After running through twenty-five thousand bottles of Niagara, Lari had a special limited shipment of two thousand flown in from Sweden to quench the thirst of frenzied and desperate Southern belles and beaux.
"It's like Beanie Babies for adults," she says. More like Ecstasy, I think. One man drove three hours to get a bottle only to discover the store was Niagara-free. A man from Tampa, who heard Lari on a Florida radio show, offered one thousand dollars for a bottle. She refused. She's heard rumors that lobbyists are charming state legislators with the drink, that some stores are ordering cases from her, then jacking up the price to ten dollars a bottle. She's not happy about those reports, or the one that her daughter Chelsea delivered: she came home from school one day and reported that she'd heard a rumor that the school was going to try to kick her out.
The thorns in Lari's side started to get sharper, or more substantial, in early April, when Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that created Viagra, filed a lawsuit against her in federal court, claiming that the name Niagara infringed the copyright of their little blue pill. (The suit doesn't bode well for Pfizer, given that Niagara was created in 1993, five years before Viagra received its trademark in 1998.) A judge ruled as much at a preliminary hearing, saying, "If men can have Viagra, why can't women have Niagara?" And as for Lari, she says, "I may just be a little girl from Little Rock, and the may be a big pharmaceutical company, but I am not backing down."
A shipment of three hundred thousand Niagara bottles is due to arrive Sunday at midnight. Lari cannot wait. Some Niagara-hungry nuts have gotten her home number and keep bothering her. She's now recognized in restaurants as the Niagara Woman.  Marketers keep calling her. They want her to buy Niagara pens and refrigerator magnets. One woman calls her weekly, leaving breathy messages on her machine: "Imagine this. Shut your eyes. Niagara. On the side of a racing car."
"I don't think so," laughs Lari.
The initial shipment is already pre-sold either to stores or individuals. By the end of March, almost a million bottles will have arrived in Little Rock.
But then the shipment didn't arrive Sunday, and Lari is beyond stressed. The ship from Sweden was in a sudden sea storm and has been held up at customs in New York. To appease the masses, Lari spends nearly seven thousand dollars to ship in one thousand bottles for first-come customers.
She announces on Tommy Smith's show Monday morning that all bottles will be here by the end of the month. By the time I arrive at Wycoff's early Monday morning to check out the scene, people are waiting. The first three customers are men in their seventies.
"My wife is embarrassed to buy it," one man says.
She's not the only one. A stream of men, who never look at each other, pour in throughout the morning. Women act like they are in high school buying condoms. Nearly everyone orders a cup of coffee to lamely cover up the fact that they are buying Niagara. One man admits he's embarrassed. "It's not exactly a manly thing, to say you need help in the bedroom," he says to me quietly.
Some scruffy-looking types who look like they're not exactly latte drinkers show up, so it's obvious what they're there for.
"If this stuff doesn't work on my wife, can I call you?" he asks me.
I ask if they don't turn on their wives anymore. They look uncomfortable. "No, our wives are just tired," one responds nervously.
The atmosphere's not exactly convivial — it's actually a bit tense. No one asks anyone else in line if they've tried it. No one cracks a joke. It's as if they're all ashamed to be admitting that they might be having sex in the near future.
Throughout the morning, men, women, black, white, twenty-somethings to seventy-somethings roll through Wycoff's buying the maximum — four bottles allowed that day. One man rolls through the door in a wheelchair and buys a four-pack.
One woman, in her early fifties, buys four bottles and returns two hours later with her son. They buy four more, sneaking past Colleen, the gatekeeper of Niagara, a twenty-something who also swears by the drink.
By noon, five hundred bottles are left. Twenty-four hours later, the Niagara is gone. I get myself one more bottle.
A few weeks later, I'm sitting in the middle of my floor, eating fried chicken from a Popeye's paper box. My Niagara is chilling in the fridge because Cameron is coming over, and we've decided to  give our trippy love-drug another try. Since we downed that first bottle, not a day has gone by that we haven't talked about what we call Niagara Friday, puzzled over it, tried to figure out whether we liked the experience or didn't. In some ways we felt closer — but I wasn't sure whether we felt closer in a good way, or in that way you feel after you've been through something unsettling together.
"There was something weird there, right?" he keeps asking me. "We didn't imagine that weirdness." I reassure him that yes, it was weird, all right.
"But it was good before that, right?" he usually follows up. I reassure him that, yes, it definitely was.
The phone rings. "I can't come over," Cameron tells me, as I hear his other line ringing in the background. "I'm tied up at work."
I go to the fridge to get myself a soda as I finish up dinner. No Coke. No Mountain Dew. I see the Niagara, its blue fluid making my refrigerator shelf look like something in a science lab.
Although we'd decided to give it one more try, Cameron and I had also debated whether or not we should. Now I find myself thinking that maybe it's okay that he had to cancel — maybe we shouldn't. In addition to being sexually assertive, I'm also a bit competitive — and I don't like the idea that Cameron needs some kind of drink to make me sexy, or that I need one to find that sexiness in myself. If he and I were looking for a little bit of edge in our sex life, couldn't we generate it ourselves, without the help of the same blue drink that every other couple in Little Rock is leaning on hopefully, desperately?
I pop the cap, then quickly guzzle half the bottle. It doesn't quite mix with my lunch. Lari told me that mind-set is probably half the trick, so it doesn't surprise me when I don't feel any sexier than you ordinarily would after eating a half-pound of fried chicken — not very. The only thrill I get is a guilty one, knowing I've wasted a precious drink that women all over Little Rock would kill to get their hands on. I don't feel sexy; I do feel decadent.
Lari, budding promoter that she is, promises me she'll be getting in a new product from Sweden that will "blow Niagara away." I suspect it's not a toy, or lingerie, but another kind of drink or food she'll sell in her shop. She's turning into a Southern-fried version of Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, it seems — with a little P.T. Barnum mixed in. And despite my reservations, I suspect when the next circus comes to town, I'll be right there, in line like everyone else.
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