The Last State Is The Best - Chapter 1 free porn video

Chapter 1 - On the Virgin River Lois looked around her room one final time before checking out of the motel in Cedar City, Utah. She tried to contain her excitement as she made sure she had not left anything behind. Not that she had brought that much in with her. Cedar City was just a place to stop for the night: about halfway between Pocatello and Las Vegas. Originally she had planned on going straight from Pocatello to Vegas. With the economy so bad, the MGM properties were running a big promotion. But the room rates were still much higher on Friday and Saturday night, and a straight run from Idaho would have put her in Vegas on Saturday. With all the expenses that Lois had recently, she had to watch her budget. Vegas wasn't all that important to Lois anyway. She didn't gamble. It had interested her at one time, until she understood that eventually the house wins. Winners don't gamble. They might take risks and they might not always pay off, but winners find ways to get the odds in their favor and maximize the risk-reward ratio. Lois decided right then and there that she wanted to be a winner, not a sucker. Oh, she played some poker in college. But those were penny-ante games, more of a social event between friends than gambling. The hard part was the stinky cigars that some of the guys smoked when they played. Smoking was another vice that didn't tempt Lois. Her eyes were opened when she cleaned a local bank at night, the summer before her senior year in high school. In the lobby were these big cylinders filled with sand. The iron grating on the top of them caught the cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and such that the customers threw in there when they reached the teller window. Her job was to pick up that iron grate and dump the contents into the big trash can she dragged through the lobby. One night, the grate slipped out of her fingers and back onto the sand. She watched a plume rise up from the cylinder, looking just like the smoke that came from her mother's Newport cigarettes. Then she watched it settle back down and realized that it was ash. Smoking would put ash into her lungs. She wanted her lungs healthy, she decided. The reason for her excitement, the event that Lois was anticipating that day, would take place the moment she crossed the border from Arizona into Nevada. Lois had been in the other 49 states at least once. Until that summer, she had been in 42 of them, mostly from her college days with a team or on business travel. Alaska and Hawaii had been covered by cruises. But somehow, her travels never took her to the Rocky Mountain States. A business conference in Phoenix and some vacation time afterward provided the opportunity. Counterclockwise, one by one the states were added to the list. Nevada would be number fifty. Having finished checking out, Lois performed a familiar traveling ritual. She took out the folders that contained the AAA Triptiks that she had printed out prior to leaving home. The one from the previous day's trip was in a folder by itself. She took that one and placed it at the back of the folder with the other Triptiks. Then she took the Triptik from the front of that folder, the one for the Cedar City to Las Vegas leg of the trip, and placed it in the now empty folder. The information for her hotel booking was also attached to the Triptik. This file was very thin, because the trip from Cedar City to Vegas (just like from Pocatello to Cedar City) was a straight shot along Interstate 15. The folder with today's Triptik was placed on the front seat of the rental vehicle. The other folder was put back in a side pocket of Lois's luggage, next to her USA atlas. The atlas was a precaution that Lois rarely had to access during any of her out of area trips. Lois loved maps and she had a pretty good working knowledge of most of the main roads in the United States. She had read maps for years, starting around the same time as she started reading as a preschooler. She knew the streets and subways of New York City long before she entered middle school. And when an uncle from LA sent street maps from his metropolitan area, she devoured them too. Boulevards in LA like Sunset, Olympic, Pico, Whittier and Wilshire were almost as familiar to her as their counterparts in NYC: Bruckner, Francis Lewis, Queens, Empire and Hylan. But it was the USA road atlases that spawned dreams of visiting every state one day. Louis Simmons didn't get packages in the mail very often. And he hadn't sent away for anything. So he was surprised when he came home one day and his mother told him that there was a package for him. Curious, he quickly picked it up and noted the return address: St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He had received something from them around this time each year, but it was usually just a letter sized envelope. The big package came weeks earlier. It contained the brand new road atlas and instruction booklet with the new set of brain teasing directions for this year's table top road rally. He set out to once more traverse North America between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, doing battle with the Old Maltese and any other characters that the rally masters had conjured up to give the hardest clues. Louis felt the weight of the package. There was something more in here than the usual booklet