Wages: Working Around Welfare

[This is the fifth of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

I found a place to live in the middle of Skid Row. A one-room address in a residential hotel, $80 a month with toilet and shower down the hall. The first place I took was a madhouse, run by a Chinese couple with a horde of children who leaped out of their beds at daybreak and began screaming, fighting and crying. The TV blared cartoons and they beat on their cereal dishes with glee.

I buried my head under the pillow and damned them all, and fled at the end of the month to another room in a hotel across the park. It was just as rundown and miserable as the first but it was quiet. As flophouses go it was the height of culture and sophistication, which is to say that people drank themselves to death quietly in their rooms, with dignity, listening to music and open-line talk shows on the radio, and nobody shat in the bathroom sink or in the hallway.

It was a quiet little room on the second floor, with a window looking out into the courtyard, an open square in the centre of the building that had once been a garden but was now closed off to the residents. I lay on my bed and read, alone in the middle of a hundred other people locked behind their own doors, the only sounds the low hiss of the radiator and the rain on the window ledge, the rattle of the pipes when the toilet flushed and the intermittent thop and swack of things hitting the cement in the courtyard, chicken bones and cigarette butts and the odd used tampon.

The Pisser, the Lunger, and the Laughing Woman

I got to know my neighbours only by the muffled sounds that came through the walls and tried to match the sounds to faces I saw in the hall or on the stairs. Some old bastard on my floor had to go to the bathroom six or seven times a night. You heard the door close, the key in the lock, the same number of shuffling, elderly steps in stocking feet and the slam of the spring-loaded bathroom door that he never caught in time.

The Lunger was my alarm clock. Every morning he spent a good 20 minutes hacking and gasping for air and then hocked a thick, wet gobbet of phlegm out the window. It hit the concrete like a rotten orange. There was the Laughing Woman and the Dirty Old Man. They were directly above me on the next floor and you only heard them in the evenings. He had a low, rolling bass voice, Rogers Golden Syrup and gravel, and it rumbled just below the threshold of intelligibility, like Louis Armstrong whispering down a drain pipe. Whatever he was saying must have been good -- the only other sounds I heard from their window were the fridge opening and closing and glasses being refilled, and tinkling, girlish laughter. She sounded young and pretty and I pictured a golden-haired moppet in her confirmation gown while a grey-haired satyr sweet-talked her out of it, his hooves clopping on the lino as he got up to get another glass of wine.

I fell asleep many nights listening to their voices fading in and out, like waves lapping at the shore -- it was like being a child again and hearing your parents in the other room as you burrowed into the covers.

Portrait of a musician as welfare recipient

Soon after moving to Vancouver, I found a new band. We were playing shows around town, making just enough money for beer and cigarettes and guitar strings. My 19th birthday came about the same time the unemployment ran out and I went up the street to register for welfare.

Government assistance was a different creature then and in my neighbourhood all you had to do was show a rent receipt to get a cheque. There were a number of other qualifications, like the job search list you were asked to provide, but that was only a small annoyance -- you got out the phonebook, looked through the yellow pages for some likely businesses and copied out their addresses.

The welfare officers were too overworked to ever check them out and even if they did, in some rare fit of enthusiasm, call Kentucky Fried Chicken or Elvis Pizza, they weren't going to get much for the effort. No one was going to dig through the pile of applications to see if I was really in there. It was a little game played on both sides of the welfare officer's desk; you lied to them and they pretended to believe it. It was easier on everybody that way.

I got up early that morning and walked to the office to register. It was already full of clients -- drunks, pillheads, men in their 20s who'd come west when the lightning bolt of reason had flashed that if the great majority of Canada had nine months of winter and three months of poor skiing, it was better to be broke in a place that didn't freeze solid for most of the year. There were stringy-haired welfare mothers in stretch pants and peasant blouses, there to collect for their motley broods of children, fathered by a variety of men and never the one they were currently living with. They got just enough money to stay home, watch TV and get pregnant again.

The government bloodlettings

A visit to the welfare office was the perfect reverse of any other important appointment, particularly if you were called in for an assessment after you'd been on the rolls for awhile. Every so often, usually after a change in government, the order would come down from on high to the workers on the front line. It was a new era and the chieftains in the legislature had promised to clean up the system. They couldn't give two shits about it but it cost nothing to give the order and the employees down on the pavement had no choice but to carry it out as best they could. They went through the filing cabinets and called in anyone who wasn't crippled or certifiable and asked you why you couldn't find a job.

When you were sent for you made sure not to bathe, shave or comb your hair. You wore the grubbiest and least flattering clothes you had. Show up sweating and nauseous in the grip of a crippling hangover, and so much the better. If you could vomit into the wastebasket they'd likely have a cheque in your hand and be pushing you back out the door before you'd finished wiping your mouth on your sleeve. The aim was to present a convincingly unemployable picture, and an address anywhere in the core of the Downtown Eastside put you more than halfway there. It was the low point on the cultural map and those unfit for hard-working, tax-paying, product-buying society rolled downhill until they got there and then bumped to a halt.

There was an arbitrary bloodletting during these purges, the minions commanded to cut x percent of claimants from their books and how they accomplished it was immaterial. So they pulled names from a hat or threw darts or somehow chose the sacrifices and reported back that welfare recipients had been cut by the target number. The ministry then sent out two press releases.

The one for the front pages of the paper celebrated how the government had cleaned the system of cheats and frauds and the taxes of decent people would be squandered no longer. The second handout, for the business pages, hailed the reduction in welfare as proof that new policies had the economy moving again, as evidenced by how many citizens formerly on assistance were now on their own two feet. They were on their feet all right, out on the sidewalk begging for change and cigarettes and checking the door-handles on parked cars to find somewhere to sleep. The next month they were back at the welfare office to reapply and things went back to normal. The government was an engine that ran on methane and this sort of bullshit just topped up the tanks.

Musicians' duties approach perfection

Welfare didn't pay much but, to be fair, I hadn't done anything to earn it so it all evened out in the great scheme of things. By rights I should have been pounding the streets looking for work but I already had a full-time career and, aside from paying almost nothing, being a musician was a near perfect job.

Stay up late and sleep all day, have sex with strangers, stay drunk and stoned on whatever free drugs were handy, behave shamefully without consequence. Honestly, you could put almost any character defect and shameful act down to simply following the job description. It was not just forgiven, it was expected: piss in someone's potted plant because you were too fucked up to make it to the bathroom upstairs, give the cat a ride in the dryer, destroy your host's kitchen while attempting to make toast at 4 a.m., leave toenail clippings on the kitchen table; you could commit anything short of murder and receive nothing worse than rolling eyes and head-shakes in return.

I had my own band now and in putting it together someone had suggested a girl named Mary as the bassist. She was tall, blonde, with legs all the way to her throat, and she'd learned to play by copying the parts on the first Ramones album. In short, she was perfect, so much so that by the third rehearsal we were sleeping together and by the first gig we were sharing a tiny apartment.

Between the government's largesse and the money we made playing bars and clubs we got by. But, slowly at first, then with dizzying speed, it all went to shit. What little the band did earn was thrown away immediately on beer, cigarettes and taxis. We were long on notoriety though, and when a local paper put us on the front page of their entertainment section the welfare worker recognized me and called me in. He wondered what a successful musician such as myself was doing collecting money from the government. I agreed that in a better world we would be discussing the matter at my mansion but beyond that, we differed. His best offer was that he would forgo criminal prosecution if I left his office and never returned. I took it.

On Thursday, John Armstrong finds gainful employment in the movie industry, and learns to hold the customer in extreme contempt.