Not Meth Psychosis: Shocking News about My Gay Mentor

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 5 Part 1

“It’s time to separate the girls from the women,” Mr. Baldridge would say, announcing a pop quiz.

Mr. Baldridge was my favorite teacher at Billings Central Catholic High School.

He was a stocky barrel of a man. His shoulders were rounded, making it seem he was always leading with his head. He was bespectacled, bearded, and balding, always in a button up shirt and tie, slacks, and such a variety of colorful suspenders that it seemed he had the perfect pair specific for every day of the year.

His humor would tap dance on the line of appropriate, perhaps intentionally offending the willingly simple minded. He treated his students as adults, some even as peers, without ever losing his authority.

After school, he could be found grading papers for AP science and math classes while watching Jeopardy, often correctly answering quicker than the contestants. He was rarely alone. His room, unique with couch and comfy chairs, was a refuge to a cross section of the school: intellectual outcasts, respectable jocks, and baby closet queers like me. His room was a safe space where it was okay to be different.

Mr. Baldridge was a thorn in the side of the administration, refusing to turn a blind eye to the high school status quo: star athletes shirking academic responsibilities; popular rich boys visibly abusive to their female classmates; members of the administration flagrantly living a “do as I say, not as I do” life. When nearly everyone else in authority would look the other way, Mr. Baldrige would stand up and say, “Absolutely not. This is not okay. This must stop. I refuse to be quiet about it.”

The administration wanted to get rid of him, but they couldn’t justify firing their arguably best teacher — a teacher of the majority of their AP classes who was overwhelmingly beloved by a large swath of the student body. They couldn’t get rid of him — not without cause.

Then one day he said the wrong thing to the wrong student.

Mr. Baldrige walked into his classroom to find a football jock — not a regular visitor — fucking around with his personal stereo equipment. When the jock no sooner broke off the open cassette deck, Mr. Baldrige railed “You dumbass! What are you doing?”

The problem was this jock was not just a no-name footballer. His family was one of the biggest donors to the Billings Catholic School system.

The administration now had cause.

On a Friday afternoon in the spring of senior year, the administration canceled last period and called an all school assembly in the gym. The school had been buzzing all afternoon, so as the 400 or so of us filed in , a small group of us prayed the rumors weren’t true.

As the principal and a couple of teachers came and stood before us, we quieted, the echoing chatter bouncing off the gym walls receding to silence.

“Mr. Baldridge is no longer a teacher at this school.”

A small murmur started to build. A classmate next to me dropped her head, lips pressed tight as she tried not to cry.

“Why?” a senior boy asked. He stared daggers at the principal, daring him to give some bullshit answer.

“That’s confidential,” he answered with a blunted finality. He wasn’t there to have a discussion. “We know how strongly many of you feel about him.” He had barely begun speaking again when the boy who asked why stood up and stormed off, walking past the principal so close he could have shoved him aside.

After letting the boy pass, he said, “This decision is final.”

An angry rumble started among those of us who were regulars to Mr. Baldridge’s room. The principal cut us off with a forceful, “Hey! Any disruption will not be tolerated.”

A couple other students defied the order, storming off as the other boy had, feeling the principal had fired their only advocate in an otherwise oppressive system. But they were a brave few. The rest of us didn’t put up a fight. We didn’t know how; our only example of questioning authority and speaking truth to power was gone.

If there was a silver lining, it was that Mr. Baldridge, Elmer, was gay and no longer had to live in the closet. He had willingly made this sacrifice because he loved teaching more than anything, but he was now free to live his truth.

After high school, we kept in touch. He told me how hard it was for him as a gay man to not reach out to me. “I knew when I first met you and I wanted more than anything to let you know that you were not alone, but I couldn’t, and that just killed me.”

The signs were there. He had a Rocky Horror Picture Show coffee table book on his classroom shelves. He wore rainbow suspenders quite a bit, though I wasn’t astute enough to perceive hidden meaning in them.

