Race Across America

How do I even begin to sum up RAAM? A race that I didn't even really participate in that took us across 3,005 miles and twelve states in seven days, eight hours, and five minutes of round-the-clock racing? How do you write a report about that? After a day or two, I even stopped thinking in days and nights and started thinking in shifts and transition stations. Instead of breaking this race report up by day, by state, or by some other arbitrary system, I'm going to summarize the whole trip in one "race report." I will include as many photos as possible, and at the beginning of each section I will summarize it so that you can decide to read it or not as you see fit. I will put key words in bold the first time I introduce them, so that you can scan back through the sections you skipped and read the pertinent back stories if you choose. Sound like a plan? Great! Let's begin.

Pre-Race
Claire is embarrassed to meet someone from her past. She makes the transition from a train wreck in Massachusetts back to her old self in California, and begins to meet her companions for the rest of the trip.

It is no secret that I've been falling apart. I'd been drunk pretty much 24/7 just trying to hold my life together until I finished my personal training exam (750 out of a possible 800, thank you very much!) and climbed on a plane for San Diego. My mom drove me to the airport, and a very hung over, very glum Claire wandered into the airport wondering if she should bag the whole thing. The idea of leaving Lindsey alone in Boston to do whatever she wanted without my being able to spy and keep tabs on her every move scared the living shit out of me. Who would do drive-bys and eavesdrop on her phone calls? At check-in I spotted a girl I went to school with across the terminal. We had been close friends growing up, but she was the kind of person that thought all lesbians wanted to be men and fancied herself the quirky star of a show like Ally McBeal. These days she works for Antiques Roadshow, which sounds less fun to me than getting my teeth pulled out of my head with no Novocaine. Needless to say, I did not want to talk to her, especially in my current state of self-indulgent homosexual crisis. I ducked out of her line of sight, checked in, and ran through security hoping she wouldn't spot me. Once at the gate, I sat against the wall staring at the carpet and contemplating leaving the airport this very second to go back home and stalk my (ex)girlfriend full time for the next two weeks. I was too absorbed in my thoughts to read or listen to music, and it took me the better part of an hour to even look across the gate and see the girl I grew up with sitting in the same fucking gate waiting for the same fucking flight. What I dreaded most was the question, "How are you doing?!" How do you answer that when your life has fallen apart around you, and you're the one to blame?

Luckily, the girl was seated far ahead of me on the plain, and I didn't see her through the whole flight. I tried to read on the plain, but mostly I just dozed and stared out the window lost in thought. In all my flights to California, I've had very few nonstop flights, and I don't know if I've ever had any where there were no clouds over most of the country. As the east coast turned to farm land and then prairie, I could feel the tension draining out of me. Once we hit the mountains and the desert, I couldn't believe that I was actually beginning to accept that she may very well sleep with someone else, but that didn't concern me anymore. By the time we hit the desert, I actually, factually, was starting to feel a bit better. As stupid as it sounds, I just needed to be physically removed from the situation to begin to feel better, and how much more removed can you get than the other side of the continent?

When we landed in San Diego, I booked it off the plane and rushed to the second bathroom (because the first one always has a line) on the way to baggage claim. When I walked out of the stall, who was standing right there but the girl I went to high school with.

"HI!" she said, a bit stunned.

"Hi!" I said. "Fancy meeting you here." Damn. So close!

"Were you on the Jet Blue flight from Boston?" she asked.

"Yep, yep..."

"How are you doing?!" she asked.

I figured, why bother putting on a happy face? I don't care what this girl thinks of me! She was a psych major anyway. She can handle it. So I laid it on her. "Not so good," I said. "I'm going through a really messy break-up and I'm moving to San Francisco after this trip." This was a shrug-off that I would tell many times over the next several days. Homegirl took it all in stride, and when I said, "Well, I've gotta go. I didn't check any baggage, so..." she seemed relieved to be rid of me and my counterculture problems so uninteresting that they would probably never be depicted on Sex and the City.

The second I stepped out of the terminal into the warm, dry San Diego air, I swear to god it was like coming home. I relaxed instantly. I love southern California (and San Diego in particular) for its different sense of casual chic, the constant rat-a-tat of Spanish in the background, the palm trees (which always make me feel like I'm living on vacation), and the warm, dry weather. All the girls were so pretty with their tans and radical hair 'dos, and I had to resist the urge to hit on the half a dozen obvious lesbians I saw standing around the pick-up area. Yep, I was newly arrived in California, and I was ready to go back on the market.

I love palm trees. They always make me feel like I'm on vacation, even if I live there.

After nabbing a burrito (a must-have the second you arrive in California!), I made my way to the Avis counter to meet up with the rest of the Team Type One (TT1) and Team Type Two (TT2) early arrivals. I'll refrain from using anybody's names, although the personal details of each rider and crew member will make them immediately identifiable to anyone who was there (and I'll have to live with the consequences of that).

Even with 56 people, everyone was kept busy in San Diego getting ready for the race.

Because I'm quiet, small, a girl, and new at this whole RAAM crewing thing, I thought that I would fly under the radar until I had gotten a handle on how things worked around here. I was wrong. By the time everyone else arrived the next day, I'd already found myself forced into the inner circle of Important People. After picking up the six (count 'em, six!) vans that we would need from the Avis desk, we drove another half an hour to the RV rental place, where I signed an agreement and sat through a 15-minute instructional video on how to operate the largest automobile that you're allowed to drive with a Class D license. The video was mostly about how the generator and the water pump worked, and when they got to the part about backing up (what I'd heard would be the hardest part), I had to tear myself away from the riveting how-to to sign the agreement papers. So I never learned what Suzie and Sam 1980 had to teach me about maneuvering this behemoth at low speeds (this would create problems in the Midwest). As we were leaving the RV place, the Head Honcho tried to hand me the keys to one of the RVs. "Do you want to practice some driving?" he asked.

I was so envious of the beautiful wheels that TT1 got to ride on for free.

