America Unzipped (18 page)

Near the tiny town of Tonganoxie, I make a U-turn into the gravel and dirt parking lot of the Paradise Saloon Gentleman's Club, a strip bar. There's another car in the lot, but the place isn't open yet.

Lawrence looks exactly how I imagined it would look, a small, brick college town, not exactly the center of a “red-light district.”

After I pass by Topeka, I find myself in the middle of farms growing soy and corn. In the distance, a freight train runs straight through the corn, only the tops of its cars showing above the tassels. Clouds are building on the horizon.

I blame the scenery for why I failed to slow down when I entered the village of Rossville. I am looking at what there is, the neat aluminum-sided houses, the rusty spur of a railroad track, a big wooden building I take for a grange, when the red lights flash in my rearview mirror. Damn! I know better. State highways may say 50 or 55 mph, but as soon as you see anything that looks like human settlement, you slow down because even tiny towns need to resod the ball field and there's no better way to finance the project than by snagging a stranger who doesn't see the sign saying 25
MPH
.

I pull over to the side of road, directly across from a general store, and reach into my pocket for my California license. The cop is going to love that license. He walks to my window and says what all cops say, and I say what all drivers say—didn't see the sign, very sorry, boy, how stupid of me—and when he sees my license he asks me what I'm doing in Kansas.

I am tempted to say that I'm in Kansas to ask a bunch of women about sex and go to sex toy parties, but that probably won't go over well.

“I'm a writer. I'm working in the area for a few days.”

“Oh yeah, whatcha writing about?”

“Well, actually, I am writing about women who go to these things called Passion Parties.”

“Sure. We got one of those women here.”

We chat about how nice I think Kansas is, which is true, by the way, and he lets me off with a warning and gives me directions to I-70. I pull into the general store's dirt lot, back up, head the other direction, and immediately see the sign
PASSION PARTIES BY BRIDGET
.

Later I call Bridget Remer. Her grandfather owned the store in Rossville, she tells me. She was raised there and in the village just east on U.S. 24, Silver Lake. Now she teaches junior high in Topeka during the day and presents Passion Parties at night. She sells over $50,000 worth of merchandise per year. Not only is she not worried about the new state law, she says she's had “clients” from the DA's office, state senators, “some pretty high up clients if you know what I am saying, and no one has ever said, ‘Hey.' But I do have a gal on my team, a consultant, who was a secretary for a lawyer. She shot me an e-mail after the indictments of the stores saying, ‘Fair warning. You might be the next one they are coming after.' I was, like, ‘Well, bring it on.'”

“What do we have to do out here in the country, especially in small towns, but hang around bonfires and drink Bud? If people can get together and learn a little about human sexuality in a safe environment, that's good.”

“You know,” I say, “I keep hearing about all the fighting over sex, but it seems to me that people around here are pretty much live-and-let-live.”

“That's a fair assessment,” she answers. “My mom played the organ in St. Stanislaus Catholic Church and I said to her, ‘Mom, I am doing this business,' and she said, ‘Could you not sell baskets or something?' I said, ‘No, Mom, this is what I need to do.' My grandfather ran the store in Rossville, where you got stopped. I said to Grandpa, I said, ‘I am gonna start this business' and he leaned forward—he was seventy-nine or eighty—and I said, ‘I am going to be selling adult toys.' He smiled and said, ‘I owned a variety store in St. Mary's [the next town west on U.S. 24], and people would drive all the way down from Topeka to look into my naughty box.' That's what he called it, his ‘naughty box.' From then on I knew it was okay with Grandpa.”

She excused herself. It was getting toward evening, the light was fading, and the kids wanted to play some softball with her out in the yard.

 

T
hat night, Brooke and I drive back into Missouri, far out into the countryside. The Escalade cruises down narrow asphalt roads as Brooke looks for the right house, but the houses are tough to see because they are spread so far apart, up long gravel driveways, set back in the trees. The hostess for tonight's party, Tanya Willoughby, told Brooke to look for balloons tied to a mailbox, but we haven't seen any yet and the landscape is more woods than houses now.