Elmer became the gay elder I had always wanted. He introduced me to queer cinema with three dimensional, complicated gay characters. Characters who weren’t just drag queens. Characters who weren’t monsters. Characters who weren’t dying. Characters living stories of rebellious normalcy, finding love, living life, achieving self acceptance in a world of puritan demonization.

He even spilled the tea on other closeted teachers at our Catholic school who turned their back on him when the hammer came down. To lose a job you love is horrible enough. To have someone say “we can’t be friends anymore” because you’re seen as unclean, well, that’s not very Christ-like.

He became my role model for living with grace and dignity in the face of injustice, even when everything was taken away from him by malicious cowards. He was deeply injured by his firing from Central, but still he chose to move forward positively in his life.

When I moved east, we stayed in touch via instant messenger. I often shared the difficulties of my relationship with Henry, and he counseled me to take charge of my own life. “Nothing is going to change until you, Henry, or both make some hard decisions.”

I never moved to make any change or hard decisions. Still, it was comforting to know I was being heard.

Though we continued to chat over the summer and fall of 2003, I never told him meth had taken over my life. I wanted to, just like I wanted to tell my brother, but I didn’t. Part of me desperately wanted his council, but the more dominant part of me knew any and all council led to the same outcome: no more Tina. That was not up for discussion.

A couple days after my trip to Hackensack and the disastrous hookup that led to a psychotic episode, I was sitting at my desk examining the blemish on the side of my knee. I had tried popping it, but it refused to be moved and I ended up just making it more painful. I studied it, wondering, was it…bigger than it had been? Was it more inflamed? I was fascinated with it, yet hoped it would just go away on its own as I didn’t have any health insurance.

I was also willfully ignoring a second blemish that had popped up on the same leg in the center of my right thigh.

Looking up from my knee to scroll through Manhunt, I saw that Elmer’s handle was online.

I typed our usual opener. “I hate my life, I want a future.”

Bing. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” I typed. “I thought it was Elmer. Say hi to him for me and tell him to shoot me a message next time he’s online.”

Bing. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Elmer died of a heart attack a couple days ago.”

In the movie What the Bleep do we Know? about quantum physics, they say when Columbus’s ships first appeared on the horizon, the indigenous people couldn’t see them because nothing in their reality could account for what they were seeing.

I read it again.

And again.

I knew the letters, recognized the words, knew the words made a sentence.

I hate to be the one…

Elmer died of a heart attack a couple…

Elmer died of a heart attack…

Elmer died.

No.

Elmer died.

“No.”

Elmer died.

“No no no no NO!” I pushed myself back from the computer like it was going to explode.

I read the message over and over again, sure, absolutely sure I was reading it wrong.

Elmer died.

Elmer died.

Elmer died of a heart attack.

Elmer died of a heart attack a couple days ago.

Elmer died.

After a long while, I realized I hadn’t responded.

“Sorry, I have to walk around my apartment in a daze right now,” and signed off.

I had never experienced death as an adult until that moment. I couldn’t accept it. There was nothing in my reality to account for this experience.

After scouring the internet for any evidence of Elmer’s death — articles, an obituary, anything — and coming up empty — I called home.

“Mom,” I choked. It was hard to talk. My throat was tight and every sound I made fought to become a sob. “I just found out…someone just told me…Elmer, Mr. Baldridge, you remember my physics teacher…yeah…well we’ve been in touch since then…yeah, um….his handle came online…someone…and…someone just…someone just told me he…he died…of a heart attack? And, and I was wondering…could you, could you look in the paper or online or something cause I can’t find anything about it and I’m afraid someone’s playing a cruel joke or something.” These last words fired out of me like a machine gun.

It wasn’t a joke.

Elmer died.

I cried.

This time not during a psychotic episode, I cried.

Honestly, for the first time in my adult life, I cried.

He was my friend, he was my teacher, he was someone to whom I could tell anything, though I chose not to.

And now my friend was gone.

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Chapter Guide

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