of race results where he would find his name somewhere down in the middle of the pack. Opening it, he found a pewter plaque with his name and place of finish on it. He had made the top 25. This was far better than anything he had ever managed before. He looked for the results and found that after the first three legs of the rally, he had been neck and neck with the eventual winner of the rally. But on the fourth and final leg, he messed up somewhere and fell down to 21st place. Louis went to his room and compared the fourth leg of his instruction book with the official answers he had just received. About halfway through, he groaned. He missed one key instruction because he missed going from the state map to the metropolitan inset map. That meant he made a wrong turn and answered 12 questions wrong because of that one error. And he didn't catch the error because it worked out that eventually he came to an instruction that put him back on course. If it wasn't for that one error, he might have come out of nowhere to win the whole thing. Still, his disappointment was tempered by the fact that he had improved so much from the year before. And there was always next year. Lois smiled to herself, thinking about how she had gotten her first road atlases. They were so much easier to handle than folding and unfolding those glove compartment sized maps that gas stations used to give away. Maybe when she got home, she would look in some box and find that old plaque. She knew she still had it somewhere. She also knew that while the St. Valentine's Day Massacre road rally had been a fun experience, there was only so much you could experience by reading a map. To really live, you had to get out on the road. Less than an hour from Cedar City, Interstate 15 becomes something far beyond what you can imagine by looking at a blue line on a map. As you approach Arizona, a rugged stretch of mountains looms on the horizon. And within 5 miles after crossing over to the Arizona side, you are in the midst of those mountains. You are in Virgin River Gorge. Although the posted signs brought the maximum speed down to 50 mph in some places, cars sped by Lois. After all, being on an Interstate means that you go fast, no matter what the road conditions are. But Lois was in no hurry to leave the gorge. For one thing, she had time to spare. Her check-in at her hotel in Las Vegas was not until 3 PM. With the time zone change adding an hour, she would make it into Vegas easily by 1 o'clock, even with a stop for lunch. And that was even with waiting until the last minute to check out in Cedar City. But more importantly, the scenery in the gorge was breathtaking. Lois had never seen anything like it before, let alone driven through it. She was not great at estimating such things, but it seemed like there were places where the canyon walls rose over a thousand feet above the roadway. And there is one point, just before the end of the gorge, where it feels like you are in one of the old western movies or TV shows. The bad guys are chasing you and it looks like there is no way out. There are steep canyon walls to your left, your right and straight in front of you. And the bad guys are behind you. Suddenly, the road quickly jagged left-right-left and not only did you get past that canyon wall in front of you, but you are also out of the gorge entirely. You've reached Littlefield, Arizona. The terrain is relatively tame here, and the buildings are sparse. Littlefield is indeed a little town. But eight miles later, you hit the first real taste of civilization since St. George, Utah. You've reached the Nevada border. Anyone not aware of the differences in the law would wonder at the seemingly artificial boundary. On the east side of the line, nothing; on the west side, you had a relative multitude of houses, stores, hotels and of course, casinos. Mesquite, Nevada is not Las Vegas. But for people traveling south on Interstate 15, it is the very first opportunity to experience a full range of legalized gambling. Lois surmised that there are enough people coming south along I-15 who are not interested in all the glitz of Las Vegas. They just want to gamble. In the middle of nowhere in the high desert, Mesquite meets their need. With an economy driven by gambling, Mesquite has grown from a tiny community similar to Littlefield, to a fast-growing city of around 15,000 people. The growth has occurred in the past thirty years. For Lois, Mesquite represented something else. She had reached her fiftieth and final state. She considered stopping to find a fitting memorial of the occasion, but had no other need to stop. She wasn't hungry, didn't need gas or use of a rest room. Now that the speed limits had been raised again to numbers far above what Lois knew back east, the Las Vegas metro area was only about an hour away. Lois decided to wait until then to stop. She would get off the Interstate in North Las Vegas, stop at a fast food restaurant, and then drive down Las Vegas Boulevard until she reached The Strip. The remainder of the trip from Mesquite to Las Vegas was anticlimactic. Most of the landscape in between is flat and barren. And so with little of interest except for the music playing on the car radio, Lois soon pulled off the Interstate at the exit she had chosen before she left New York. Google said that there was a Burger King near this exit. But she couldn't find it. So