Charlatangent

When I was in 7th grade I was infatuated with my thirty-something math teacher, Mr. Giorgi. Instead of teaching us algebra, he told us stories about defending himself from San Francisco gangs with a crowbar, or eying down a particularly antagonistic swathe of Hell's Angels on the open road in Arizona (the Mr. Giorgi-is-threatened-by-a-menacing-group-of-evil-doers-and-performs-badass-maneuver-to-escape-story had a number of permutations). The veracity of those yarns, in retrospect, seems patently dubious, but, as a 90 lb pre-pubescent, Mr. Giorgi embodied everything I had ever wanted to be. He was devilishly handsome, dating a beautiful/mysterious woman, and the object of innumerable school girl crushes. In sex-ed he was the only teacher who attempted to verbally describe an orgasm (for those of us who hadn't yet been there): "It's like a great release of energy, you know? It's like you've just been so pent up for so long and..."
After he said this the other teachers nodded gravely. "What wisdom," I remember thinking, "he is a poet also."

One day, Mr. Giorgi stopped class early. He told us he was about to give us something that we would take with us for the rest of our life. He told us that "alllll this," everything around us, "this classroom stuff," wasn't shit compared to what we were about to hear. What we were about to hear was infinitely more important than math, which we "probably wouldn't use after the 12th grade."

Then he played this on his stereo:




Four years later Mr. Giorgi was fired after getting in some sort of verbal dispute with another teacher. He refused to leave campus and, reportedly, the police had to chase him around the North Quad during recess in order to apprehend him and remove him from the premises. Last December I thought I saw him when I was driving home from a friend's house. But John looked also, and he said it probably wasn't him.