America Unzipped (15 page)

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.”

 

F
ortunately, 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.

No matter. With a little assist from Brooke, who provides a detail here and there, they fill in my story on their own, while I smile mutely and dab at the corners of my mouth with a napkin. The women do a very good job of guessing why I am standing in Julie Bunton's dining area holding a plastic glass of wine and chewing on shrimp because they are media savvy and fully aware of their Heartland status. Reporters and writers have been running around the Heartland for a few years now, conducting anthropology. Mainly those efforts aimed to explain why Heartland folks (always “folks”) are so different from people in New York City or Los Angeles (never “folks”). So they infer I am here to find out what people in small towns think about sex and why women go to “sex parties” and if they're hicks the way they think they are so often portrayed. When Brooke says, “He's from California,” somebody back in the living room says, “We have sex here, too!” and then everybody laughs. Except for the hicks part—I don't think they are hicks—they've got it basically correct and I haven't had to say a thing. I pick up another shrimp.

Brooke finishes setting up her little display, and I keep waiting for one of the women to voice some objection to my presence. It never comes. More women arrive and somebody says, “Hey, this guy is going to make us famous for sex toys!”

Nobody is going to ask me to walk out.

“Do you all know each other?” I finally ask.

“Well, that's my mom,” a young woman says, pointing to another woman, about forty, sitting in front of the fireplace hearth.

“And that's my mom,” says another, indicating a woman sitting in a recliner next to where I am standing on the threshold between the kitchen area and the living room. “My aunt's over there.”

“These here are my cousins.”

“We're sisters.”

One woman turns out to be a grandmother to another woman in the room.

“Are you really her mother?” I ask the woman sitting in the recliner.

“I really am.”

“You aren't skittish about this?” I ask the mom.

“Not at all. My daughters are more uncomfortable with me being here than I am with them being here.”

A few more women arrive, and Brooke says, “Okay. We may as well get started.”

She had warned me that she tends to bull her way through her sales pitches. She likes to pass around the sample products in order to start conversations and giggling, and the resulting noise can fill a room. That's okay, she had told me, because people are having fun and when they have fun, they buy, but she has to keep going or else the party would last all night. By the time Brooke begins her presentation, standing in front of the display she has created, the volume is already high. But Brooke launches into a rapid-fire prologue about Passion Parties and how women can make extra money doing something that's so much fun by joining her network. Then, like Trista at Fascinations, Brooke tells the women that selling Passion Parties products is as much public service as it is business—stronger marriages, healthier lives, greater intimacy, journey of self-discovery.

She distributes long order forms with nearly 150 items listed in columns. Julie retrieves Dr. Seuss books from the kids' room so the women can use them as lap desks when writing their orders for the Mini Tongue vibrator.

“The first product I want to show you is our Luxurious Bath and Shower Gel with pheromones,” Brooke says, speaking over several conversations. Brooke always starts out with products like bath gels and salt scrubs, deferring the more explicit appurtenances for the second half of the show. She says this is a way to organize the pitch around the senses, starting with smell first, then taste, then touch, but really, it's just a lot less intimidating for all concerned if you kick off with bath gel and perfume instead of the nine-inch-long Chocolate Thriller with the “lifelike veins.”

Brooke pushes the irresistible attraction power of pheromones and quickly moves on to Bedazzle perfume, and then a body gel with glitter mixed right into the gel to accentuate cleavage, and finally a honey-flavored body powder “you can put in three places, and then tell your partner you put it in four and have fun as you keep him guessing.” Partner. Not husband or lover. Not everybody here is married or straight.

Brooke's script is carved deeply into her brain. Even as her eyes dart around the room to alight on this woman or that one, they aren't really focused. She could be thinking about her newborn daughter, or why the navigation system in the Escalade went on the fritz, or how hot she feels even though the house isn't really that hot. The spiel just keeps coming, hardly pausing even for a shouted question. After she talks about each product, she starts it circulating around the room and the women smell it or feel it or taste it and talk about it among themselves. Brooke knows that is where the real selling happens.

Taste that strawberry massage lotion! Every woman dabs a little on an arm and dutifully tastes. “To really be great lovers we need to activate all five of our senses…this is Silky Sheets, you can spray it between the sheets to give them a silky feeling, smells great too and really dries up that wet spot…Okay, ladies, rub a little of the Fireworks warming gel on your arm, ready? Now rub, lick, blow. Rub, lick, blow. You can practically breathe your partner to orgasm with this…Tasty Tease comes in strawberry, piña colada, and mint, will also inhibit the gag reflex, here's another gel, hot and tingly, also makes your lips fuller, called Nipple Nibblers, this is our number one product, Pure Satisfaction a clitoral gel to stimulate your clit and make it fat and juicy makes orgasms stronger, harder, longer and gives you lots more of them! Use it in the morning to get going for the day the price is just $39.50 and that's less than $.05 per orgasm! I'm going to put this jar in the bathroom so during the break I want each of you to go in there and rub some on and feel just what this does for you.”

Just before the end of Part I of her sales presentation, Brooke slows down and pulls out a rubbery tube and a long, phallic-shaped bottle of lubrication. “Now, ladies, this is Gigi.” She squirts a load of lube from the bottle into Gigi, and then slowly slides and twists Gigi up and down the bottle. “This is going to make your job a lot easier,” she says, sounding like a roving vacuum-cleaner salesman who has just tossed a handful of topsoil on the carpet.