctors, the new psychologists and gynecologists, would masturbate women to relieve what they called “hysteria.” Not surprisingly, a lot of women suffered from hysteria with some regularity and the doctors grew tired of using their hands. So they turned to mechanical and then electrical devices. “Can we use a vibrator? Sure you can, if you want to.” Joe even endorses one, the Hitachi Magic Wand, partly because it's powerful and partly because it doesn't look like a penis.

Joe knows many sex toys are illegal in his home state of Alabama, as they are in several other states. Section 13A-12-200.2 of the Alabama Criminal Code makes it “unlawful for any person to knowingly distribute, possess with intent to distribute, or offer or agree to distribute any…device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value…Any person who violates this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be punished by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and may also be imprisoned in the county jail or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not more than one year.” You can't make such devices either. The ban, passed in 1998, was taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 2007, but the justices refused to hear the case, thus upholding existing law.

(This annoys Joe. He thinks they're “ridiculous laws. Stupid. Like oral sex laws were a way to cut back on homosexuality. ‘If we do this, we can arrest homosexuals.' But it's difficult to legislate morality. I was born in the great state of Alabama and respect the great state of Alabama, but that law is ridiculous.” When Joe says all this to me later, he pauses a moment. “I hope my career is not over now. I just do not wanna fight Dobson or the Falwells.”)

Can we fantasize? About other people? somebody asks. “I am saying that is not good because now you've violated your relationship. Rather than fantasies, you should concentrate on giving your partner as much stimulation as possible. Concentrate on making love to your spouse. Look, if I were the devil, I would make sure she wound up fantasizing about other church couples.”

This sparks a shouted question. “How about swinging?”

Swinging? This guy is asking about swinging? The very fact he thinks it's a question makes me wonder.

“I am telling you from a marital expert standpoint, it destroys your marriage,” Joe says. “It destroys your sex life. But it is rampant in America. We are beginning to see those couples now in our New Beginnings seminars because one of them has fallen in love with somebody else. You know, I used to subscribe to
Playboy.
I got one every month. I remember I read an article, in the Playboy Advisor column, ‘What do you think about us having other lovers?' and the
Playboy
writer said, ‘It will destroy the relationship.' Even the heathens know that! Well, I shouldn't call them heathens. I don't know if he's a heathen or not. Let's say people who do not have our values.”

Now that Joe has brought up
Playboy,
we want to ask him about porn. There's no mention of porn in the ten biblical prohibitions, somebody points out, to which Joe answers that yes, porn is not on the list, but you can't blame him because it's just not in the Bible and if you are going to be a book, chapter, and verse guy like he is, if you are going to take the Bible literally, well, you can't just go around making stuff up. Porn is bad, though. Very bad.

Hands shoot up. Joe has hit a rich vein. “Is all porn bad?” somebody asks, a little hopefully.

“See how many questions there are about porn? This is always among the top-five things I am asked by Christian audiences. Are we just wrong when we say porn is bad? It seems like we in the Christian community are the ones hung up on this.”

This is a surprising admission because, yeah, it does seem like “the Christian community,” by which Joe means fundamentalist evangelicals and Roman Catholics, mainly, are hung up on porn. On other areas of sexuality, he has used the word
abiblical
to say, Hey, it's not forbidden by the Bible, the Bible never mentions it, so, say, butt sex could be okay if it does no damage to the body. He's just said, though, that porn is also abiblical.

But Joe isn't only a Bible scholar. “So I wanna talk to you as a marriage expert. Let me tell you what it does to your marriage.” He sighs in a great heave of sadness. “Yes, it will stimulate you. Looking at an aroused person is arousing. When I was drinkin' and druggin' those three years Alice and I were divorced, I went to strip clubs. Yes, I had no money, but I was hanging out in strip clubs. I'd get drinks by telling jokes. Now, Saturday afternoons are the very slow period and strippers would come by to talk to the sad guy. They called me the sad guy. And they told me stories. Well, I have watched them take in $300, $400 in an hour, but almost all of them were drug addicts or alcoholics and the reason why was that they felt so degraded. They generally think men are scum.

“My wife is fifty-seven. She does not look like she did at twenty-seven and never will again. If I get turned on by hard bodies, I am losing the ability to be turned on by Alice. But who suckled my children? Inevitably, it is a matter of time until the wife's self-esteem is destroyed. Get that stuff out of the house! Get the Showtimes and the Cinemax and all that stuff out of your house!”

“Umm…can we use instructional videos?” another man asks, a little quietly, perhaps thinking that Joe's arm, as nice an arm as it is, doesn't quite communicate the way a Sinclair video communicates.

