Millennium

I spent the first thirty-five years of my life furtively sidling towards the year 2000, running from one bush to another with a bit of twig held above my head like an inept spy in a Spike Milligan drawing. It was difficult to deny the symbolism of the numbers, much as I knew it was ridiculous. Way back in 1977, during my final months of junior school, Paul Moorman had told me that the world would end in 1980. This, he explained, had been predicted by someone called Old Mother Shipton, and she was usually right about such things. I spent the next three years doing my best to not think about it, knowing that it was almost certainly going to happen exactly as predicted. The numbers alone seemed to support Paul's hypothesis - the eerily tidy 1980 rather than the somewhat messier 1979 or the incomprehensible 1981 on either side.

Ultimately, this has taught me to avoid placing too much stock in numbers or dates on the grounds of their appearing pleasantly or even uncannily rounded in the fairly arbitrary context of the decimal system. Even so, it was difficult to avoid feeling something about the approach of the year 2000. As a child I had regularly read a science-fiction comic called 2000AD, so named as to evoke what then seemed like a distant and culturally remote future. The same deadline had generally been recognised as signifying the point at which everything would be different to the present day, and this had been the standard in films, books, and television for a long time, most of the twentieth century, and certainly the years during which I grew up. Tomorrow's World would wheel an unconvincing and glacially slow domestic help robot around the television studio - always a disappointment after the robots of Star Wars or Doctor Who - and James Burke would look to the viewer and explain this is how we will live come the year 2000.

Even as we counted down, as the future approached and we began to realise that it would probably look at least a little like what had become the present, the numbers had taken on too much meaning to be ignored. Millenarian cults popped up left, right, and centre proclaiming that it would be the end of the world, civilisation, or both, or that the spaceship was coming to take us all to Heaven - all the usual bollocks which comes around whenever someone who isn't very bright starts taking their mathematics far too seriously. On a seemingly more tangible note there was the Millennium Bug by which everything containing a microchip would reset itself to the year 1900, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil would return to office as Prime Minister, and everyone would be thoroughly pissed off with nothing but coverage of the Boer War on telly. I asked my friend Andrew if it was serious. He worked in the city as a programmer for Cazenove, and he seemed to know about such things. He didn't really know about this one, he told me, but said it seemed significant just how much money his superiors were throwing at people brought in to solve millennial problems before they happened.

My friend Tim was meanwhile laying an egg, although thankfully he was laying an egg a hundred or so miles away, thus at least affording me the possibility of hanging up and blaming it on a bad line when I'd heard enough. He had a computer and as usual had imagined himself to number amongst an elite group of five or six individuals distinguished in this way; he became an expert, finding it difficult to conceive of anyone else having experience equal to or even greater than his own, because at the root of it all he really needed to feel important, to be someone other than the lonely boatsman with just one oar rowing himself around in a circle on his own social and cultural oxbow lake. He'd probably read an article about the Millennium Bug in the Daily Express, something which had impressed him at least as much as Paul Moorman's testimony had initially impressed me.

'Anything could happen, Lawrence. It will be a free for all for computer viruses and all the computers will think it's the year 1900. You should be careful what you download, you mark my words.'

I had been using a PC for about three years. At the time I had not yet found good reason to hook it up to the internet, and so I was using it purely as a word processor.

'I can't see it happening. I'm not actually online.'

'You don't know, Lawrence. Some of the viruses that are around these days are incredible.'

Maybe they were. Maybe they were so incredible that they could now build themselves physical bodies with which to perform home visits on people with isolated computers and no internet access. Tim seemed to know more about it than I did.

I thought about it and decided the worst that could probably happen would be a temporary loss of either gas or electricity, maybe some disruption to the phone system. In any case, there didn't seem to be a lot I could do, aside from follow Tim's expert advice and buy the most expensive antivirus software I could find for a computer with no actual internet connection. There didn't seem much point in worrying.

