Wages: Seasons of Despair

[Editor's note: This excerpt, in which our hero toils on, fully ensconced as a reporter for a big Vancouver newspaper, is the 12th of 14 installments, appearing Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

And so the time went by -- the days were endless, the clock hands moving so slowly during a shift I wanted to climb on a chair and check they weren't painted on, but the years fled like mice from a cat. Each summer I got a raise, as the contract stipulated, and the paycheque stub announced each anniversary in the pay scale box -- first year reporter, second year, third year -- until one day I looked at it and it said "key rate." Seven years had come and gone. The slip of paper from Human Resources pinned to my corkboard was turning yellow, the edges curling: "Your normal first day of retirement will be September 1, 2021."

Sweet Christ, that would make 35 years in the place and I'd racked up a nice chunk already. Seven years -- seven times the same stories had come and gone and come again: St. Patrick's Day, which had reliably been scheduled in mid-March for as much of my life as I could remember, still seemed to take the assignment editor by surprise every year. It had fallen to me three years in a row because I had made the mistake of taking it seriously the first time I drew the assignment.

That first go-round I went down to the Irish Community Hall and wrote a piece about how, on this one blessed day of the calendar, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, Orangemen, Republicans and IRA bagmen all raised a jar together, differences forgotten in light of the greater truth, that all of them were far from where they would rather be. It was the kind of sentimental crap the desk could swallow without chewing and so next year when the 17th of March came around they sent me. After all, I had done such a tidy job the last time.

Never mind that I had exhausted the topic. When it came down to it, the Irish Problem was simply that; they were Irish and it was always a problem. By the third kick at the fucker I was reduced to writing about shamrock milkshakes and festivities at the Irish Rovers pub. The Rovers were a singing group made up of four or five members who capered and jigged and sang popular Irish songs written by New York Jews, wiping a tear away at the end with the cuff of their shirt. They were stage Micks, all boyo and begorra, and instilled the same cultural pride in actual Irishmen that Stepin Fetchit inspired in negroes. It would have been more historically and culturally accurate if they'd murdered and blown each other up and then vomited on their shoes, but it was a mainstream act, suitable for the entire family, and no mention of the Troubles was ever made.

In jail, a life sentence is shorter

There were other stories like St. Patrick's Day that came around regularly to remind us that our lives were ticking away. Each one was another signpost on the road to the grave and oblivion -- Jesus was born and we were sent out, like the Wise Men on their camels, to follow the lights and interview shopkeepers, reporting back which toys were the hits of the season. Extravagant front-yard displays of twinkling lights and Christmas dinners for the down and out on skid row were followed by the New Year's Baby, which required sitting in the office half-drunk and phoning the hospital maternity wards to see which expectant mother had dropped her package closest to 12:01 a.m....

We soldiered on through the months, trudging towards a horizon that kept moving away from us. After a while we stopped looking up and stared down at our feet as we marched endlessly towards nothing at all. Spring was the annual front-page story on daffodil farmers in the valley and the end of June reserved a space above the fold for the traditional graduation night car crash. Four Dead, Several Crippled, Alcohol Suspected -- the editors wept crocodile tears and smiled at the thought of follow-up interviews with the survivors, once they could talk again. At the height of summer sweat ran onto our notepads and blurred the ink and our ears were filled with shrieks and bad music and the smell of popcorn and candy apples hung over it all. We were at the annual fair....

Fifteen years. If I'd killed someone I'd have been free by now -- Jesus, if I'd killed several and made clothes out of their hides I'd be out on the street. But there was no parole from the Word Factory, no commutation of sentence.

It was as if I'd woken up after a long sleep and when I rubbed the crust out of my eyes and washed my face there was a 45-year-old man staring back at me in the mirror. He looked desperate and more than a little frightened, and well he should be. I still had the hair on my head as well as unlikely tufts sprouting from my ears and nostrils. I was no longer young; in fact I was teetering at the mid point, balancing as long as I could before the long slide down began in earnest. The truth was I had already begun the descent -- I was only dragging my heels in a hopeless attempt to slow the wagon down. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had an erection I didn't want.