instead, Lois pulled into the parking lot of a Jack in the Box, located at the acute intersection of Cheyenne Ave and Las Vegas Blvd. This particular fast food franchise did not exist back home, but Lois had heard of them. One fast food place was pretty much as good as another. "America's contribution to the world's cuisine," thought Lois, sarcastically. She reset her watch and the clock in the car to Pacific Time. As she had been taught, she took note of her surroundings. The neighborhood was lower middle class. Signs pointed to the nearby Air Force Base. Across the street, cars would occasionally pull into the parking lot of the adult store. Such a place would have interested Louis, but Lois noted the place and frowned. Some of the lingerie there might be interesting, but she had nicer places to buy the same things now, places that were friendly to girls like her. As she walked from the rest room to place her order, she passed a woman who probably was homeless. On the other side of the window from where she sat, a heavily laden shopping cart waited. No doubt it contained whatever earthly possessions were not on her person. As Lois passed her, she was grateful that the woman must have had some way to keep clean. There were many times that Lois had been repulsed by the stench of a homeless person on the streets and in the subways of Manhattan. But as shabby and unkempt as the woman's appearance was, there was no foul odor. Even so, when Lois received her order, she took it to the opposite side of the restaurant and observed. And so they were two people with apparently no place to go. The woman seemed as oblivious to Lois, as Lois was keenly aware of her. The woman was nursing her coffee and whatever was the cheapest item on the menu. Keeping an eye on her shopping cart was more important to her than taking note of the other patrons in the restaurant. Here she could find a little nourishment, a safe place to rest, and protection from the cruel midsummer desert sun. Dry heat or not, it was going to be around 100? that day, and not a cloud in the sky. The employees didn't pay attention to her, but how long would they let her sit there? Lois wondered about the woman's past. She was wiry, and Lois could picture her at one time as being slender and attractive - beautiful in the way society defines beauty. Hard living had aged her, but Lois guessed that she was in her late thirties. Was she a former showgirl or an aspiring one who didn't make it? Had she been a call girl or hooker? Was her downfall drugs, booze, mental illness, or a bad marriage and an inept divorce lawyer? Lois would never find out, and even if she had gone over and asked the woman, she could not be sure she would get an honest answer. The woman might not know or even be willing to admit the answer to herself. In her own way, Lois was also killing time. It was around 12:30 PM - still a long time to go before the 3 o'clock check in time. Lois had always been a slow eater, from a family of slow eaters. When she had been associated with an athletic team in college, a bunch of athletes, with voracious appetites and a desire to get quickly to the next destination, turned meal time into a hurried event. Many times she would be last to finish and forced to grab what she could and bring it to the team bus, rather than suffer the stares of angry team members. So when Louis came home on vacation, his mother would complain that he ate too fast. Louis would soon joke that he ate faster than everyone in his family and slower than anyone else that he knew. But now Lois was eating even more slowly, especially when she got about halfway through. Lois had already forgotten the silly theme name that the restaurant called this thing: something with a beef patty and a roll and cheese and some other sauce and veggies on it. It was okay, as fast food went. But it was way too much for her. But she was in no hurry, so it was okay. So she would take a small bite of the burger and then stop; then a French fry and stop; then a sip of iced tea and stop. The meal took on a slow, rhythmic pattern all its own. And so the two women sat, polar opposites. At one point, Lois thought, "There but for the grace of God ..." and then stopped. "I don't know if I could have walked in her shoes, but could she have walked in mine?" Lois looked at her and thought wryly, as neuter and tattered as her clothes are, as dry and weathered and wrinkled as her skin is, as badly as her hair has been hacked off here and there in a poor excuse for a hair style, as unlikely as it was that Tyra would ever pick her out of the background to be a model, there was no question that this person was a woman. Among the many cares she undoubtedly had, being read was not one of them. Lois thought back to her early days of transition, first living part-time and then full-time. How she lived in dread of being read. And of course, it happened from time to time. Fortunately, Lois had been one of the fortunate ones who did not have any dangerous situations resulting from being read. She tried to be careful about where and when she went, especially when she had to travel alone. Now she had reached a point where she thought that maybe someone wondered, but they probably left not being quite sure. Still, Lois thought how ironic that she had to work so hard to pass or blend (as one TS resource site called it), while this genetic woman could