Doin' Soft Time
22/12/05 08:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsOver in his lj, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lnhammer has his own lovely county jail story and solicited stories from his visitors. Mine was too long to clutter up his comments area, but it made me nostalgic, in a sad sort of way. And it was just about twenty-six years ago.
When I moved to Boston I met this guy, for whom the phrase "it's a long story" was invented. He was a dear fellow, and a train wreck, at the same time, and me being me, I fell for him. The feeling (and here we were fortunate) was mutual. Rob came with a lot of history--he had run away from home when he was fourteen and lived on the streets of Boston--and a certain amount of baggage, but he was getting by and always believed that things were going to get better. With no formal education and not many skills and a host of low-level physical ailments and--it must be admitted--a bit of an authority problem (and a rather, um, flamboyant appearence: long hair, leather jacket, Bowie knife) the number of jobs he could find was limited. However he was a sublimely talented salesman: I have seen him, without taking advantage, sell a Rubic's Cube to a blind man who was looking for a gift for his nephew. There were any number of things he sold me on, but that (like his history) is a long story too. Anyway... Rob worked at a game store in Cambridge where he knew everyone who walked in the door; for most of the year he worked part time; at Christmas he worked 90 hour weeks and made what was, for him, serious money.
One evening late in November as we were walking around, an acquaintance told him that the police were looking for him. With a warrant. Eyebrows were raised. Rob went home and left the Bowie knife behind (he had an authority issue, but he wasn't stupid) and presented himself at the local police station. "I hear there's a warrant for my arrest?" he says politely. Yes, there was, for non-payment of child support.
In the words of Inigo Montoya, lemme sum up: Rob had had two kids when he was a teenager; he and the children's mother had briefly been married. When they were divorced no child support was ordered--both of them were marginal in terms of finances, although the mother, who was several years older, had a few more resources than he did. Now, five years or so after the divorce, Massachusetts had a new Governor who had sworn to get tough on deadbeat dads (a policy I am generally in favor of, let me add...but it was badly implemented here). So Rob, who had never been asked for child support, learns that 1) his ex, whom he had thought was living out of state, has come back to Massachusetts and 2) filed for Welfare, and 3) under the state's new policy he, as her ex-husband, is liable to make good those payments to the tune of 20,000.
The short form of the story is: he didn't have it, couldn't get it, and went to jail. The longer form (which involves several illuminating sidelights on the judicial system) is that a bunch of us got together to put in $2000 to keep him out of jail during his peak work season at the store--which would help his boss, who needed him working those ninety hour weeks, and satisfying the state, which would keep most of what he made. The judge was all for this until the morning when we went to court with a $2000 check; the judge's house had been robbed the night before, he was feeling cranky, and decided that he would teach a lesson to all deadbeat dads everywhere. Rob was sentenced to one month in jail and two on probation, to start immediately.
So I spent the month of December that year going between the vet (where my cat was undergoing profound medical problems) and what Rob called the Billerica Home for the Criminally Bewildered. He had his guitar, and a few of the bigger guys decided he was entertaining (he sang a lot of Johnny Cash songs, and when he used to say "Johnny Cash saved my ass," I think he meant it literally) and watched out for him. The hardest part, he said, was not walking out of the place, because the security was not very tight at all. So I would drive up to Billerica, to this big, dreary looking building surrounded by chain-link-fence, and we'd be checked for weapons at the door and admitted to what looked like the world's dreariest lunch room--cinderblocks painted that awful institutional pale green that I think was chosen because it makes everyone and everything look sickly--and sit across from Rob at those lunchroom tables that have benches attached. The room was filled with other visitors and other criminally bewildered inmates (when I hear the phrase from Batman, "criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot" I think of the guys at Billerica, and would add malnourished, uneducated, dentally impaired and doughy). It was kind of like going to an indoor picnic for depressed trailer park residents.
