The Common Lawyer

by Mark Gimenez

  He was getting old.

  He rode past the five-star Driskill Hotel and stood on the pedals across Congress Avenue, hoping not to get nailed by a speeder running a red light. Once on the other side, Andy breathed a sigh of relief. Sixth Street sloped down from there, so he coasted through the intersections at Colorado, Lavaca, Guadalupe, San Antonio, Nueces, and Rio Grande-more Texas rivers. Beads of sweat were rolling down his body by the time he turned into the parking lot at the Whole Foods eighty-thousand-square-foot flagship store and corporate headquarters, which occupied an entire city block at Lamar Boulevard.

  Whole Foods gave the slackers of Austin hope: If a twenty-five-year-old college dropout and his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend could open a small organic grocery store in 1978 and build it into an international organic food conglomerate with three hundred stores and $7 billion in revenues in thirty years, couldn't Andy Prescott be successful enough one day to rent a decent place in SoCo and own a top-of-the-line trail bike? Okay, just the bike then.

  Was that asking too much from life?

  Andy parked the Huffy at the Bicycle Pit-Stop, stuffed his coat and tie into the backpack, and hung the pack on the handlebars. He walked past the outdoor patio that featured a man-made stream coursing through the slate surface and entered the food court through sliding glass doors. He proceeded directly to the breakfast taco counter and ordered his usual from Team Member Brad (a fifteen-year member sporting a white chef's coat, a green Whole Foods cap, clear sterile gloves, and a $500,000 net worth from his company stock options): scrambled eggs, bacon, cheese, and refried beans on wheat tortillas with enough salsa to clear out his sinuses.

  " Dos."

  "You need one for Max?"

  "He's lunching at Guero's today."

  And by now napping on Guero's front porch. Andy took the tacos from Team Member Brad, stepped past the Gelato counter to the day2day juice bar, and ordered a Jumping Grasshopper smoothie from Team Member Charlene: wheat grass, lemon, lime, apple juice, pineapple, banana, and fat-free plain yogurt, his personal added ingredient. Breakfast tacos and a smoothie: his version of a power lunch for under $10. He returned to the Gelato bar and sat on a stool with his back to the counter.

  Whole Foods had been created as an alternative to the corporate grocery stores of America; the original name was "Safer Way" and back then the little store had catered to the hippies of Austin, like Andy's mother, who wanted whole, organic, non-corporate food. Fast forward thirty years and Whole Foods was now much more than an alternative grocery store for hippies. It was an alternative lifestyle. A way of life.

  And its customers lived the life.

  They were young and fit, hip and organic, green and liberal, educated and employed. But mostly fit. Men and women, but Andy didn't come for the men. He came for the women. Young, incredibly fit women. Lean and toned, muscular and tanned, the hard female bodies of Austin worked out at Gold's Gym and hung out at Whole Foods, their awesome anatomies tightly encased in segmented polyurethane, a magnificent long-chain synthetic polymer fiber known as Spandex. Tube tops, tank tops, short-shorts, leggings- God, the Spandex. These girls did not put personal ads in the Chronicle. They came to Whole Foods.

  Whole Foods girls were the finest and fittest females in Austin, Texas.

  Looking at the girls now, Andy Prescott was again moved to offer a silent thanks to Joseph C. Shivers, the DuPont scientist who had invented Spandex in 1959. He had dedicated an entire decade of his life for the betterment of mankind. Or at least man.

  Andy finished off one taco, sucked down half the smoothie, and then dove into the second taco. He loved to sit right there in the food court and girl watch, but there was one distinct downside: spotting a law school classmate who had done better. Which is to say, any law school classmate. Like Richard Olson. Rich. Which he was. Pale-skinned and soft-bodied, he looked like the tax lawyer he was. Rich was talking to two girls, who were hanging on his every word and sidling close like cats rubbing against his leg- two Whole Foods girls flirting with Rich Olson, the bastard. Andy shook his head.

  What does he have that I don't?

  But Andy knew the answer to his own question: a steady income. Rich had graduated at the top of their class. Four years with the biggest firm in Austin and the guy's making $250,000, driving a Porsche, living in a downtown loft, and dating beautiful girls.

  Andy sucked hard on the smoothie straw and felt the heat of jealousy building inside him when a lovely vision passed a few feet in front of him. She was blonde, lean, and fit. She was wearing Spandex, but not much. She was twenty-five years old. She was Suzie.

  "Hi, Suzie."

  She stopped, spun around, and assumed a perfect pose… until she saw it was just him. The pose evaporated like spit on the hot sidewalk.

  "Oh. Hi, Andy."

  Suzie was the kind of girl whose engine was always idling, just waiting to be shifted into gear by a stud. Which is to say, not by Andy. He had never come close to touching her gearbox, but he never quit reaching for the stick shift. He said, "I'm free tonight."

