I came to the University of Texas at Austin in 1965 as a graduate student and lived on less than $100 a month. I rented an apartment at 2513 1⁄2 Rio Grande—I’d never heard of an address with a half in it before—and did my time at Scholz Garten and Lake Austin Inn and all sorts of places. I was enchanted by the idea of Texas; that’s why I went there. One afternoon my roommate and I decided we wanted to have dinner in El Paso. So we got in a car and left Austin, but nobody told us it was like seven thousand miles away. We hadn’t checked the map. We were both from the part of the country where you can go through three or four states before you get to El Paso. So we drove and drove and drove and finally ended up in Junction. We stopped there and had chicken-fried steak for dinner, and the proprietor of the restaurant asked us, “What are y’all doing out here?” “Nothing,” we said. “We’re just going to El Paso.” He must have guessed we were from the university.