break all the "rules" and have no problem. She fought back the urge to think to herself, "It's not fair." "Where is it written that life is supposed to be fair? Stop complaining," Lois chided herself. "You have an air conditioned car to leave in, a hotel room to sleep in tonight, money to buy food and clothing, and a job to go to back home." She wondered if she should go over to the woman if she finished before the woman did. Should she offer her money, some words of encouragement or both? The point suddenly became moot. As if a silent alarm went off in her head, the woman got up quickly and walked out. As the woman left and wheeled her shopping cart away, Lois finished her meal. Without the woman to hold her attention, Lois became lost in her thoughts as she reviewed the trip in her mind. She thought of how symbolic the trip was. Her first stop on the trip was Phoenix, the mythological bird that rises out of the ashes to new life. But to achieve her goal of being in all fifty states, she had to drive into the desert, representing the emptiness of her life as Louis. Then crossing the Continental Divide, it was a reminder that there were two sides of her life. But the first time on the road, she crossed the Divide in the wrong direction, going from west to east. East was where she had been. The first crossing represented the wrong direction her body had taken her life. Then the drive through Big Thompson Canyon to Rocky Mountain National Park: the canyon represented the narrow way that she needed to walk to get where she needed to go. Then out of the canyon into the Rockies: the twisting, turning, climbing road represented the climb that she needed to take from the depths of manhood to the heights of womanhood. Each twist and turn represented all the different parts of her life that needed to be addressed: hormones, makeup skills, voice, career, legal records, credit history, identity cards, therapy, her sexuality and surgery. Although these items appear linear due to the limitations of a two- dimensional page the journey was not linear, two-dimensional, left hemisphere and male. No, each of these items fit together holistically, three-dimensional, right hemisphere and female. And so as Lois drove up the mountain to the Visitor Center, noting the changing vegetation with the change in altitude until there were no trees at all, she had gone back and forth, higher and higher, east, west, north and south until arriving at the peak. The absence of trees symbolized that her vision of who she was meant to be was no longer obscured by the expectations of others. And up here, even on a late July afternoon, snow could be seen in various places. The snow represented the cold, lonely days that she felt during transition, especially the earliest days. Loneliness came when people she felt close to had rejected her (though some later came back). And there was also the loneliness that felt like a gulf when she was hiding something from an important person in her life, but was not ready to tell that person yet. And finally, there was the shortness of breath caused by the thin air at these heights. This represented the fact that the journey was exhausting at times, so exhausting that even a simple task was rarely easy. There were times when Lois did not know where she would get the strength to continue. Sometimes, the only thing that kept her going was the knowledge that going back would be worse. And as Lois made her way back down the mountain to her motel room in Loveland, Colorado, she thought about how the journey had made her a stronger and better person. Even the name of the town was right, for she now truly loved and accepted herself as a person. When she checked out of the motel the next day, and continued her journey, the symbolism continued, also. As she drove from Colorado through the vast openness of Wyoming, she thought of how a part of her life was still empty. A relationship that seemed so promising ended shortly after she had recovered from her surgery. The fact that this was not uncommon did not make it any easier. As she stopped for lunch in Casper, she wondered if she would be haunted by ghosts from her past. And when she made a wrong turn in Billings, Montana and wasted a half hour finding her way to her motel, it reminded her of the well-meaning but wrong advice she had received along the way. Sometimes, someone else would try to apply their experience to Lois's life. But one size does not always fit all. Sometimes, Lois could only blame herself. She did not yet know herself well enough to always ask the right question. The next leg of Lois's trip brought her back across the Continental Divide, but this time going in the right direction. The map called it Targhee Pass, but when she arrived there, it didn't look much like a pass at all. It was as broad and flat as a football field. As daunting as transition had seemed at the start (and how many times had Lois turned away from it in fear?), the crossing over to womanhood turned out to be easier than expected. And soon after crossing the Divide, which also serves as the border between Montana and Idaho, the road suddenly went on a long downhill run. Idaho was state number 48, the same number of states as when Lois was born. She could only hope that this signaled that the mistake at birth had been corrected, and it was all downhill from here. As she neared Pocatello, her