"Across all of San Diego County at rush hour?!" I asked. "Are you crazy?! I'll try driving when we get to the hotel and I can practice in a parking lot before I have to get on the freeway!" So I drove one of the vans the 45 minutes to the hotel. After over a year of Lindsey criticizing my driving (defensive driving is considered a weakness in Boston), I was really nervous to drive an unfamiliar vehicle in a barely familiar city, but I soon remembered that Bostonians are some of the least predictable drivers in the country, and felt like a pro working my way through the wide lanes of the San Diego freeways. This was my first of many triumphs in self-confidence over the next week or so. Other driving triumphs included:

• Being added to the list of shuttle drivers because I could find my way over the 27 miles to the airport without a GPS (take that, Lindsey and your criticism of my sense of direction!)
• Parallel parking a sedan in downtown San Diego (take that, Lindsey, and your criticism of my parallel parking skills)
• and parallel parking an RV with minimal help (take that, Lindsey, and your doubt that I could drive an RV at all!)
• Frequent complements on being able to jump right in and drive an RV so well under such stressful conditions (take that, Lindsey and your comment that you thought that I was going to kill everybody!)
• Using my iPhone for navigation when no one else could figure out where we were (take that, Lindsey and your disdain of my iPhone and how frequently I use it for everything!)
  

Stuff, stuff, stuff. I heard that the cost of the whole operation was upward of $100K. All this stuff was just for pre-race prep.

Over the next several days people started to trickle in from all over the country (and beyond). People came from states like Alaska, Alabama, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Colorado. People came from vacations in Milan and Paris. Meetings were called every few hours to discuss everything that had changed since the last meeting. The size of this operation was astounding. Between the two eight-man teams and their crews, there were sixteen riders and forty crew members in our party. For my own part, I woke up early and ran and/or lifted weights every morning before getting my orders for the day. I had hardly worked out at all since Lindsey shit on me a month before, and it felt good to be using my body again.

Right to left: Fearless Companion, me, Abro, and Cock-a-Roach. Abro made me put an (unlit!) cigar in my mouth for the picture in WV (when we'd already become BFFs).

Everyone seemed more or less from one corner of the bike culture or another. The TT1 riders were your typical Cat 1 young guns on the express train to success. The TT2 guys were more of the types you would expect to find mid-pack in a local century, signing up for my Straight Men Over 40 fan club. There were diabetes activists, triathletes, ultraendurance athletes, hipster mechanics, and friends and family who may attend the occasional spin class. The only one who didn't seem to fit in the crowd was a bald Wop from Brooklyn who spoke with an accent like a deep, gravely Joe Pesci. He sometimes called himself "Abro" because as the union rep at the heavy machinery/construction/whatever plant people were always calling him, "Hey, bro!" Abro's kind of bike was a Harley and I first noticed him when he was smoking a cigar in the middle of the patio/de facto bike shop at the non-smoking hotel. Someone must have asked him to smoke it somewhere else, because the first thing I heard him say was, "No, you stand over there if you don't like it." When they told me that he would be my alternate, I cringed.

"Where you from?" he asked me in his thick Brooklyn snarl.

"Boston. How about you?" I asked. I already knew the answer.

"Me? I'm from New York" ("new yoawk"). No shit, I thought. He seemed like he had fallen right out of an episode of the Sopranos, although I guess the Sopranos are from New Jersey, so maybe I don't know everything after all.

"It's you and me, buddy," Abro told me as he put his hand on my tense shoulder. I resisted the urge to shrug his hand off of me. "Now where's dis rig I'm gonna be driving?"

"C'mon, you can come this way so you don't have to put your cigar out," I said in my most professional voice, leading him out a side door from the patio. I led him out to the RVs and he had a look around. Then we went to the front of the building to go in through the front door. "You're going to have to put that out," I said, motioning to the sign that said this was a non-smoking building.

"Nah," he said. "Watch dis." And then he strode right through the lobby, stogie stinkin' up the joint, just like he was supposed to be there. I walked ten feet behind him and pretended not to know him.

I got my shorts wet trying to stick my feet in the water and take a picture, so even though my finger was blocking the lens I decided not to retake the picture.

On Friday (the day before the race), everyone in our entourage went down to the Oceanside pier for pre-race check-in, equipment check, and a meeting. I had now been in California for almost three days and was realizing that while Lindsey would be talking about how she wanted to move west for the rest of her life, here I was actually out here. Not only that, I'd been here before. My world was so much bigger than just her. Let her keep our shabby life in Massachusetts and her own reservations, I was moving on and getting the better of her. I wandered down to the beach and let the waves wash over my feet (and the bottom of my shorts). As corny as it sounds, the symbolism of washing myself off in the Pacific (where she may never get the balls to get on a plane and see) was just what I needed.

The Desert
RAAM begins as we drive through California, Arizona, and Utah and I save our crew from certain death.

These cacti must have been over 400 years old.

I let Abro take the first "pull" so that I wouldn't have to drive in San Diego traffic as my maiden voyage in the RV. All the veteran crew members had told me to try to rest on my first down shift, but I just wanted to watch San Diego go by. Watching even the backwater, inland parts of the Greater San Diego Area where no one wants to live gave me a little thrill. It never rains here, and it never gets cold! I thought. Imagine! A world without snow where you can wear flip-flops all year! Then it was the desert, and I just wanted to watch the tumbleweeds go by. I tried to rest, but when we reached our first transition point in Brawley, CA I had only rested about 20 minutes, the rest of the time I'd had my nose pressed against the window snapping pictures.

We stopped at a Von's supermarket, and I could hardly contain my excitement. "THEY HAVE A STARBUCKS!!!" I squealed, grabbing the hand of the nearest crewmember and sprinting toward the building. I had introduced Lindsey to Starbucks, and it had become "our place." Although I think they give the best caffeine buzz in the world, I hadn't had the heart to walk into our neighborhood Starbucks since The Incident. But here in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Starbucks was anyone's game, and I needed a venti iced coffee to get me through my first overnight drive.

Arizona Desert.

The racers had left Oceanside at about 2 in the afternoon, and as the sun was setting around 8:30, we saw the first TT1 racer come through. This would be the last we would see of TT1, which would go on to win the race over 2 days ahead of us. Our guys were more about awareness than competition anyway. Here's how our teams' strategies worked:

The transition from beach to desert in southern California

The eight-man team was broken into two four-man shifts. At any given time, only one rider was on the road, with the other three men in a van leap-frogging up the road. The van would stop about 15 minutes up the road, and the next rider would get out and wait for the last guy to reach him, at which point Guy #1 would load his bike on the rack and get in the van while Guy #2 hauled ass down the road for 15 minutes. They would cycle through, riding about 15 minutes per hour for 8 to 12 hours until they reached a transition point where a "fresh" 4-man squad was waiting for them. In the RVs our job was to feed breakfast to the riders coming on, feed dinner to the riders coming off, clean up while they showered, and let them sleep as we drove to the next transition point.