Since moving to Lordship Lane in 1995, I'd generally spent New Year's Eve with my friend Eddy. We often seemed to be the only two of our social group who never had anything planned, and so would generally end up in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, followed by watching the fireworks across the river as December switched over to January of the new year. Sometimes there would be a few more of us, Neil and Rachel or Carl and Christine; sometimes it would be fun, or sometimes it would be pissing with rain as we stood shivering amongst assorted Time Out readers trying their hardest to have an experience that would justify paying a million quid every three days to rent a glass cube just past the Victoria Bridge. I nearly always enjoyed the pub, but could never quite work out what I was supposed to get from the postscript with all the explosions and cheering. It being 1999, everyone I knew had planned in advance, Eddy included for once, paying tickets for ringside seats at this or that spectacle. Of course everyone knew that 2001 would be the first true year of the new millennium, but please...

It being 1999, I had at last found something resembling a calling, specifically something geographically orientated in the direction of central Mexico. I'd been gripped by Mexica and Pre-Colombian culture since just before I'd moved to Lordship Lane, and had spent five years reading up on the subject. In May, 1996 I'd dug out a bag of acrylic paints which had lain more or less untouched since the end of the eighties - when a really lousy portrait of the poet and author Bill Lewis had convinced me that painting just wasn't my medium - and I began painting images of Mexican Gods and Goddesses. I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing or why, but the composition of each painting gave me a point of focus around which to base my reading. I told myself I was putting a book together, twenty-six paintings of Mexican Gods with a lengthy written piece on each; but I couldn't quite condense the pantheon as I understood it into twenty-six individuals, so it became fifty-two, then finally 104 - these all being theologically significant numbers in the Mexican triskaidecimal system which uses thirteen rather than ten as a base. My painting ability was ropey, but I had decided I could teach myself and fake the rest, and never mind if one or two of them ended up looking a little like X-Men fan art. I was still technically a better painter than Rene Magritte, I told myself.

It seems an absurd undertaking given that some paintings took days or even weeks to complete, but by 31st December 1999 I was working on a representation of Ixpuztec, or Broken Face, a minor Death God. It was sequentially the ninety-eighth painting I had done in the series, and as part of a larger undertaking for which I still had only approximate plans.

As evening drew in on the very last day of what the great majority of people, rightly or wrongly, regarded as the twentieth century, I was perched on my couch with a board on my knee working at a painting. The television was on in the background, and the gas fire was almost certainly turned to its highest setting. My figure work had never been what you would call outstanding, but for once it was looking okay to me, shortfalls compensated by tricks picked up from all those years reading superhero comics. The sky was drawn from a painting by Czech artist Zdeněk Burian which I had known since childhood from a book called Life before Man. I suppose the composition was all a bit cobbled together, but it felt as though I was at least doing something vaguely meaningful, in the context of having spent most of my thirty-five years producing art which aspired only to the appearance of meaning.

It was five minutes to midnight. I set down my board, picked up my glass of tequila and orange, rolled myself a cigarette and went outside. Lordship Lane slopes downhill just past where I lived, meaning that I was stood upon a slight rise looking north towards the River Thames and the newly constructed London Eye, just visible and all lit up on the skyline. I recall the comet Hale-Boppe as a vivid splash of milk in the heavens to the north-east, but according to Wikipedia that would have been a couple of years earlier. I sipped my tequila and smoked my fag, and thought about the twentieth century as the sky filled with fireworks.

It felt as though I had come a long way.

A few months earlier, back in September, I had been to Mexico City. I went alone, and it was the first time I had ever been out of the country. The world had come to resemble something very different to the one in which I had grown up, something I could never have predicted. I had come to view the paintings as something akin to a ritual act, hence the culturally specific count towards which I was working. They were a catechism of sorts, an act of naming by which something was brought into being, specifically brought into being as living rather than dead ideas; and I never really cared whether that made sense to anyone else or not.

It was 2000. The future was here and everything was, as promised, different. Stood alone outside in the freezing cold, paint all over my hands and a ciggy on the go would have been a poor New Year's Eve by the standards of most people, but for me it was magical. We had escaped the twentieth century, and the future had become mutable once more. Almost anything could happen from this point onwards, as indeed it eventually did.