“Get books. Get the books with line drawings. And play games with each other. Like ‘First one who orgasms loses.' Really, you can do whatever you wanna do. Drop your inhibitions at the door of your own house.”

The day is wearing on. Joe finally segues into the marriage portion of his seminar, a presentation mainly about communication skills and personality types. This lasts about an hour and feels a little perfunctory, or maybe it's just that the air of excitement has escaped the room.

Then Joe, who has spent much of his time striding back and forth across the floor in front of his audience, steps up onto the stage and grabs a stool. He walks it downstage and sits, with a deep exhale into his cordless microphone. If this were Vegas at two in the morning, there'd be a spotlight and a loosened bow tie and a drink in his hand.

Joe Beam was a broken man, he tells us. He worked as a pastor and hit his crisis, then tried building houses for a living and nearly went bankrupt. After he took that job with a relative's paving business, he nearly killed somebody while driving a paving machine across a new parking lot. The booze and the drugs grew out of that soil like weeds. Joe's voice is more deliberate, becoming quieter with each woeful step of his descent.

One night he found himself in an Atlanta strip club, he says, the sad guy, surrounded by disgusted women. He drank six beers that night. Took twenty Valium. There was a man he remembered back in Alabama, an attorney Joe himself had led to Jesus. Joe decided he had to see this man and so Joe left the strip club and started to drive. He made it all the way near to Birmingham before he crashed. In the hospital they said he overdosed; did he want to kill himself? And there he was with nobody to hold his hand.

“I never felt so alone.”

Joe Beam's story fills the room. His audience is transfixed. Some are nodding along with his testimony.

He betrayed his wife. He betrayed his daughters, especially his angel, Joanna, who's mentally disabled, but Alice took him back. “We got married a second time. It was just the right thing to do. We did not love each other, but we learned how to be in love with each other and now she is my best friend. I pray every day, Lord, let me die first. I wanna get old with her and sit on the front porch. No matter how bad a marriage is, you do not wanna die alone.

“So if there is something in the way, the Xbox, a job, pornography, get rid of it. Make each other your focus. Please, please. You can do that.

“That's my time.”

Joe Beam walks offstage and out the door.

CHAPTER
3

The Gonzo, Vibrating, Futurotic Pleasure Dome

I G
O TO
W
ORK IN A
S
EX
X
ANADU

We are, after all, in the business of fantasy fulfillment.

—Fascinations Sales and Guest Care Manual, 2006

I
have been accused of endangering small children. Not me personally, I suppose, me as the smallest of drones in the giant hive of the American sex industry. According to several concerned citizens quoted in the
Arizona Republic,
a Fascinations “romance superstore”—part of a chain of thirteen adult stores in Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon for which I am temporarily working—puts “kids in grave danger.” Specifically, Edward de Santiago, one of the people quoted, was referring to a proposed Fascinations branch in Tolleson, Arizona, about two miles from where his daughters attend elementary school. He seemed pretty sure two miles were not enough miles to protect his girls from the danger of porn, sex toys, gag gifts, and cheap lingerie. So even though I am working in Tempe, much farther away from his daughters and their school, I have been branded.

Yet as far as I can tell, the only danger I present to society is rank incompetence at retail sales. I am sitting, a little panicked, in my new employee training session trying to avoid looking like an imbecile and failing. My five fellow newbies are not betraying the slightest hint of confusion, but I'm completely lost. I have a college degree my colleagues lack, about twenty more years of life experience, and I can read Chaucer in Middle English, none of which qualifies me in any way for my new job as a “romance consultant.” (Or any other job, for that matter.) So I am writing notes furiously as Trista Windels rattles off store polices, procedures, and statistics, all of which I am supposed to remember and begin using tomorrow.

Trista is a pretty, waifish nineteen-year-old with long, straight blond hair and eyes of such a deep emerald green that people unconsciously find themselves staring at them. Trista survives mainly on Red Bull and cigarettes, apparently absorbing from the air whatever nutrients her body requires, which she knows isn't exactly the most healthful strategy “but, whatever.” She isn't into makeup, though she does wear coverup for the occasional blemishes that still pop out of her teenage skin.

She grew up in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, not far from the South Dakota border. About seventy-five hundred people live in Detroit Lakes, but the town seems bigger because in summer the place swells with tourists who stay at a few lodges and resorts along the shore of Lake Detroit. Besides servicing visitors, people around there farm, mostly. Corn. Soybeans. Cows. Trista spent part of her childhood growing up on a dairy farm but didn't like it much. She worked at a tanning salon for a while, then gave manicures, then worked as an aid in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home. She used to wash dead bodies. When she graduated from high school, she planned to go to a community college to earn a degree as a licensed practical nurse, but when her boyfriend moved to Phoenix, Trista figured that even though he was the only person she knew in the entire state of Arizona, and she had no idea of what she would do for a living, moving there wasn't going to be any worse than changing soiled sheets and preparing dead bodies.

