Mortgage Monster

Mortgages and Mayhem

by Ron Lupton

Growing up in Portsmouth, VA, in the early fifties I was a runt of a little kid, but fairly popular with most of the neighborhood boys because of my imagination. Jungle, cowboys and Science-fiction-type space stories were all I cared about playing! Thus, when baseball and football finally invaded my world and stole my little followers away I felt betrayed and destroyed by these rules-n-regs-some-stupid-adult-thought-this-up games! Pretty much turned me into a loner until later in life when I moved to Colorado and discovered the Fabulous Denver Broncos (hurrah!) But I digress.

We lived in West Park View off and on with my aunt, Ettie Felton, and finally got our own home in Westhaven, (ironically on Colorado Boulevard!), but still stayed with 'Aunt Ettie' and Uncle Jethro while the new house was being constructed. Mother and Dad were absolutely THE churchgoers, and I was, too, being pushed or pulled along, often enough, in my stroller, to Westhaven Baptist Church. For years I heard the stories about what a happy little baby I was to go out for a morning buggy ride until I turned the corner near the church! That's when I began to scream, you see, and cry uncontrollably. My parents thought this was decidedly amusing, but never investigated the parlor of horror the nursery must have been. I don't remember the nursery, but I do remember the primary Sunday School as filled with loving church ladies and boring activities and kids. Not only did I disLIKE having to go to church and Sunday school, I actually got to where I feared it even more than having to go to REGULAR school. It always struck me as a miasma of inertia and the Empire of Ennui until much, MUCH later in life.

One of the things I learned there and at home was that it was never nice to spy on adults or listen in on their conversations. Even if the stuff THEY talked about WAS fun or exciting. So the night I slipped out of my bedroom and stole down the hallway to listen to Mother and Daddy talking, I already knew I was violating a major rule.

"Jessie," Daddy was saying. "This thing has got me scared to death..."

Now, you must understand this was Ottis Lupton, the biggest man on earth, who was talking. He also owned the largest, most lethal GUN on earth, and it was chock full of 22 long rifle bullets! What was he saying!!!

"We'll get out from under it somehow, Ottis," Mom assured him. I could tell they were drinking coffee and Daddy was smoking a cigarette. They were surely upset about something!

"I don't know how," Dad replied. "It just worries me to death to have that hangin' over our heads..."

I looked up in the dark hall and pictured the roof of our house in my mind. Of course, it was night and spooky out there now, and what on earth was up there, outside there, on the roof, in the dark...?

"We'll be all right," Mom said. She was also the one who thought church was so compelling she had to be there if the door cracked open! Couldn't much trust her judgement...

"A mortgage is a mortgage," Daddy's voice lifted. "We have a mortgage on our house, Jessie, and I don't know what to do about it and it's just gonna eat us ALIVE if we don't look out!"

Ottis R. Lupton, "Jake", was a Depression- and war-era mortgage battler. He did eventually kill the monster.

I snuck back to bed, shaken and trembling. There was a Mortgage up on our house and it would kill us and my Daddy was afraid of it! New nightmares joined all the old ones that night. I shouldn't have read all those old horror comic books, and I shouldn't have ever, ever eavesdropped on my mother and dad!

I remember telling Richard Henderson, the newspaper editor's son. He lived catecorner from me there on Ward Terrace, and was my same age. We sat on the curb after he'd come over, and I'd warned him not to get too close to my house when he'd hollered for me to come out. Yelling out the door, I told him something... really dangerous might jump off the roof on him and...

I'd asked him if he could see anything up there from the street... maybe something big, up on my roof, with claws or bat wings? He'd squinted and craned his neck and said no, just the chimney, and I was out of my house and clear of the front porch like a shot, turning back to gaze in horror up toward the roof. It LOOKED all right, but there was, indeed, something up there on that house, I told Richard. Something my daddy couldn't kill even with the big gun, and maybe nobody could even see it, but it was up there. Up there for sure. And you called it a mortgage and it could eat you alive. We sat there on the curbing looking from our sandals up to my roof, trembling.

"You think I have one, too?" he asked me, when I'd told him the story.

“Richard, don't you DARE tell anybody I told you about it, because we aren't supposed to KNOW!" He promised he'd keep me out of it and went in to ask his momma. When he came back out and sat he said his momma wouldn't talk to him about it, but, yes, he DID have a mortgage on his house, too, but he couldn't talk to anybody about it, because it wasn't NICE! Now, neither of us could tell anyone else! And he broke down and began to cry and so did I, sitting on that curb, looking at our roofs and heaving with fear. Saying anything to any grownups would be admitting I had SPIED on my folks! That might be even WORSE!

I was afraid of monsters, things like devilish cats which haunted our house and were called 'strikes' (possibly because of the way my blind Uncle Jet used to curse them during baseball games on the radio) and anything else I could imagine to generate fear, and now there was an honest-to-goodness MORTGAGE up on top of the roof which my daddy couldn't kill!

From what I now know, I must have scouted the roof edges and gutters before I ran... RAN... inside or out, for weeks! No telling what such an intimidating, lofty creature was capable of! Eventually, some of the older kids got to coming by to ask if I could come outside just to watch
my antics! I got funny looks, but... so what? I was that STRANGE little kid, after all, and folks were used to it. The fear lasted until I was another year older, possibly eight or nine,
but should have continued well into adulthood.

See, Daddy was right. And if you didn't know how awful mortgages were before right now, well... your .22 and my dad wouldn't do YOU any good, either! Dumb little kid I was, I hadn't known until much later that ADULTS are the mortgage's prey.

And they WILL eat you alive!!

Ron Lupton grew up in southside Virgina, lives in Colorado, won his own mortgage war and has contributed several pieces in the THE POOR TOWN NEWS.
This is his second for www.roanoke-chowan.com.

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