The Mojave Desert, below sea level.

Once the riders were showered and tucked into bed it became my turn to drive the RV. Our team leader, a control freak (read: "megalomaniac") who didn't know how to relax and called herself Mama Bear insisted that we stay on the race route rather than taking the freeway from transition point to transition point. This meant that although the RVs had no obligation to stay on the RAAM route, we were still on the same 2-lane road as regular traffic, racer vans, follow vehicles, bicycles, and other RVs. On top of all that, every time we stopped for gas or a bathroom break, we had to pass teams that we'd already passed before, amplifying the number of risky passes we needed to make by merging into the oncoming traffic lane. This road was not made for so much traffic, let alone so much traffic moving anywhere from 15 to 65 mph. I was bringing up the caboose of our crew caravan consisting of the racer RV, the utility van, and my crew RV under strict instructions to "just follow."

Somewhere between Arizona and California.

We saw a sign that said "Dips," and then dove into a series of 50' rollers that were so uniform they seemed like an ammusement park ride. The front RV began to pass a rider, and the van and I followed behind him as we were told. However, when the first RV pulled back into the right lane, its tail lights were replaced by the headlights of an oncoming semi, only about 1.5 football fields away. The 18-wheeler must have been hidden in a "dip" when we moved over, then hidden behind the first RV for the next several seconds, and now was barreling at me at about 65 mph. Time slowed down, my parasympathetic nervous system kicked in, and I drove based on instinct. To my right was a rider and his follow van, so I couldn't move back into my lane. I couldn't slam on the brakes, because there wasn't time for the rider to get out of my way before I had a head-on collision with the truck. In some unconscious part of my brain I realized that I was going to have to choose between killing the 9 people in my RV plus the truck driver in a head-on collision, or run over the rider next to me. It was an unthinkable position. All I remember saying was a forced, "Oh shit!" I gunned the engine to try to overtake the rider before the semi closed the gap, but the RV was a slug. I must have been only about 10 yards from the semi when I judged that my ass might be beyond the follow van next to me, and I tucked in close to the rider. My navigator, my fearless companion for the rest of the trip said he could have reached out his window and bopped the rider on the head, the semi was about as close on my side of the road. The follow car honked at me for cutting him off, but I didn't care. For a frightening second, me, the rider and the semi were three-abrest on the shoulderless road, but none of the vehicles touched. Once we were safely in the right lane again and the rider safely behind us, my phone rang. "Is everyone alright?!" Mama Bear asked. Yes, against all odds, everyone was alright.

Arizona Desert.

For the next hour I was shaking as the gravity of what could have happened sunk in with me and my fearless companion. "I didn't see him either until the other RV pulled over," Fearless Companion assured me. "You didn't do anything wrong. He shouldn't have tried to pass over a double yellow line."

"Fearless Companion, I could have killed everyone in this RV. I could have killed another rider." All I could picture was the authorities calling the families of all 9 other people in my RV. Then I remembered that I'd put Lindsey as my emergency contact. I wondered if I'd killed everyone, would anyone piece together that there had been nothing I could do?

"That was a nice piece of driving," Tree Hugger in a Skirt (a name given to him by Abro) said to me at the next gas stop. Tree Hugger in a Skirt was a bike mechanic from Louisville who preferred to wear kilts and Vibram 5 Fingers over more socially-acceptable attire. He'd been driving the lead RV. "If you hadn't been a cyclist, you never would have had the instict to accelerate and stick your nose into a tight place and that situation could have been much, much worse." I didn't want to think about it. For the next 2 days I led an unsuccessful (but popular) campaign (ignored by Mama Bear and her husband, Tree Hugger in a Skirt) to stay off the RAAM course with the RV's and avoid endangering the lives of both riders and crew.

As if to underscore my concerns, the next day the team which had been giving Team Type 1 a run for their money rolled their crew RV and had to drop out of the race. The rumor mill had it that some of the guys had to be airlifted out. Team 4Mil was a team of military riders, and one would assume that the crew was used to driving big vehicles, so it seemed that a bad accident could happen to anyone. For the rest of the trip, people would reassure me for small driving snaffoos by thanking me for saving their lives, but I would still get flashes of our crew members being thrown around a rolling RV or crushed and/or ejected in a head-on collision.

You can see the Grand Canyon off in the distance.

On the second day in the desert we not only stopped at our first Wal*Mart transition station in Prescott, AZ, but we also took our first foray off the prescribed RAAM path. There were warnings in the route book that the roads through the canyons into Cottonwood, AZ were too windy and dangerous for an RV, so they suggested a detour to Flagstaff. One problem though: the suggested detour took us 100 miles out of our way, while there was a shorter route we could have taken on the interstate. I grumbled and groaned along with Abro and his designated navigator, a Mexican-American Badwater finisher from Houston that Abro called "The Cock-a-Roach" about the unnecessary run-around when we could have taken an even shorter route, but when we reached the Grand Canyon at sunset, everyone quit complaining and let their jaws drop to their laps. Abro had never seen the Grand Canyon before, and the rest of us were no less impressed with our fantastic luck as we passed through the red canyons of the Colorado river valley. That night we stopped at a gas station in the middle of the Navajo reservation where I tried fry bread for the first time (something I'd been wanting to try since I fell in love with a Native American Indian girl in college).

Pictures really don't do justice to passing the Grand Canyon at sunset, even if you don't make it into the National Park. Believe me, it was breathtaking.

If there was one thing that they told us in all those pre-race TT1/TT2 meetings and the RAAM pre-race briefing in San Diego, it was: Don't Pee on the Indian Reservations!
We could all understand it: Native Americans revere their land (and how could you not if you live in a beautiful place like this!), and they don't take well to the White Man coming through and pissing on it. On my second driving shift, the route book said that in the middle of the reservation we would be coming across an all-night Wal*Mart (Wally World No. 2) that was "always open." We needed some diabetic supplies from the pharmacy, so we followed the route book instructions to find the Wal*Mart very much closed at 3 am with about half a dozen locals sitting on a bench outside, giving us the evil eye of small-town folks looking at outsiders. "Are we at a pee break?" asked a follow van driver that I called Waste of Space (the reason for his name will become clear later).

Fearless Companion: "Whenever I get to a Wal*Mart parking lot for the rest of my life, I'll wonder why I have the intense desire to brush my teeth."