Gruts

Signing on for a three year fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art back in September 1984 was a big move for me. I'd just turned nineteen and probably had not previously been away from home for longer than a couple of days. I was loosely familiar with beer and the genitalia of one specific member of the opposite sex, but I was otherwise generally naive; and now I was living in Kent amongst complete strangers. Home was Warwickshire, which may as well have been on Mars, or so it seemed at the time.

Whilst I was doing my best to remain open-minded to new experiences, I had developed a general scepticism regarding poetry as something which really wasn't for me. What poetry I'd been obliged to read at school and then in further education would, so I believed at the time, have worked better either converted to prose or set to music, and poets themselves seemed a self-involved bunch. Admittedly I didn't have a great wealth of experience with poets amongst my vague circle of friends, but I'd watched The Young Ones on the box, and Steve the poet with whom I now shared a student house in Leeds Village was doing nothing to disabuse me of the impression fostered by Rik Mayall directing condescending odes at his enemies. Steve was both funny and amiable at a certain level, but I always had the feeling of everything being part of some larger chess game to him. He was barely able to buy a packet of crisps without it resembling strategy. His poems, so far as I could tell, amounted to everybody stop what you're doing and look at me. He almost certainly would have told me about the Medway Poets, about Billy Childish and Bill Lewis - these being people he clearly admired - but it wouldn't have made much sense to me. As I say, I wasn't really drawn to poetry as a medium.

Traci Emin, a noisy Turkish girl in second-year printmaking was in the habit of scaling tables in the college canteen to announce some event or other, and she would do this roughly every two or three days. The events for which she evangelised were rarely ever anything which caught my interest, and I wasn't sure what to make of the girl, so I generally paid her no attention. She knew Carl, then Student Union president, one of the first people I got to know at Maidstone, and still a close friend today. Carl had briefly introduced me to Traci, just as she barged into our conversation to haggle over Student Union business of some kind. She scowled at me and observed isn't your 'air 'orrible! with her wonky gob, dropping the aitches like a younger, vaguely Turkish Irene Handl.

Charmed, I'm sure, I didn't bother replying as I began to weep bitter internal tears of self-loathing.

Now she stood on the canteen table bellowing like a lonely mountain goat, and the words resolved into something about a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. My curiosity outstripped my scepticism as I recognised the name of one of those who was to read - Billy Childish. I didn't know much about him, beyond whatever it was that Steve had told me, but apparently he was a local name of some distinction. I now realised that I had read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper a year or so earlier. I'd never heard their music, but it seemed like it might be interesting to watch some bloke who had been in Sounds reading out his poems, and it was something to do.

The hour came and the lecture theatre was dark with just a table at the front. Billy Childish had short, severe hair and wore what appeared to be his grandad's demob suit. He didn't smile. He didn't look like a man who had ever found any good reason to smile. In the midst of flourishes of artistic flamboyance, he appeared streamlined, efficient, even ruthless. He rattled off his poetry as though reading out a statement in a police interview room. He demonstrated neither charisma nor stagecraft, a deficit which seemed curiously highly charismatic in its own way. He sounded bored, as though he was trying to get through the fucking things as quickly as possible. The performance was, in spite of itself, incredible.

Then there was Bill Lewis, loud, theatrical, and intense. It was poetry performed more as I had anticipated it would be, and yet it was impossible to keep from being swept along by the force of his words and their delivery. He had a presence with which one could not argue.

Traci later made an announcement to the effect that she was selling various books of Billy Childish poetry. I had a hunch that I would regret it if I didn't go and see what she had, and so I did. I ended up buying the lot - Poems from the Barrier Block, Prity Thing, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and five or six others. Poems from the Barrier Block was a proper square bound collection, but the others were slimmer volumes of cranky dyslexic verse - if you could really call it verse - all hammered out on a broken typewriter. There were few concessions to grammar or spelling, but for want of a better qualifier, you could tell it was the real thing, the genuine article:

t.v. poetry scotch n piss

the t.v. said - 'we wanna make a film'
they said 'you read with this group of poets'
so i said 'yeah'
n they get us to do some readings
n this producer said to me -
'yeah great stuff - this is your program - you make it - we just film it' n i said 'yeah'

