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.'
His mother had protested war and fought football-she said the government was controlled by the military- industrial complex and the university by the athletic-alumni complex-since she had first arrived on campus as a freshman in 1966. She had never left the campus or quit the fight.
Andy had seen photos of her from 1970 when professors and students had chained themselves to thirty oak trees along Waller Creek to block their being bulldozed for the football stadium expansion. Frank Erwin, Jr., an LBJ crony and chairman of the Board of Regents at the time who had loved Longhorn football, driven a school colors orange-and-white Cadillac, and been dubbed the 'Emperor of UT' by Time magazine, called in the cops and had everyone arrested, including Jean Prescott. Then he bulldozed the trees and expanded the stadium. His mother had lost that fight and every fight since. But she had never tired of the fight, and she wasn't tiring now. So Andy changed the subject.
'How's Dad?'
She took a deep breath.
'He won't leave home. Won't even sing in church. At least he still tends his garden. You need to come out, Andy, he'd like the company. How about this weekend? I'll pick you up on the way home Friday, bring you back in Monday.'
Her face showed her hope that he'd say yes.
'I'll ride out Saturday morning.'
The bike would be faster than the twenty-year-old Volvo his mother drove.
'It's forty miles.'
'Piece of cake.'
'And ice cream.'
'I mean, the ride out and back.'
'I mean cake and ice cream. It's my birthday.'
' Your birthday? Mom, I'm sorry. I forgot.'
'But no presents, okay?'
She said the same thing every year.
'Saturday, then?'
'I'll be there.'
'Promise?'
He went over and kissed her on the cheek.
'Cross my heart.'
'Bring Max. Your father misses that dog.' She hugged him then said, 'Oh, tickets.'
She handed him two tickets; a $100 bill was clipped to each. The left-wing UT professors drove hybrids, but they drove them fast. They knew that Professor Prescott's kid could take care of their tickets; and Professor Prescott acted as if she were not the least bit ashamed that her only son was a traffic ticket lawyer. What kind of woman was she?
'Do you need more money?'
'I'm good.'
He was very good. Four hundred bucks in one day-his all-time career record. He considered how he would spend that $200. He could (a) pay next month's office rent, (b) ask Suzie out, although a date with Suzie would run $500 minimum, or (c) upgrade the replacement bike with a RockShox suspension and a gel saddle, which sounded particularly good. But Andy was just kidding himself. He knew all along that he would spend the $200 on (d) a birthday present for his mother.
SIX
