Someday You May Miss This Miserable Now

It was the early 90’s in New York City when I first met Mikal Reich. I had dropped out of college after just a few weeks, and desperately needed a job. But doing what? I was reasonably proficient with words, or fancied myself so, but a job in journalism required a degree, and building a career writing books or plays would take a lot longer than either my landlord or American Express were willing to grant me.

With few other options, I decided to get a job in advertising, which required no degree and even less talent. I put together a portfolio and was lucky enough, after many months, to land a job – unpaid at first, then $200 a week – at a small agency on East 11^th Street in Manhattan named Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

To describe Mad Dogs as an ad agency is admittedly a stretch, located as it was in the 11th Street loft apartment of the creative director, Nick Cohen, where a half-a-dozen employees smoked pot and wrote funny ads for small local clients like The Village Voice and The Tiny Mythic Theater Company, while Sharon, Nick's wife, tried to pretend we weren't annoying her and Betty and Herbie, Nick's dogs, did the same.

It was there that I met Mikal, one of the other writers, and soon we began working together. He had a twisted sense of humor, a generous heart and a fantastic laugh. We became fast friends, drawn together by a shared sense of the absurdity of life and a shared feeling, at that moment, of utter misery. We were in our twenties, after all, and had bigger dreams than writing Coca-Cola ads. Mikal played in a ska band, Mephiskapheles, and I stayed up all night writing plays I hated the next morning.

But here we were all day, every day, writing ads.

It seemed such a tragic waste - the people that worked at Mad Dogs were smart, funny, rebellious. Why, Mikal and I would wonder over diner coffee and toast, were we wasting our time doing this? We could be putting on plays, we could be writing novels, we could be shooting films! Why were we sitting around making commercials?At lunch we would go to the bars and clubs in the East Village and leave band cards at the front, promoting his next gig, and then we would stop at the nearby bookstore where I hoped to find some answers about life and/or writing. Then we would return to the loft, sit on the fire escape, smoke cigarettes, and despair at the situation we found ourselves in.

They were difficult times for us personally as well. Mikal had issues with his family, I with mine, and the shrapnel of my dysfunctional childhood was bloodying my still-new marriage. Orli and I lived in a shoebox street-level no-bedroom studio next door to a brownstone crackhouse, I was depressed, I could barely afford cigarettes let alone therapy and I hated what I did for a living.

One day, I quit. Mikal stayed. But we made a pact: if we were still in advertising when we were 50, we agreed to mercy kill each other.

And yet those days, when I think back to them now, appear almost mythic. The laughter, the East Village, the bars, the Doc Martens, the dreams. I visited NYC recently, and went to take a look at the old agency. The clubs are gone, the bookstores shuttered. The Village Voice no longer exists, nor does the Tiny Mythic Theater Company. The city today is not the city it was then, and the world that allowed a Mad Dogs to exist is no more.

Mikal and I stayed in touch over the years; we reached out to one another, when he had a new album or I had a new book.

Recently, I received an email from Nick, informing me that Mikal had drowned off the coast of Miami while swimming with his daughters.

His daughters, fortunately, were saved, but the lifeguards could not get to Mikal in time.

The photo above is of Mikal, later in life, but it's how I will always remember him - hands on his head, rubbing his hair as if trying to ignite a creative spark, feet up on the Mad Dogs table as we tried to make sense of a creative brief, or our lives, or the world.

Perhaps you are in a miserable place right now. Perhaps you hate your job, your school, your apartment, your job. Surely, you think, things can’t get any worse, and you will find no shortage of seemingly knowledgable people who will assure you that they can - indeed, that they will.

And maybe they’re right.

There’s a good chance they are.

But there’s also a chance, thin as hope’s shivering feather, that someday you will miss this miserable now. That someday this will not seem funny, it will seem sacred; that someday you may look back and rather than laugh, you will long; that someday you will think, despite everything you feel so certainly right now, “Those were the days, man, those were the fucking days.”

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

Mephiskapheles on Spotify

Nick’s book, Honest!, about Mad Dogs & Englishmen

illustrations by Orli Auslander