“Supreme Court okays editor’s suggestion.”
Sounds like a landmark freedom of the press case, right? It was closer to home. Last summer, Letters editor Steve Elkins wrote a little editor’s note after my story about arriving in Rehoboth by boat. He knew we’d spent weekends last summer on Rehoboth Bay, and suggested that we continue to weekend here after boating season, too. Well, the spirit was certainly willing, but the devil was in the details.
Last August, when it was time to think about putting the boat into dry dock, we started looking for a condo. After all, we’d had a taste of Rehoboth life, and it was tough to think of weekends anywhere else. Between boating on the bay, soaking up rays at the women’s beach at Gordon’s Pond, and getting involved, for the very first time, in an out and proud gay community, the idea of leaving town for a long, cold winter was unthinkable.
When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping for real estate.
First stop, a squatter-inhabited bargain basement. Management assured us the place would fumigate just fine. We’d been inside five minutes, stepping over crushed beer cans, pizza boxes, and laundry, when one of the piles of clothes sat up, groaned like Frankenstein and fell back down. We fled.
Next we saw a perfectly fabulous apartment on the perfect block. Only it was a third floor walk-up; a two-bedroom Stairmaster. We imagined dragging up there with luggage. We envisioned planting sod on the balcony for the dog. We worried about the stamina of pizza deliverers. We came to our senses.
Schlepping around town, we saw a handyperson’s special affectionately referred to thereafter as the Amityville Horror House. Next up, a place with a basement so wet ducks swam in it. Then came palaces way beyond our means.
“I have one more to show you,” said the agent. It was the one. Three doors from the boardwalk on a quiet block, this old house converted to four contemporary condos was perfect. We could be three-season weekenders in town, and in the summer, move aboard our boat while renters paid our annual condo mortgage. “Write the contract,” we squealed.
At first, things seemed normal. When we learned the condo was owned by a bank we figured someone else’s loss was our gain. And we didn’t flinch when told the contract could only become ratified after Oct. 5, 1995 at the expiration of some kind of litigation. That’s what settlement attorneys are for. Don’t worry; be happy. You live and learn.
We learned that the builder, having lost the property at a Sheriff’s sale, fought the simple foreclosure all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Talk about making a federal case out of something.
So Fay and Bonnie had to wait until the first Monday in October, thank you, to hear whether Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Supremes would let us buy our beach place. Eventually, they did.
But then the mortgage company got wind of the story and wanted to know the whole gory litigation history. The mortgage man needed to talk to the bank who needed to talk to the lawyers, who needed to talk to the investors, who had to check the documents, so they could call the courthouse so that ultimately we could live in the house that jerk built. Silly me, I thought Slower Lower Delaware was just a clever t-shirt logo.
If I made one phone call a day to hustle up the facts, I made ten. As the clock ticked on my loan commitment and Nov. 28 settlement date, we played telephone tag. Finally, after I harassed three quarters of the lawyers in Sussex County, somebody hollered “uncle” and my fax machine started to grind out a 23 page opus detailing the condo’s pathetic legal history.
Hold the victory lap. Was there a lawyer left in town who’d never represented or been sued by the foreclosee? Hardly. One newbie attorney surfaced and I called his office two weeks before settlement to give the firm a heads up on the legal mess.
His administrative assistant told me not to worry; they were working on settlements for the next day and they’d work on the Nov. 28 settlement on or about Nov. 27. I tried to warn them.
On Nov. 18, the day I was leaving for a Thanksgiving trip to Palm Springs, I got a call from a genuinely surprised assistant to the settlement attorney. “This is a difficult case to research,” she said. “Did you know it was a foreclosure?” “AUUUUGGGGGG!!!!!....”
I was still feeding War and Peace into the fax machine for the title insurance company when it came time to leave for the airport. I spent the better part of my vacation wrestling information about condo documents, parking easements, and insurance out of any number of lawyers and funneling it to unsuspecting title company flunkies.
Jet-lagged and harried, we made it to settlement on Nov. 28, with the last legal hurdle having been leapt mere minutes before. As we signed the deed and promised to love, honor and obey the mortgage company until the year 2025, we realized that for once, nobody even batted an eye over our non-traditional union. We knew we liked Rehoboth. They may be slower in lower Delaware, but they made us feel very welcome.
Two weeks later, we drove to town in a blinding snowstorm only to discover the outlets closed, the gas stations closed, the 7/11 closed. But our Cloud 9 Restaurant was open. Gay people are nothing if not spunky.
So now that the weather is finally breaking, our victory before the high court of the land seems most worthwhile. If the Supreme Court would only do as well on upcoming discrimination and sodomy cases, we’d really be home free.