Wages

Armstrong is a terrific writer and he has seen the whole capitalist system from the wrong end of the rabbit cages. His story of having worked for a living since he was a young teen in provincial Farmtown, BC is truly apocalyptic; it's an epic, almost Homeric catalogue of slights, injuries, mishaps, horrid bosses, substandard working conditions, insulting and inhuman treatment, virtual slavery, and he argues skillfully that this is what all of us have to eat every day of our lives. Armstrong's mom used to sigh about how there's always too much month left over at the end of a cheque. Ain't that the truth! Her boy John wasn't raised to suffer fools gladly, but a man's got to have some sort of job, and John tried them all, cleaning up in a giant rabbit hutch (a job truly worthy of Dante's 9th circle of hell), sorting out "adult movies" to make sure they violated only US standards, not the rather different Canadian ones, working in a body shop with morons who were sure they could score with some high class women if only they installed a top of the line muffler in their car--but they're totally delusional losers. Armstrong points out that the system turns all of us into losers, yet if it's a call to action, it's one delivered with a knowing wit and a sympathetic, understanding lack of pretension. Even despite his minor fame as a rocker in the bustling Western Canada scene of the late 1970s and early 80s, Armstrong (author of an earlier book on his misadventures on the music scene) soon found himself a prisoner of bank loans and extended credit, the sort that turn you either to bankruptcy or "going postal." "Now that we had a basement," he writes, "we got another loan and bought a used washer and dryer. I felt like Pinocchio--I was a real human boy and like the rest of them I was to up to my assin debt." Armstrong's strongest vitriol he reserves for the editors and readers of the alternative weeklies that employed him when, not having any other training or experience, he turned to journalism to make his payments. There's a New Grub Street going on and, to hear him tell it, John Armstrong was Sergeant Grub. It's a funny, coruscating book, and if the bosses knew what was between these two covers, they would go to unheard of lengths to shut down feisty, independent New Star Books, even if it meant dipping every extant copy of WAGES, and every inch of John Armstrong's tattered flesh, into industrial strength battery acid, turn them all into a few burps and bubbles of quick dissolve. If you value freedom and social justice and self determination, gang, then get it while you can.