Easy.

 

I remember back to 1980.

I had just left college--and home.

I had not two dimes to rub together.

And was getting evicted from Columbia housing where I was paying $90/month sharing a two-bedroom with an apprentice diamond cutter from Philadelphia and 22,000 feral cockroaches. Columbia wanted me out. I was no longer a student.

I grabbed the fifty-page want ad section of the Sunday Times. Like a 1930s corn-fed movie, I circled the one or two things I found of spurious interest that I was remotely qualified to do.

One was a running-shoe salesman at Paragon sporting goods on Broadway and Union Square. One was a junior catalog copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalog--whose "fashion" divisions were based at 393 7th Avenue, in the garment district.

I got offers for both jobs and took the writing one, regarding it as having more of a future. Later that day, I signed a lease on a small one-bedroom on 109th, between Broadway and Riverside. 

The Montgomery Ward job paid $11,700 per annum, but gave me time in the evening to work on my portfolio or to play basketball at a nearby private school or to pick up some work somewhere if I could find it.

My girlfriend at the time, my wife today, helped me find some freelance work with the husband of a woman she worked with. Somehow N owned pages in the glossy free-standing inserts that were stuffed into the newspapers of the day. 

N would go to clients with deals. For instance, show two proofs of purchase having bought this toothpaste or that, and you can get two free games of bowling at your local alley. If N sold that as a concept--to someone at Colgate, he then would charge them to create an ad announcing the offer. N would come to me to write the ad.

I remember thinking, toothpaste and bowling. That goes together as naturally as tiramisu, spam and bug-killer, but ok. And I got to writing the ad.

Quickly I scribbled "Get Bowled Over," and some sub-copy that explained the workings of the offer. For that I was to get paid $500, which was more than two-week's of my Montgomery Ward pay.

"This is easy money," I said, as I nervously showed it and a few other choices to N. 

It's been 50 years now.

I think I'm still waiting to be paid.

Wednesday night, I was out for dinner with the JCrew, a coterie of older ad people I'm associated with. We're all in the later stages of our careers but still working and sweating and shaking our heads about the work styles and/or the lassitude of the people we work with. Still wondering if it's worth it or when the fun that was supposed to be part of the business will actually show up.

Two or three of the constituents list night have their own legitimate agencies. They have account people, and CFOs, and project-managers. You know, the trappings of a grown-up business. And the have worries like rent, salaries, the leases on copiers and the tsurus that comes from people not showing up or the elevator being out or the bathroom toilet being clogged.

That said, they have accounts and reputations and PR machines that proffer the illusion that Mammon is waiting in the next room. They fly to conferences, book blocks at seaside Cannes hotels, and wear expensive sunglasses even when its dark. At some point, I can hear the sub-rosa utterances we all sotto voce at one time or another primarily to ourselves.

"This is easy money," we whisper, hoping the fates don't hear us and thereby punish us.

After 68 years of bowling people over with this banality or that banality, for this client or that, what I've learned is very simple and very blunt.

No matter how easy it seems,
no matter how accustomed you are to doing the work,
how well you know the client
or how well-versed you are in the product or service,
there is never,
never,
not once,
not ever,
never ever,
there is no such thing
and never will be
as easy money.

The sum total of all I've learned so far is this:

Easy money isn't.