Brick by brick a
man devoured his house last week in an attempt to keep his bank from reposing
it. Walter Briggs of East Elmhurst Queens got the idea after he was turned down
for the tenth time trying to re-finance his 1950’s cape style home. After the
bank took him to court Walter said, “Fuck em’. They ain't getting my house even
if I have to eat it.”
Walter started on
the obvious place, the shingles. “I knew it wasn’t going to be easy so I
started with the roof cause’ that’s what I did when I ate my first house. That
one was a three-month old gingerbread house that was left on the windowsill in
our fifth grade class. The real one was just as hard and stale as the
gingerbread one.”
Walter’s building
materials binge started on the day that a sheriff’s vacate notice was nailed to
his front door; one of hundreds of thousands that were posted on front doors
around the country. The lender, Bank of America was all to eager to repossess
Walter’s house even though they knew they weren’t going to be able to sell the
house for a profit and it would remain empty for a long time. A spokesman for
BOA said, “We’d rather let it rot than have someone living it for less than the
monthly mortgage payment.”
Walter just
couldn’t make the monthly payments after he lost his job at the local
supermarket due to other homeowners losing their homes and having to leave the
neighborhood. Walter’s wife and four children took the car and the family dog
to live with relatives in Monroe, NJ.
“I just didn’t
see any other options,” Walter said from his bed at Elmhurst hospital where
he’s recovering from internal injuries. “Besides, the fridge was empty and I
was hungry.” When reminded that there were other safer options, Walter proudly
said, “I thought of torching it but I knew I’d end up in jail. But I just
didn’t want those bastards to have the satisfaction of takin’ my home from me,
especially since I worked so hard to get and keep it.” When asked which was the
hardest portion of the house to consume Walter responded, “The front porch.
It’s where we laughed the most. It made me cry thinking that we’d never be able
to sit and rock as a family again on that porch.” Walter didn’t seem to mind
that he lost most of his digestive system and would never be able to eat solid
foods again. “It was worth every single nail and piece of wood I swallowed.
Whadda’ those bastards gonna do now, foreclose on my ass? Fuck them!”
