From Bars to Bands

The fifth and final volume.

An elevator mechanic licensed by his state, in good standing, on the payroll of the biggest outfit in the county - and barred from seventy percent of the elevators in it. Not by any law about him. By nineteen separate private decisions about buildings.

A woman whose real estate license waits on seven years from the final discharge of her sentence, and whose sentence is not discharged while restitution is owed, and whose restitution carries four percent interest. She has paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month for twelve years and owes more than she started with.

A grain man with no rule in his way at all - no statute, no board, no registry, no underwriter. Only nine farmers who vote on him out loud, by name, at a meeting he attends, every March, for the rest of his life.

A woman the state will never license to write a bail bond, who may lawfully do every single part of that work forever, on one condition: that nobody ever pay her for it.

Ten more people come home to the same city, learn a trade, get good at it, and run into a wall that has nothing to do with what anyone thinks of them. A credentialing matrix owned by a company in another state. A curfew on a form nobody ever read about them. A licensing statute that requires a private product no private company will sell.

Three of them never get through. Six of them never own anything, and are as far out as anybody in these books ever gets.

And the woman at the desk on Danforth Avenue - who has spent thirteen years and two thousand phone calls getting the other forty-nine people in these five volumes through their doors, and who has a number of her own that almost none of them knew about - finds out what happens when a rule written in 2009 is folded into a state contract in 2027 and finally reaches her.

Fiction. The walls are real. Every barrier in these stories is drawn from how licensing, credentialing and underwriting systems actually operate in some part of the United States right now. The details vary by state. The shape does not.

The From Bars to Bands series is complete in five volumes. Each one stands alone. Together they map one city.