He left the listings on the table in the coffee shop where he’d found them. Leaving the relative quiet of his afternoon refuge he headed north to the sounds of the city exhaling the last of it’s daily tower dwellers.
He shoved his right hand deep into his hip pocket as much to offer some cover from the raw wind blowing off the lake as, to return the meager silver of his change to rest with the few crumpled bills in the bottom of his pocket.
He’d mused over long this afternoon over today’s listings and now he was worried he might miss the cut. With the sky darkening and sleet in the forecast and freezing after two, he didn’t linger on the implications, just quickened his limp.
He had followed those same listings in a much more intense way until the crash, making sure each day that the details were right; address, hook, price and call back numbers. Now, they provided mere intellectual distraction to his daily routine, a faint touchstone to another world.
In that other world, in that other time, the listings were much thicker, some days up to a hundred and fifty pages or more. Back then it wasn’t unusual for him and his agency to be responsible for twenty-five or thirty pages themselves. Now, there weren’t enough pages to properly wrap an old mackerel. He grunted when he thought about how much he’d paid “The Times” for those listings each day.
Mind wondering over those old listings, he made his way down the block, cap pulled low against the first sting of the promised forecast. He wondered if whoever left the listings each day was still in the market, or like him, only following out of a stunned sense of what was and might have been.
Like most, he hadn’t seen it coming. God knows it wasn’t because the signs weren’t there. Prices had gotten absurd. Everybody was flipping anything they could hawk as fast and often as the paper would allow.
Nobody cared about underwriting. The wizards had it all figured out; default rates the points you name it. They securitized the bundles and peddled as much as they could print to little old ladies and pension funds everywhere.
The models and algorithms all agreed. Hell, Greenspan himself had even gone before Congress and reassured everyone about how much better the financial institutions systemically managed their risks.
Back then the money flowed. Qualifying for a mortgage was as difficult as breathing. Nobody did the math. Nobody asked the obvious questions. Nobody wanted to know as long as the money flowed.
Nobody cared about any of that until those first variable rates began to adjust and the teasers were over. But, by the time they figured out that Bubba, Billy and Mary Jane made less each month than their new mortgage payments, it was too late.
Back then the real estate he obsessed over, swapped flipped and flipped again with the paper the wizards supplied, consisted of whole city blocks, condo complexes and new strip malls. Tonight his thoughts focused on a much smaller tract.
Rounding the corner to the welcoming smell of hot soup and freshly baked bread coming from the back of the church, he relaxed his gate. He was going to make it. Door open, familiar volunteer, clipboard in hand, he was in. Tonight he’d bunk, warm, and dry, and while a far cry from his loft by the lake, tonight it was the only real estate that mattered.
By: R. D. Taylor,
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