Hook, Line, and Sucker

The Day I Lost All Faith in Adults (and Infomercials)

Bouncing balls. Jumping children. Painted faces. Squeals. Screams. Laughter.

Last weekend, Paris and I found ourselves the only childless couple at a four-year-old’s birthday party in a mini gymnasium. Kids flew around the foam-covered floors and walls, flipping and jumping, and sometimes landing upright.

One particularly runty kid, the younger sibling of a party attendee, flipped off the trampoline and onto the floor. Her mom was elsewhere, mingling with other grownups. Paris and I were the closest adults in range. She locked eyes with me and began to cry. We stood, staring back at her. It’s a particularly sticky situation being a random adult at a kid’s birthday party. On the one hand, you’re an extra chaperone. On the other, you shouldn’t go around snatching up kids that don’t belong to you.

The kid’s mom’s MomRadar™ kicked in, and she ran over to scoop the girl off the ground in seconds flat. But still, in that moment when she looked at us, she believed that because we were taller, we had the answers. She believed we could help, that we must know how the world works.

Sorry, little kid. That just ain’t true.

Being a kid involves a ton of inherent trust. It’s an innocent viewpoint, one that I held dear throughout my earliest years. That belief was completely shattered one summer day in 1992: the day I realized adults have no idea what they’re doing, even if they tell you otherwise.

I am the youngest grandchild in my family by five years and five months. As such, my role has often been that of gullible guinea pig. Early on, my mom trained me to follow her without question by calling things “adventures” rather than “chores” or “errands.” She would ask if I “wanted to go on adventure.” These adventures could mean throwing phone books with her best friend, Lillian. It could mean going to a movie set with Lillian’s husband, Dan. Just as likely, it could mean going to the grocery store or taking cans to the recycling plant.

It could also mean going to the dentist and having five teeth removed.

This scam worked every time. A gambler by nature, I risked the dentist “adventures” and endured the grocery store “adventures” to get to the movie set adventures. If adventure was on the menu, I would always order it.

This fateful day in the late fall, my mom asked me if I’d like to go on an adventure to my Aunt Bari’s house. I said yes. I had hope. Bari’s house was where we spent all our Christmas Eves throughout the years. An adventure to her place was bound to involve a gift or at least some fun. I was wrong.

Honestly, I should have known. Just a few months before, I had heard my mom, my Aunt Bari, and her sister, my Aunt Vicki, all circled around my sister, Shannon, in our dining room. Shannon was crying. My mom was comforting her. Aunt Vicki, who we were told had “beautician training,” was applying some goop from a container to my weeping sister’s head as the three of them told her, “You must suffer to be beautiful.”

This oft-repeated phrase was how they got Shannon to endure hours with noxious perm chemicals singing her scalp, its fumes permeating the walls and upholstery. The result of her suffering was not beauty. Instead, Shannon ended up sporting a blond Jheri curl when the process was done. The combined result of their laughter, the reckless abandon, the results of their attempt started the erosion of my trust in adults.

Maybe, just maybe, I thought, they don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.

Still, it was my mom. They were my aunts. They were grown. They drove us around. They fed us. They gave us a place to live. They kept us safe from strangers. Being vested with that much responsibility, I relaxed back into the notion that they had to know what they were doing. They had to.

As I eyeballed the situation that day at Bari’s house, I was relieved that there were no chemicals around. They had stacked three phone books on a wooden dining chair and asked me to climb on up. Suspicious at the three of them together, especially after the number they had done on Shannon, I hesitated.

At the first sight of uncertainty, they started convincing me: “Come on,” they said. “It’ll be fun. It’s an adventure!”

I settled up onto the phone books and turned to face the fireplace. I noticed how the mantle looked emptier without the family’s Christmas stockings. Christmas would be here before we knew it. I started making a list in my head of all the things I would ask Santa to bring me that year.

I was wretched from my thoughts by Aunt Vicki pulling a comb through my hair, yanking my head back every few strokes.

It was shocking, but I was ready for this. It wasn’t long before that day when we had been visiting family in Tennessee. A strong-handed cousin had gone wild on my head with a fine-toothed comb. She had tried yanking my hair into a thick braid on our cross-country visit.

“One day, I’m gonna be a hairdresser,” she assured me, as if her future plans somehow qualified her to perform the current task. Like telling someone, “Lie back, I’m going to be a doctor some day,” as you make the first cut of the at-home tracheotomy.

My Tennessee cousin’s amateur cosmetology had prepared me for that day, I thought. It was a tough comb job, but I was tougher.

Then I saw Bari affixing an attachment to her vacuum cleaner. My mom held an instructional booklet in her hand, flipping through the pages and reading out loud.

“Affix the hose — yeah, yeah, yeah. Be sure to attach the safety — blah, blah, blah.”

