"With the upgrades?"
Andy had already saddled up. Damn, this seat was a little hard on the boys.
"Sure. You get her dialed in, she'll be a sweet enough ride, at least for the few months till you crash her. I'll add it to what you owe. That'll be six-fifty."
"Fifty a month like now?"
"Can you pay a hundred?"
"How about seventy-five and…"
Andy dug out the two $100 bills and held them out.
"Two hundred down."
"What, you hit the lottery?"
"I got lucky all right, but at traffic court."
Wayne took the bills but said, "You still gonna be able to eat?"
"I'd rather ride than eat."
"You got that right, brother."
They fist-punched.
"You can pick up the bike tomorrow." Wayne pointed a thumb at the front door. "But park that Huffy over at BookPeople."
In 1839, the Republic of Texas authorized the creation of a state university in Austin and endowed it with 231,400 acres of barren, worthless land in West Texas. Thirty-seven years passed-statehood, the Mexican-American War, secession, the Civil War-and still the university did not exist.
In 1876, the State of Texas ratified a new constitution which mandated the establishment of a "university of the first class" and added another million acres of barren, worthless West Texas land to the endowment.
In 1883, the University of Texas opened with eight professors teaching 221 students in one building on forty acres north of downtown known as College Hill. Texas politicians were so darn proud of their new school that they added
another million acres of West Texas land to the endowment for a total of 2,231,400 acres-all barren and worthless. That land generated total income of less than two cents per acre in 1900.
The University of Texas was poor.
And so it might be today had two wildcatters named Frank Pickrell and Carl Cromwell not drilled an oil well on that West Texas land in 1923, which they named the Santa Rita No. 1. They hit pay dirt: the great Permian Basin oil field lay directly under the university's land. Billions of barrels of black gold. That barren land was no longer worthless.
The University of Texas was rich.
Today, the original Santa Rita No. 1 pump jack sits on the UT campus as a monument to the oil that built the school, oil revenues have generated a $15 billion endowment, and 2,700 professors teach 50,000 students in 130 buildings sprawled across 350 acres of land located north of the state capitol.
The University of Texas is filthy rich.
Andy had ridden the Huffy north on the Drag, the stretch of Guadalupe Street that bordered the campus on the west and that had once been a cool strip with the Nighthawk Diner and the Varsity Theater and subversive bookstores and protesters railing against the government on street corners. Today, the Drag was just another string of expensive stores catering to rich students.
Andy entered the campus at the West Mall, the free speech zone where student activists pushed their political agendas between classes. He rode past long-legged girls in short-shorts (wow), oversized athletes acting as if they owned the place (they did), and tenured leftist professors (who made the Harvard faculty look like a Republican caucus) strolling with the confidence of knowing they could never be fired by the school's conservative alumni. He looked up at the three-hundred-foot-tall UT clock tower rising in front of him; in 1966 a deranged shooter had gone up to the observation deck with a high-powered rifle and killed sixteen people below.
Andy's mother had been on campus that day.
New buildings were going up everywhere, as if the goal were to pave over every square inch of green space on campus; of course, the only green that mattered at UT was the kind printed by the U.S. Treasury. Hence, the construction of more naming rights. For say, a $50 million donation, the university would name a building after you-"naming rights" in the vernacular; and rich Texans were lining up to buy theirs. UT buildings were named after corporations and CEOs, doctors and lawyers, athletes and coaches, politicians and presidents. The crown jewel was the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, which Andy's mother always said made about as much sense as a Joseph Stalin School of Humanities.
Andy emerged onto San Jacinto Street in front of the Reeves Research Institute and rode past the massive Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium where 96,000 fans watch the Texas Longhorns play football, listen to the public announcers on the $9 million sound system, and view instant replays on the "Godzillatron," the $8 million high-definition video screen that measured 55 feet in height by 134 feet in width, the biggest HDTV screen in America.
How's that for bragging rights?
One hundred thirty-two years later, some might debate whether the State of Texas had fulfilled the constitutional mandate for a university of the first class, but anyone who dared argue that the university's football team was not first class would be met with a simple, irrefutable rebuttaclass="underline" the Longhorns had won four national football championships.
Andy parked the bike outside the Fine Arts Building then went inside and found his mother's classroom; the door was propped open. He leaned against the wall outside and listened to his mother teach art history. All that he knew about art had been learned by listening in on her classes, a practice begun at birth. She had taken him to class with her every day until he had entered kindergarten; she said he had listened intently to her lectures. He liked to listen to her still and to watch her in moments like this, when she wasn't being his mother; when she was a human being engaged in her life's pursuit: Dr. Jean Prescott, artist, Ph. D. in art history, and tenured professor.
She was sixty-one and slim, pretty and passionate. Her hair was black with gray streaks. She wore a colorful skirt, a red shirt, sandals, and a smile. She was pretty even with her minimalist makeup, but back in her day she had been a beautiful flower child. She was passionate about art and about life, politics and education, immigration and global warming, war and football. She had protested every American war from Vietnam to Iraq and the presidents who had waged them; to this day, she remained proud of her extensive arrest record. Andy wished that he had known her back then-and that he possessed more of her passion for life. His passion was reserved for the bike. That was when he felt alive. The rest of the time, he felt as if he were just sleepwalking through life.
He waited for her class to end and the students to file out, then he stepped into the room.
"Andy."
She came to him and embraced him as if she hadn't seen him in years instead of just a few days. She pulled back and examined his battered face as if checking for skin cancer.
"The bike?"
He nodded. "I'm good."
His mother had never once asked him to stop riding. She understood passion. She brushed his hair back.
"I like your hair long."
She gathered her books and notes into her arms.
"Walk with me to my office."
"I'll carry your stuff."
She passed the load off to him, and they went upstairs. Students greeted her with a cheery "Hi, Professor Prescott" along the way. Tenure had earned her a ten-by-twenty-foot office with a prime view of the football stadium, which at UT was along the lines of a prime view of Central Park. She could have swapped offices for a view of the tower, but the stadium stoked her fire each morning. Until Iraq, she hadn't had a war to protest for thirty years, so she had taken on football-which is to say, she had taken on not just the University of Texas, but the State of Texas. She held out a newspaper to him.
"Read that."
Andy took the paper but didn't read it; he knew his mother would summarize the story for him. She did.