Rob got five days off his sentence for good behavior and was home for Christmas. This really isn't my story; even at the time I knew that, but being a writer I couldn't help taking notes.
lnhammer has his own lovely county jail story and solicited stories from his visitors. Mine was too long to clutter up his comments area, but it made me nostalgic, in a sad sort of way. And it was just about twenty-six years ago.When I moved to Boston I met this guy, for whom the phrase "it's a long story" was invented. He was a dear fellow, and a train wreck, at the same time, and me being me, I fell for him. The feeling (and here we were fortunate) was mutual. Rob came with a lot of history--he had run away from home when he was fourteen and lived on the streets of Boston--and a certain amount of baggage, but he was getting by and always believed that things were going to get better. With no formal education and not many skills and a host of low-level physical ailments and--it must be admitted--a bit of an authority problem (and a rather, um, flamboyant appearence: long hair, leather jacket, Bowie knife) the number of jobs he could find was limited. However he was a sublimely talented salesman: I have seen him, without taking advantage, sell a Rubic's Cube to a blind man who was looking for a gift for his nephew. There were any number of things he sold me on, but that (like his history) is a long story too. Anyway... Rob worked at a game store in Cambridge where he knew everyone who walked in the door; for most of the year he worked part time; at Christmas he worked 90 hour weeks and made what was, for him, serious money.
One evening late in November as we were walking around, an acquaintance told him that the police were looking for him. With a warrant. Eyebrows were raised. Rob went home and left the Bowie knife behind (he had an authority issue, but he wasn't stupid) and presented himself at the local police station. "I hear there's a warrant for my arrest?" he says politely. Yes, there was, for non-payment of child support.
In the words of Inigo Montoya, lemme sum up: Rob had had two kids when he was a teenager; he and the children's mother had briefly been married. When they were divorced no child support was ordered--both of them were marginal in terms of finances, although the mother, who was several years older, had a few more resources than he did. Now, five years or so after the divorce, Massachusetts had a new Governor who had sworn to get tough on deadbeat dads (a policy I am generally in favor of, let me add...but it was badly implemented here). So Rob, who had never been asked for child support, learns that 1) his ex, whom he had thought was living out of state, has come back to Massachusetts and 2) filed for Welfare, and 3) under the state's new policy he, as her ex-husband, is liable to make good those payments to the tune of 20,000.
The short form of the story is: he didn't have it, couldn't get it, and went to jail. The longer form (which involves several illuminating sidelights on the judicial system) is that a bunch of us got together to put in $2000 to keep him out of jail during his peak work season at the store--which would help his boss, who needed him working those ninety hour weeks, and satisfying the state, which would keep most of what he made. The judge was all for this until the morning when we went to court with a $2000 check; the judge's house had been robbed the night before, he was feeling cranky, and decided that he would teach a lesson to all deadbeat dads everywhere. Rob was sentenced to one month in jail and two on probation, to start immediately.
So I spent the month of December that year going between the vet (where my cat was undergoing profound medical problems) and what Rob called the Billerica Home for the Criminally Bewildered. He had his guitar, and a few of the bigger guys decided he was entertaining (he sang a lot of Johnny Cash songs, and when he used to say "Johnny Cash saved my ass," I think he meant it literally) and watched out for him. The hardest part, he said, was not walking out of the place, because the security was not very tight at all. So I would drive up to Billerica, to this big, dreary looking building surrounded by chain-link-fence, and we'd be checked for weapons at the door and admitted to what looked like the world's dreariest lunch room--cinderblocks painted that awful institutional pale green that I think was chosen because it makes everyone and everything look sickly--and sit across from Rob at those lunchroom tables that have benches attached. The room was filled with other visitors and other criminally bewildered inmates (when I hear the phrase from Batman, "criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot" I think of the guys at Billerica, and would add malnourished, uneducated, dentally impaired and doughy). It was kind of like going to an indoor picnic for depressed trailer park residents.
Rob got five days off his sentence for good behavior and was home for Christmas. This really isn't my story; even at the time I knew that, but being a writer I couldn't help taking notes.