She flipped the booklet shut and tossed it on the dining table without finishing. Bari snapped the attachment into place. The box on the ground read in large block letters — FLOWBEE.

I cannot fault Bari for purchasing this contraption. The advertisement featured, as most infomercials do, smiling people using the product. These actors made using the Flowbee look effortless, even fun.

In retrospect, the infomercial footage is iconic. A middle-aged man with feathered hair drags the machine over the crest of his skull, sucking chestnut hairs conveniently into the vacuum bag below. A small boy, even younger than I was, smiles as a disembodied hand runs the business end of the vacuum across his scalp with ease.

One guy who looks like an off-duty soccer coach stands cutting the hair of someone I have to assume is also on the coaching staff. In another scene, a man suctions the hair off a woman while a third guy watches. The woman on the receiving end of the hose monitors the Flowbee’s efficacy with a hand mirror, her eyes narrowed.

Hey, this footage tells the audience, Even extremely discerning women let their friends cut their hair with a vacuum cleaner hose.

A professional hand model in pleated slacks and a pastel button-down tucked neatly into his pants demonstrates all the parts, showing off how simple it all is to assemble, use, then disassemble.

The voiceover really sells it: “Tens of thousands of satisfied customers! Save time and money! Have fun!”

The Flowbee, like almost every other product ever marketed to the masses, promised to fulfill your dreams, solve your problems, and answer your prayers.

“Who has time to get a haircut?!” the announcer asks. “Don’t you hate spending time sweeping up all that hair?”

No one bothered to ask why you wouldn’t just use the vacuum to suck up the hair from the floor, rather than sucking hairs still attached to your head into a relentless machine.

Trusting the grownups around her, little Heather sat on the phone books, a vulnerable target for the waiting Flowbee. My mom had disregarded the instructions. Bari had eyeballed the assembly. Vicki had been eager to grip the hose. Though I started to question the whole idea, I had no chance of escape. We had driven all the way to Bari’s house, and it wasn’t even Christmas. No chance we were leaving without completing the adventure.

Though the written instructions had been tossed aside, the Flowbee came with an instructional video on VHS tape. We popped it in the VCR and watched it play. Two hosts came on screen. For some reason, they kept trying to sell the Flowbee rather than explain how to use it. My dudes, we already plunked down the money. Just give us the instructions. But, nope, Gary and his sidekick continued to extoll the Flowbee’s virtues.

“A lot of kids like trendier haircuts,” Gary’s partner said. “With kids these days, we are talking about any kind of haircut imaginable.”

Gary agreed, “That’s one of the great things about the Flowbee. You can create. You can experiment.”

Great, just what I wanted to be. An experiment.

Then, finally, instructions, though scant: “Bounce it up and down. Make sure you bounce it up and down.” Everyone in the instructional video gave the same imperative: Bounce. It. Up. And. Down.

The video rolled to a close. My mom and two aunts descended on me. Bari fired up the vacuum. Vicki grabbed the hose and held it over my head.

“Just start at the back,” my mom told her. Vicki pressed the Flowbee down toward my scalp. In direct disregard of Gary’s imperative, she did not bounce it up and down.

Neither the Flowbee nor I was prepared for what happened next.

As an adult, I have been told by haircare professionals that I have densely placed follicles. My hair is like a forest you cannot walk through without first thrashing a machete out in front of you. Using the Flowbee on my hair was like trying to drive a school bus through that dense forest. Everything gets ruined, and all you hear is the sound of children screaming.

The vacuum’s engine whirred on, but the Flowbee’s “state of the art” blades ground to a halt. The searing pain was worse than anything my inept cousin from Tennessee could have ever done. I’m not sure if it was the lack of bouncing up and down or my hair or a combination of the two, but there was no way I was walking out with any of the trendy haircuts Gary had mentioned.

My hair and the Flowbee were at an impasse. It wasn’t until Bari unplugged the vacuum that I could hear their laughter over my screams. They snipped my hair free and caught their breath. I was traumatized and sobbing, but they could not help themselves. The infomercial, the instructional booklet, the VHS tape, Gary — nothing prepared any of us for this.

When you start out as a kid, you think that grown ups have all the answers. They know what to do, know how stuff works, know how to run the show. The day comes for us all when we learn that is not true. Not at all. When you actually are a grown up, you realize you don’t know what to do. You can just do your best to appear authoritative. You master pretending to know all that stuff so the kids around you don’t freak out and you don’t either.

Once you’ve pretended long enough, the grift has worked on you as well the kids around you. You become fully convinced of your authority. That’s when you pull out your credit card. That’s when you pay your four easy payments. That’s when you drive your youngest child to another town to be a test subject. That’s when you throw caution to the wind, fire up the vacuum, and let nature take its course.

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