Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(4)

I’d watched plenty of television and read enough legal thrillers to know I was a suspect. I called the base legal office. The base lawyer told me I shouldn’t be too worried, but I should stop talking to the cops. Tell them to talk to her. Call her back if anything changed.

That’s when the Air Force took over the investigation. I waited as the investigators asked every airman on base if they knew Senior Airman Hough was being harassed, if they knew Senior Airman Hough was gay. She’s gay. I waited while investigators showed up at my grandma’s door in Texas. But they didn’t know she’d been an Air Force wife. She’d had about enough of the Air Force somewhere between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. They didn’t even finish introducing themselves before she slammed the door in their faces and called me.

   “Lauren, the OSI just knocked on my door. And I knew it was them before they showed their stupid badges. They have a smell.” My grandma never had much patience for small talk.

I said I was sorry they bothered her. And I was.

“Never mind that. What do they want?” she asked.

“They didn’t say?”

She laughed. “I never gave them the chance.”

So I explained about the car, about the death threats. And I shit you not, she said, “Oh. Good. I was worried you’d done something stupid like have an affair with an officer’s wife.”

Here’s the thing you need to know about my grandma: when I lived with her in Amarillo, she was the only Democrat I’d ever met. I was half convinced she was Amarillo’s sole liberal, who practiced all manner of lunatic beliefs like recycling and yoga and feminism and gay rights. She caught hell for it—from the neighbors; from the old biddies at the First Presbyterian; from her own family, who regularly referred to her as “that crazy old bitch”—but she never gave a shit. In fairness, she wasn’t what anyone would describe as “nice,” or even “nurturing.” Oh, she’d give you the shirt off her back if you needed it. Then swear at you for your pathetic posture. When we were little and Mom was working late at the restaurant, she’d let us stay up to all hours watching Dallas and Miami Vice. She’d answer any question we had, with no regard for what might be age appropriate. I knew more about hookers and blow than any kid in second grade. She’d take us on archaeological digs and show us how to dig up fossils. Then drop all four of us at the dollar theater with three wet dollar bills she’d pulled from her bra because she had a bridge game. She could play Chopin without looking at the music. She held several degrees. She’d read everything. She forgot nothing. And she was one of the first people I’d come out to, before my own parents even, because I knew she would never judge me.

   So while I was pissed that they’d worried her, I was a lot more pissed they’d knocked on her door for no other reason I could imagine than to humiliate me by outing me to my grandma.



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The investigation took another bad turn when they talked to my roommate. He said I was a liar. Sometimes when we watched a movie set in a place I’d lived, I’d say, “Hey, I’ve been there.” I grew up all over the place—Japan, Switzerland, Argentina, Chile. Sometimes I forget that some people never stray too far from home. Most people know where home is. But I didn’t understand why he thought I was a liar just because I said “I’ve been there” unless I’d slipped.

It could be hard sometimes to keep my lies straight, hazard of the trade. The trade—that is, being a fucking liar, whatever the reason—keeps you apart. Even the most basic of initial friendship-interview questions like “Where are you from?” required a lie, or at least omission. But I wanted to tell. I wanted to have a story like everyone else. And sometimes, just sometimes, I’d let a little thing slip. “I was born in Berlin” or “I used to live in Osaka.” “My parents were missionaries.” Here’s a thing about me. I’m someone too. Please like me. But maybe I’d switched stories.

   With all the chaos, I moved back into the dorms on base that I’d been so eager to leave. Senior airmen were allowed to move off base, and I had taken advantage of that. Off base, there were no dorm inspections, no first sergeants trolling the common areas for underage drinkers or dayroom blow jobs. I liked thinking that gave me some privacy, but I’d been wrong. I’d let my guard down, trusted the wrong people with little bits of information. Nothing that would out me as having grown up in a cult. But enough maybe to join a conversation.



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It hadn’t been a year since Barry Winchell, an Army private, had been beaten to death with a baseball bat in a barracks hallway at an Army post in Kentucky because he was gay. I was scared before. But the worst I feared was getting kicked out of the Air Force. Even the act of torching my car seemed like a far leap from murder; a beatdown seemed more likely. That is, until June, six months after my car was torched, when I got the next note: “Gun knife or bat I can’t decide which one.”

In the months since the car fire, it had seemed whoever torched my car was finished with me. I thought they’d leave me alone now that I was being investigated, keep their ass clean and get away with it. Maybe they’d transferred to another base.

   The Air Force’s investigation had stalled. My car insurance company, frustrated with the lack of an outcome, sent their own investigator. He looked at the evidence the cops had, interviewed me and a few people on base, called Sheriff Horton some names, which I appreciated, and cleared me of wrongdoing in two days.