Jester Food

To eat good food is to be close to God.

--Primo, “Big Night”

I know, I’ve used that quote before. But its very apropos of today’s post, about the advances in dorm food at the Jester Center, at the University of Texas. Or, basically, my 25 years too late complaint about the chow.

Its an earthshattering topic, sure. Not nearly as important as something like the Aggie football program, or plastic surgery. Still, this story I’m about to unfold came like a bolt from the blue. Enough to delay the third and final part of my college football trilogy.

These past few years, I’ve gotten to spend a fair amount of time on campus (the University of Texas campus, that is), mainly because I workout at Gregory Gym. Well, actually, its because they have an indoor track and pool, so when the weather is bad I can still run, or swim. Anyway, I’m there at weird times, usually after 7 p.m., so other parts of campus can be a bit sparsely populated. After around 7, I figure these kids have more important things to do. You know, like studying, dining, napping before they go out, smoking dope and watching Sponge Bob Square Pants, going on keg runs. Not getting there during the day or spending much time in spots not between my secret parking spot and the gym, I don’t get to see too much of campus.

So its easy to forget how truly lovely it is, particularly after the recent (i.e. last 10 years or so) building growth spurt. Budget deficit? Recession? No problem for the University of Texas. Its doing its part to contribute to the stimulus program with lots of new buildings. Happily, most of these have an architectural style similar to the 1920s and 30s, and similar to some of the original campus buildings, like Garrison Hall, Waggoner Hall, or Painter Hall. Not like those hideous utilitarian boxes of the Frank Erwin/Peter Flawn era. I met Dr. Flawn once, actually. I was invited, at random along with about 50 other of my fellow students, to an informal get together at the President’s office. Very imposing. Two stories’ worth of books lining the walls, kind of like Professor Higgins’ study in My Fair Lady, only a lot darker. For the President of the University of Texas, that guy sure reminded me of Sam Drucker from Petticoat Junction. (That’s actually extremely funny to the 10 people in the world who’ve both seen Dr. Flawn and watched Petticoat Junction). The new landscaping and statues are also nice additions. The Barbara Jordan statue at the Union is really nice. She spoke at my graduation ceremony. Actually, she gave the longest, slowest, most painful speech I’ve ever heard not given by Bill Clinton. “Conviction values!” she kept booming in that Burning Bush of a voice, every minute killing me and everyone else sweating to death under graduation robes in the late May heat outside the Tower. What the hell that old lady was ranting about I have no idea. I’m ok that she’s the Voice of God and all, but with 2,000 drunk graduates and three times as many parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and significant others all suffering silently through the ceremony for us to be able to take pictures and have punch and dessert after, that speech had to stop about 45 minutes sooner than it did. I think I took a nap during the middle part. Or blacked out with heat stroke. I can’t really tell which.

Texas has, unfortunately, made it nearly impossible to park on campus unless you patronize one of their fancy new garages charging obscene rates. Averaged out, most Park Avenue townhouses are cheaper to rent than a UT parking garage spot. I guess it keeps away those pesky outsider troublemakers (or scams the parents visiting their kids on the weekends of the last few dollars still in their pocket after they’ve paid for tuition, room and board, and books). So most people have to park in state parking lots across MLK and walk past either the new AT&T center or the new Blanton Art Museum. By the way, how funny was it that Player’s Hamburgers got over on UT, who wanted to tear the place down to build their new cash cow hotel and conference center? The owner’s cousin was a state rep, and not even a powerful state rep . Just someone with enough influence to slow down appropriations if they condemned Player’s. So the place is still in business, no doubt serving food poison like I got the one and only time I ever went there, in 1982. Thank God there’s plenty of other places to go to now after 2 a.m.

But this is all kind of beside the point, which had something to do with dorm food. Another building you have to pass to get to the gym is the notorious Jester Center, at one time the largest college dormitory complex in the nation. Or, as they used to brag for some odd reason, its own zip code. A throwback to Soviet-bloc housing styles, it pretty much resembles the People’s Central Student Housing Complex for the Glory of the Proletariat. Or Cabrini Green, but with slightly more parking. Those of you Affirmers who’ve known me for awhile know that for one, brief, shining moment, I lived in Jester East my freshman year. No matter how bright it was outside, it always seemed dark inside. And it smelled like Bourbon Street, even after it was cleaned. Everything was trashed. Usually only one elevator out of eight was working. The cleaning crews didn’t work on weekends, so by Sunday afternoons the place resembled the Turkish hospital at the end of Lawrence of Arabia.

