On March 29, Nerve ran a dispatch about Niagara, the now-notorious
love potion from Little Rock. We were overrun with demands for the
beverage. Never accuse us of being less than eager to please:
in the aftermath of the article, Nerve.com, Inc. has partnered with the U.S. distributors to make the drink available online. Buy it here.
To kick off this service, we're running a new, expanded version of the original story. So we're biased, we admit it. We like the drink. We like the woman who sells it. We want you to buy it.
Read it, and sip.
The first time I heard about Niagara, the news roused me from my sleep. It was sometime around Valentine's Day, and my friend had called early that morning to see if I'd heard about this love potion, this soft drink, that was selling all over Little Rock, where we live.
"Tommy Smith's talking about it on his show," he tells me. "Turn on your radio."
Tommy Smith is Little Rock's version of Howard Stern, all redneck raunch on his Rock and Roll Breakfast Show. His following includes strippers, stockbrokers and politicians, including Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who doubles as a Southern Baptist minister but has appeared on the show several times. As politicians go, Bill Clinton is no exception in this city. A few years ago, the state commissioners regulating liquor permits attempted to ban bare breasts at strip bars and force pasties on the dancers, which didn't stop them from also inviting the performers to put on a show at the capitol. That's Little Rock — a bunch of Bible Belters with the sexual curiosity of the deeply repressed in a town big enough to give them plenty of temptation.
I have lived in Little Rock for ten years and grew up nearby. I know the town well enough that I'm not at all surprised that yet another herbal aphrodisiac is considered newsworthy. And sure enough, when I turn on my radio, there's Tommy Smith, growling in a Southern drawl about what the drink does to women, how it juices them up, makes them weak in the knees. And it didn't just affect women — one man calls in to say the drink made him erect with one swallow; another claims the same. "Oh please," I think to myself, and I roll over and sleep through the next forty-five minutes of panting testimonials.
I forget all about it until a few weeks later, when I pause mid–channel flip to see what Louisa Drouet, a peppy, brunet local television reporter, has to say. She's doing a live stand-up in front of Wycoff Coffee, a small gourmet coffee shop that's now ground zero for Niagara distribution. Drouet, pretty and flirty, says she thinks Niagara might just help everyone in Little Rock "get a little nookie." The camera pans to an endless line of middle-aged women waiting to get the last remaining bottles to be found in Little Rock city limits.
By the next morning, Little Rock media listservs are buzzing about the drink, but mostly about Drouet's word choice. The offensive word, in case you missed it, would be the "n word" — nookie. All that day and the next night, nookie is the talk at the state capitol, the county courthouse and the downtown doughnut shop. The rumor is that the higher-ups at the TV station aren't happy with her word choice. My friend runs into the newscaster at a news event, at which point Drouet, who she barely knows, breaks down and gets teary. "What's the big deal?" asks Louisa, who's from Oregon. "Don't these same people listen to Tommy Smith?"
Meanwhile, the depraved beverage is selling out. Bottles are running scarce, and Lari Williams, the sole U.S. distributor, is placing frantic calls to its source (and the source of so many sexual fantasies): Sweden.
Lari Williams is the Niagara goddess, and she knows it. That's why she hates it when people are rude to her. "What a witch," she says as she slams down the phone, having put up with the entreaties of a desperate woman demanding more of the drink. "They don't understand — I just don't have anymore. They think I'm lying."
She was born and raised in Little Rock, after all, and she expects you to be polite to her, even if her store is the only place carrying the fizzy neon-blue drink that everyone in town craves and demands. So she's running out. She wishes everyone would just deal with it. Lari's coffee shop was never the kind of place where cliques of any kind — skateboard rats or media elites — congregated. It just another strip mall coffee shop, located next to the Hallmark store. But since Lari started promoting and distributing the Swedish nectar a few weeks before Valentine's Day, her phone has been ringing so consistently that she's had to install additional phone lines; she estimates that she's been getting seventy-five calls a minute. Although she occasionally sounds hassled, Lari, a red-haired forty year old who talks at three times the speed of most southerners, is thoroughly enjoying the success of a drink that inspires women to send her flowers the morning after they've tried it.
Lari will tell you straight out. Niagara worked for her. Of course, lately, in the heat of the Niagara craze, she says she hasn't opened a bottle. To start with, it's scarce. Besides that, "Who has time?" says Lari, who's married to Roger Williams, her high school sweetheart and now business partner. "I'm busy selling it."
Lari, who dresses more Nashville than Little Rock — all sequined jackets and leather pants and cowboy boots and glittery belts with big buckles — is both a product of her hometown and a provocateur within it. She sends her daughter, Chelsea (pure coincidence), to Christian school, but has been pushing the fifteen year old to get a belly button ring. (Lari was chastized by administrators for showing up at the same school in a long leather skirt. She has no belly button ring, but she does have a tattoo of a marlin on her ankle.) Brought up in a devoutly Christian home, she was booted from the Church of Christ after her first divorce (Williams is her third husband). When she's in Niagara sales pitch mode, her accent's as soft and southern as they come; but she's also fond of saying anyone who doesn't like what she's selling can "kiss my ass."
"People in Little Rock love to know everyone's business. This place is
nothing but a Peyton Place," says Williams, sitting at a picnic table that serves as her desk and barely fits in her tiny office. She's ignoring the ringing phone, trying to make some sense out of the papers piled on it, an influx of orders and notes she's scribbled to herself in an attempt at organization. "Hell, sometimes you just walk out the door and someone wants to know where you are going. This place is crazy with gossip when it comes to sex and you never know what you might see. Like our neighbor who goes in her backyard and picks tomatoes naked. Mind you, we don't live in the damn country."