the contract said -
they give us a couple of qwid
for the filming then they could
use the film anytime they liked
with no payment
they said time place n the way to dress
this was ment to be a documentary about the real stuff

well a thew qwids a thew qwid so i said 'yeah' n signed
i got a cigar of one t.v. bloke n a double scotch of another
i went to the bog

i couldnt find the gents so i went to the ladys
i put me scotch down n had a piss
most of it got in the bowl
but some spatered in me scotch

it stank of piss but i drank it anyway

Reproduced without permission and probably (c) Billy Childish June 1982.

The oldest of the books I had bought was called The Man with Wheels, dating from 1980 and revealing Billy's formative interest in Kurt Schwitters, which made one hell of a lot of sense to me. I could see the progression. His poems were made of the dirt and the rubbish. They were unvarnished - raw and invigorating. Poetry had been men in silk cravats scoffing vol-au-vents and spicing overly elaborate love poems to unremarkable girls with a naughty word here and there, not so much to let us know that they were themselves from the mean streets, but that they knew at least one chap who was, and he was a really splendid fellow with his working class accent and leather jacket. Whatever Billy Childish was doing, it bore no relation to such distractions. It was not something in which he dabbled for the sake of something to do. It seemed like he was writing in an effort to keep himself from braining someone.

Some of the books were signed for Traci, with love - Billy, or addressing her more intimately as Dolli. The two of them had been romantically involved for a while, and I guess that this was around the time they began to drift apart; and so she sold me his old stuff, the books he'd had printed and had dedicated to her.

Over the next couple of years I became acclimatised to Kent, it being the county in which my adult personality was formed, adult in this case quantifying age rather than development. Finishing at Maidstone, I moved to nearby Chatham because half the people I knew seemed to live there by that point, and the town had some great bands. In fact the town had a scene in the sense by which Liverpool and Manchester have on occasion been described as having scenes. There were pubs which put on gigs, bands which played live and even put out records, fanzines, poets, artists, and people generally doing their own thing regardless of whether anyone else liked it.

Alun Jones of the Dentists said that Chatham, or specifically the larger Medway conurbation of which Chatham was part, was in some respects like a northern town transplanted to the south of England. At the time I rolled my eyes a little, having come to resent the popular cliché of the north of England as some sort of cultural Mecca inhabited by a friendlier, more down-to-earth, somehow more valuable people. I've never found people in the north of England significantly friendlier than those in the south, nor more culturally vital, and as for down-to-earth...

What would I need with your fancy book learning and your so-called toilet paper and indoor lavatories? I'm down-to-earth, me.

Nevertheless, Alun was right. Medway was a reasonably tightly knit community with its own distinct identity founded upon a major naval dockyard established in the 1500s and significantly expanded during the industrial revolution, around the same time as all those sprawling northern towns founded upon coal, iron, weaving and Hovis advertsing. Even in the 1980s Medway felt like the setting of Ada's Apron or some other typically harrowing television drama in which pramfaced chain-smoking schoolgirls made veiled references to men's cocks and disapproving matriarchs would address each other as chuck from across the washing line. It was the rain-soaked rooftops of utilitarian housing, row after row after cramped bricky row of hardened smokers coughing up their lungs in time to Herman's Hermits. You get the picture.

Within weeks of my settling in to the septic tank I had rented in Glencoe Road, I discovered Gruts café, a small establishment just before the railway bridge on Chatham High Street. A couple of summers earlier, my friends and I had discovered Ivor Cutler and had become so quickly and dramatically obsessed with his haunting monologues that by the time school came back around in September we were having trouble shaking off the soft Glaswegian lilt we'd developed during the holidays.

I walked past the café a couple of times, deeply impressed that there could be an eaterie named after one of my favourite Ivor Cutler pieces. Eventually I summoned the courage to go in, probably having at last spotted someone I vaguely knew sat on the other side of the glass. Being unemployed and without access to a television by which I could watch children's programmes and other daytime broadcasting at the taxpayer's expense, I became a regular customer at Gruts; and given the pitiful state of both my cooking and the cupboard which served as my pantry, the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches prepared and served by Gerald and Caroline - mine hosts - were probably what kept me alive long enough to see the nineties.

