I was not (hypothetically) running an illegal gambling ring. First of all, what I was (hypothetically) doing exists in a gray area of the law. Second, when society uses the phrase “gambling ring,” it’s usually talking about the people accepting the bets, not the people placing them. Those people make money. I was not making money. I was (hypothetically) pooling my dollars with those of my friends to bet on sports.
It was New Year’s Day. 2022. The heat was broken, and the walls were thin, and the landlord had made it over but only to confirm that yes, this did seem to be a different problem from the air conditioning issues, and no, there was no chance of getting a repairman out before the 2nd or 3rd (at most, one of these things was true). It wasn’t cold, but it was chilly, and our dog was only halfway through the 15 trips she made to the vet that winter. But the thin walls helped give the duplex its character, and we’d gotten our hands on a space heater or two, and Fargo had her blankets. Over in Arizona, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish were kicking off the Fiesta Bowl against the Oklahoma State Cowboys. My fund had bet a lot of money on the game.
The situation was that Notre Dame’s successful but nationally disliked coach, Brian Kelly, had carpetbagged off to Louisiana State, and with little time before Signing Day and Luke Fickell tied up coaching Cincinnati in the playoff, Notre Dame had promoted defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman to the head coaching job. The reception was sensational. Freeman was young. He was handsome. He was a skilled recruiter beloved by his players. For the first time in my lifetime or the lifetime of my (hypothetical) co-conspirators, our alma mater was somewhat likeable. This was the first game of what was being enthusiastically branded the Freeman Era.
Why we thought this would translate to Notre Dame beating Oklahoma State by 19 or more points, I’m not sure. Our thinking made more sense at the time. We did bet responsibly, though. We put 38% of our fund on alternate spreads and 44% of it on the Notre Dame moneyline. With Notre Dame a 2.5-point favorite, this assured us that we would at worst—we knew Notre Dame would at least win the ballgame—break even on the day, and at best—if Notre Dame won by 19 or more—recoup all of our losses from the preceding two and a half years. With one minute and sixteen seconds left before halftime, Michael Mayer caught his second touchdown, and the boys were in business. The Irish led 28–7. A 21-point margin. All we needed was for the brave young men carrying the banner of our school, our way of life, and 82% of our gambling habit’s bankroll to keep the score where it was over the final two quarters.
We were doomed.
To Scott’s credit, he (hypothetically) asked if we should hedge at halftime, after Oklahoma State scored in four plays to cut the lead to 14. Why I thought this was a bad idea, I’m not sure. My thinking made more sense at the time. We could have bet a small amount of money at halftime on Oklahoma State to win, and doing so would have guaranteed us a profitable New Year’s Day. We didn’t do it. It’s possible my answer had something to do with karma, or with Bitcoin transaction fees. (Thankfully, this is all hypothetical.) Whatever the rationale, we did not hedge, and Notre Dame did not win the game by 19 or more points. Notre Dame did not win the game at all, in fact. Notre Dame didn’t even lead at the end of the third quarter. Roughly one hour after pacing excitedly around that tiny, frigid Hyde Park living room, free from the weight of my lifetime gambling deficit, I hunched on the edge of the couch in panicked silence, cupping my mouth and nose with my hands while the adrenaline coagulated beneath the bottom of my rib cage. I waited for touchdowns that did not come. I watched 82% of the fund whistle away.
That second half took forever.
When the game ended, I told my wife I’d be back in four hours, and I went out to recoup losses the old-fashioned way: Through honest labor.
I’m an Uber Eats driver by trade.
It was the middle of the afternoon, so the dinner orders weren’t yet piling up, which meant it was a better time to drive people than to deliver them their food. I opened the Lyft app and waited for it to start pinging. My records say I drove 72 miles that day, and that I was out there for 3.5 hours. I believe I made about seventy dollars.
You learn a lot from a little after you’ve driven rideshare for a while. I’d imagine it’s the same with taxis. You’re given a person’s first name and their destination, and you see the place you picked them up from. If there are multiple passengers, you hear their conversation. Sometimes, you’re involved in it. In the middle of that afternoon, driving mostly around the northern half of the city (images of triumphant Mike Gundy still haunting my every blink), I picked up three college-aged kids who were not students at UT. They’d come to town for New Year’s, they were leaving that night or the next morning, and they were looking for somewhere nice to take a walk. Disappointment swelled when I learned this last part. Their destination was Mueller.