"We're at a Wal*Mart," said my Fearless Companion. "But I think they're closed."

Meanwhile Tree Hugger in a Skirt was standing outside our RV door saying something about the gas station up the street.

"Alright, well I can't hold it," said Waste of Space in a contentious tone, lumbering out the door. My fearless companion turned his back to Waste of Space, thinking that he was going to pee between the two parked RV's. I mean, how sacred could a Wal*Mart parking lot be? Then we all piled back into the RV and got ready to drive up the street to a gas station.

"Hold on, hold on! We're missing someone!" The Cock-a-roach said, and I looked over my shoulder to see the cabin door open and a security guard standing right outside it. Oh. Shit. Then Waste of Space came lumbering up with his stupid eye mask still on his forehead and earplugs dangling from a string around his neck. He hadn't peed between the RVs, he'd wandered off and peed on one of those pencil-thin trees that they put in the middle of parking lots.

"Please tell me that you weren't relieving yourself over there," the security guard said to Waste of Space. It was clear that he was offended, but he was handling it as well as you can handle the White Man urinating on your Earth Diety.

"What, man? You've never had to go?" Waste of Space asked in an aloof, unapologetic tone.

"You don't have a bathroom in the RV?" the security guard accused.

"We're not using it, man." (We didn't have time to stop by camp grounds to dump it and didn't want to deal with the stink for a week).

"What about the gas station up the street?"

"They said it was closed."

"Just apologize and please get in the car!" I yelled, totally mortified. I personally have great, great respect for Indian tribes and feel personally guilty for their treatment over the past 400 years. That's what the ex taught me: white guilt.

Eventually we did manage to get out of the Wal*Mart parking lot and to an open bathroom without a penalty or a ticket, but I almost wished that we had gotten one. Waste of Space was officially on my shit list.



That night we crossed from Arizona into Utah and Monument Valley. No sooner had the sun risen, then we came over a ridge and suddenly there were all the striking redrock butes and mesas of Monument Valley framed by the sunrise behind them. When we looked in the rear view mirrors, the rocks behind us were lit by the rising sun. Fearless Companion and I were taking in the breathtaking view with such awe that when Abro and the Cock-a-Roach (who were sleeping right behind the cockpit) heard us, they had to wake up and come sit and watch through the windshield. This is part of my country and I'm stuck living in boring, stuck-up New England, I thought.
"If I could live out here, I'd take up painting again," Abro said, who I was learning had a softer side behind his cigars and tough New York accent.
"Woooooooooooooooooow," we all said as we drove through the valley. We handed around cameras and took pictures out the windows until the light was good enough for them to come out.
"Is that the thing from Close Encounters?" asked Fearless Companion (no photo of that one).


"That sure was something else, huh?" Fearless Companion asked Mama Bear when we stopped at a gas station in Mexican Hat, UT, nearly out of Monument Valley.

"I didn't see it, I was asleep," said Mama Bear, dropping her head onto my shoulder. Although few of us had slept a wink since leaving San Diego, all of us felt sorry for her.

The Mountains
Claire gets a taste of poor middle America and accepts the idea of driving 25 mph under the speed limit.

The view from behind the laundromat in Cortez, CO: the foothills of the Rockies from the west.

We only took a short knick out of southeastern Utah before we were into Colorado and the foothills of the Rockies appeared on the horizon. We stopped at a Wal*Mart (Number 3) in Cortez, CO to wait for The Boys to come in. It was already looking like it was going to be a long transition, so Mama Bear asked me if I would go with the Diabetic Posterchild to do some laundry. Diabetic Posterchild is Type 1 and has been involved in RAAM since before TT2's inception. He is an ultraendurance athlete who works for the Alaska tourism board showing tourists from the Lower 48 all the natural highs that Alaska has to offer. Posterchild was also Mama Bear's right-hand man in the utility van that was quickly being taken over by junk food wrappers and cookie crumbs (Mama Bear is apparently a stress eater).

Interesting hair in the Pizza Hut in Cortez, CO

When I saw that the laundromat was only a few doors down from a Pizza Hut, I had to take advantage of the first wash cycle to get a hot meal. I tried to convince Posterchild to get something with me, but when he explained that all the fat in pizza can really mess with the rest of the carbs and really mess with his glucose/insulin levels for the rest of the day, I kind of lost my enthusiasm for pizza. "Something about the fat in pizza makes it way more dangerous for diabetics than french fries or doughnuts." Really? But tomato sauce is a vegetable and cheese is high in calcium and protein! the fat girl in me begged. So I went to Pizza Hut by myself and sat in the restaurant while one obese family after another paraded by the buffet for their Monday lunch. I didn't know what bothered me more, that all the people in this town were so overweight, or that so many of them weren't working on a Monday afternoon, freeing them up to gorge themselves on the all-you-can-eat pizza. Cortez kind of seemed like a place that had been left behind. Posterchild later explained to me that one town over from Cortez is one of the last remaining one-room schoolhouses in the country, but the schoolhouse is losing students every year to the Cortez public school system and the "big city." That threw the strip of KFC's, Pizza Huts, and Burger Kings into a whole new light for me. I'm all for expanding people's horizons in middle America, but is Pizza Hut and Wal*Mart really the best way to do it? In all the Wal*Marts we passed through (of which there were about a dozen), it seemed like the Wal*Mart had replaced Main Street, and the convenience of having knock-offs of the same fashions that rich kids in LA are wearing didn't seem quite so quaint anymore.

Approaching the Continental Divide the RVs could barely maintain 30 mph.

Out of Cortez Abro drove us over the continental divide. The breathtaking views certainly weren't holding back. One of the riders was a guy I'll call Guinnie (sorry, can't think of anything better) who came from the same Brooklyn/Sicilian roots as Abro and had invited Abro to crew the ride. Guinnie had never really been outside the North East before, and he was the one rider who really, really seemed to be loving life the farther into the trip we went. As the other riders got more tired and grouchy, Guinnie remained enchanted even as we left the mountains of Colorado and dropped into the monotonous prairies of Kansas. Every time he got off the bike, and every time we stopped for a pee break in a new god-foresaken town, Guinnie was positively glowing. "I don't want it to end!" he told me in a USDA parking lot in some hellhole in Kansas after a hard, hot day in the planes. Just before we reached the Continental Divide, I remember Guinnie stepping out of the Racers' RV and his eyes flashing as he looked above the outhouse at the mountains bigger than anything he'd ever seen in New York. "This is awesome, just awesome," he kept saying. It gave me a warm feeling to watch him.