I had mastered the art of sitting around in pubs a few years earlier, and had reached the stage at which one realises that it can sometimes be fun to walk in a straight line or to wake in the morning without a splitting headache; and so I quickly adapted to the Chatham equivalent of café society because it was cheaper than the pub and better than sitting at home. Of the regulars I already knew there was the aforementioned Alun of the Dentists and Prez of the Martini Slutz, one of the most entertaining bands I've ever seen live. Tim Webster of the Sputniks and later Johnny Gash ran his own musical instrument repair business out of a workshop over the road, and would wander across for lunch with his apprentice, Tim O'Leary - lunch being one of Gerald's guitar maker's fancies, which Tim O'Leary recalls as being possibly the best egg mayo baguettes I've ever had.

Bill Lewis has written of Gruts as having been known as the poets' café. I don't remember this at all, although maybe that's because I was never a poet. The description is probably justified by the regular presence of himself and Billy Childish, and even Sexton Ming on a couple of occasions. I got to know Bill Lewis fairly well as it turned out that we were almost neighbours and had mutual interests. Any idea I've ever ripped off from an American underground comic artist can most likely be traced back to the huge stack of comics by Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson and others that Bill sold me. Bill would drop around for tea and tell me about Sandinistas and his time in Nicaragua, tales from a world I was yet to discover. I tried to paint his portrait, but my efforts were so awful that I threw the thing away. Like Billy Childish, he seemed in some ways a man out of time, someone who always seemed like he should have known Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce; but it was only that he contrasted so dramatically with the feckless apathy of our respective generations.

I had never been introduced to Billy Childish and was slightly in awe of him. He was an imposing presence before which I was sore afraid, suspecting that whatever came out of my mouth would probably be dog shit.

Excuse me, Mr. Billy, I think your poems are really ace!

Happily the fears of my inner teenage girl fell by the wayside as Billy spent so much time in Gruts that my self-consciously marinading in silent awe whilst attempting to effect nonchalance in the presence of relative greatness became impractical, and obviously ridiculous. Aside from anything, it turned out that he was, if not exactly a nice guy by conventionally sappy terms, thoughtful, ruthlessly honest, and very, very funny. He was also pretty good at chess, a game I'd only recently been taught by Tim Webster and Prez one afternoon as we sat in the café slurping tea and smoking. The game became something of an obsession, and I took to playing every day, but unfortunately everyone else was better than me. I played Billy, and the match was over in about four minutes. He wiped me off the board. He'd spent most of that time staring out of the window or talking to Gerald. His matches against Alun, Prez or Tim Webster lasted longer, and were more enjoyable for the spectator. I seem to recall that he usually won, although I could be mistaken.

An exchange student from Germany named Andreas became a regular for a couple of weeks. He and Billy would talk about Hamburg, and he too was drawn into the never ending chess tournament. After one particularly long, drawn-out game he beat Tim Webster and Billy bought everyone a round of tea in celebration.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'It's not like this is the first time anyone has beaten Tim.'

'I know.' Billy sported the faintly disturbing smile of Harry H. Corbett. 'But this is the first time he's had an international thrashing.'

Gruts became much more than just a place to hang out with friends and talk crap. It became our place, almost a livelihood. Poets and writers sold their work from a small bookcase next to the counter, and Billy's own Hangman Records had taken to releasing an album more or less every month - beautifully pressed brand new long playing vinyl records of himself, Sexton Ming, the Pop Rivets, and others, and these were joined by releases from the Dentists' Tambourine label. Even the subject matter was locally sourced in Wally the 2nd Hand Salesman - one of the noisier compositions on Sexton Ming's Which Dead Donkey Daddy? album - being named for Wally, the proprietor of a junk shop just on the other side of the bridge. Billy had gone in there to give the man himself a copy of the record, so he told us. Wally had mumbled some token of potential gratitude and tossed the album into an open trunk full of rusting nuts, bolts, spanners and the like. He didn't really seem like a big record collector.

