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If he wasn’t prepared before, he was now.Ī licence is one of many basic possessions a person can lose during the course of a long absence from the outside world He had applied for a renewal and paid the fees. Now it was June, and this time he brought a letter from a judge clearing his fines and a letter from his caseworker granting the temporary stay of the suspension. Or was it six? On each occasion, a clerk told him there was a problem: outstanding fines his licence was still suspended his suspended licence was expired and had to be renewed. Rodeo had been to the DMV five times since then. In January 2019, a new caseworker agreed to release his licence for 90 days and told him to head to the DMV. Most of the time his messages to the child-support office went unreturned, but a year and a half after he’d been on the outside, he seemed to catch a break. If there was anything Rodeo hated more than turning up sweaty and late for work, it was turning up sweaty and late for a date with his six-year-old daughter, the time and place of which often changed at the whim of his ex.
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And he couldn’t always hitch a ride to get to a construction site at the break of dawn. But he struggled to make a dent in the roughly $300 he owed in child support each month. The work paid around $20 an hour, enough to cover his mobile-phone bill and chip in for groceries and rent while staying with his two friends, Jesse and Taryn, in a blue-collar neighbourhood in Santa Rosa. Then he strung together construction gigs, when he could. First, he’d used his experience in the prison paint-shop to line up temporary jobs with two decorating companies. Rodeo had worked since leaving San Quentin. Union employment comes with higher pay, benefits and regular hours, but workers commonly need both a licence and their own vehicle to ensure that they get to work on time – shifts can start as early as 5.30am. That was particularly true for his dream of getting a union job in a construction trade. To make regular child-support payments, he needed regular work to get regular work, he needed his licence. In an effort to get his licence back, he’d called his case worker and left messages. Friends called him a “beast” for the way he threw himself into each day with grim enthusiasm. Tall and broad-chested, he had his mother’s smile, the same gap between his two front teeth, and a trim goatee that cast a shadow of manhood over a babyface. Even at 42 and fresh out of prison, again, he considered himself an optimist. Rodeo preferred to concentrate on what was possible. “Sometimes you just get so deep into a life you can’t get out” Rodeo understood that he needed steady work to avoid going back to the hustle, and more importantly, to stay out of the pen, though holding a job could be impossible without a licence or a car. A few weeks after his release, he learned that his driver’s licence had been suspended for failure to pay child support.Ī licence is one among many basic possessions a person can lose during the course of a long absence from the outside world, a list which also includes childhood photos, underwear and birth certificates – things that proved you were someone before you became a number in a six-by-nine cell. By Rodeo’s last day in prison, on July 30th 2017, he said he owed $9,787. His case worker at the state child-support agency knew about his situation, but she told him there was nothing she could do. (He has one other son and a daughter but said he doesn’t have government-mandated support obligations for them.) The bills arrived each month, addressed to his inmate number and cell unit.
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![the 1975 somebody else piano the 1975 somebody else piano](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NIuByQnkIPk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Thanks to “good time” credits, his sentence had been reduced from four years to two, but he hadn’t been able to keep up with child support for his oldest son. In prison, he’d attended group therapy and took classes that contributed towards earning his high-school diploma, volunteered as a mentor to “at risk” young men and worked at the paint shop, earning $1 an hour. The driver’s-licence debacle had started in June 2017, when Rodeo was nearing the end of a stint at San Quentin State Prison for assault “likely to produce bodily injury”: he’d beaten up a guy who he believed was casing his house for a robbery.