  "I'm not. Free. I'm a very expensive date."

  "Jeez, Suzie, you sound like a Dallas girl."

  "Andy, Austin girls are no less superficial than Dallas girls. We're just in better shape."

  Suzie was in extremely good shape. She was awesome. She looked like an airbrushed model in a magazine, but without the flaws. She was a top-of-the-line Whole Foods girl. She was digging in her waist pack. She was pulling out a familiar-looking piece of paper. She was holding it out to Andy.

  "Andy, I got a speeding ticket. Fourth one this year. Can you take care of this for me?"

  "Sure… for a hundred bucks. I'm not free either."

  Suzie snatched the ticket out of his hand and stormed off.

  He still had his pride. Well, sort of.

  Andy rode the Huffy north across Sixth Street to a large L-shaped building on the corner that housed Anthropologie, a women's clothing store, BookPeople, an independent bookstore that had achieved cult status in Austin, and Recreational Equipment Inc. He wasn't there for the blouses or the books; he was there for the bikes. He parked and went inside REI.

  He stopped just inside the door and gazed around like a kid in a candy store. REI housed all of Andy's dreams, except Suzie and the Slammer. Every manner of extreme sports gear stood on the floor or sat on the shelves or hung from the ceiling or on the walls-for running, hiking, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, canoeing, kayaking, and biking. This was not your father's sporting goods store.

  Unless your father snowboarded down Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  REI didn't sell sporting goods; it enabled outdoor adventure. You want to climb Mt. Everest or kayak Niagara Falls or hammer Death Road in Bolivia, this is your store. You want to play hard and get dirty, push yourself to the extreme, find out what you're made of, come on in. You want to play a friendly round of golf at the country club or a spirited game of badminton in the backyard, go somewhere else. REI sold extreme gear for extreme athletes, for people who wanted to live life, not watch it on TV. Like Andy. He was admiring the new mountain bikes hanging from the ceiling just out of his reach when he heard a familiar voice.

  "Dude, you get the number?"

  Wayne. In his green REI employee vest.

  "What number?"

  "The number of the train that hit you."

  Wayne laughed. He was funny like that.

  "Seeing your face and that Huffy you rode up on-you steal that from a kid? — I'm gonna take a wild guess and say you crashed another bike."

  "Yep."

  "Three months, that's gotta be some kind of record. What happened this time?"

  Andy gave Wayne a brief recap of the old ladies and his ride down the ravine. By the time he had finished, Wayne was shaking his head.

  "Dude, you're pushing that Samson theory."

  Wayne was the bike man at REI. He repaired bikes in the bike shop and sold bikes on the floor. He had sold Andy every one of his bikes; this one would make six
. Or was it seven?

  "Don't ever cut that hair." Wayne slapped Andy on the shoulder. "Come on, let's see what trade-ins I've got."

  They walked under the new bikes that Andy coveted even more than Suzie-the Novara Method 2.0… the Marin Rift Zone XC Quad… the Cannondale Prophet… the Stumpjumper-top-of-the-line trail bikes that he had about as much chance of riding as he did Suzie.

  "Andy," Wayne said, "I wish you were rich. You buy more bikes each year than my Dellionaires."

  "Dellionaires" were employees of Dell Computer-founded in Austin by Michael Dell, another college dropout-who had become millionaires on their company stock. Their spending habits were legendary in Austin.

  "Difference is, you buy cheap bikes. Speaking of which, check this one out. She's another Schwinn hardtail, but your butt's used to that. I was gonna upgrade some of the components, sell it for four-fifty, but I'll let you have it for four."

  "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 rebuttal: 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.

  "Says that Texas universities spent over a billion dollars the last five years to build football stadiums."

  She pointed at the UT stadium looming large in the window. The new north end zone was under construction; the workers looked like ants scurrying about the two-hundred-foot-tall structure.

  "That's another hundred and eighty million dollars for football. They sell corporate skyboxes, tickets and TV rights, merchandise-that's a nonprofit educational activity? They gross a hundred million a year from football and don't pay a dime in taxes! That's obscene."

  "That's Texas, Mom."

  "And the governor wonders why Texas' brightest math and science students go to the Ivy League or California for college. It's simple: Texans invest in football, not math and science."

  "Mom, you ever meet a math major who could play strong safety?"

  "What's a strong safety?"

  "A football player." His mother had a confused expression. "I'm just pulling your chain, Mom."

  He had pulled her chain, but he hadn't slowed her down.

  "A fifteen-billion-dollar endowment and we make middle-class kids pay twenty thousand dollars to attend a public university. But the athletic department has a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar budget for five hundred athletes and the football coach makes five million a year, with bonuses." She shook her head. "The University of Texas isn't a university-it's a football team."