'Well, that's nicely filed away for future reference,' Billy observed, although I'm not sure if that was what he said to Wally or simply part of his account as told to the rest of us.

The albums were a fiver each, which meant that Gruts actually served as a better record shop than Our Price a few hundred yards along the road, not that Our Price was really up to much in the first place.

At one stage, I hung a load of my own pseudo-Futurist paintings on the walls of the café, following on from previous exhibitions by Billy and others. Mine weren't for sale, but the main point was that they were seen, and this even drew interest from the local newspaper, the Chatham Standard, who sent Judith Mullarkey along to do a short feature on me. The first entry in my comments book came from Billy:

I've seen this man's work before, and I said, and say it again - to the funny farm with him!

Sometimes we would watch the local crazy woman as she passed by outside, shouting mysterious accusations at the river. She too seemed to appreciate the art, and once dutifully came in to hand Gerald a drawing she'd produced of crabs at large on Easter Egg Island, according to the caption. Her technique wasn't great, but you had to admire the spirit in which it was done.

For a while life seemed to revolve around Gruts to the point that my friend Carl phoned the café on a couple of occasions, knowing I would be there, sat on my arse and weighing up my employment options. As I had no telephone, it was a better option than calling directly at my bedsit in the hope of my being at home.

It felt like being part of a family, and at the same time, because of all the stuff that was going on in and around Medway, it felt like we were part of history even at the time. It felt as though one day we would all be looking back and recalling where we were when we first heard Billy's calypso cover of Anarchy in the UK.

We were in Gruts, obviously.

He'd just bought in a freshly minted stack of the Blackhands album, and Gerald had stuck it on the record player so we could all have a listen. Some people remember seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and some of us remember Gruts.

Naturally it didn't last, there being a limit to how much tea anyone could reasonably be expected to drink in a single afternoon, and although the place was nearly always full, or at least rarely ever empty, whatever Gerald and Caroline were making out of it wasn't enough. They closed, and it became the Bridge Roll, a well intentioned but similarly doomed tea room style café with laminated Gingham tablecloths run by a couple of middle-aged women, whose enthusiasm reminded me of my grandmother once harbouring an ambition of being known as good for a cup of tea and a bun amongst long distance truck drivers. The Bridge Roll wasn't terrible, but the new decor had the feel of something aspiring to the custom of a better class of diner, or at least better than we were.

Like all good things, it was over.

My Postcard from Harvey

In September, 1987 I moved from a house I'd shared with other art students in the village of Otham, near Maidstone, Kent to a bedsit in Glencoe Road, Chatham. By coincidence it turned out that I had moved to within a hundred yards of the home of Bill Lewis, renowned local poet, writer, painter and associate of Billy Childish. I didn't know Bill, but I recognised him from readings, and we knew some of the same people; so once the opportunity arose - in Gruts, café on the High street at which we had both become regulars - I introduced myself.

For a short while we were each semi-regular visitors at the other's house, drinking tea, talking about art, religion, the supernatural, and whatever other common preoccupations we shared at the time; and somehow this led to Bill selling me a big stack of American underground and ground-level comics from the late seventies and early eighties, the work of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Bill Griffiths, Skip Williamson, and a host of others with whom I was less familiar. He sold me these comics as a job lot, and although there were a few titles I found initially mystifying, the price was good, so it would have seemed churlish to pick and choose. Within the pile were two issues of American Splendor which stood out due to being magazine sized, autobiographical, and written by someone of whom I'd never heard - Harvey Pekar - although one issue featured art by Crumb and was thus of obvious interest.

