Wages: Weighing the Benefits

[Editor's note: This is the final excerpt from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

Three times a week I went to therapy at the university, an hour of relaxation exercises followed by individual sessions with a doctor. The exercises consisted of deep breathing and visualization, a dozen or more of us in a room on plastic chairs under fluorescent lights imagining a happy, safe place where we could retreat when stress and panic threatened. I imagined myself in an overstuffed chair with a good book, a cat sleeping on the hearth and the mailman pushing a disability cheque through the slot in the door.

The one-on-one with the doctor was equally pleasant and meaningless. Each time it was a different man or woman from the psychology department, students earning credit, and they all asked the same things. They had a master sheet to track my progress on.

Was I nervous and anxious? Yes, particularly at the thought of having to go back to the newsroom. Was I depressed, or moody? Ditto. Irritable, frustrated, have trouble concentrating or thinking clearly, did my pulse race, did I feel out of control, did I abuse drugs or alcohol? Yes, yes, yes, yes to all of them but the truth was, that described the natural state of almost everyone who worked at the Standard. If they didn't exhibit these symptoms, they were clinically brain-dead, or sports writers. It wasn't even necessary to lie -- the truth had the researchers clucking and tutting as they entered my answers on the sheet. I was in a bad way, all right. They said I was suffering from severe anxiety disorder brought on by long-term stress, and I needed to go lie down and be still for however long it took to get better. I should come back next week and in the meanwhile practice my breathing exercises. Seeing the therapist sign my insurance form was an excellent remedy in itself. I had to remind myself not to whistle or hum until I was out of the building.

The hope of no improvement

About the fourth month of treatment I had three clinicians waiting for me in the office, with a much longer sheet of paper. They talked to me for over an hour and at the end of it said they were very sorry but I really hadn't improved much under their care. They were recommending I be put on long-term disability. There was still hope that I could lead a normal life, with further therapy. I had to bite my tongue to keep from giggling; living a normal life was what put me here. I choked the laughter back and thanked them all for their efforts. We shook hands and I went home.

The next morning the phone rang. It was the editor who'd starred in the live sex show in the parking lot at the Christmas party. She was now in the Human Resources department and just wanted to touch base with me. How was I? Feeling any better? A cynic might have found the timing more than coincidental, given I'd just been cleared for untold years of payments and benefits without the bother of actually having to work. I told her the psychiatric outlook wasn't good and it looked like I might be off for some time to come.

Well, she was glad she could pass on some good news, then. The company had reevaluated my application for early retirement. She was positively beaming over the phone. What do you know -- this time I had qualified. The moon and stars had certainly lined up in my favour, hadn't they, but then again I was due for a break. She couldn't have been more pleased for me if I'd been her own kin.

As permanent as amputation

I told her I'd think about it. It took about 15 minutes. Long-term disability looked fine in theory but while I'd be shut out of the newspaper, the insurance company was the one who'd be doling out the cheques and I could expect to be examined by their pet doctors on a regular basis. I'd heard of people with mangled arms and legs who'd been judged perfectly healthy by the insurance doctors and ordered to return to work. They spent the rest of their lives in court while one set of specialists argued against the other.

A buyout was as permanent and unchangeable as ancestors and amputation -- I signed a paper agreeing that I had no further claim on them, they wrote a cheque and I cashed it. Oh, I had also to sign a form stating I understood I could never again work for the conglomerate or any of its subsidiaries, including but not limited to the Picayune-Standard, but I thought I could suffer that. It was like swearing never to drive roofing nails into my scrotum. I was confident I could uphold my end of it and if I went mad and reapplied with the company at some future date, the flashing lights and blaring alarms would save us both from making the same mistake again.

It was as close to a clean getaway as I could imagine. The office delivered the papers to me so I wouldn't have to go all the way downtown, the courier waiting at the door while I read them over and filled them out. That was fine by me. The thought of walking in through those doors and taking the elevator up to the newsroom gave me the trembling whim-whams. What if it was all a cruel joke and they jumped up from behind their desks yelling "Surprise!" and handed me an assignment, a toddler who needed a heart and lung transplant or a parakeet who had learned how to work the remote control for the TV. No, no, no -- the only time I wanted to see the place again was to piss on the ashes.

Contemplating life on the back nine

I did have to go back after all. I still had a shelf full of reference books and a couple of framed pictures on the wall. I'd left in something of a hurry the last time I'd been there. After I boxed them up the only thing left was sorting the accumulated mail in my pigeon hole. I was stuffing it all into a wastebasket when one of my colleagues took my arm. She was somewhere in her 40s, and had been for as long as I'd been working there. She was deeply concerned for me, which was odd. We'd passed less than 100 words between us in 15 years.

"I was just so shocked to see your name on the buyout list. What will you do?"

She'd been there so long she couldn't remember what it was like outside, only that it was cold and dark and dangerous. There was another element to it; being a part of something as shoddy as the Standard ate away any confidence in your abilities until finally you couldn't believe any other place would have you.

"I never imagined you leaving journalism. Do you have a plan?" she asked. She really wanted to know. I put another handful of mail into the basket and pushed it down with my foot.

I thought for a minute.

"I'll go back to being a male whore," I told her. "At least I had my pride." Then I picked up my box and walked down the hall to the elevator. Behind me I could hear the ceaseless clatter of typing and a hundred overlapping conversations as the newsroom readied another edition for the printer, an endless, incoherent din that made no more sense to overhear than it would make when it was rendered into print. I was free, but only for a while. We were all prisoners of the same hard truth, that a man had to make his way through life somehow. He could do it with a pickaxe or a pen and it hardly mattered which one he picked up. In the end, we were all doing life sentences, the warrant signed at birth, condemned without appeal and at the end of it release or execution amounted to about the same thing, with time and place yet to be determined.

"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery." You could copy that line out of the Book and throw the rest of it away. I was 46 years old with something less than 20 years of work ahead of me, doing Christ alone knows what and for whom. I remembered something we said back on the golf course about middle age, that anyone over about 40 was "playing the back nine."

There was no getting around it -- I was humping my bag towards the clubhouse. It was getting on in the afternoon and the shadows were growing long across the grass. In the distance and growing closer I could see my stepfather and my mother drinking beer and tomato juice at a table under an umbrella. I would be sitting with them soon enough. But not just yet.

John Armstrong now works in a group home for troubled kids, records music in a studio near Gore Street, and performs in a reinvigorated Modernettes, which recently appeared before insanely adoring audiences in Japan. To learn more about his current state of mind, you can read our interview with him, which kicked off the series.