November 18, 2019: Jerry Baxter

(Sorry for the delay; it was my stupid birthday this weekend. So, so very old.)

As an undergraduate English major at Auburn University, I had been the alpha male (hahahaha) English major because the few other male English majors were pretty lame. When I finished my MFA and came back to join the English department faculty as an instructor, there was a new alpha male: Jerry Baxter.

I hated Jerry Baxter on sight. He was a real Southern fraternity boy with his short blond hair, glasses, and slacks, never jeans. The first thing one noticed about him was that he tucked his sweaters into his slacks. He had the accent, yes, but also a manner common to certain southern males: he enunciated as clearly as he could, ostentatiously pronouncing the “g” in “being” and all other participles or gerunds or whatever they are. (Yeah, I used to teach that stuff, what about it?)

There’s a thing that Southern men do that they may think marks them as sincere: they pucker their lips, speak quietly and pompously, with a small, very sincere smile tweaking their lips. It’s virtually clerical. It says, implicitly, you are not up to my standards, but you can see what a kind and pure-hearted fellow I am to endure you.

Within a year of my return, he graduated and started his M.A. in English at Auburn as a teaching assistant. He had his circle of friends, those who graduated with him and others who joined in. There was a whole phalanx of graduate teaching assistants and instructors who guarded the flanks of the regular and senior faculty, protecting them from the predations of the undergraduate corps.

It was a time of pre-HIV frantic plunging into a carnal fire. At one party, a nice girl named Holland waited for me outside the bathroom and grabbed me and kissed me, and then ground her groin against my erection, and said, “Oh, Jarecke!” I’m pretty confident that Jerry Baxter and most of his friends were more restrained. There developed, in essence, two groups, and we were in different ones.

One 4th of July, he and his friends drove to a lake where Jerry’s family had a boat and reportedly everyone skied. My friends had a picnic in a large yard out in front of an apartment house where a number of them lived. I asked Phil Sharpe if he wanted to play pitch and catch; his eyes lit up and he asked, “Do you have the equipment?” Phil knew that I was coaching a 13-14 year old boys’ team that year. Phil and I took turns putting on the catching equipment and squatting down way too close to several windows, really, and firing away at each other. I could still break off a curve ball then. I didn’t even ski, so wasn’t this a hoot?

But the existence of two groups implies tension that ultimately made itself manifest. I had had a longtime girlfriend, Becky, and we were, as 20-somethings will do, always breaking up and reconciling. During a break-up, I started seeing a bit of Sue Wright, whose older sister (hang on, this won’t take long) Lauren, was friends with Jerry’s group.

Then I suddenly began missing Becky, and Sue became boring, so changes were made. Becky and I were a thing again. (When I ran my legal writing tutoring business, I taught this as one of the examples of when you can use passive voice: hide the bad actor, who in this case was me. Becky and Sue both deserved better.) Sue and her allies, all on Jerry’s side, were furious. I was anathema. Word got around that Jerry Baxter said I was “cheesy” due to my behavior with Sue. OK, harsh but fair. Nevertheless we all soldiered on, ignoring each other when we rushed off to teach our classes. It may as well have been high school.

The situation became complicated, though, when a tall, grey-eyed Dane named Annie started her Master’s a year or two later. She was chillingly devoted to her work. She ended up getting her Ph.D. at a good but not excellent Midwestern state school and somehow got the last tenure track job in America at another. She’s a full professor now, writing on topics that have more to do with lesbian culture than literature, but, really, hasn’t every English department already said all there was to say?

In any event, I essentially kidnapped her from the rest of the men, including Chuck Howard, a red-haired DJ who ran marathons, and of course Jerry Baxter himself. They had dated briefly; she told me later that he was an awful kisser, pressing his face hard against hers and forcing his tongue in. That cheered me up.

But he somehow managed to keep her interested, and he became a bit of an issue because he wouldn’t give up on her. And, though it was a large department, he was always around—we were always on our way to or from teaching, checking mail in the main office. He always had that sweater tucked in.

She was no fun. I drove a stick shift and one morning when I let the gear out to coast to a stop sign, she said, “Can you not do that this morning? I have a lot of work to do.” My mother, usually unhelpful, said at some point, “Love is supposed to be more fun than this.”

Jerry and I played basketball with all of the others in the department, but I don’t recall any tension between Baxter and me, though the contention over Annie should have introduced some. Also Baxter and I played a lot of tennis together, which should have been even worse. I now imagine that neither of us wanted to let on that he was annoyed by the other’s attention to Annie, and the constant basketball and tennis were weekly affirmations of our nonchalance.

Unlike other Auburn graduate students, some of whom seemed to stay decades on a Master’s, Annie got done and got the hell out. Jerry and I had one last year together in Auburn, and truthfully I don’t recall much of it except that we played tennis and basketball and I suppose tolerated each other; Annie was gone anyway, so what the heck?

Leap forward nearly 20 years. At some point, the English Department started publishing a newsletter, complete with notices: Jerry Baxter wrote that teaching as a graduate student had been the happiest time of his life and he’d love to hear from anyone from those times. I thought that so admirably vulnerable that I couldn’t help emailing him.

As it turned out, he was working in Huntsville for Boeing as a technical writer (survivors of English departments in those years became either technical writers or lawyers.) Boeing was coincidentally bringing him to Seattle. Would you like to get together? I would.

I live on Bainbridge Island, which is a ferry ride to the west of Seattle; for whatever reason, Boeing, south of downtown Seattle, had put Jerry up at a hotel on the east side, just off I-90. We met at a chain, steakhouse, probably an Outback. Jerry showed up wearing sweatpants. I recalled Seinfeld’s character assailing his unemployed friend George who took to wearing them: “Do ya know what kind of message you’re sending?” That he’d given up, of course, which made me a little annoyed: you can’t put on slacks for the first time we’ve met in 20 years?

Anyway, no one was an alpha male anymore. He’d obtained a pilot’s license. He was living with a girlfriend, which surprised me; I would have thought he’d been conventional enough to get married. He was happy enough as a tech writer; I don’t think anyone took Jerry as a serious scholar any more than they did me. We both missed the teaching days, though, in all honesty, I’d done it for six years and had been ready to move on. It was curious that Jerry didn’t elaborate at all on the emotion he’d cited in his newsletter comment: those had been the happiest days of his life. They had been for me, too, but the subject simply never came up.

I didn’t ask Jerry about any of the conflicts of the past, how I was cheesy, how I stole Annie from him. Being a Southerner, he wasn’t going to bring anything that smacked of our conflict, and I wasn’t inclined to; it would have been in poor taste, as I had won. We parted with an amicable handshake, and I’ve never heard from him again, nor has he from me. I wonder what that was all about, and I wonder if he does too—or perhaps he forgot all about it the minute he left the steakhouse.