A candle for the creative everydayness of Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar became internationally famous for living a humdrum life.

But the truth is that Pekar, who died early Monday morning, July 12, at his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home, was a highly unusual person whose life — working-class-ordinary though it appeared – became extraordinary because he made it so. And he made it so simply by imagining it as a comic-book story.

Like most intially simple creative inspirations, Pekar’s American Splendor series and the personal experiences, feelings and thoughts that it recounted required a lot of grinding work and suffering of various degrees to turn it into a success. In other words, Pekar had to live, sometimes precariously, and artistically translate his outwardly dull existence as a file clerk in a grimy, rundown American Rust Belt city into a tale all of us humans could recognize in some way as our own.  

That was a pretty skillful bit of artistry and entrepreneurship for a man of slightly odd appearance, crabbed and difficult nature, peculiar domestic habits, and a profound, scholarly passion for jazz that gave him a professional sideline as a free-lance music critic. Nothing about Pekar suggested the typical or the expected. He fit no stereotype at all: From salt-of-the-earth lunch-pail laborer to romantically impoverished artiste, he was miscast in every standard role.

I interviewed him once for a 2004 Plain Dealer story about the New York musical, Brooklyn – a play written by creative former street person Mark Schoenfeld and partner Barri McPherson about other creative street people – whose history Pekar and artists Gary and Laura Dumm had been commissioned by the New York Times to relate in American Splendor style  to illustrate a newspaper article about the show. Pekar lived with his wife, Joyce Brabner, and their adopted daughter Danielle in a small house that, like him, looked somewhat drab and unkempt on the outside, but  was really something else inside.

In fact, it looked as if a cyclone had blown through it: Every surface — floor, furniture, counters, mantel — was inundated, buried, under layers of paper, used dishes, cat food, clothes, utensils … just endless stuff comprising a mess so deep and so entire that the Cat in the Hat could not have  removed it even with his multi-handed clean-up vehicle. Pekar had considerately excavated one of the drifts to clear a small wooden chair of debris and I sat in it, a tiny inhabited island in a sea of refuse, and asked him questions about his work and life.

Not ordinary. And Pekar himself — a short, shabby, balding man with huge brown eyes that relentlessly fixed like a pair of dark searchlights on whatever met his gaze – was a gnome of rare intensity, somehow embodying cynical, bitter disappointment, irascibility and a shy, rather sweet kind of pride that surfaced in the moments when he spoke of his own work and the jazz he loved.  

He was 70 when he died. His work was renowned — had been adapted to the stage twice and also to the screen in the film American Splendor starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar — and so was he, as all the Letterman appearances and news coverage attest. He was also just Harvey, a local curmudgeon whose calls to The Plain Dealer’s arts department always produced wry smiles. 

What more proof do we need that creativity can make the remarkable out of the quotidien?

The quotidian life

That’s what Harvey Pekar calls the everyday-existence stuff that he writes about in ”American Splendor,” his autobiographical comic-book chronicle. It’s kind of an anti-drama, in a way, just like most of our daily lives.

Well, some lives are more exciting than others, I guess, but I think that if you got a truly honest assessment from people – even celebrities and world leaders and astronauts – you’d find that most of their time, like ours, dribbles past them in long files of little chores and annoyances relieved by stretches of random hanging around. Once you become something, it loses a lot of its mystique. 

“Entrepreneur” still sounds like an exciting gig to me, even though being one has shown me just how much glamorless grunt work goes into it. It sounds energetic, intrepid, brainy – the next best thing to “adventurer.” It feels that way, too … every once in a while. 

So what’s in an entrepreneur’s day? Since I haven’t done any serious drawing in decades, I’ll give you a verbal version of “Entrepreneurial Splendor,” with apologies and homage to Harvey:

Panel 1.  “Uuuuuunnnngh.” (Entrepreneur Woman – or EW – rolls over in a blind, bedbound coma of fatigue from blogging until 1 or 2 in the morning. The clock reads 7 a.m.)

Panel 2. (In her pre-verbal sunrise state, with knuckles and chins scraping the floor, EW staggers to the bathroom, where a hot washcloth eventually unseals her eyes.)

Panels 3, 4,and 5.  ” ‘Morning. … ‘Bye.” (Words begin returning just as family members leave. EW consumes cereal and news on autopilot, squints slightly more enthusiastically at the funnies. Not “Mary Worth.”)

Panel 666. Click.Taptaptaptaptaptap.Click. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” (Internet connection’s out again. EW brushes her teeth while rebooting continues … and continues.)

Panel 7. Click. taptapta… bzzzzt! ”Hello?” (Mother calls. EW surreptitiously continues answering e-mail while on the phone, typing ve-e-e-ery quietly so Mother doesn’t get bent out of shape because EW’s multitasking during her call.)

Panel 8. “Ow.” (EW has sent 583 e-mails and placed four dozen calls, trying to reach artists, writers, designers, advisors, insurance people, repairmen, school administrations, brokers, doctors, investors, kids and friends and now her lower back has fused with the frame of her ergonomic chair.)

Panel 9. “Ungh. Huuuuh. Ungh. Huuuh.” (EW resumes pre-verbaling at 10, while working out. Plenty of time to get ready for that lunch meeting, plenty of ti….)

Panel 10. “Shoot!” (This is the euphemistic panel, which gets its own workout as EW realizes she doesn’t have enough time to get ready for the lunch meeting and speed-showers dries hair checks voice mail dresses checks e-mail logs off splotches on makeup collects contracts brochures shoes purse hurls self into driver’s seat and bounces down the MLK like a coal car through a mine shaft applying lipstick at red lights which never happen when you need them to and sprints the last 100 feet from parking meter to coffeeshop arriving her usual 15 minutes late.)

Panel 11. “I’m fine, thanks. My business? We bring the power of creativity to every …plus hands-on…creative worksartssciences …writing best growing numbers up…looking for have need marketingadsproposal networkingand revolution journalism. … So … how are you?”  

Panel 12. “G’night, g’night. Love you. “ Taptaptaptaptap. (It’s midnight. EW has made it to a second meeting, chauffeured to afternoon music practice and the skate park, brought groceries to Mother, written a new executive summary, sent 583 follow-up e-mails, printed out 16 contracts, checked the site, made dinner, signed permission slips and, limp and spaghetti-stained, is concluding her next day’s blog post. … ) 

Panel 13. Taptaptaptaptap. Click …… Aaaaugh! (The bad-luck panel! Internet out again! EW tries to stab herself to death with a highlighter.)     

Panel 14. (Post rewritten. Face washed. Lights out. Eyes … open. Night-night, EWwwwwww…)