HARVEY PEKAR AND ME

Once I was sort of, almost friends with Harvey Pekar, who was an American file clerk, curmudgeon, cancer survivor, everyman, comic book writer, and, most famously, frequent guest on David Letterman’s talk show.

Pekar was bought in to the Letterman show not to talk about his comic books, but to argue with Dave and to the uneducated eye it would appear that the function of those appearances were to make fun of Pekar and his prickly manner, but I suspect their purpose was to do the exact opposite.

Dave claimed to be an honest, wry, mid-American iconoclast who was almost embarrassed to be in front of the camera, but he didn’t look like that when sitting next to Harvey. Harvey was the real thing.

I think Dave bought Harvey in because the pair made good TV, and because his name was Harvey Pekar (Dave always loved people with names like ‘Harvey Pekar’), but also as a sort of atonement for Dave making so much money, and for wearing make-up, and for having a team of writers, and for being so damn beloved.

Anyway Dave and Pekar had a funny old relationship with Dave, and I did too, once, very briefly.

One day, when working at Ralph Magazine I got an offer to interview Pekar to promote the film American Splendor, a biopic starring Paul Giamatti as Harvey. Pekar wasn’t a typical subject for Ralph Magazine, but I thought the contrast between his dour wit and the surrounding pages of fast cars and shiny women would be amusing.

I think it was.

Anyway, I was also personally very keen to speak to Harvey, as I had something to say to him.

I’d had a stroke a year before the interview, with the most damage done to the part of my brain that processed language. As I started to recover, I couldn’t get an answer from my neurologists on what the extent of the damage was, or what kind of recovery (if any) I should expect.

As the days of invalidity went on, it started to feel like I could speak any more clearly than the day before, and long chunks of text didn’t look any less like Latin. I started to despair that I was permanently impaired.

I had a lot of angst.

I would lie awake at night in the hospital, amidst the nocturnal groaning and wheezing, and the faint smell of incontinence and I’d take stock of the day. I’s try to reconcile what I thought was exactly damaged in my head. The big question I couldn’t answer was whether it was just my ability to read and write that had been impared, or whether I’d become a duller, simpler person.

The question was answered when a friend- a wonderful, thoughtful friend- bought me an anthology of Harvey’s American Splendor comics, and in those books I started to comprehend again.

In Harvey’s books the settings weren’t revealed in text, obscured by impenetrable clauses and tenses, but right there in the panels; the confusion was drawn in Harvey’s face, the ambivalence of Harvey’s wife Joyce was in her posture, and the small bursts of dialogue or observation was manageable.

As Harvey says in the comics, ‘ordinary life is pretty complex stuff’ but it wasn’t stuff so complex that I couldn’t understand it. While reading Harvey’s stories I realised it was just the words that I had issue with, not the concepts, and that made recovery far easier

At the end of my interview with Harvey, sitting in the storage closet/ interview room at the Ralph office, I told him the story of my stroke and his comics. His reply was, “That’s good, that’s really, really…good”

His enthusiasm for enthusiasm waned as the sentence went on. I think he was embarrassed, but also happy that his work had touched me in the way it had.

It was supposed to be a twenty-minute interview, and we were at the half hour mark, but I didn’t get a sense that Harvey wanted to get off the phone, so we kept talking. We’d already talked about his lymphoma, and his retirement, and his standoffish wife, and how cold Cleveland was, and Letterman, so I asked him if he was every happy.

He said he was sometimes. I asked when he was happy. “I guess I’m happy now,” he said.

I asked if he minded if I called him again, and he said that was fine, as long as it was around this time, which was lunchtime for me, and around ten PM for him.

“I’ll be sitting in my chair watching the television,” he said.

So I did call him, usually cradling a plastic container of Thai or Chinese food from the food court under our office. We’d basically just talk about our day- him going to the post office, me writing some feature or another- usually for about twenty minutes of so, and then I’d say I had to do some work or he’d say he was going to watch television.

Anyway, the last time I called Harvey was on a bus going from the ARIA Awards to an after party. It was around ten in the morning in Cleveland, and I thought he might be interested about the ARIA’s and Ira Davies, who was sitting in front of me. I was drunk and Harvey wasn’t in the least bit interested or amused. Why would he be? That was the last time I ever spoke to him.

Harvey’s dead now, and has been since 2010, so that means you won’t ever be able to speak to him over the phone. Honestly though the best way to connect with him is probably though his books, which aren't going anywhere.