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PROF. HIGGINS: (Urbane. Addressing the audience.) Some years ago I encountered my first Americans in Spain. (Pause.) Grand People.
  But to know a few Americans away from their own country is no preparation for meeting them en masse in their native habitat.
Particularly if they happen to be Texans, who may or may not even be representative Americans.
  The University of Texas at Austin has a campus of nigh on fifty thousand students, with very few Negroes. I am scheduled to teach two weekly classes, comprising twenty-five students each, in the coming Fall Semester.

Jet plane landing. Hold under.

ANNOUNCER: "Boomtown, Texas, USA," by Aidan Higgins.

PROF. HIGGINS: Professor Sivaramakrishnan himself was waiting for me. (PROF. S. enters, to shake HIGGIN's hand.) A small neat cricket of a man in a wide-brimmed Brazilian sun hat.

PROF. S.: In Rio, I believe, the fruit in the market is rotten by midday.

PROF. HIGGINS: I, the Visiting Professor Higgins, was to teach "Creative Writing"—a trade recondite as falconry—through the Fall Semester. Class enrolment had already begun.

HIGGINS, PROF. S., and PROF. LA SALLE gather around the table, which serves as the interior of the Sivaramakrishnans' home.

PROF. S: (Fastidious intonation, pipe smoker, patronising, slow delivery.) I have a great sympathy for the eighteenth century novelists. Men like Fielding (puff) and Smollett. And people like that (puff, puff). I consider Fanny Hill a great novel. Do you?

Silence. Offstage cry from Waldo the Cat.

 (Complacently resumes, puffing at pipe.) They are my boys. (Pause, puff-puff.) Why is that?

Longer silence.

PROF. LA SALLE: (Bass; clearing throat.) You look like Chekhov, Higgins.

PROF. HIGGINS: Maybe I am Chekhov.

PROF. LA SALLE: (Rumbling laugh.)

PROF. S.: (Indulgently.) An Irish Chekhov? (Meditative puff.) M’mm, maybe. Maybe. But certainly I am Professor Sivaramakrishnan . . . though regrettably no relative of the great Pakistani all-rounder!

Polite laughter. Mrs. S.’s high screech. Cry of Waldo the Cat.

 Right, my Waldo?

Music. Thelonius Monk,"Well You Needn’t," hold under.

VOICE: "America . . . often only a place in the mind." (Louder, agitated.) “No democracy in nightmares.”

Music.

PROF. HIGGINS: On a midsummer morning not very long ago the sun advanced on the city and lit the topmost spines of the hill.
  Then the light came closer, touching the tall buildings and the fresh-washed streets.
  The nearly full-blown heat came with it, quick and palpitant. It was close to being desert heat: sudden, emphatic.
  The sun’s heat came through the cloud cover, steaming the streets, quivering upward through the . . .
  The city was quiet; people stayed inside, sitting under fans, sipping iced drinks, barely stirring.

Students stand and face the classroom flag, hands on hearts.

 The American flag is like a child’s plaything. Vivid primary colours that would gladden a childish heart. Scarlet . . . no, crimson, and sailor blue on white. A joyful-looking thing, like a lacquered tin drum. Like a good day’s work. Or a win on the turf. It flies free up there, seemingly.
  A pretty girl, a very pretty girl, very free of brown leg and thigh in the briefest of white shorts, passes along Duval Boulevard on her modern bicycle, standing up on the pedals, hair flying. A gorgeous maroon helium balloon straining out behind her. Her infatuated boyfriend cycles alongside, pleased to be with her.
  Where else would a smile be, but on a bonny face? (Pause.) . . . Ah America, my New-found land! (Pause.) . . . Land of Dreams.

HIGGINS sits at the bar.

BARMAN: (Brisk.) Did you say you wanted anything?

PROF. HIGGINS: Shiner.

BARMAN turns to get HIGGINS his beer. Turns up the radio.

ANNOUNCER: “Tiny” Edwards, Longhorn middle linebacker, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on a police officer Wednesday after a fight in an Austin nightclub. Using profane language and with slurred speech and bloodshot eyes, the maddened Longhorn said:

TINY E.: Go ahead an’ try an’ arrest me!

ANNOUNCER: Four or five police officers got Edwards into a patrol car. He faces third-degree felony charges, punishable by up to ten years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Longhorn coach Fred Akers said he would not take any action until he received all the facts of the case.

COACH AKERS: Austin, Texas, is still part of America, and the last time I heard, you’re innocent until proved guilty.