'Point me to the Lake of Fire'

Towards the end of one shift, watching the unmoving hands of the clock and trying to avoid any editors with bright ideas, I did a byline search and the computer brought back a little less than 5,000 stories with my name on them. It was a depressing anthology. They were all crap, maybe a dozen I wouldn't be embarrassed to claim....

I remembered my mother telling me how our lives were played out before the throne of God when we were judged and I saw myself before the assembled multitudes of heaven, a bored and sullen angel reading out my collected works, God himself drumming fingers on the arms of his throne in boredom.

"Do you have anything to say in your defense?" the head angel says.

What could I say to that, that I'd won second place in the critical writing category two years running at the Press Foundation Awards?

"No Lord, just point me towards the Lake of Fire and I'll be on my way."

If I added it all up what did I have -- I'd stayed there for no reason other than money, selling my life by the week and the year at what seemed a decent price but what I had in hand at the end of it was a house the bank still owned half of and a car four years old and nearly paid off.

It was all grimly familiar, the same treadmill my parents and aunts and uncles had marched along all those years until they finally tottered off the end into the void and their reward. It wasn't much but it would do; after a lifetime of work, the prospect of lying down and never having to get up again seemed sweet as daisies in a field. Somehow, I had followed in their footsteps even while determined every inch of the way not to. The laughter of ghosts followed behind me.

They freed the slaves, didn't they?

Still, there was no way out, not really, not without abandoning the house to the bank as my family had done so many times, with the keys and a note on the counter and the porch door banging in the wind. Then I would truly have sold my years for nothing and Esau with his mess of pottage would be a canny businessman in comparison. I felt like one of the freed slaves who went back to work on the old plantation after the reality of emancipation set in, when he discovered that he was free to go anywhere so long as he could afford the fare.

Twice during my time at the paper there had been a round of buyouts when management offered early retirement to older reporters, so many weeks of pay for each year they had in. It was a miracle, as if the warden and guards had all chipped in to buy you a file for your birthday. The offer was simple business; it allowed the company to shed itself of older employees who had trudged to the top of the pay scale but were too exhausted when they got there to do much work....

Now the company had settled on a more cost-effective plan. They simply made the place as miserable to work at as possible and waited you out until it became unbearable and you quit of your own accord. It was tempting to think it all a grand, evil scheme but that was like believing the government could orchestrate vast conspiracies and keep them successfully hidden over generations when the evidence clearly showed them inept at even the simplest crimes. No, the process of making the place worse than it already was came as naturally as bowel cancer, organically, on the cellular level....

We remembered the years of the buyouts as if they were some golden age whose like we would never see again. We had had our chance and let it go.

Brave new business models

The world had changed; no-one owned a business with the thought of simply running it and making what profit they could. Anything more than a hotdog cart at the corner was subject to a new way of thinking: the product was not the basis of profit, whether it was newspapers, diaper pins or hand grenades -- that was an idea that had gone the way of buggy whips and whalebone corsets, as antiquated and laughable as etheric philosophy. In the sunset of the 20th century, the product was the business itself and profit lay in the buying and selling of one business to another. Whether the buyer wanted to absorb its acquisition, amoeba-like, into itself or simply reduce competition by buying out the competition and smothering it, the result was the same, dividends for the shareholders and bonuses for the executives.

And so we came to be sold, the Picayune-Standard and all its sister papers scooped up like so many child's jacks by a media combine from the east, the whole works, from the empty gin bottles hidden behind a wall in the photography department to the iridescent penis on the statue in front of the building, and all of us along with it.

An emissary from our new overlords flew in to address the newsroom. He was beside himself with excitement at what the future held, giddy with possibility and profit. The newspapers would join with the new owner's existing TV and radio holdings to create a news and entertainment juggernaut: a print reporter might write a story about the collapse of a bridge and then be interviewed in our newsroom by one of their TV reporters for that night's newscast, presented to the viewers as an expert commentator. The merger would bring new efficiencies and economies of scale, he said; the future was a place of synergy and vertical integration, cross-promotion fuelling it all.

We had a word for it back in the neighbourhood; we called it a circle-jerk.

On Tuesday, in the second to last of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong is blessed by the discovery that he's not wanted after all.