I met Harvey Pekar once. 

It’s September 2006 and I’m in New York visiting friends.

Leaving where I’m staying in Brooklyn one morning, I head across to Manhattan to pick up my old Mac after a fix by the good people at Tekserve. My receipt says ‘please don’t call us up to ask whether your computer has been repaired as we’ll have to stop repairing it to answer the phone. We will call you.’ Good advice. I plan to wander aimlessly until the call comes in.

‘Walk The Line’ the Johnny Cash movie has just opened so I buy a ticket and settle down in the theatre. The screening is pretty sparsely attended but after a minute or two someone else enters, it’s a woman pushing an old battered pram with a newborn baby inside, they take up residence on an aisle seat a few rows in front of me. The movie starts and she proceeds to rock the pram back and forth for the entire film, sometimes in time to the music. Her pram metronome is mesmerizing.

After leaving the cinema I set off uptown, internally grumbling about the lousiness of the movie, I’m annoyed that I didn’t walk out sooner, in fact I wish that the baby had woken, screamed the place down and driven me out.

A while later I’m walking through Greeley Square, it’s then that I spot a police officer, he’s standing perfectly still and staring into the middle distance. As I get closer I notice a prone figure lying at his feet next to an upturned chair. It’s a man. Middle aged. Large. He’s dead. His eyes have rolled white but he’s still holding a lit cigarette pinned between two fingers which is slowly burning out. People are going about their daily business, bustling past, some barely noticing and plainly there’s nothing to be done – just two grim options - stop and stare or move right along. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

I go for a drink.

It’s late afternoon and Tekserve haven’t called so I wander towards their Chelsea address. I’m passing Penn Plaza Pavilion when I see a giant window ad.

CARRIE FISHER HERE TODAY!

It’s a comic convention (I think it was the Big Apple Comic Con) so I decide to while away a little time gawping at Princess Leia grown old.

Inside all is as you’d expect, various comic book artists and writers signing, scribbling and being photographed alongside row after row of dealers selling comics, action figures and whatnot. I amble about the place a while but quickly realize that Carrie Fisher has long since left the building; then, across the room I notice a lonesome figure sat at a desk beneath a wonky biro-scrawled name sign. 

It’s Harvey Pekar.

Now some of the meet-and-greet queues are immense, snaking and criss-crossing around the hall but Harvey is on his own and looking pretty bored and crabby.

I can’t walk over to him fast enough. Misery loves company.

Harvey is everything I expect him to be, by measure engaging and obstreperous - he’s magnificent to be around. We talk about American Splendor, Cleveland, Manchester, New York and I tell him how happy I was to hear Joe Maneri on the American Splendor movie soundtrack (the track ‘Paniots Nine’ is really something). As we nerdily talk Jazz some more, Harvey’s mood lightens, he seems much happier talking about the Maneri family than the focus of his current woes - no one has interrupted us but the queues for hasty sketches of barbarians and superheroes stretch on.

Someone from the convention comes across and hands over money for dinner; Harvey hits him for more cash and after he’s left tells me that one of the few upswings has been the free trip and hotel for his wife Joyce and daughter Danielle. He’s hustling.

I tell him about the poor dead fellow I’d wandered across earlier - the arch egotist in me imagines the story being suitably Pekaresque enough to make the pages of American Splendor (but of course it doesn’t).

My phone rings, it’s Tekserve calling me in, so I buy one of his books I already own and say my goodbyes. As I leave I take a look back.

There’s Harvey Pekar sat on his own with the whole of the comic book world amassed on the other side of the room.

 For more on Harvey Pekar go here - http://www.smithmag.net/pekarproject/

Photograph of Harvey by Seth Kushner - http://www.sethkushner.com