American Splendor

So last night, I had my Harvey Pekar moment.  My mother was coming over for dinner, and I had already chopped the garlic and sliced the avocado and gotten the Brussels sprouts ready for steaming.  The big chunks of tuna were cooking in lime and salt while they waited for grilling.  So I poured a glass of wine and sat down to find a movie for us to watch on television.  "American Splendor" had just begun, and since I hadn't seen it since it came out in 2003, I watched for awhile.  My mother and I, I thought, would watch "Game Change" when it came on in half an hour, but until then, I'd get a kick out of this.

My mother showed up and talked up the cat while I prepared the salads.  We sat in front of the t.v. with trays (o.k., o.k., I too much info), and she began to chuckle.  By the time I had the tuna on the grill, the other movie was about to start.

"You want me to change it or do you want to watch this?" I asked.  She said to stay with this.

And so we watched and laughed at Pekar's life, but too soon, I recognized too many scenes from my own.  There he was, for instance, sitting in the bathroom with the cat between his feet.  Walking by the mirror, he says famously, "Now there's a reliable disappointment."  A frame from a cartoon shows him with a dish and dish rag in his hands saying, "I could wash this ten times and it wouldn't be clean."

And then as he walks across a highway bridge, the narration is about loneliness, and I suddenly realized that tomorrow, I'd be back at the factory.  An entire week had gone by, and I'd barely left the house.  I looked at my mother surprised and said, "I haven't seen anyone all week."

"What?"

I thought hard about it.  I'd been to the gym and to the studio and out for meals, but other than that, I'd talked to no one.  It startled me that I hadn't thought about this at all.

What had I become, I wondered.  And just then, Harvey was asking his wife:

"What's wrong, Harvey? What are you doing up?  What is it?"

"Tell me the truth. Am I a guy who writes about himself... in a comic book? Or am I just a character in that book?"

"What are you talking about? What are you saying?"

"If I die, will that character keep going? Or will he just fade away?"

I've never been a comic book fan, and I've never read an issue of "American Splendor."  And I wasn't perturbed by the intimations about me the movie seemed to be making.  When I drew the parallels, my mother laughed real good.  There is not tragedy in it, I guess.  It is just the way things work out.  But tomorrow--yea--I'll be back at the factory, and later, I'll write about the things I see in my life.  I'll even show you pictures.  

Here is the song over which they rolled the credits.