Occupational Hazards

When I tell local author John Armstrong that I just finished reading my press copy of his new memoir, Wages, he is slightly surprised that I’ve read it at all. “You’re letting your side down,” he says, and warns me that they’ll take away my press pass for doing so.

This cynicism is not unwarranted: after 15 years working as a journalist for the Vancouver Sun, Armstrong knows altogether too much about how the media works. “I think journalism is like laws and sausages,” he tells me. “You should never see either one being made. I don’t read newspapers anymore, ever.”

In certain circles, Armstrong is probably better known as a musician than as journalist. Under the name Buck Cherry, Armstrong sang and played lead guitar for the Modernettes, a popular local punk band. In 2001, he chronicled this “misspent youth” in Guilty of Everything, a relentlessly entertaining memoir of the Vancouver punk scene in the late 70s and 80s. In Wages, his second volume of acerbic true tales, Armstrong focuses on the other, less fun side of life: shift-work, petty bosses, and punch-clocks. Many people blog and write about this very subject, but Wages might just be the darkest and most bilious meditation on work. At it’s best, the book comes across like a compelling-yet-disturbing bar story told by a guy who’s had a bit too much, but who’s just getting started. Armstrong’s writing is vivid, propelling the reader through a series of terrible jobs with equal parts humour and anger. Each job has its own particular soul-killing power: one position saw Armstrong beheading live chickens on an assembly line for eight hours a day, the lopped-off heads collecting in a tub near his feet.

Wages was written in a stint of unemployment just after Armstrong ended his lucrative but deeply unhappy career as a journalist. Although about a third of his book is devoted to detailing the bleakest aspects of his time at the newspaper, I still felt compelled to ask him about it. “I don’t know if I got to practice journalism,” he says. “I think there’s a world of difference between the ideal of journalism and the daily practice of it. There’s probably places where you get to perform the pure art, but it’s so inextricably bound up now with advertising and share values.” When I ask him if he’d like to perform journalism as an art form, without commercial pressures, he laughs. “It’s too late for that. When I was young and keen maybe, but I’m not young and keen anymore.”

The funny thing is, Armstrong still loves writing. He’s always been creative, but prior to working as a journalist, songwriting and music were his chief outlets. He cites financial difficulty as his muse: “It wasn’t until I had to write prose for a dollar that I did” he explains, “and if I hadn’t made a dollar, I don’t know if I would have started writing.” So what made him think he’d be able to churn out words as a freelancer? “It didn’t seem very hard! And it turns out it wasn’t. Well, doing it passably well didn’t seem like a great stretch.”

When I ask him if he thinks it’s possible for someone to love their job, he’s doubtful. Armstrong is a lonely figure in a culture that constantly insists that people follow their bliss and make a living from their dreams. But his cynicism comes from learned experience and a realistic outlook. “I don’t know many people who love their jobs. Some people say, “I love my job” and they’re the same ones that say “I love people.” Well, how could you love people, in general? I think they might be telling the truth, but I don’t want to sit next to them on a long bus trip.”

Wages
by John Armstrong
New Star Books