It is about seven thirty at night and Jennifer, Marlena, Kyle, Kira, and Ashley—the other members of my training class—and I are gathered with Trista in the back storeroom surrounded by porn DVDs, leather body harnesses, and penis-shaped dildos proportioned to satisfy the fifty-foot woman from
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
This is distracting enough, but Trista's Red Bull and nicotine–propelled stream of instructional language keeps me at least three bullet points behind on our corporate handouts.

“G.U.E.S.T.” she says. “Who knows what G.U.E.S.T. means?”

Wait, wait, what page is that?

“Greet, Understand, Educate, Suggestive Sell, Thanks,” Kira says.

Before I can finish writing the acronym, Trista moves on. What comes after “Greet”?
U
? What's the
U
stand for again? “Can you go back?” I plead. “To the G.U.E.S.T. part?”

“Brian,” Trista says with exaggerated patience, “it's in the handout in your packet. Have you read your handout?”

I have not read my handout. I was supposed to read my handout earlier today, to be thoroughly familiar with my handout, but I slacked off in a nearby taco shop. “I haven't had a chance yet,” I say. Trista raises a scolding eyebrow.

At least I grasp the main idea. The store is dedicated to customer service, and through some magic technique no doubt gleaned from a sales consulting guru, part of my job is to bump sales by communing with shoppers about their sex lives. This will allow me to sell additional items by suggesting products to match my patron's particular sexual menu or, better yet, expand the menu. The idea is making me queasy. It's one thing to sit in my office far removed from readers and write a column in which I quote experts doling out advice, but quite another for me to go mano a mano over a penis pump with somebody who may be much bigger than I am. Am I really expected to “find out if there is a specific fantasy that he is trying to realize” when a male shopper is thinking of buying a love doll? The booklet suggests I “help that customer complete their fantasy by suggesting additional items like matching bra and panties.” I am not a shy person, but I do not want to have a discussion with a guy about why his new vibrating Aria Giovanni “love goddess” with vagina, ass, nipples, and mouth, should be outfitted with a nice lace demi underwire. Nor do I aspire to suggest all the good uses for Sphincterine Ass-tringent, a product promising to give your ass a “fresh minty flavor.”

The nature of the merchandise also complicates my longtime phobia of the term
company policy.
The last time I worked in anything remotely resembling retail sales, I manned a Standard Oil station on Memorial Drive in Lancaster, working the 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. shift. You wouldn't think there would be much challenge in sitting all night behind bulletproof glass, speaking through an intercom, and turning pumps on and off with a keyboard, but I quickly became overwhelmed. I liked my blue gas station shirt with the attached name tag because its rugged bravo cachet appealed to girls, but I turned it in after a drunken guy ignored my repeated warnings about exact change and then handed me a twenty for five bucks' worth of gas. When I kept the twenty he ranted from the other side of my protective window, and I picked up the phone to mime calling the police.

“I'll go!” he screamed, pointing a trembling finger at my nose. “But I'll be back.” I told my manager that being threatened by guys with bellies full of beer at three in the morning was my reason for leaving, but really, it was my inability to follow company policies regarding the cash register, organizing the credit card slips, and figuring out the drop safe. I am flashing on that experience right now and not liking it. Back then, I didn't even have to try to “sell” anything while complying with company policy. People either needed gas or they didn't.

Nobody really needs Sphincterine. At least I don't think so, and I seriously doubt I will be able to pitch the need for a minty-fresh ass with a straight face. Add all the injunctions Trista is giving us now about the corporate structure, our pay rates, our uniforms, our break periods, and time clocks, and I am becoming embarrassed by the mere anticipation of my failure as a romance consultant.

This whiny nervousness is not what I expected when I formulated the half-baked idea of working here. While much of the fundamentalist community may be debating the pros and cons of masturbation with the diligence of medieval scholastics, it seems to me that much of the rest of America is no longer worried if self-pleasure, or any other sexual activity between consenting adults, will land them in hell. Judging by the mail I receive, my reticence about discussing the nitty-gritty of sex with my potential customers makes me a fogy. Could that be true? What sort of person consumes the products Edward de Santiago believes put his daughters in danger? Are these the people James Dobson thinks are creeping around our houses right now? Are they worthy of the government crackdowns social conservative voters and political pressure groups advocate?

