“Do you have stocks or bonds?”
I felt slightly ill. No one in my entire life had ever mentioned stocks or bonds to me.
“Then what will you do for collateral?”
Again a word no one had ever used in front of me.
I tried another tack. “I believe I ought to tell you more about myself.” Then my voice dried up. Tell him what? That when I was in college, I learned the Ode to the West Wind by heart? That I believed in the impossible? That I would rather die than fail to meet an obligation to his bank? It would never do ... not for this man with the pale, hard eyes.
He was not unkind to me. He pointed to a little, old lady across the floor and said, “Now suppose that woman making a deposit were told that I made a loan to you of one thousand dollars without the security of any collateral, do you know what she could do? She could have me fired for jeopardizing her savings.”
I didn’t have the heart to ask about the happy signs in the buses, but grasped at one last straw. “Isn’t it a fact,” I said, “that the government will guarantee this kind of loan if I can show justification for it?”
He admitted this was correct. “But we’d rather not make that kind of loan,” he said.
That was twelve years ago. Today the banks are generous and I can get a loan without shining my shoes or straightening my tie. The answer is terribly simple. Banks only loan money to those who already have it.
I walked defeated along Michigan Avenue under the cloudless sky. It was all so simple, logical, and perfectly mechanical. I just couldn’t make something out of nothing, no matter how strong my will or how deep my faith. I had to have money.