Finally, just about dusk, we see some balloons over a rise in the road. A small pickup truck parked in the front yard at the bottom of the gravel drive has a
FOR SALE
sign in the driver's window. Brooke pulls in and we climb the hill toward the Willoughbys' place, a small ranch-style house that may be a converted doublewide mobile home. I open the SUV's door as two men approach. One is Matt, Tanya's husband, wearing a baseball cap and a white T-shirt and holding a beer can in his hand.

Matt looks me up and down, shakes his head, and asks if I want a beer. He and his buddy are going somewhere—I don't catch where—in the friend's truck and maybe I'd rather come along than attend one of these “wiener parties”?

“I think you're crazy,” he says when I say thanks but no thanks.

Brooke and I carry her bags into a small living room. Portraits of two of Tanya's brothers, one in Marine Corps dress blues and one in National Guard combat fatigues, sit on a small bookcase. A copy of the Open Bible, a study Bible, sits on the coffee table in front of a couch along with a
Bambi 2
DVD.

Most of the women who are coming are already here. They are gathered in the kitchen eating snacks, including a gooey butter cake so sweet it makes my teeth hurt. One woman is wearing an old sateen track suit. Another a one-shouldered black T-shirt with “Baby Girl” scripted across the chest. A third is wearing a green and yellow John Deere logo T-shirt that says, “Been there. Cut that.”

These women are skittish to the point of fright. Nobody tries to talk with me, though I make a point to say hello to a few of them. It's as if I have a zone of contagion around me; as I move in any direction in the cramped kitchen / living room, women move away. I had expected this before but became lulled by the easy way other women have spoken to me about their lives. So now I'm surprised.

Brooke sets up as usual; then Tanya directs her to a small bedroom down a narrow hall. The “office” will go in here, on a card table. Tanya is pregnant. This will be the baby's room and she and Matt have been working on it. A ladder rests against a wall, half-finished Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper border dangles loosely, a few cans of Similac sit at the bottom of an empty closet.

I am already regretting that Brooke picked this party to let me sell. I don't sense much goodwill, and I seriously doubt any of the women will be interested in the Pyrex dildo Brooke has selected for me to present. It is one of her most expensive items. This is going to be a tough room.

Brooke is already perspiring heavily, and soon after she begins the spiel, she looks almost panicked. There is no boisterous conversation, no giggling, no shouted questions. She is a stand-up comic dying on stage. Finally I decide to interrupt.

“Excuse me, Brooke. Can I ask everybody if they are very uncomfortable with me in the room? Does anybody want to ask me any questions?”

“I have a thirteen-year-old stepson!” says a woman, who is herself about twenty-three.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I don't want him knowing I'm here! What if his mother finds out?”

“What about the people at church?” asks another.

“Okay, what about the people at church?”

“They'll know!”

“Do you think you are doing anything wrong?”

“No.”

Like the first party I attended, some of the people in the room are related to each other either by blood or marriage.

“You've got family here, right?” Heads nod. “So who are you hiding from?”

Well, it turns out they are hiding from “others” mostly, an ill-defined group they assume will be condemning. They see themselves as a vanguard and are not very comfortable in the role.

After some reassurance from me, Brooke starts again. Gradually, the room warms up. At the break, the women go into the bathroom one by one to rub Pure Satisfaction on their clitorises and the mood brightens more.

“Whoa! That stuff is comin' home with me!” one says.

“I'm gonna use it when I have a toy between my legs,” says another.

“You ain't put any on, have you, Brian?”

“No, uh…”

“Come on. Fair is fair. Come on. You get in there and put some on your dingle.”

Everyone thinks this is very funny.

So I go into the bathroom, lower my pants, put some Pure Satisfaction on my fingertip, and rub a little on my dingle. A tingly feeling like menthol makes me conscious of my dingle, but that's about it. Maybe you have to own a clitoris.