The food was about what you’d expect. Pretty much like soup at the Hanoi Hilton. Totally unbearable. Unsanitary. Inedible. The people making it looked like they were nust out on parole. The cashiers and other workers were the same work-study idiots you’d see throwing up on Sixth Street the night before (and going back into the bar because, after all, the night is young). They’d serve grilled cheese sandwiches one day, then the next they’d serve some Cheeto-ish looking casserole which, upon deconstruction, proved to be yesterday’s grilled cheese sandwich remnants in some undefined, goo-like residue. The usual entrée involved some sort of mystery meat, generally some grayish, stringy substance which you’d cross your fingers to hope wasn’t nutria. Or horse. The salad, which I didn’t eat at the time because that was back during my strict no green food diet, had black spots and looked like it had been sun-dried. For a treat, every three or four weeks, on a Sunday they’d give you a ticket which would entitle you to a steak or some grilled shrimp. But only once through the line. Normally you could go through the line as often as you like, which is where I first coined the phrase “its not good but there’s a lot of it.” Yeah, really, I thought of that one. The only thing remotely edible was dessert. My fellow students all looked like floating corpses toward the end of the year, sporting the look of someone having their last meal before spending the early morning hours being given the last rites and then lethal injection. By the end of the year, I was like the guy in Super Size Me, bloated, close to liver failure, and I had a mustache, which unbelievably was not a good look on me. Imagine Horatio Sanz from Saturday Night Live. The next year I lived in Moore-Hill and ate at the Varsity, which had edible food. And the ambiance of a 1950s hospital cafeteria. Several years later, Steve and I went on a tour group of several Huntsville TDCJ units, and had lunch at the Ellis II unit. It was the same food they served the prisoners. I remember thinking how it was so much better than what I ate my first year at school.

Within the last couple of weeks, I had the privilege of participating in the hearing from hell. Held in the Bob Bullock Museum just off campus, we were given somewhat extra long lunch breaks. To break the tension and get outside, I would walk across the street and walk on campus for about 15 to 20 minutes. Each day I would pass the Blanton and the Education building, the main library, and Jester Center. On a whim, and to get some air conditioning, I walked into Jester and for the first time since May 1983, walked into the student dining facility. What did my eyes behold, but a new day dawn. Gone was the industrial food complex, to be replaced by a variety of choices, all of which looked yummy and either nutritious, or not borderline toxic—deli, pizza, grill, entrée, salad bar, pasta bar—it was like being at a real dining facility. See examples in the photos above. Or the Austin airport. These kids were eating something you might actually want to eat, happily ignorant of the swill and grunge the prior management formerly served at that establishment. I spoke to an adultish-looking supervisor. She said that alumni frequently came there and were shocked at the changes, and all of them complained about how bad the food used to be.

I’m no expert, but as early as 1982, couldn’t a major American university with one of the richest endowments have been able to serve halfway decent food to its students? I’ve had better meals on hikes than what I got there. Or did it really take the computer and internet revolution to enable Jester to serve grilled salmon? In 1982, there were other locations on campus where you could eat halfway decent food, and not just the athletic dining hall. Kinsolving, the Varsity, the Union, all served food that wouldn’t leave you semi-paralyzed for two hours afterward. Texas obviously had the machines and the personnel to make edible food, why couldn’t they have done it at Jester? I went to A&M a couple of times when I was in school, and they had pretty good food. I’m sure it wasn’t just the animal husbandry connection (one of my favorite Aggie jokes involves the school of animal husbandry by the way…ask me some time). Hell, that was like going to Maxim’s by comparison.

So I’m glad to see today’s kids aren’t being killed by cuisine, or getting to play the “name that meat” game like those of us from yesteryear. You can thank Bill Powers, I guess, current UT President and one of my favorite law school professors, who, incidentally, gave me my worst grades. The best was Olin Guy Wellborn III, who once berated the class for not knowing that Elvis would shoot the screen of any television set if Robert Goulet or Mel Torme came on, and used to illustrate points with stories about the heavy metal doctor, the Midnight Special, or putting little children on leashes. That’s my kind of guy. As Will Ferrell might say, “Goulet!”

Next—the athletes are guilty too, man.