Back when I was cooler, one of my heroes was Harvey Pekar, Clevelander, jazz critic, writer of downbeat real-life comic books for adults, most famously American Splendor, and file clerk.
He had a clerk’s job at the same V.A. hospital in Cleveland for at least 35 years, which came to mind the other day when I visited Suffolk’s ground zero for filings of record, the Evans K. Griffing County Center in Riverhead.
Someday the drudgery of digitization will be complete, but for now the endless stacks of hefty bound deeds remain to get contentedly lost in, the volumes, should you choose to inspect one, rolling out from sturdy metal shelves, a remnant of once-great American industry courtesy of the Watson Manufacturing Company of Jamestown, N.Y.
Looking into how that aged widow transferred the family property laterally over to her creepy nephew all those years ago? Your search for a will would take you next door to the county clerk’s office, where untold yard-feet of index cards sit in oh so many well-worn wooden drawers, the years of forgotten clerk labor that went into them somehow heartbreaking, not unlike the discontinued library card catalogs across the land, works of elaborate and cross-referenced if prosaic art dispatched to basement uselessness.
The clerks I saw on the job were in fact just like librarians — helpful to the citizen supplicant, diligent, at times even interested in the research in front of them, thus betraying brains, which they forget is frowned upon these days.
Their collegiality was intriguing, as co-workers engaged in meaningful, perhaps important tasks, which no doubt eases the conscience. Maybe more to the point, the work was not of the kind to follow them home, the bane of the 21st-century white-collar worker.
Harvey Pekar wasn’t much of one for collegiality. He’d take his lunch alone so he could read. You’ve got to have a rich inner life to be a career file clerk. The recently departed director David Lynch once said he ate the same lunch day in and day out so he could think of other things.
That’s probably B.S., but with Pekar his thoughts were clearly with his comics — depicting slices of hospital life with orderlies or janitors, or, at home, exploring the mundane. I recall one story about nothing more than his efforts to haul a couch upstairs into his apartment. Another had him sitting on the crapper when two lowlifes broke in. He fought them off using the brawling skills he learned on the hard-knocks streets of his youth.
As I say, a hero.