All she needed was a street address

The following op/ed submisison was rejected by the Los Angeles Times in September.

Back in 1986, when I was 21, I drove up from Santa Ana to visit my mother in Huntington Park. I'd been living on my own for a year, and, having managed to scrape together a year's worth of rent and bill payments without the family's help, I wanted to take Mom out to dinner and a movie so she could see how wrong she'd been about my ability to survive without her.

As she got into the car, she asked if we could stop at "the bank" on the way to the restaurant; she said she needed to sign some papers and that it would take just a few minutes. Mom had an account with BofA, but the "bank" she directed me to was just a storefront office with a name on the window that I'd never heard of -- Something-Something Financial Services, the full name escapes me. It resembled less a bank than an Off Track Betting site.

Instead of the rich, sterile decor of an actual bank, it was filthy and drab, furnished with what looked like plastic patio chairs and cheap pasteboard desks. Mom led me straight to a desk at the back of the office -- it occurred to me she'd been here several times before. We sat down on the plastic chairs in front of the desk, and soon a man -- a baby-faced kid, actually, probably younger than I was -- walked up and warmly greeted my mother by her first name and introduced himself to me as Javier before taking his seat on the plastic chair behind the desk.

"Did you bring the documents we discussed?" he asked, and Mom pulled some folded papers from her purse and handed it to him.

Javier unfolded the papers and examined them. "Perfect," he said, and like a magician produced from under the desk a stack of papers about a half-inch thick and placed it on the desk front of us. "Go ahead and look these over while I make some photocopies, and then we'll get you all squared away." He got up and left.

"What's going on, Mom?" I asked.

"Nothing, mijo," she said. "It'll just be a few minutes, don't worry."

She glanced at the stack of papers, and looked away.

"Don't worry about what? What's going on here, Mom?"

When she didn't answer, I picked up the stack and looked at it. "What is this?" I flipped through the pages. "These are loan papers, aren't they? Are you borrowing money, Ma?"

"Just a couple of thousand," she said. "It's just a small loan, don't worry about it."

"A couple thousand -- two thousand dollars? Why?"

"Because I need it, that's why."

"How much interest are they charging you?"

She looked away. "Mom?"

She said nothing. I looked back at the document in my hands, and for the first time in my life began scanning the details of a contract fearful of what I might find. Finally, on the last page before the page with all the signature lines, I found it. Thirty-six percent.

"Thirty-six percent?" I said this so loud that heads turned to look at me.

"Keep your voice down," Mom said. "What are you getting so upset about? It's just $2,000. I'll pay it off in no time."

"Not at 36 percent, you won't," I said. "You'll be paying on it for years. Mom, you can't sign this!"

"Give that to me."

"Ma, you can't sign this."

"Give that to me!" Now heads turned and looked at her. I saw in her expression that there was no point in arguing, so I handed the papers to her.

My mother was always terrible with money. She paid her bills -- most of her bills -- and she got by -- barely got by -- but words like "interest" and "principle" and "percentage" meant nothing to her. Those were bankers' words, of concern to bankers and not to regular people like my mom -- people without money. If a banker was willing to lend my mother money, then the loans had to be right and fair and repayable, because bankers clearly were smarter than regular people or they wouldn't have money to lend.

What my mother didn't understand, couldn't understand, was that in 1986, as in the years just before this latest financial calamity, bankers would lend money to anyone who asked. Smart had nothing to do with it.

This is why my mother still works at 77. She has no retirement fund other than Social Security, no property or investments or savings of any kind. Every dollar of every paycheck she ever received was consumed entirely by rent, food, taxes and debt.

"What did you give him, anyway?" I said in that OTB of a lending institution 22 years ago in Huntington Park.

"Give who?" Mom asked.

"Javier," I said. "What were those 'documents' he asked for?"

"Electric bills," she said. "He wanted to see a couple of electric bills to prove where I lived."

All she had needed was a street address.