destination for the night, she noticed the traffic slowing down up ahead. Lois wondered how there could be traffic jams on a late Friday afternoon in Pocatello, and going into the city, not leaving it. She also noticed something else: the skies were getting dark overhead. After crawling for a few miles at about 15 mph, she saw the reason for the delay. They were repaving the Interstate ... on a summer Friday evening ... with a thunderstorm approaching. Lois couldn't believe it. They would have wrapped up work back in New York by 3 PM, the latest, especially with storms coming. And then, Lois heard it. First it was rain, but then the tiny blips of hail stones hitting the roof, hood and windshield of her rental car. "Oh no," thought Lois! "Oh please, don't damage the car!" And then Lois had a flash of anger as she realized that if they had shut down the paving at a decent hour, she would have been at the motel by now. Then she reflected upon the fact that it could be hailing there, too. When Lois got to the motel, the first thing she did was inspect the car for damage. Fortunately, the hail stones were small enough that there was no evidence of any damage. This reminded Lois that transitioning did not change the fact that stuff still happens. Sometimes people put roadblocks in your way. Sometimes a little rain, or even a little hail, will fall. Sometimes all you can do is ride it out and hope it comes out okay on the other side. The next morning, as Lois checked out, the desk clerk was very friendly and they engaged in a little conversation. Noticing the rental car plates and the fact that Lois did not sound like she was from Idaho, the clerk asked her where she was from. "New York," replied Lois. She was always interested in seeing people's reactions to her being from New York. Some commented on the crime, to which Lois always replied that it is much better than it used to be and that New York is now safer than most major US cities. Others commented on how they always wanted to go there or about the one time that they had visited there. It was always interesting how they always assumed that Lois meant New York City, even though about half the population of the state lives outside of the city. Anyway, Lois lived in the city's suburbs, so she figured it was close enough. In this case, however, the clerk seemed more interested in the fact that Lois was a tourist. She wanted to know where Lois was going next. Lois explained that she was headed for Las Vegas, but would be stopping for the night in Cedar City. "Oh," the clerk replied. "Good idea to break up the trip. It will take you all day just to get to Cedar City." "Really?" Lois responded. "My directions tell me it should take about four to five hours." Lois's maps were already in the car. She wasn't trying to win an argument with the woman. She was pretty confident in her information, as she always consulted two mapping sites before picking how far she would travel in one day. But she did want to hear what the woman had to say. "Oh yes," the clerk answered. "The traffic is always terrible in Salt Lake City, and it seems that they are always working on the roads." Lois thanked her as she said good-bye to the desk clerk. But she reminded herself that today was Saturday. She knew that she probably could have made it all the way to Las Vegas from Pocatello in one day, helped by the time zone change, if she had wanted to pay the higher room rate. Cedar City was a little past the halfway point to Vegas. And as it turned out, there was some road construction, but nothing that slowed her very much. And the Saturday traffic in the Salt Lake City area was moderately heavy in places, but still nothing to cause a time delay. She arrived in Cedar City in mid-afternoon, on schedule. And she thought about other well-meaning people who were always so cautious in their advice, it would have kept Lois from living. The whole idea of being Lois was to be free, not to switch from one prison to another. As the Sergeant used to say on Hill Street Blues, we need to be "careful out there." But that didn't stop the police officers from going "out there". And in the end, it didn't stop Lois from living her life, either. Somewhere in Utah, Lois entered desert land again. This represented the fact that Lois still had lonely voids in her life. Transition does not solve everything. Yes, Lois was more confident now, had achieved closure with some issues and discovered some previously hidden truths about herself. But we are all works in progress and Lois still had areas to work on. At the beginning of her vacation, the road through the desert led to mountains. This time, it lead to the breathtaking Virgin River Gorge, described earlier. Lois smiled weakly, reflecting on the fact that she had not yet tried out her new equipment with another person. She assumed that it was a given that she would experience sex as only a woman can as soon as it was medically safe, and was crushed when it did not happen. That rite of passage still had not occurred for Lois. Although she had a sex life as a male, as a woman, she was still a virgin. And now, she sat in Nevada, nursing the thawing ice cubes in the bottom of her cup and ignoring the French fries that had grown too cold to be appetizing. Would Nevada as the last state mean that the journey was complete? And would Las Vegas signal that she was ready to hit the jackpot? Or