Coming through the Rockies, I wore out the transmission brake... or thought I was going to...

Waste of Space, on the other hand, stepped out of the RV and said in an annoyed voice, "Where are the bathrooms?" He was from Colorado and was decidedly nonplussed by the 14,000 foot mountain we were climbing.

"Right in front of you, bro," said Abro. And they were, only 25 yards directly in front of the door. But Waste of Space had only stepped out, looked up, and been annoyed not to see what he wanted right in front of his face.

That night I tried to get some sleep at the transition point. I'd been so enthused by the scenery so far that I'd hardly slept for going on three nights. I had another overnight drive ahead of me, and I really, really needed some sleep. The least bumpy place to sleep in the RV was the bay right above the cockpit where two people could fit. Once we hit the transition point at a Texaco station on the side of the mountain, I climbed up into the bay and passed out next to one of the navigators who had been in a similar sleep-deprived state. We'd only been sleeping about 45 minutes when Mama Bear came in to wake us up. "You need to make room for Oompa Loompa (I call him that because he's from Hershey, PA) and Waste of Space. They haven't gotten any sleep since we left."

It was true, Oompa Loompa had been working his ass off in the racer van and had hardly slept in three days, but I'd also only had about 5 hours' sleep in three days. Waste of Space, on the other hand, had walked right into the RV after each one of his shifts and promptly passed out until the last possible moment before he had to get behind the wheel again. One night I'd even tried to get him to move over in the double bed in the back so that I could have room to sleep, and he hadn't even taken his earplugs out when I shook him. "Hey, man, could you move over?" I'd asked, and he just snored in my face. The only time he seemed to wake up during his sleep time was to pee on Indian reservations. If anyone on this crew was well rested, it was Waste of Space. Oompa Loompa apologized for ousting me, but I explained that I didn't begrudge him the loss of sleep. On top of all that, that night Waste of Space's navigator, Dixie (a techie from Georgia) had refused to work with him anymore. At the next transition Waste of Space got up to pee, and then climbed back into bed while someone else worked a double so that he could be moved to another shift. "You're going back to bed?!" I asked incredulously. He just shut the curtain to sleep his twelfth hour straight while I got woken up yet again to attend a meeting in a Safeway parking lot in Trinidad, CO about the importance of washing your hands. Some racers and crew members had gotten a stomach bug, and Mama Bear wanted to stress the importance of washing your hands and wearing gloves when preparing food.

"I woke up for this?!" I grumbled as I made my way back to the RV where I never got any more sleep that day. At least there was a Starbucks at that stop.


It fell to me to bring us out of the mountains, and my slug of an RV had a hell of a time getting over the final passes out of the Rockies. At one point, we were climbing at about 25 mph and gaining on the RV of a Brazilian team climbing ahead of us. The Brazilians pulled over to let us pass, and now it was my turn to build up a train of impatient traffic behind me. I noticed that one of the vehicles was a RAAM Official vehicle. "Do I pull over illegally and let them pass, or do I just keep driving?" I asked my Fearless Companion. We'd already received a warning on the first night for not letting traffic pass. It was like driving with a cop behind me. I got out of hot water when the RAAM van passed illegally over a double yellow line and tore ass up the road.

The Midwest
Claire talks to other crew members about being a big ol' homo, sees small town USA and begins to finally get some sleep... And ends up denting the RV.

Once we came down out of the mountains, we had several miles of Colorado prairie to pass through before hitting hardcore planes in Kansas. It was my turn to drive through the night to the next stop in Ulysses, KS. The road had no hills, no turns, no curves, and no lights. At one point we passed a sign for a "Scenic Overlook" and wondered what could possibly be hidden in the inky blackness other than more fields. With no movement in either my arms or my feet, I had to bite my tongue to keep awake, even though my Fearless Companion was telling me entertaining stories about marathon mishaps. Before long Treehugger in a Skirt came over the radio saying that Mama Bear needed Fearless Companion to take over driving the utility van. "I don't think Claire's going to make it without company," my Fearless Companion told Treehugger in a Skirt. That's how I inherited the Racer RV's navigator, Milwaukee's Best as a companion.

When we first pulled into Yates Center, Kansas we had to stop for a 9-year-old boy driving a rider mower down the street. Later, we found this on a gas station bulletin board and we knew why.

Milwaukee's Best was a woman in her 40's who had gone to high school with one of the racers and talked like the woman in Fargo. She was too nice to be critical of the uptight racer van crew, but she was cool. We bonded over not wanting kids, and how people treat you like a monster if you're a woman of childbearing age who doesn't want snot factories. "I mean, it's not like I'm going to have an accident or something..." I said.

"I never would have thought that you were a..." she trailed off, "lesbian," she whispered as if it were a dirty word. "I didn't suspect anything until you said that thing to Treehugger in a Skirt about having been on dates with people in skirts (but never with a mustache). You seem like someone who's really secure in who she is."

"Ha!" I said. "If only you knew what I've been like in the past 3 months, I have no idea who I am. I just don't think that my sexual orientation has much to do with who I am." Still, I don't think that I can ever thank her enough for what she said. I hadn't felt like much of a functional human being in months, and it was only since this trip started that I was starting to remember what the Old Claire was like. I had noticed that most of the stories I'd been telling were stories that Lindsey hadn't figured into at all, and I'd noticed that just the traits that Lindsey said I sucked at (driving, organization, knowing how to talk to strangers, a sense of direction, my unhealthy attachment to my iPhone) were things that were valued on this trip. On top of that, I'd been worried about how my sexual orientation might be taken in a group that said a prayer together before we left San Diego, but several people who had never been close to a real, live homo before (and had probably voted for Bush, twice) went out of their way to tell me that they weren't scared of a queer like me (which probably means they were, but they were making an effort...). It kind of gave me a warm feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"What does your boyfriend think of you doing this trip?" Abro asked me one day.

"I don't have a boyfriend," I said.

"Now I don't believe that. A girl like you, there's no way you don't have someone at home missing you."

"My girlfriend just dumped me," I said.

"Well she's the stupidest person on earth," he said, not missing a beat. This is a man who had never tried Starbucks, received a text message, or used a GPS before this trip.