ANNOUNCER: Austin Police Officer Melecio Villaneve, who attempted to arrest the Longhorn linebacker outside the Rox-Z nightclub on Riverside Drive last night, was taken to Brackenridge Hospital for treatment of injuries, cuts and scratches, and a nose injury. The Longhorn had attempted to bite him on the chest.

Football stadium, cheering.

 No charges were pressed by police. (Pause.)
Three murderers and a rapist have escaped from Leavenworth via an airshaft. Bloodhounds and helicopters patrol the rolling hills of northeast Kansas. The wanted men were serving life-sentences.

WAITRESS: (Feminine, coaxingly.) Did you say you wanted something?

Music. 1960s Joan Baez recording.
Hold under: bar sounds. Two students leave their seats and approach the bar.

PROF. HIGGINS: A Mexican couple sit near me. Middle-aged, close together, intimate but not touching. Whispering to each other in Spanish. She asks for a Jack Daniels.

FEMALE MEXICAN: Could we get two Jack Daniels?

MALE MEXICAN: (Low, puzzled.) Whass’ eet—whees-kee?

They continue to whisper to each other in Spanish.

PROF. HIGGINS: Why do I feel more at home where Spanish is spoken? A World in a Word: the lingo of children, itself not childish. A protective language, until you encounter the hard menace of Spanish male abuse; but that’s protective too.

Bar sounds. Baez Sings. HIGGINS turns and faces his classroom. The two students at the bar shoot down their whiskey and return to their seats.

 (In classroom.) And then I’d like . . . Davis to read his paper, which is exceptionally good. And then Kurt, an extremely fine paper. (Pause.) All As.

STUDENTS: (Scramble. Each standing in turn.) Adult means horny . . . coming on like B.O.
  Get him!
  Twenty-five years old for Chrissake and thrown out of college!
  My drinking problems only increased.
  Dropt it in there an’ you’ve got it goin’ . . .

HIGGINS nearly retreats to the bar.

BARMAN: (Brisk.) Would you like another?

This chases HIGGINS back to his classroom. Tumult of bar abruptly cut.

PROF. HIGGINS: Stacey . . . if you would be so kind.

STACEY: (Standing.) The month of September is like no other in America. The air is slightly spicy, but not heavy. And it makes the most beautiful, contented sound when it blows through the trees. And the sky is full of stars, more stars than I have ever seen in any other town.

Whirr of phone ringing on HIGGINS’s desk.

PROF. HIGGINS: The phone rings. A tall, willowy girl bursts through the door and pounces on it, long braids flying behind.

STACEY quits reading and bolts for the phone.

STACEY: (Breathless.) I’ve got it!

PROF. HIGGINS: (Bored.) It’s Ben. Ben Ryder. A swim in the pool in the evening before malts at the drugstore? Why not?

OLDSTER has surreptitiously inserted himself at the bar.

OLDSTER: (Crotchety.) I’m not as young as I used to be, Charles. It gets harder and harder to get the blood to my brain.

Long puzzled silence.

PROF. HIGGINS: The redmen and their frugal race are virtually extinct, confined to their Reservations, become drunkards. One of my female students who sends in interesting papers is Cherokee-Irish. She has widely spaced periwinkle eyes and the fixed stare of an owl.
  No Negroes are seen in the campus. I was given directions by a Negro one night, having lost my way walking back from a production of The Duchess of Malfi; he was watering a lawn. I thought of Medgar Evers’s last words. Turn me loose.
  The Mississippi civil rights leader murdered in 1963 by a white supremacist who twice escaped conviction by all white juries. Thirty years later he was tried again.
  There are no flies in Texas. No Indians either. An orange glow suffuses the Tower of the Union Building; like an extended penis, says La Salle. Signifying that Texas won the football game today. This Saturday at the beginning of October.
  The stars over Austin are bigger than the stars over anywhere else, like the Texans themselves. Venus burns lopsided and below her to the southwest the Bull blinks a reddened eye. The topless bars, the Red Rose and the Yellow Rose, do a roaring trade. (Pause.)
  You can drink and drive in Texas. Take in a ball game. Play golf. They drive about in large air-conditioned cars with windows closed, Budweiser in hand. There is no state tax; oil pays for it all. The All-You-Can-Eat nights are perhaps the most relaxing of all. The Hungry Horse Saloon, moving with the times, has become The Steel Penny. Don’t ask me why. I guess I’m just a fool for the past . . .