As my dingle and I mingle during the break, the talk turns to the Internet. “Ricki and I are total MySpace whores!” one woman says, naming a co-hostess of the party. Ricki confirms that, yes, she is a MySpace whore, made so much easier now that high-speed access has come to the area. They spend hours on MySpace messaging each other and cruising to see what else, and who else, is online and what they are doing.

Somebody is getting married soon, and of course they have to plan a bachelorette party. But where to go for the big night out? Shaft, a gay nightclub in St. Joseph, emerges as the clear favorite. “I like it there. The gay guys know how to dance, they're fun, and they don't try to pick you up.”

During the second half of the party, as Brooke hauls out the dildos and vibrators, everyone is relaxed and open. “My husband drives me crazy with that thing!” one says when Brooke displays a long phallic vibrator. They play with the vibrators and laugh about the ways they can use them.

“And now Brian wants to show you a special item.”

I stand in the back of the room holding a nubby glass penis. I tell them I sold one of these to a woman in Arizona who liked hers so much she had to buy a new one as soon as she broke her old one. I talk about the nubs. I say it is worth the extra money. You can warm it up in hot water or cool it down in cold water. You can stick it in the dishwasher. I keep talking because every face is blank. I don't know if it's me, my maleness, or the pricey item, but nothing works. I smile weakly.

“Okay, and now Brooke has some more to show you.” I hand her the glass dingle and slink away to the back of the room.

A few minutes later, Brooke has finished. She retires to her “office” and one by one, women arrive, sit under the Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper, and pick out items.

Matt arrives home early, but Tanya quickly banishes him before he crosses the threshold of the front door. The women are busy buying their own satisfaction. Why doesn't he go downstairs and watch TV? “The remote's down there,” she says, as if the remote control is tempting bait.

Meanwhile, I sit out on the front stoop with one of the older women. She's been to a few of these parties, she tells me. Most of the women in her family have toys, which is wonderful because things used to be so buttoned up around here. Southern Baptists had such a grip on everyone's lives, including hers, that nobody ever talked about sex and especially how to make sex feel good. Her own mother and father hardly seemed to show each other any affection. Despite all that, she wasn't a virgin when she married at eighteen. Then one day, she realized nobody had to live their lives like that. Her husband, thank goodness, he was open and tender and loving. She just got lucky. They enjoy their experiments, the bondage, the anal, the girl-girl-boy, the boy-boy-girl…

“Wait. Whoa. Threesomes?” Massive bugs from the surrounding woods have started strafing the light by the door, so I wonder if I've heard her correctly.

“Oh yeah. Sure. Of course, I get competitive in everything, including sex, and so I got a little competitive then, too. I want to win, though I'm not sure what it was I was supposed to be winning. So I didn't really care for it.” She's glad she tried it, though. That's how you survive thirty years of marriage. You try new things.

“I can't imagine going through life unsatisfied,” she says. “I sure don't want that for my kids.”

“So sex is very important to you?”

“Sex is important. Oh yeah. It is another way of being satisfied and happy. I cannot imagine not having sex.”

 

O
n the Adult Novelty Expo's second day, I met up with Kim Airs, the woman who had been tutored at Good Vibrations and had gone on to create Grand Opening! Kim ushered me around, introducing me to various corporate executives, with an excited enthusiasm. “Oh wait, you gotta meet these people!” she'd say, and off we would run. After years of feeling radically at odds with the rest of America when it came to sex, Kim now felt the warm and fuzzy welcoming embrace of acceptance.

“Just look at Amazon.com,” she said. “You can buy sex toys on Amazon. How cool is that?”

But the biggest, most exciting growth, Kim told me, was at the high end. Cheap sex toys sold by the likes of Passion Parties were once all you could get, but now everyone in the know wants to go upscale. One northern California metallurgist was making vibrators out of titanium for $600 apiece. “Over here, though, you gotta meet these guys,” Kim said, as she and I half trotted to a booth. “These guys are getting sex toys into department stores!”

She was right. JimmyJane had crossed over. The products weren't sold in most adult stores like Fascinations, and they weren't sold by home party outfits. JimmyJane had succeeded in making sex toys into fashion accessories.