Once Abro took over the driving again the next morning, the view looked like it was a ten second video on loop: tall grass, tall grass, bush, grain silo, tall grass, tall grass, telephone pole, grain silo, repeat. There was nothing to watch, there were no major turns in the road, and for the first time I was able to fall asleep in the moving RV. I slept through the entire drive into Yates Center, KS; a town of about 1,200 people that seemed like it could be a town of 200 people. Downtown was about the length of my house's lot in MA with two gas stations, a grocery store, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, and a Mexican restaurant.

I suspect there was a little inbreeding going on in Yates Center based on our Pizza Hut experience. Half a dozen of us went to The Hut, where we were waited on by a waiter with Downs syndrome (more power to him for finding a job, but it would have been nice if he could have taken more than one drink order at a time). All the pizza on the buffet table had some form of pig carcas on it, so I asked our waiter if they could put a cheese pizza on the buffet table. "I could ask them to make a cheese pizza..." he said.

"Yeah, why don't you do that, please?" I asked. He didn't want to bother them.

Twenty minutes later, no one had gotten their order but Abro, who had gotten his appetizer after the main course, and had already and finished both. Our retarded waiter and the 400-pound cook were nowhere to be found, leaving only a confused-looking teenaged cashier. "Hey, listen man, we've gotta go get some stuff done, and we're just wondering how long till our food is ready," asked the Cock-a-roach.

"Dude, I'm so sorry! What did you order?" asked the lost teen.

"I had the XYZ pizza, and he had the ABC pizza," the Cock-a-roach explained.

"Wait, the what?"

Cock-a-Roach repeated the order and the lost teen went back into the kitchen. "Listen, I'm sorry, man, but I don't know where those orders are," he said when he came back.

"Well can we order again?" suggested Chicken Legs, a 60-year-old electrician/nurse/Peter Pan-type who had a congenital bone condition that prevented his calves from growing thicker than my little finger.

"Oh yeah! Sure!" he said, like this was a new concept, like we were going to walk out without our food and go somewhere else in this one-horse, four-pizza-shop town. He took the order, repeated it back wrong, took it again, and repeated it back wrong.

"Why don't you write it down, just in case?" I suggested.

Instead he just said, "Coming right up!" and went back to the kitchen and frantically started looking around on the receipts for some written record of our orders. I still handn't had a chance to ask for my cheese pizza on the buffet for the umpteenth time, so I went (back) up to the counter to ask for it again.

"Hey, what are those two personal pizzas and cheese pizza that are sitting in the oven?" I asked. "Do you think that maybe that's our order?"

"What did you order?" he asked. Didn't you just take our order 30 seconds ago? I thought.

"Well that looks like a pepper, onion, and mushroom pizza, and I don't know what a Super Supreme pizza is, but could it be something with sausage, peperoni, and ham? And maybe that's that cheese pizza I've been looking for on the buffet table?"

"Oh wow! Yeah!"

A few minutes later the waitor with Downs syndrome came out to apologize. "I'm sorry guys. I hadn't eatten all day and I wasn't feeling well."

"It's okay," said Chicken Legs. "And you know what? I'm going to make it better for you. Because my pizza didn't have as much tomato on it as I like, I'm just going to have a few pieces from the buffet. Okay? So we're all good."

"Okay!" said the waitor, like he'd just fixed a huge problem, and Chicken Legs got some free pizza out of the deal.

Found this behind an autobody shop in Kansas. I think it says, "Fozzy Bear says, 'I take it in the ass!'".

Those who didn't go to Pizza Hut for lunch went to the other fine dining establishment in town: Subway. They came back to the RV telling a story of the town cop who had come in and ordered a sandwich when his talking broach went off. Suddenly the officer ran out of the building without paying and was away up the road with his lights flashing and siren blaring before you could blink. "I hope there wasn't an accident," Fearless Companion mused.

It turned out that there had been an accident. A driver had veered into the rider for a 4-man Spanish team, putting him in critical condition (they were investigating whether the driver was texting). This news really saddened me, not only because I feel strongly attached to Spain. I'd met the team at the first time station, and admired their pluck. They were pulling off this whole RAAM ordeal with only two crew members (typical stingy Spanish to be on a budget). They had been excited to meet someone in the middle of the desert in California who spoke their funny, lispy Spanish and they were as interested to find out what I thought of their country as I was to find out what they thought of mine. I thought of something that my psychotic ex-girlfriend had said about our healthcare system, "How, in the richest country in the world, can you get sick and they'll let you die if you don't have the money to pay? That only happens in third world countries!" I wondered whether this poor Spanish rider would get the care he needed out here in rural Kansas on his socialist health plan.

The crew in Kansas waiting for the riders to come in. The shade didn't do much to combat the humidity.

Kansas was hot. It was about 90 degrees out, and we'd hit humidity for the first time on our trip. The crew just sat under a tree wilting and making idle conversation until the racers came in. I had to call my mother, so I started walking down a residential street as I talked to her. I was surprised at how many houses were on this street, one cute and quaint, the next one looking like a meth lab. I walked for about 10 blocks chatting before I decided that maybe I should start walking back. Maybe my decision to turn around had something to do with the thunder. Suddenly, right before I was about to turn around anyway, the skies opened up. Within 2 blocks I was soaked to the skin, and my phone was blowing up. Everyone wanted to know where I was and whether I had saught shelter, but because I have an iPhone with a touch screen based on conductivity (you need to slide an icon to answer a call), the screen shorted out in the rain. I sprinted up to the RVs just as they were pulling away. Since the rain had washed the greasy old sweat sludge off my skin, I counted it as a shower.

Kansas looked something like this.... for the whole day!

I slept all the way through the halfway point in the race at the border between Kansas and Missori. While I was sleeping, the race was heating up for the riders. One team that had been closing in on us since the mountains finally caught us, and we were leap-frogging the whole way across the prairies. The other team began using tactics against us, parking their support vans at the side of the road so that our guys would spend themselves sprinting to it, or slow down thinking they were done. Finally our cars had to figure out a system to signal the riders (a code of flashlight waving and high beams) so that the other team couldn't fool us into slowing down anymore. We had also gone through a very stressful transition in the mountains of Colorado in order to not incur a penalty for improper night transitions, only to see the other team do a blatantly illegal transition. We finished Kansas a minute or two ahead of them, but they slowly started to pull ahead across the rest of the Midwest.