There is nothing wrong with Mueller. I mean this sincerely. But if you ever find yourself in need of a walk in the city of Austin, Texas, please do not take that walk in Mueller. Mueller is an ok place to take a walk. But there are good places, better places, places worth walking. You could walk in Zilker Park. You could walk alongside Town Lake. You could stroll or hike a stretch of the Greenbelt. You could wander the grounds of the University of Texas. You could peruse South Congress Avenue, grabbing a coffee on the way, or you could even find the two little stubs that make up North Congress Avenue, downtown. Between those stubs? The Texas State Capitol. Another beautiful place to take a walk. Mueller? Mueller Lake Park, or whatever the park is named? It’s nice enough. It’s a fine place for a walk. But you’re walking around a retention pond.
I want to stress again that there is nothing wrong with Mueller. I mean this sincerely. Austin did a very good job when it developed this development, and the only actively bad parts about the neighborhood arose through natural cause and effect, in a phenomenon adjacent to the tragedy of the commons. But while Austin is a city of character and variety and free-spirited organic creation, even in its most corporate parts, Mueller is a neighborhood of plain, rigid, vanilla order, accompanied far too often by a loaded question: “Oh, don’t you love it there?”
I have now, today, two years after that Lyft ride, lived in Mueller for seven months.
Mueller’s origins trace back to 1999, when Robert Mueller Municipal Airport closed and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport opened, the city moving its air hub somewhere it could grow without butting up against population on every side. In the wake of the closure, 711 acres of undeveloped real estate were left in what was becoming, more and more, a prime part of town. A mile and a half from UT’s campus and right across Airport Boulevard from the gem that is Cherrywood, there was land, and something needed to be done with it besides letting the runways crumble to gravel. I’m not sure who made the decisions, or how, but it was decided that a planned community would be built, with retail and commerce and medicine and living space, that living space adorned with parks and swimming pools and a school and a theater and a children’s museum and all sorts of other amenities right down to the retention pond, which they admittedly disguised very well as a lake. Entirely built in the 21st century, the development is as environmentally friendly as just about anything in the state of Texas. Entirely built in Austin, roughly a quarter of the permanent homes in Mueller qualify as Affordable, with much of that affordability built organically, through clever architecture and quadplexes. There’s some waste, and there’s some grift, and there are the customary consequences of some well-intentioned and poorly-thought-out ideas, but all in all, whoever designed Mueller did a very good job.
However.
If you were to build a trap for the kind of person who loves an HOA, you would build Mueller.
If you were to remake the movie Edward Scissorhands with more sensible zoning, you would set it in Mueller.
If you were to find a picturesque community, pluck it from its location, and boil off every last hint of its soul, you would be left with Mueller.
It’ll grow into itself one day.
Tolerable nuisances:
- The parking cops are disturbingly eager. Last Friday—one of those weekdays that felt like a weekend, being the Friday after Christmas—they swarmed at 4:00 PM, right when the restrictions kicked in. Dozens of them bustled around, scanning license plates under wordy signs like they were TV cops raiding a mafia warehouse. This is also known to happen on springtime Saturday mornings. In case someone decided not to drive drunk the night before.
- The sprinklers are a problem. Too many spray straight onto pavement. They run too often when it’s raining. Either I don’t understand the design or one is broken every block, so if you step off the sidewalk at night—say, to make way for an affluent mother of two riding her bike on the sidewalk—you often step into a slop of mud.
- Nobody keeps the shitheads in check. There’s no old guard to gather on the corner and grumble about the affluent mother of two who thinks it’s ok to ride her bike on the sidewalk. There aren’t enough dirty looks thrown at the guy at the park who lets his kids run all over the court while old dudes try to play pickup basketball.
- Most of the commercial stuff stinks. The coffeeshops are uncomfortable and overpriced (one of those we must accept, but both at once is insulting). The pizza place is uncomfortable and somehow complicated. The HEB—the vaunted Mueller HEB, icon of the Instagram caste—is cramped. There are a few good restaurants, but there’s only one real bar, and it’s an Irish pub. Irish pubs are useful, especially in the morning, but if they’re the only player in the space, they start to feel like Chotchkie’s, the restaurant from Office Space.
All of these are, again, tolerable nuisances, and given the choice between Mueller and most other white-bread neighborhoods, I would choose Mueller. Mueller will be splendid in fifty years, when it’s gotten through the newness. But while Mueller would be a great asset to Overland Park, or to another stronghold of suburbia, Austin isn’t Overland Park. There are better places to go for a walk on New Year’s Day.
You’re going to move to Mueller in your fifth year here, and you’re going to hate it. The skyline will look far away, and not an inviting far-away, like how it looks when you’re on a hill in North Campus. Your townhouse will fit your needs, and it’ll become home, but you’ll be isolated, and you’ll be lonely. You’ll somehow miss the city where you live. You’ll be glad you rent. You’ll try to leave the neighborhood once a day, and you’ll find the people who let their dogs say hi, but every bad day will be a little worse. Because you live in Mueller.
**
This is the first essay of a 52-essay series: The Courier’s Guide to Austin.
