Davis

The summer after my junior year of college, my girlfriend and I decided to stay in Greensboro before she headed off to San Francisco and then the Peace Corps in the fall. One of my friends was going elsewhere for the summer, so her room was available for sublet. Liza and I promptly moved into a closet-sized room in what I thought was the coolest house in town. Near campus, it had its own yard and wasn’t a part of anything else—no neighborhood, nothing around it but un-used field.

George Mavronikolus lived there and he was a man who could play cello, pick up the phone and answer a complex physics equation, then go back to Mozart or Vivaldi or whatever. He also dropped out of graduate school, where he was getting a full ride, so that he could sit on Tate St. all day, in front of the coffee shops, and talk bullshit to passers by. Then he’d come home, pack a pipe with weed, and proceed to exclaim that he wished he could just dig his eyes out with a fork. He wasn’t a happy man, but he could definitely be counted in the number of pre-indie rock(er) dudes that I was swimmingly enchanted by and wished they could just be able to see me enough to know that I could love them well and fix everything. Yeah right. In the meantime, I was dating Liza so, you know, there was that.

Living upstairs in a separate apartment was a man who everyone referred to as “the Navy guy.” A quiet, older type who didn’t want to be bothered, often complained about noise, sometimes got stoned with George, and had apparently dropped out of the Navy. “Don’t bother him,” we were warned.

A little more than a year later, for my student teaching assignment I was placed in the only inner-city high school Greensboro had. My cooperating teacher was planning her wedding at the time, so basically, from day one, I was it. I was to be the teacher for these 250 kids who couldn’t give less of a shit about being there, since they had their own kids to worry about, and all.

Since I quickly learned that I couldn’t get help from my cooperating teacher, I relied on the kindness of strangers. Other teachers in the English department introduced themselves and made it known how much they would be helpful to me.

One, in particular, was Davis Lee. He said, “I know you. You used to live downstairs from me.” I’m the type of person who has a terrible memory for meeting other people, especially if I get the sense that they won’t like me, so I was surprised that Navy guy remembered me. This also meant that Navy guy knew something else about me that none of the other teachers in this intolerant, southern, inner-city school knew. Nor could they know. It was crucially important to me that they not know this.

So the first chance that I got to take Mr. Lee aside, I begged him not to tell. Well, begged in a “you know what I know and I don’t want them to know what you know” type of communication that was revealed solely through eye contact and tiny gestures while speaking in the thinly-veiled speech of those in the know. Just like the mafia, gay people in Greensboro had code words. And this was a language that he perfectly understood. You see he’d been waiting for another gay person to arrive so that he wouldn’t be so alone. I guess I should have known this, being that he wore an article of clothing that was a tell-tale sign: Birkenstock sandals. Even in the winter, the hippies in North Carolina wear them with wool socks.

After that, Davis Lee and I were BFF in that school. We had lunch together and talked about teaching and lesson plans and what life was like outside of school. About our passion for teaching English, what drew us to it, etc.

It wasn’t long before people noticed. The students made jokes that Mr. Lee and the student teacher were hooking up. We didn’t care since it was the farthest thing from the truth, and since it acted as some sort of protective blanket. In fact, it was even better if they thought this, among this homophobic community.

Davis Lee was the one good thing about my student teaching experience and sometimes I wonder, after I left, what became of him? Is he still there? Did he finally burn out? Has he found love? Moved to a new state?

Mostly, though, my favorite two memories of him are this: observing his class; him teaching in action. He was a natural and really brought his classroom, his students, education to life. The second is this. One day one of his students was recounting a time when Davis Lee was mad; he had to bust up a fight. He was clipping down the hall at a quick pace and one kid said to another, “That Mr. Lee, man, you don’t want to get him mad. He be runnin’ down that hall in his flip-flops fast.”