The Common Lawyer (11 page)

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."

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

Andy Prescott always had a thing for redheads.

He was staring at one now. She had long legs and a sensuous smile. Her lips were red and her skirt was short. Her red hair was a wig, but she was still incredibly sexy. For a mannequin.

"Need a date for the prom, Andy?"

Andy hadn't noticed Reggie standing there. They were at the display window out front of Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds. Reggie chuckled and entered the store. He was a real funny guy for a white dude wearing black eyeliner and dreadlocks.

Andy had arrived back in SoCo on the little Huffy, checked for Max at Güero's only to learn that Oscar had sent him down to Ramon's, and found Floyd T. pushing his grocery cart from dumpster to dumpster searching for treasures in other people's trash. His responsibilities satisfied, he had then begun his quest for the perfect birthday present for his mother.

He had first tried Tesoro's Trading Company and then Maya Star and was walking the bike past Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds when the mannequin had caught his eye. He took one last look at her then continued down the sidewalk to Yard Dog. And there in the front window he spotted the perfect present for Jean Prescott: a white owl hand-carved from a small log. Yard art for her native Texas garden. She'd love it. He checked the price tag: $1,000.

He sighed and shook his head. He couldn't even afford a nice birthday present for his mother. Natalie was right: he needed ambition.

Andy walked down the street to Uncommon Objects. He searched the booths for a secondhand gift he could afford but found nothing special except an armadillo purse for $125—a real armadillo made into a purse. It was cool but creepy. Jean Prescott was a different sort of woman all right, but maybe not that different.

He gave up and went into the tattoo parlor to collect Max and his mail. His email. He couldn't afford a computer or Internet service either, so Ramon let Andy use his computer and maintain an email address on his Yahoo account.

The parlor reeked of antiseptic. Fortunately for his clients—hepatitis C was a constant concern in a tattoo shop—Ramon Cabrera was a clean freak; he wiped the entire place down a dozen times a day. It was as clean as a hospital and had the same look: bottles of alcohol and green germicidal soap, sterile gloves and gauze, the autoclave, a hazardous waste disposal box for used needles, vials of colored ink … well, maybe not the ink.

Andy walked around the front counter and found Max snoozing in the corner so he headed over to Ramon's computer on the back desk—but he stopped dead in his tracks. Lying face down on Ramon's padded table was a blonde girl clothed only in a black T-shirt and thong; her shorts lay on a chair. Her bare bottom was smooth, round, and glowing in the light of the bright fluorescent bulbs overhead. No doubt she was a UT coed getting a tattoo to assert her independence from her parents—at least until she needed more money.

"Tickets on the counter," Ramon said without looking up.

Ramon was sitting next to the girl and leaning over and peering through his little reading glasses only a few inches away from her smooth skin.
Jesus.
First Britney at traffic court, then Suzie at Whole Foods, and now a bare butt at Ramon's. The pressure of daily life in Austin was almost unbearable.

Andy grabbed the two tickets, each with a $100 bill attached—the day just kept getting better—then stepped over for a closer look, careful not to breach Ramon's sterile field. Ramon wore a white muscle T-shirt and white latex gloves; he was inking in a "Yellow Rose of Texas" tattoo on her left buttock, one of a matched set. The buttock, not the tattoo.

"Not polite to stare, dude," Ramon said.

But he smiled when he said it. Ramon Cabrera was only six years older than Andy, but the hard life he had lived and the tattoos on his body had aged him. Ramon had practiced what he preached: his entire upper body was a mobile mural commemorating Austin and Mexico, Latino culture and the Catholic religion, the Aztec sun god and the Tejano goddess Serena. It was beautiful and weird at the same time.

Ramon Cabrera was an artist with a tattoo needle.

The thing sounded like a dentist's drill, which made Andy's skin crawl. With his left hand Ramon stretched the skin on the girl's bottom tight and with his right hand he moved the needle from spot to spot on the stenciled outline of the yellow rose in rhythm with the Latino music playing in the background. The tattoo machine drove the needle into her skin—actually through the epidermis and into the dermis, the second layer of skin—puncturing her bottom hundreds of times per minute and depositing a drop of insoluble ink upon each insertion.

It hurt like hell.

But the girl had iPod buds stuck in her ears and her eyes closed, oblivious to the pain and the world around her … including Andy admiring her butt. After a long, wonderful moment, he broke eye contact and sat in front of Ramon's computer. He logged onto his email account and checked his messages. He shook his head.

"All I get is spam promising to make my penis longer."

"Don't waste your money," Ramon said. "None of that stuff works."

Andy logged onto the
Chronicle
's website and clicked "Classifieds" then "Personals" and then "Lovers Lane." He checked for responses to his ad. There were none. So he looked for new ads from "women seeking men." All were from women over forty hoping to find their Prince Charming (since the first two hadn't worked out) and live happily ever after. He wondered if it ever really worked. His mother said she had fallen in love with his father when she was a grad student at UT and saw him on stage at the Broken Spoke. It was love at first sight. They had married three months later and were still married thirty-five years later. Those kind of relationships weren't found in the personal ads. But Andy still looked.