Because American Splendor seemed less conspicuously humourous from a cursory glance, and was concerned with the mundane daily existence of some guy from Cleveland, it took me a while to get around to reading it as I worked my way through Bill's stack of comics, but when I did, it had a profound effect upon me. I was poor, single, living in a strange town, moderately fearful regarding an uncertain future, and had just started working at a job I was not sure I really liked too much; and so Harvey's Awaking to the Terror of a New Day in American Splendor issue three really struck a chord. The story is nine pages of introspective musings upon one man's struggle to make it through a single day of which it has become tough to find the positive aspects. It's about the point at which you realising you're not so much living as merely surviving, and it somehow seemed that a middle aged Jewish guy from America had said more to me about my own life than Morrissey or any other supposed voice of a generation. I became fixated on the comic, and quickly hunted down all the back issues I could find.

Harvey's autobiographical tales often appeared to have very little in the way of subject matter, but the art is in the telling; and somehow these stories just had to be comics, even if truthfully they were barely ever more than illustrated prose. As raw text, the emphasis would be all wrong, but with an artist underscoring each seemingly unremarkable scene of Harvey trudging on through his life, somehow the pace is exactly right. Harvey's stories often felt oddly profound in their zooming in on some seemingly inconsequential event as though it were of cosmic import. My favourite example remains Stetson Shoes, drawn by Gary Dumm and also from that third issue, an account of Harvey buying a pair of shoes from a second-hand store. It's sheer simplicity, the satisfaction communicated as our man finds that the shoes fit and are a good price, is a thing of beauty, despite how absurd that may well sound.

Harvey Pekar saw value in the most unlikely places, with no subject so trivial as to be undeserving of attention, and his rambling, doubtless indulgent strips probably need to be read to be truly appreciated. There is no angle to his writing. He offers no zen parables on the minutiae of modern life, and there is none of the ruined melodrama of Bukowski. He wrote about the pleasure of finding a cheap pair of well-made shoes when they were most needed simply because it was a small but significant moment that would be lost in almost any other narrative context; and his work endures because it's honest, and because most of us inhabit the same world.

On more than one occasion I've seen the Pekar name employed as a yardstick by which to beat at the supposed inherent tedium of narrative realism, but the argument has not thus far ever been much less than moronic. Endless retellings of Superman are the art form at its most elevated, so it is claimed, but to reflect on daily existence, to experience wonder at the purchase of a pair of shoes shows a lack of imagination; and so imagination is presumably easily identified because it wears a cape, flies in a spaceship, or delivers snappy Samuel L. Jackson style one-liners just like on the telly; as opposed to an ability to take pleasure in whatever is there in front of your eyes. It's the cretinous Doctor Who obsessive swearing he would rather gouge out his own eyeballs than sit through a Mike Leigh film, because real life is boring, yeah? It's the fundamentalist Christian stood before the Grand Canyon, entirely unable to appreciate it as it is, or to articulate any sense of wonder that doesn't invoke his or her belief system. It's the child who screams and refuses to eat any more green beans and yet still has room for a bright turquoise bubble-gum flavour ice cream cone. It's terminal adolescence offered as a statement, because it's either that or accept it as a failing. If a person is unable to engage with either a Harvey Pekar story, or at least a story of its type, then I feel genuinely sorry for them, and for their inability to deal with our world without first spooning on the sugar.

In 1991, I had the big idea of writing to Harvey Pekar and offering my services as a cartoonist. I sent him photocopies of my work, and crossed my fingers, prematurely excited at the thought of illustrating the prose of someone who had been such an inspiration. Of course, I knew it probably wouldn't happen, but when I received a handwritten postcard from Harvey himself it still felt like an occasion for celebration, regardless of the fact that he had effectively told me thanks but no thanks; specifically:

Dear Lawrence,

Right now I'm set as far as artists are concerned, because my next two projects are being entirely done by Frank Stack (a 200 page graphic album) and Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm (a 32 page comic). I appreciate your interest in my work however, and think the stuff you sent me, the writing as well as drawing, is good.

Sincerely - Harvey Pekar

Like so many of Harvey's stories, this one doesn't so much have either an end or a conclusion as a point at which it simply draws to a halt. I no longer produce comic strips, although I do write, and Harvey passed on at the age of seventy back in 2010. I still get a tremendous thrill when I read the postcard, and think of that guy in Cleveland, Ohio going through my stack of photocopied comic strips. It seems a small yet wonderful thing.