like the woman with the shopping cart, would her life roll snake eyes and hit bottom? Finally, the last ice cube was gone and Lois could dawdle no longer, even though she knew from the way the staff had treated the homeless woman, no one would rush her out the door. Besides, she was starting to get restless. She looked at her watch. It was 1:15 PM. She stepped back out into the heat. The temperature had risen a few degrees while she had been eating and the sun was beating down even more viciously overhead. Suddenly, Lois felt a pang of guilt. Remembering someone who might be suffering in the heat and sun, she looked for the homeless woman. But she was nowhere to be seen. Lois shrugged, gingerly opened the hot car door and turned on the air conditioning as soon as she started the car. She couldn't steer the car until the steering wheel was cool enough to touch. At last, she pulled out of the parking lot - destination, the Las Vegas Strip. If the Nevada desert was anticlimactic, the Strip was, quite frankly, disappointing. Lois remembered shows like Vega$ and how exciting the Strip looked in the promo shots. There were some movies, also, and even if they were not filmed in Vegas, they probably used some stock footage of the Strip somewhere in the movie. First of all, the lights weren't on. Lois forgot why, whether it was budget related or energy conservation related. Although she knew that all those lights being on in the middle of the day was wasteful, she still missed seeing a street so gaudy and bright that it could outshine the noonday sun. But the buildings and layout were the biggest disappointment. There was a time when the casinos were well spaced on the Strip. The architecture had class, and each building could be appreciated on its own merits. Now, the Strip quite frankly is ugly. Everything is thrown together haphazardly. Here, an Eiffel Tower, there a Statue of Liberty head: the senses were assaulted with one image tumbling on top of another. Calling it camp would be too complimentary. It was cheap, tawdry, tasteless. Lois was grateful that the room rate was so low, cheaper even than many of the places (in far less popular locales) where she stayed during the rest of the trip. Without gambling to interest her, and having researched the shows and finding nothing she liked enough to justify the cost of a ticket, all Las Vegas would be was a cheap, albeit more luxurious, place to spend a couple of nights. And she was beginning to regret having booked more than one night. Finally, Lois turned the corner onto Tropicana Avenue. Maybe it was corny, but Lois had decided that she would feel most comfortable at New York, New York. This whole city was about make-believe, anyway. Why not spend it in a fictionalized version of the city that she loved? A few feet down the driveway, Lois saw the sign requiring the drivers using the parking lot to have an ID ready. She was completely unprepared for this. Surely, gamblers who are not staying in a room come to the casino. And of course, Lois had not yet registered. But underlying it was an old feeling that died hard: at the beginning of transition, Louis worried when he started looking too feminine to match his picture. And then when her ID was changed to Lois, she worried that her appearance still looked too masculine. And then there was her darn shoulder bag. Lois still was not used to all the things she needed to carry in there - or at least what she was told she needed to carry. Where was that stupid wallet, anyway. It should be near the top. She just paid for her meal not two hours ago. But things do have a way of shifting around in there, especially if you reach into the wrong spot and push it away. Lois inched her car forward, not wanting to stop completely to attract even more attention to herself, and fearful that a line of impatient drivers would form behind her. Finally! She pulled out the wallet, unsnapped it, and found a way to pull out the license while steering the car with her elbows down the twisting driveway. And so when she pulled up to the security guard, a very imposing dark-skinned man in a blue uniform, Lois was all scrunched together, trying to keep control of steering wheel, shoulder bag, wallet and still hold out her ID so the guard could read it. She looked about as graceful as a slapstick comedian moments after encountering a banana peel - not exactly a picture of femininity. With nary a glance at the ID, the guard smiled broadly at Lois and waved her on. "After all that trouble I went through to find my ID with only fifty feet of warning," Lois thought. "Why do they bother to even ask you for your ID if they aren't going to look at it?" But then, Lois realized it was a heck of a lot better than the possible interrogation which she had irrationally feared. The indoor parking lot was more than half empty. Lois selected a spot at random and noted its location so she could find the rental car later. She took the pages with the room registration info out of her travel folder and slid them into her now disarranged shoulder bag. Assuming she could not check in, she did not want to lug around her luggage for an hour and a half. But on the off chance that she could check in, she wanted the papers handy. She locked the car doors and strode toward the passageway marked as the entrance to the casino. Lois was ready to face another new experience in life. End of chapter 1