I woke up as we were pulling into a Wal*Mart parking lot in Washington, MO. Wal*Marts were the "Taj Mahals of parking lots" (according to Abro) because they offered a wide variety of food options, a Subway, and 24-hour open bathrooms. However, the Wal*Mart was about a quarter of a mile off the race route, so Mama Bear made the "executive decision" to have us camp out at the official timing station set up outside a bike shop and laundromat. (For Mama Bear, "executive decision" was code for pulling rank and going against all reason and popular opinion.) The only food nearby was an ice cream place that opened several hours after we'd arrived, but when it's 90 degrees out and humid, there are worse food options than an ice cream place. Fearless Companion and I bought ourselves sundaes and raced to eat them before they melted. With my sundae already mostly soup, we returned to the RV and I licked some caramel off my spoon, moaned, and said to Posterchild, "God, I'm so glad I'm not diabetic right now!"

"Yeah, well you'll regret it later," he warned me. I did wind up regretting having ice cream for lunch, but not that much... I'd given up on trying to eat healthy on the road.

Best view of the St. Louis Arch.

I drove the next leg of the journey through Saint Louis traffic at midday on a weekday. Driving the RV through congested urban freeways was stressful (especially when I had to slam on my brakes a few times, throwing everything out of the cabinets in the RV), but it was comforting to see that we were back in civilization for what felt like the first time since California. Even though we didn't stop at any of the Starbucks that I spotted along the side of the road, it made me feel better to know that they were there for me should I need them. I had switched from real Starbucks to the canned Double Shots that tasted like melted coffee ice cream but were available at Wal*Mart and gas stations everywhere. We hardly noticed when we crossed the Mississippi River, and suddenly we were in Illinois. Suddenly there were crosses sticking up everywhere like giant scarecrows to ward off athiests.

Abro's phone rang and I heard him talking to Guinnie who sometimes called ahead to make lunch requests. "What the fuck country do you think you're in, man? You're in Illinois." (He pronounced the 's' on the end of 'Illinois.') "Where you think we're gonna find a fucking Jewish bagel shop in Illinois. Get back to your biking, you're having macaroni & cheese for dinner!"

Illinois may not have had Jewish bagels, but they had the Buckingham Palace, the Alhambra, or the Ritz of parking lots. We stayed at an enormous high school with sprawling athletic fields, a Mexican restaurant around the corner, and best of all: tepid SHOWERS! Since we would be waiting for a long time at this transition point, I pulled out my workout clothes and went for a run on the high school's state-of-the-art track. It was about 85 degrees out at 7 at night, but it felt good to move my body and sweat out all the shit I'd been feeding myself at gas stations and Wal*Marts across the west. I hit the (gang) showers at the same time as a 4-woman lesbian team from Santa Barbara. I'd tried to talk to them in Kansas just to get away from the sausage party in my crew (and because they looked hott from across the parking lot), but I got that vibe from them that I get whenever I go to a gay bar: 'Who brought the straight girl?' They continued to give me the cold shoulder in the showers, giving me short answers to my questions about how their team was doing. When I saw them naked, I realized that they weren't half as hot as they'd looked from across the parking lot. I'm way hotter than these chicks, I thought. Why, if only I actually looked like a lesbian, I may even be able to get a date.

Zoom in, oh yes, that's a lady in a fat people's kart driving in traffic to get out of the Wal*Mart parking lot.

So when we stopped at the next stop, a Wal*Mart/Kohl's combo somewhere in Indiana the next morning, I decided to take advantage of the cheap discount stores and do some clothes shopping. I went right to the boys' department and got myself a pair of khaki cargo shorts (the pair of girl shorts that I'd been wearing since the rain

storm in KS just didn't have enough pocket space), a pair of those ugly plaid shorts that I hate so much but are so trendy right now, and a pair of camouflaged cargo shorts (I chose the grey cammies so that I could blend in with my natural habitat: the Wal*Mart parking lot). I then went over to Kohl's and found a very gay-looking Tony Hawk hat that not only fit my freakishly small head and had room for my pony tail, but it also had the added benefit of hiding my filthy hair.

The roads outside Cincinnati were so rural that the trees were even growning out of the steeples.

We finally reached Ohio, a state that felt like home because it was only a day's drive away from Boston. When I saw that we'd be coming near Cincinnati, I'd hoped to meet up with Judi. However, when we pulled into tiny Leesburg (a town that the 2000 census listed as only covering 0.8 sq miles), after driving over an hour on country roads, I figured that a reunion was pretty unlikely. Ahead of me, Treehugger in a Skirt pulled into a gas station. "What the hell is he doing? Are we low on gas?" Fearless Companion asked.

"No. Do you think that this is where we're stopping?" I wondered.

"It isn't big enough for two RVs. Maybe he just has to pee?"

"But we're already here. Why not just pee wherever we're going to stop?"

"Well it says in the route book that there are limited services around here, maybe he's trying to fill up?"

From a BP station: "You are responsible for spills."

Through this whole exchange I'd been waffling with the steering wheel, trying to decide where to park. Finally I made a last-minute decision and pulled up to a pump. I heard a Cruuuuuuuunch! and my blood froze. I'd forgotten to check my mirrors, and I'd forgotten that on this stupid giant RV the rear wheels don't follow the same path as the front wheels. I saw Treehugger in a Skirt turn around to see me stuck on a cow catcher at the end of the pump island, toss up his keys in a 'told you so,' gesture, and walk into the gas station. Then everyone in my RV was awake yelling orders at me. "Don't move!" "Pull forward!" "Cut the wheel this way!" "Cut the wheel that way!" "Hold on, I'll jump out and direct you!"

"Get out and let Abro get you out of this spot," the Cock-a-roach suggested. It was the best piece of advice I'd had all day. The last thing I needed was for people to think I was even more incompetent than they already did. Every time a banana fell off the counters in the RV, people would shout, "Claire must be driving!" Lots of people comforted me, telling me that an RV was a hard vehicle to drive and that I'd been doing a great job, that professional truck drivers do things like this all the time, but I still felt terrible. The worst part was that after Treehugger in a Skirt came out of the bathroom, we pulled out all of our vehicles and parked at a church across the street. I never even HAD to go into that gas station, really.

Hillbilly Country
As the trip winds down, Claire begins to dread going home, the RV has its own challenges getting over the Appalachians, and there is a race for non-DFL.

The view of the mountains from my hike. In the foreground was a construction site where hillbillys were driving their four-wheelers.

