America Unzipped (13 page)

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 But local shoppers demanded their Second Amendment right to weaponized porn browsing and Fascinations rescinded its no-guns policy.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.

 

T
rista 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.

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.”

 

B
y 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.