Wages

by John Auber Armstrong

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. John Armstrong has worked as a paperboy, a caddy, and a Bible camp counsellor; as a janitor at the Regal Theatre, a shipper of video porn, and a real live punk rock star. As if those jobs weren't punishment enough, at the tender age of thirty he entered the trenches of journalism. "Get up, get dressed so you can hurry to a place you don't want to be, and do things you don't want to do for people you don't like, all for very little money at some far distant point in the future." Armstrong doesn't let it get him down. Whether he's writing about the Bobbsey Twins, a pair of strippers who really love their vegetables, the Golden Road personal fulfillment seminar, where you learn that you choose your own cancer, or the literal bowels of hometown paper the Picayune-Standard, Armstrong simultaneously excoriates and delights. WAGES is a laugh-til-you-cry account of one man's remarkable working life or attempt at a lack thereof. This eccentric, irreverent, and witty chronicle is vintage John Armstrong.

Genres: Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2007

About the author

I was born and raised in Little Italy on the East Side of Vancouver. In my teens we moved to the small town of White Rock on the US border and I met Art Bergmann, which led to 15 years of playing music for a living and generally acting in a shameful and often legally actionable manner.

I retired from the stage in my early 30s and began writing. For 15 years I was a reporter and columnist for the Vancouver Sun, covering crime, politics, theatre, books, music, and science.

In 2001 I left the paper to write full-time and have published four books since, with six more in varying stages of pre-publication.

Guilty of Everything, a memoir of the Vancouver punk scene, is still in pre-production as a feature film, forever.

In 2017 i published A Series of Dogs, a remembrance of the dogs in my life,

Coming sometime in the next year or two are The Circle of St. George, a fantasy set in WW2 Britain.

Mob Rule, an alt-history satire, and Sugar, a dystopian- future drug novel.

Schadenfreude, in which alien tourists come to Earth to witness our atrocities and horrors. (Yeah, that will shoot to the top of the charts ...... but what are you gonna do? You write what you write, and you see what happens.)

Currently finishing up Plague House: The Haunting of Fairacres, a supernatural story based on true events, and a final non-fiction book - The back Nine: A Gentleman's Guide to Growing Old.

Modernettes have an album coming out this year called New maps of Hell - yes, a nod to the great Kingsley Amis

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book full of cynicism, depression, sarcasm and occasional moments of brilliance. You'll feel much better about yourself after reading this. Recommended.

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my year to read trilogies, and this is an unlikely trilogy for me. Three books by Armstrong in the first month wasn't what I expected but it was certainly what I needed. This one on the futility of working for other people and the frustrations of trying not to be a working stiff resonated with me. Not as touching as the one about his dogs and not as exciting as his one about his time in punk bands, this one is still a fine book that completes the circle. His time in the newsroom was worth the entire book. Everyone should read this author.


Key quote: "...shot from your bed by a blaring alarm at a ridiculous hour in order to do things no one in their right mind would want to, and all for a paltry sum of money promised sometimes in the future."

Just about sums it up.