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by Carlton Clayton
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When I was based at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico back in 1985, I sometimes babysat on Friday nights for my co-worker, Master Sergeant Lampkin, and his wife. He was thirty-five years old and a lanky man about six-feet-three, sporting a part down the center of a head of lush, jet-black hair. We called a part down the center a marijuana smoker’s part back then, and it was risky having one due to its connotation, but Sergeant Lampkin didn’t care. I liked that about him.
He and his wife lived in one of the standard, three-bedroom units in base housing with their two children, a girl and a boy. I had visited their home once, on a Friday afternoon to pick up the kids. It was the standard floor plan with the living room, kitchen, and dining area all open and flowing from one to the other. The walls were grey cinder block, the same as the outside, and the floors were a stony grey linoleum tile, giving the look and feel of cold misery. That’s how I felt in it anyway.
The central attraction of Sergeant Lampkin’s house was the hallway, which mimicked a museum’s picture gallery. It was lined on both sides with framed, erotic black and white photographs of naked men in various poses. At the end of the hall hung the centerpiece: a horned, Roman satyr holding a black, gold-tipped spear and sporting a massive, upward curved erection. I was overwhelmed with surprise. Spotlighted, it was the largest and most elaborate of the pieces that were proudly on display as if they were the children’s preschool, blue-ribbon artwork. The display caused me to wonder about Sergeant Lampkin. Was there another side to him? It probably meant nothing, but I was very attracted to him, so I forged my own scenarios.
When Sergeant Lampkin dropped by my apartment to pick up the kids after a long night of barhopping, I’d meet him at the door with his sleeping little boy cradled in my arms. I didn’t have to. I could have left the boy sleeping on the sofa with his sister, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to brush against his father when handing him off.
Sergeant Lampkin and I worked at the headquarters level of a fighter wing where he was an intelligence specialist, and I was a staff sergeant overseeing the division’s administrative operations. On the last Friday of each month we had division clean-up day during the morning, which culminated with a pizza and soda lunch.
On one such Friday, Sergeant Lampkin stopped by my office. He stood in the doorway leaning against the jamb. He had earlier removed his fatigue shirt, exposing the dark sweat stains that left a trail down the center of his olive drab t-shirt and a patch under each armpit. I sat on the edge of my desk facing him with my legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, secretly studying him: the beads of sweat on his forehead, the crook in his nose, his Adam’s apple, his nipples poking at his shirt, his black belt buckle, his gig line. We made small talk about what we cleaned in our areas, the unit’s flag football team, our weekend plans, and music, his passion. The conversation was desultory, moving between topics so quickly I didn’t know where one ended and another began. I wasn’t listening anyway, and that’s what got me into trouble.
He moved closer. His spit-shined combat boots on the carpet sounded like footsteps in sand. My eyes never left him as he talked, and I don’t remember hearing him. I watched his pale skin against the jet black of his hair line, his eyes, his mouth, his lips, his teeth, the sweat stains—I wanted to lean in and smell them. I was inside him.
“I like you, too,” he said, the words jolting me.
My heartbeat thumped all over my body. I felt a rush of heat like a fire raging deep inside me and burning its way out. I pushed off the desk to my feet, dropping the dust rag I had been holding. I took a step closer to him. We stood like two gunfighters ready to face off.
Then it happened.
“I like you, too,” I said in a sultry half whisper that frightened even me. Forgetting where we were, I was readying to sink into him, smell his breath, touch him the way I had been longing to without having to use his little boy as my alibi. However, before I even finished the reply I knew it was all wrong, but I couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. They had their own momentum now, moving like a freight train barreling toward a disjointed track. Had I been listening I would have known the subject had changed, and Sergeant Lampkin was now speaking of the rock band U2 and not the “you too” as in “me.”
The thumping concentrated in my forehead and in the back of my eyes. I mouthed Oh fuck, which I thought was silent, but it was loud enough for him to hear. My mouth felt like sawdust. I closed my eyes for a moment before looking Sergeant Lampkin in the eye. Searching. Wondering. I could hear him breathing, and I could hear myself breathing.