After Kansas, pretty much everything's a blur in my memory. I drove a double through West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In West Virginia we stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere (but isn't everywhere the middle of nowhere in West Virginia? You have to zoom in pretty close for the state capitol to even show up on Google Maps), and I went right to sleep. What I slept through was probably the biggest drama our crew saw for the whole trip. Posterchild had been sleeping in the utility van, and Mama Bear hadn't wanted to wake him up. Eventually she did try to wake him to prepare for the racers' arrival, poking him and saying, "Posterchild, it's almost time to go." Posterchild didn't wake up. Half an hour later she tried harder, shaking him. That's when she noticed that he was convulsing. He wouldn't wake up. She checked the glucose monitor on his wasteband, and his glucose was below 30 (roughly 80 is the clinically-accepted minimum). They fed him a gluco shot (something like a gel), and then gave him an injection when he still wouldn't wake up. After that they called the paramedics. As luck would have it, both EMTs were Type 1 diabetic, and Posterchild was right as rain in no time without having to go to the hospital. Still, everyone was a little freaked out. Posterchild is not only single, he lives in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. What could have happened if his glucose had dropped on a Friday night at home? No one would have missed him until Monday...

In Maryland we stopped at a supermarket parking lot tucked in at the foot of a wooded hill. Our transitions were getting longer and longer as the racers lost interest in racing and started just coasting through their pulls. I noticed that there was a trailhead in the corner of the parking lot and decided to go for a hike by myself. I needed the time alone to think.

The trailhead in the parking lot

Ever since we'd reached Missori and the terrain started looking like home, my spirits had started to sink. Soon I was going to have to go home and face the music. Further worrying me was that my rockstar third housemate had told me that no, she hadn't had anyone over since I left, but warned me not to hope for any reconciliation with Lindsey before I left, that it was likely she was going to just pretend I didn't exist. On this trip I had gone back to being "The Old Claire" that I'd thought I'd lost. I had felt competent and strong for the first time in months. I was sure that moving away would be the best thing for me and I'd realized that as long as I was with Lindsey, I was never going to move forward in my life because she talks herself out of everything she's ever wanted to do in her life. But still, I missed her terribly... Everything cool that I'd seen and done, I wished I could share with her. I wished that she could see how well I was doing now. I was afraid to go home and get the cold shoulder again. All anyone else was thinking about was finally getting home to sleep in a real bed, but the only reason that I wanted the trip to be over was that I'd had a growing desire to drink ever since we crossed the Mississippi.

There are big bugs in the south.

I was so eager to get going that I had ants in my pants through my last drive into Gettysburg, PA. I was so worked up that I caught another cow catcher in exactly the same spot at the next gas station and wanted to throw myself under the wheels of the RV. This is what happens when I get drinking on the brain: I get hasty and sloppy. I threw the car in park, had someone else wake up Abro, and started pacing circles in the far corner of the parking lot. Finally, Milwaukee's Best drew up the courage to come over and talk me down and I got back behind the wheel.

We pulled into the final Wal*Mart on our trip right outside Gettysburg and Fearless Companion, the Cock-a-Roach, and I went in looking for beer for the next morning, since it looked like the boys would be finishing in that brief time of day when liquor stores and bars are closed. Much to our dismay, Pennsylvania is one of those states that doesn't sell beer in grocery stores. Disappointed, I went to bed and didn't wake up until we were pulling into the hotel in Annapolis.

In Hillbilly country the race started to heat up again. The team that was in last place (a team that we'd wondered whether they were going to hit the Mississippi River in time for the time cut-off) started to close in on us. Our guys were tired, and had started to flag noticeably. Through the last two transitions we were in a bike race again, and it looked like it was going to come down to mere minutes after 3000 miles of racing. Our guys beat the other team into the finish line by 2 minutes, logging the same average time (down to the hundreth of a mile per hour) that the other team registered. I missed the finishing ceremony because of an early flight, but Fearless Companion told me that hearing our boys being interviewed at the finish gave him chills.

Post-Race

Everything wraps up too quickly, Claire comes home, there is more somber news, and Claire gets some nookie.

We arrived in Annapolis at the same moment that my original flight was scheduled to leave Baltimore. I'd bought a new ticket in West Virginia, but after bussing everyone to the finish line, they told me, the Cock-a-Roach, and Waste of Space that we'd have to get back in the car immediately so we wouldn't miss our flights. I'd been looking forward to partying with the people I'd been sleeping next to in musical beds for the past 7 and a half days, but in the end I only got to share two beers in the airport with the Cock-a-Roach. RAAM had been one of the greatest experiences of my life, on par with the AIDS ride and my trip through France. I was so sorry that I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to all my new friends, but at the same time I was relieved because I didn't know how I would find the words to thank them. I definitely planned on being there next year.

On the hour flight home I had enough time to order a water before I passed out into a deep, deep sleep. If there was one thing I'd learned from this trip it was how to sleep anywhere. My water was still sitting on the tray table of my neighbor when the flight attendent came by to tell us to put our tray tables up.

The day after I returned I got a sad e-mail. One of the Team Type 1 crew members had died of an apparent heart attack the night before. Additionally, he was from the Boston area. I didn't remember the guy (there were, after all, over 20 TT1 guys that I'd only had a chance to meet in the hotel). His daughter had been my age and had also been on the TT1 crew, and I remembered her smile and upbeat, low-key attitude. My heart broke for her and their whole family. I couldn't imagine someone I loved getting through an experience like RAAM only to pass away in his sleep a few days later. The message that struck me about RAAM was that it's a great, big country and you should get out there and do whatever you can while you can, because you never know when someone's going to flip an RV, run you over, your glucose is going to suddenly drop in your sleep, or when the Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to tell you that it's your time.

Back at home, Lindsey was being nice to me. In fact, she was doing everything that I'd prayed (yes, prayed) for. I was more relaxed and upbeat from two weeks of experiences that seemed pre-planned to remind me of who I was, and she had had two weeks away from me. She struck up a conversation, and we ended up kissing. She appologized for intentionally hurting me, for lying to me, and for fucking things up because she didn't know how to deal. She admitted that there had never been anyone else (except for the skank, which had been short-lived), and that although she'd tried, she couldn't bring herself to sleep with anybody else. We made love. It was fucked-up, but the way our relationship has worked, I couldn't imagine a better way to say goodbye. She's finally getting happy in a way that I always tried and failed to let her do, and I'm going through with what she always held me back from. But it's so, so very sad to be leaving her all the same.

"You're so much better now that you're not drinking," she told me between kisses.

I didn't tell her that I'd already had four beers that night while writing up this post. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.