I have chosen this Fascinations store because it is big, a sexy Costco, if on a somewhat smaller scale. Middle America, I have been told by members of the industry, is flocking to such stores. Fascinations is one of several growing chains billing themselves as a new kind of adult establishment, offering comfort to the bourgeoisie. No more skeevy guys sitting behind messy counters smoking and reading back issues of
Mature Nymphos
magazine, no more peep booths with dim lighting and sticky floors, no more parking two blocks away on the bad side of town out of fear somebody will see your car out front. Fascinations's local rival, Castle Megastore, a chain with seventeen outlets in Arizona, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and New Mexico, spent over $500,000 in 2007 upgrading its own facilities to make them more couple and female friendly. At the store where I am working, the parking lot is large and well lit and at the moment it is hosting several SUVs, a Volvo, a beat-up Chevy, and a few Toyotas.

But I am not thinking about this big picture now, I am trying to avoid humiliating myself in front of my fellow trainees. At twenty-five, Jennifer is the oldest. She is single. She had a baby seven and a half weeks ago, but I would never have known if she hadn't told me, because she is thin and rangy with black hair hanging in stringy curls down her back, a couple of tattoos, a pack of cigarettes at the ready, and a sandpaper demeanor that suggests the American lottery of fate has directed her to an adult store. She's not happy about it, and she's not unhappy about it. There are worse places to work, and who knows, it could be fun.

Marlena has just turned twenty-five. She applied for the sales position here as a second job to make a little extra money. Kyle is twenty-three and recently arrived from Alaska. He's pudgy and opened-faced with the buzzed blond haircut of a high-school varsity baseball player. Kira is a pretty, heavyset girl from Yuma. Like Kyle, she's new to Phoenix, just looking to land a job in her new city. Ashley is twenty, overweight, and dresses like a goth long-haul trucker with black combat boots, a black flattop haircut, some facial piercings, and eye makeup suitable for the Grand Ole Opry before it went pop. I am the only nonsmoker.

And then there is Trista, who is explaining that we'll be given two sales goals, one for every shift we work and one for the entire day. These will be posted in the break room. If a shift makes its sales goal, 2 percent of that shift's total sales will be divided among employees as a bonus in addition to our $8 per hour wage.

But there are rules. No facial piercings that show, please. No strange piercings at all unless you can cover them up somehow. If you do have a facial piercing, like Ashley's eyebrow ring, you'll have to wear a clear, plastic “keeper” during working hours. Cover your tattoos. Wear your uniform at all times, including the official maroon polo shirt, khaki or black pants or skirt, brown or black shoes. Name tags at all times. We are professional consultants.

For some of my new coworkers, working in a sex shop represents a step back from edginess and into the pastel embrace of corporate image.

No matter what you might have thought before you walked in here, Trista tells us, our clientele are not lonely middle-aged perverts. The customers are women, mostly. Only a third are men. Most are in committed relationships. Forty percent are college educated. These people do not want to be served by punked-out goofballs or scary guys with sketchy hygiene. They want young, fresh-faced, eager sexual educators, which, by the way, is what you will become in addition to your romance consulting. You will have to learn all about the toys because two-thirds of the customers buy them. Lubes, oils, lotions come next, but do not forget the DVD sales and rentals. By item volume, as opposed to dollar value, porn is a big part of the business.

The one sure way to get yourself fired, Trista says, is to fail to check customer identification when someone walks through the door. Every person must show a driver's license or some other official ID to prove he or she is at least eighteen years old.

Trista gives us a quick overview of the store's products. There are about 8,000 items in all, over half of which are DVDs. Customers can choose from 1,354 different sex toys. Until this moment I had no idea 1,354 sex toys existed and I have no idea how one would use 1,354 sex toys. The most expensive toy is a mysterious item called a violet wand, at $449 with attachments. The store also stocks lots of joke items—drinking straws shaped like penises are always popular at bachelorette parties—naughty greeting cards, books on sex, skin magazines for all persuasions, Japanese porn manga, lingerie, and costumes.

“This place is crazy at Halloween,” Trista says. “Every girl wants to be slutty at Halloween. It's like it's okay then. There will be lines out the store waiting for dressing rooms.”

She directs us to our employee packets and the twenty-page “Introduction to Products.” “Customers place a great deal of trust in your suggestions,” it says, a frightening thought if true. I glance through the booklet's lists of product benefits. Almost every item promises to enhance sex in some way or other, but even the store sounds skeptical about some, like Tighten Up Shrink Crème, which is supposed to “provide the sensation of a tighter than normal vagina.” The description smacks of bet hedging to me.

Then Trista escorts us on a field trip through the store. We start in the dungeon room, a small section devoted to riding crops, whips, padlocks, nipple clamps, and other devices used in bondage, domination, and sadomasochism (BDSM). A love swing hangs from the ceiling and I think back to Kathy Brummitt and the Sinclair love swing video.