eric nuzum dot com

Know Your Gompers

Samuel Gompers
Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine

I've been taking a new route to work in the morning, which takes me by this huge statue, kind of in the middle of no where.

The only words on or around it are a name: Samuel Gompers.

You might, as I did, wonder who the fuck Samuel Gompers might be. And what he did to deserve this monstrous statue?

Well, thank God for Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has a quite exhaustive article on Samuel Gompers.

In short, he founded the AF of L (later the "AFL" in AFL-CIO) and had a lot to do with the evolution of the labor movement in the U.S.

Another interesting tidbit. The otherwise empty plot of land the statue sits on is called Gompers Square (though, to be honest, it isn't a square at all--more like a tiny triangle/wedge between K St. and Mass Ave.). Gompers used to live in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, which explains the location (and might also explain all the shirtless men in the statue).

And if one giant statue tribute to Samuel Gompers isn't enough, there is a second--in Chicago.

So there.

Buffered Mel

Braveheart scaring the tourists
Originally uploaded by Leo Reynolds

This morning, I finally decided to take a listen to the Mel Gibson tapes.

This whole hot mess broke while I was on the road. I wasn't reading much, wasn't watching much TV. I read some headlines about them, but that was about all I knew. Despite my lack of exposure to Mel's recorded rants, my heart continued to beat. The sun came up the next morning, etc.

Sometimes I like to pretend I turn up my nose at celebrity gossip...but who am I kidding, really. I was just as interested as everyone else.

The disadvantage of trying to listen to the recordings this morning was that 2/3rds of the planet was also trying to listen to those tapes. As a result, they tend to play for a few seconds, then silently buffer for a minute or two, then play a few more seconds.

Given the language, I thought it would be best to listen on headphones. As a result, I sat in silence, headphones on, hearing nothing except my own breathing. Then, the buffered sound would jump out of nowhere.

"FUCK YOU. YOU INSULT ME WITH EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE," screamed Mel.

Then the audio would go silent and start buffering again.

A few minutes later...

"YOU SHOULD JUST SMILE AND BLOW ME," would come shrieking out of the complete quiet.

This went on for the next half hour. A few minutes of silence, then...

"YOU HAVE NO FUCKING SOUL...AND MY SOUL IS SCREAMING!!!"

One time, the audio buffered and played just four seconds of Mel panting into the phone, then went silent again for a few minutes.

I kept checking to make sure these seemingly random blasts of tirade weren't also coming out of my computer speakers.

All said, this was actually a fun way to listen to the tapes.

See ya later, Harvey

Harvey Pekar.
Originally uploaded by sp.sullivan

Probably one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed in my life was also one of the most intimate things I’ve ever witnessed, as well as one of the most inspiring and uncomfortable.

Harvey Pekar, asleep, his nose pushed against a microphone I was holding.

Well, Harvey wasn’t really asleep--more like passed out. He’d nodded off, mid-sentence, while reading into my microphone.

“Harvey,” I said, quietly, hoping to wake him up.

“Harvey, are you okay?”

Nothing.

I moved the microphone slightly, hoping he’d jolt back awake. He just leaned forward more.

I sat there for a few seconds, which felt like hours, not knowing what to do. His wife was upstairs, so I could have called out for help. But then, if Harvey was simply asleep, he’d probably be more freaked out by me yelling. I just held the mic, which was, at this point, also holding up Harvey.

It was 2002 and Harvey was undergoing intense chemo to treat a recurrence of the non-Hodgkins lymphoma that he’d documented earlier in his American Book Award-winning graphic novel, Our Cancer Year. The timing of the recurrence was Pekar-esque to say the least. After busting his ass for 37 years as a file clerk at the VA hospital, Harvey had finally managed to retire. Shortly afterwards, he got sick. Shortly after getting sick, he got news that his auto-biographical comic book series, American Splendor, was going to be made into a movie. At what should have been the peak of his career, the culmination of sixty-plus years of struggle, Harvey was thin, pale, weak, slightly disoriented, and barely able to muster enough energy to read 400 words of text.

Check that, he didn’t have the energy. So little energy, in fact, that he couldn't come into the station to record. I went to his cluttered house to tape Harvey while he propped himself up on a futon. Less than two paragraphs in, he closed his eyes and lowered his head until it came to rest on my microphone.

I eventually reached out and gently touched his arm.

He slowly opened his eyes, turned to me, took a second to remember what we were doing, looked down at his script and said:

“How far did I go?”

“Not far.” I answered.

“So I didn’t finish?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“So then, I guess I should start over,” he said, completely uninterested in reflecting on the simultaneous humor and tragedy of what just happened. That was Harvey.

Despite his health, Harvey had insisted on recording that day. It was nothing romantic like some sort of unstoppable work ethic (which, frankly, he did kinda possess), nor some kind of “healing through art” nonsense that he would deplore--Harvey wanted to record because once he recorded a commentary, he’d get paid. He wanted the money.

When I became Program Director at WKSU in Kent, Ohio, in 1998, one of my first "big ideas" was to build up a stable of commentators. The first person I wanted to approach: Harvey Pekar. I came up with a bunch of reasons why I thought he'd be a good choice, but in truth, I just wanted a chance to meet him.

Like many people, my first exposure to Harvey came when I was in college, watching David Letterman. Harvey was a regular on the show for awhile until the Letterman folks decided his unpredictable nature and cantankerousness were no longer funny. At some point during his brief television career, I’d picked up a copy of one of Harvey’s comic books and enjoyed it. His writing was vivid and frank, sad and funny, depressing and yet even more depressing. He was a sad sack with a heart of gold. He was an angry quasi-socialist who had a unending, yet highly pessimistic, idea of fairness. He was more optimistic than you'd expect (unless the subject was himself) and thrived on evangelizing about music, books, and movies that he loved and excited him. He was, above all, an idealist masquerading as a cranky old man.