Remembering Austin

Remembering the old Austin today with a passage from my novel The Krottkey Chronicles. There's still plenty to love about this town, but brother it ain't cheap.

There wasn’t a lot of money to go around, but it didn’t matter. Austin was an oasis for the impoverished. Mrs. Nguyen and her extended family sold eggrolls for fifty cents apiece on the Drag. The Hare Krishnas fed all comers a meal of rice and steamed vegetables for the price of only a little simulated interest in the avatars of Vishnu and the consolations of herd behavior. Sister Cindy and the Reverend Frank preached on a more or less continual basis at the foot of the West Mall and you could watch them haranguing the girls from Tarrytown Methodist for hours at a time. You could wander up to the fourth floor of the UGLy, the undergraduate library, and listen to Django Reinhardt albums all day if you wanted. Weekends were better. On any given Friday you could see a dozen movies on campus for a buck a show. Howard Hawks and Ingmar Bergman. Harold Lloyd and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Only a buck. On Saturdays you could head east of I-35 and drink fine strong coffee and eat migas with tortillas and refried beans at El Azteca for a couple of dollars a plate. Barton Creek was running that Spring. The stream came tumbling down from the hills west of the city to the crystalline pool at Barton Springs, and it didn’t cost a dime to sun yourself on one of those slabs of limestone beside Twin Falls and watch idiots go shrieking over the drop. As the weather warmed up there were free festivals and concerts, a Spam cook-off, a citywide tug o’ war, foot races, pun-offs, and a massively stoned celebration of Eeyore’s birthday. The next Stevie Ray lived in every van. Frisbees freckled the purple sky and sometimes the city seemed like a massive conspiracy mounted by those who didn’t have any cash to annoy the people who did.