Harvey Pekar.
Originally uploaded by sp.sullivan
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.
