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
