Chapter 35: The Fee Schedule
The programme review at Cranmore happens at ninety days and again at one-eighty.
Ms. Prine does it at the desk in the front office with the door open, because the door is always open, which is a policy and not an oversight.
She has a form. Employment, savings, compliance, incidents, discharge plan.
Under discharge plan she had written, at ninety days, the word PENDING.
At one-eighty, she told me, PENDING stops being an acceptable entry.
The programme is not indefinite.
It is a bed and there are eight beds and there is a list of women waiting for one.
So I sat down on a Tuesday in October and did the whole thing in the notebook across two facing pages.
Left page, money in.
Right page, money out.
Money in, monthly. Twenty-six hours a week at thirteen twenty-five, plus the extra half hour twice a week for opening.
Call it one thousand five hundred and thirty gross.
Net one thousand three hundred and twenty-two.
Money out, monthly, fixed.
Programme fee, five hundred and fifty-five. Mandatory savings, three hundred and thirty.
Supervision fee, thirty-five. Restitution, seventy-five.
That is nine hundred and ninety-five before I have eaten anything or gone anywhere.
Bus pass, eighty-one. Laundry, twelve.
Food, the lunch half, about thirty. Everything else — soap, socks, paper, moleskin — call it forty.
Nine hundred and ninety-five plus one hundred and sixty-three is one thousand one hundred and fifty-eight.
Which leaves one hundred and sixty-four dollars a month, of which three hundred and thirty is already locked in a house account I cannot touch until I walk out of the door.
That is the trap and it is not a metaphor.
It is a cash-flow structure.
The three hundred and thirty a month is real money and it is mine and it is designed to be there on the day I leave.
At one-eighty days that account would hold about two thousand two hundred dollars.
A studio at seven-ninety-five wants first month, last month, and a deposit equal to one month.
Two thousand three hundred and eighty-five, before a bed, before a spoon.
So the savings the programme forces on me is, to within about two hundred dollars, exactly the entry price of the thing the programme requires me to have.
Whoever designed that was not being cruel.
Somebody sat down and did this arithmetic and got it almost right.
Almost right is a hundred and eighty-five dollars and a criminal record.
I want to put one more number here because it is the one people never think about.
To rent, you must have twenty-four months of verifiable rental history.
To have rental history, you must rent.
Nobody in that chain is lying and nobody in it is corrupt and the chain is closed.
There are three ways out of a closed chain.
A co-signer. A landlord who will take a risk personally. Or a subsidised unit.
I had no co-signer.
My family consisted of an aunt I had not spoken to in six years, and a cousin who was married to my husband and living in a house I had never seen.
I had one landlord who had written something in a duplicate book that was worth nothing except that he had written it.
So I went for the third door.
The county housing list opens twice a year for two weeks, and if you miss the window you wait five months. I got the dates from a flyer in the district office waiting room, under the television with the delayed captions.
The application is fourteen pages and it wants everything.
Income, assets, household composition, disability status, prior addresses for five years, all names ever used, and a criminal history disclosure.
Page nine, question forty-one: has any household member been convicted of a felony in the past five years.
Five years. Not ten.
I released in March. The conviction was six years and four months old on the day I filled the form in.
I read question forty-one eleven times to be sure I was reading it and not hoping at it. I have watched people misread a form because they wanted it to say something else.
Then I answered every question
and I attached the criminal history report I had bought for nineteen sixty-five, unfolded, because a folded exhibit reads as something hidden.
The applications are date-stamped on receipt and then drawn by lottery.
Lottery is the honest word for it and they use it on the form, which I respected.
I posted it at the Kesler Street box on a Thursday with two stamps, certified, which cost four dollars sixty.
The receipt came back with a barcode and a date and a time of 4:47 p.m. I stapled it to my copy of page nine.
I wrote the date in the notebook, and under it, the number of days until the one-eighty review.
Sixty-two.