“Time to eat,” he announced and turned towards the door. “Pizza is here. You gonna hang out here for a few moments? I’m gonna head down.” I knew that was an order in the form of a question. I willingly obeyed as I was in no condition to protest.
Homosexuality in the military was punishable by court-martial and dishonorable discharge at that time. I was usually very discreet and on point, but I unwittingly let down my guard with Sergeant Lampkin.
I was on edge the next two weeks and wondered what actions he would take. Would he report me? He and I didn’t talk much during that time, which made it worse—only official business stuff like me locating a file for him or looking up the correct pronunciation of some tongue-twister name of a country. Some mornings I was afraid to go in to work and when there I rushed the hands on the clock. I was startled with every incoming telephone call.
It got worse. I lived in an apartment complex in Alamogordo, a few miles northeast of the base. On the Thursday of the following week, I inquired at the administration office about a maintenance order I had called in several days earlier. The office manager told me she had called me and left a message on my answering machine. I questioned her about the message.
“Was it my voice?” I asked.
“Yeah, it was your voice,” she said. “It was you, and I left the message.”
I asked her more questions to confirm it was me she assumed she was talking to. “It was your voice,” she reaffirmed.
At work the Tuesday morning of the next week I called my workout partner at his office to ask why he hadn’t shown up at the gym the night before.
“I called you on Sunday night and left a message telling you I couldn’t make it,” he said. I drilled him the same as I did the office manager. He gave her answers: “It was your voice.”
I left the office and headed to the latrine. I stood with my hands pressed into the walls of the far stall trying to control my breathing. I didn’t have a telephone answering machine at the time, so there was no way that was my voice they heard.
I convinced myself I was being watched. I could feel it. I could feel it all over. No matter where I went or what I was doing, someone was watching me. They were watching me.
I had gay porn I’d discreetly collected over the years. I’d removed my favorite pages from the magazines and placed them neatly in plastic document protectors and filed them in a notebook. I purged them all. I removed each picture from its slip and ripped it to shreds. I did the same with the magazines. Then I divided the bits into three separate plastic trash bags. I also discarded anything I felt remotely suggested gay, even my two white jockstraps, my bandanas, and a studded black leather belt. I disposed of the trash bags as murderer would a dismembered body, dropping them off in three different dumpsters throughout the city.
I called a friend in New York City who worked with the telephone company and told him the situation. I asked him about the possibility of someone intercepting my calls and posing as me. He assured me that wasn’t happening. He didn’t say it wasn’t possible, just that it wasn’t happening. I was still being watched.
I was sinking into delirium or something like it. I kept thinking about the voice on the answering machine and what my friend told me. The walls had eyes and ears. I had no safe place. No refuge. Home was miserable. Work was miserable.
At the office, every phone call was the commander summoning me: Intelligence Division, Sergeant Clayton speaking. Sergeant Clayton, report to my office. Every Good morning from Sergeant Lampkin was damning, Faggot. Every look from co-workers was skeptical, Yeah, we know. Every day passing without word should have gotten easier, but I made it harder. I saw my demise in every ordinary circumstance: the wing commander and the division chief behind closed doors, the weekly staff meeting with the sections’ heads, the airmen standing along the wall discussing classified matters and hushed when I approached, the gatekeeper in the vault asking me What do you need. Even the toll of the chapel bell was damning. The evidence was all there—in my head.
On the Thursday afternoon of the second week, I was busy at my typewriter when I noticed Sergeant Lampkin standing across from me and finger-drumming the top of my desk. I gripped the arms of my chair and turned to face him.
“Can you watch Rosa and John-John tomorrow night?” he said.
I nodded anxiously, my whole body responding to my head’s agreement. I could have burst wide open. I had plans that weekend for a two-night hotel stay in El Paso. Prepaid, nonrefundable. I needed to get away for a while. To hole up in a different distant space.
Sergeant Lampkin did a drum roll as he waited for my verbal answer. It came swiftly.
“Yes. I’ll watch them.”
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Carlton Clayton Carlton Clayton is a thirty-year Air Force retiree with tours in, among others, South Korea, Europe, and Saudi Arabia. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program with a concentration in creative nonfiction, he has work in or forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine, the New York Quarterly, and Iron Horse Literary Review. He is currently working on a memoir.
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