Bars to Bands

Nobody can see a payment from the outside. That's the whole trick of it.

Wendell Crowder learned to read a tape measure to sixteenths in the vocational shop at Fairlawn Correctional. Nine years later he can frame anything that stands up - and not one surety underwriter in the state will bond him.

Tino Ngo cut hair inside for nine years and came home with eleven hundred documented hours, every one of them worthless: the private college that ran the program lost its accreditation while he was serving.

Charlie Dowd holds a clean commercial license and five years sober. The carriers would hire her tomorrow. Their insurance underwriters won't.

Margie Kessler is turned down for sixteen apartments in a row on a credit check that never mentions her conviction at all.

FROM BARS TO BANDS is ten linked stories about people who came home and built something anyway - a framing crew, a landscaping outfit, a restaurant with a sister's name on the sign, a barbershop, a service dog kennel, one paid-off truck. Each of them learned a trade from someone who had nothing to gain by teaching it. Each of them hit a wall that wasn't prejudice but paperwork: a statute, a licensing board, an underwriting sheet, a box on page four. And each of them, somewhere along the way, did something wrong, or costly, or both.

The stories are fiction. The walls are real - every one of them drawn from how the system actually works in some part of this country right now.

Bands is banded cash: the picture of money everybody chases and almost nobody keeps. What these ten people build instead is slower, uglier, and nearly invisible from the outside. That is the entire subject of this book.

Volume One of five. Each volume stands alone. The city stays the same.