While Lari has never latched onto anything as big as this drink, her lastest success is not pure serendipity. Williams worked in radio and television promotions for ten years, and has long marketed goodies that hint at a knack for the sexy sell: the most popular of the candies she sells at Wycoff is something she calls "praline orgasms," vanilla fudge mixed in with pecan brittle. And her method of marketing has always promised the suggestion of a chemical fix along with the sweet: "It's like eating marijuana fudge," she says of the praline dessert. Her seriously-spiked bourbon fudge, available for a rich fifteen dollars a pound, sells almost as briskly.
In addition to running Wycoff, Lari and her husband cater parties for the celebrities who perform in Little Rock, making chocolate stilettos for Faith Hill when she passed through, a chocolate piano for Elton John when he was in town. It was at a food and beverages trade show last January that the two of them discovered Niagara.
Lari had the sense that the drink would fly in Little Rock, one of the top markets for sex toys in the country. And people who might balk at the idea of taking a clinical, cold, blue pill to spice up their sex life — a pill that hints at failure, at illness — might feel perfectly comfortable sipping at a pretty, cobalt-colored soft drink. Even the old-fashioned honeymoons it invokes with its name are the stuff of sweet, nostalgic associations.
"I knew I could sell this product and make it take off," says Lari, wearing a denim jacket with the word "lucky" in sequins on the lapel. "But Roger was just excited because he thought we were going to have a lot of sex."
When she contacted Nordic Drinks in Sweden, the owners were surprised that someone from the American South would want to market a drink that had gone absolutely nowhere with the sex-loving Swedes. Once the drink took off, its disbelieving manufacturers actually flew over to witness the phenomenon.
With her attorney's help, Lari cut a deal to be the sole distributor of the drink in the United States. She now controls every aspect of Niagara in the U.S., including marketing. She has talked to Nordic Drinks about adding "Romance in a Bottle" on the labels. Anyone who wants to sell Niagara has to be approved by Lari, who has decided to limit the drink to a handful of boutiques, restaurants, salons and drugstores across the country. The contract dictates that the drink not be sold near sex toys or in the vicinity of sex magazines.
"It has to be promoted classy," says Lari. She takes a long sip from a straw in her oversized blue plastic cup filled with Diet Coke; instead of coffee, she drinks the stuff all day. To Lari, Niagara is no clinical chemical manipulator but a romance enhancer to be served chilled, preferably with candles, lingerie and sexy music. She calls those special evenings "Niagara nights."
As for the drink's effectiveness, Lari admits Niagara requires a certain mind-set. And like most things in life, it won't work exactly the same way for everyone. "But this isn't green M&Ms," she insists. "Repeat business says it all."
I pick up the one remaining bottle in Lari's store. The aqua-colored "aphrodisiac energy drink" might have been created by a Willy Wonka who went bonkers in the jungles of South America, snatching up unpronounceable herbs — damiana, shizandra, as well as the more familiar ginseng — and then mixing them with carbonated water and sugar, plus a healthy dose of caffeine. The result? A $4.50 drink that women report makes them relaxed, tingly in the right places and fired up for a night of nookie. Lari tells caffeine-addicted women they might need two bottles. I wonder, What if you slipped someone a No-Doz and told them it was a love drug? Would that make you feel light-headed and tingly? Would it make you get wet?
Damiana, the key herb, has been sold in the United States in one form or another — formerly as an aphrodisiac oil — since 1874 (it's also long been used in a liquor considered an aphrodisiac in Mexico; families traditionally gave it to girls to relax them on their wedding night). These days it's marketed as a dietary supplement, which doesn't require FDA approval. Never tested formally on humans, it has been tested on male rats. One study found that damiana had no effects on rats that were sexually potent, but did heighten mating behavior in impotent rats.
The drink is said to be particularly effective on women in their thirties, and even more effective in women older than that, which may explain why the first person I saw when I walked into Wycoff's was an old friend of my mom's, a widow in her sixties, whom I've known since childhood. "Tell your mom I have a boyfriend," she says, winking at me. "And tell her this stuff works."
I closely examine the bottle. The label tells me that the "love herbs" will give me good staying power, and that the drink's caffeine will bring me to life. In a light touch, the Niagara's mascot is a shiny red rabbit, its curvy bottom high in the air, its tail erect. I think of the bottle in Alice in Wonderland, the one with the instructions that sound like a dare: Drink Me.
And it didn't just affect women — one man calls in to say the drink made him erect with one swallow; another claims the same. "Oh please," I think to myself, and I roll over and sleep through the next forty-five minutes of panting testimonials.
(Lari was chastized by administrators for showing up at the same school in a long leather skirt. She has no belly button ring, but she does have a tattoo of a marlin on her ankle.) Brought up in a devoutly Christian home, she was booted from the Church of Christ after her first divorce (Williams is her third husband). When she's in Niagara sales pitch mode, her accent's as soft and southern as they come; but she's also fond of saying anyone who doesn't like what she's selling can "kiss my ass."
"Romance in a Bottle" on the labels. Anyone who wants to sell Niagara has to be approved by Lari, who has decided to limit the drink to a handful of boutiques, restaurants, salons and drugstores across the country. The contract dictates that the drink not be sold near sex toys or in the vicinity of sex magazines.
