Not because I am Satan, but because I am one of countless David Kirbys out there. In the Book of Mark, Jesus draws a host of devils out of “a man with an unclean spirit,” though the David Kirbys I know seem to be good fellows all. I hasten to add that I know only about eighty other DKs and only on Facebook. Yet we’re a chummy group, and we take pleasure in each other’s company.
There may be a sort of mirroring at work here. Experts tell us we are hard-wired since prehistory to mistrust the Other: who are those people who just stepped out of the forest, and why are they dressed like that instead of like us, and why do their totems suggest that they worship the jaguar instead of the tapir, as we do? To the contrary, the David Kirbys of my acquaintance seem disposed to regard anyone with the good sense to have the same name as theirs the way two toddlers will stop abruptly on a playground and gaze at each other in quiet approval, happy just to be in the presence of someone who is clearly a member of the same club.
Like you, for most of my life I thought I was the only incarnation of myself. I got wised up a few years ago during a period when I began to write about poetry collections for The New York Times Book Review and occasionally either failed to get a check or got one I didn’t deserve. As it turned out, the mixups were due to the fact that another David Kirby was writing science pieces for the Times then, and the computer responsible for issuing checks couldn’t tell us apart.
My wakeup call was literally that. One day the phone rang, and at the other end was an agent offering to book me on what he promised would be a lucrative speaking tour. In those days I had just published the fourth collection of my own poetry; what I didn’t know was that the other David had just published a book about autism, a topic which was just starting to get attention in the media.
“How’s your book doing?” asked the agent. “Okay, I guess,” I said. I think I’d sold forty or so copies in the first few months of that year, which, unless you were Allen Ginsberg, would have been a lot for a poetry collection. “Well, look,” said the agent. “There’s a group in Connecticut that wants me to book you. What do you usually get for a talk and a Q & A?” An accurate answer would have been “a few hundred bucks,” but my caller was promising me riches beyond my wildest dreams, so I said “Uh, five thousand?” There was a long silence. Then the voice at the other end of the phone said, “Our minimum is ten thousand dollars.”
Not long after, I got an email from an editor who said she’d seen some pieces of mine in the Times that she liked and asked me if I’d be interested in writing an article for her journal on erectile dysfunction. I wrote and thanked her for her praise but said she had the wrong DK and that I was Poetry Dave, though if she wanted to contact Erectile Dysfunction Dave, well, here’s his email address. Apparently she forwarded our entire exchange to him, because a day later I got an email that said: “Hey, Poetry Dave! Thanks for the lead. I’ll follow up on it, and next time you’re in Brooklyn, let’s get coffee.” He signed it, “All the best, Erectile Dysfunction Dave.”
My grad-school roommate once said he thought at best there were ten people on earth and the others were just copies. He might be right. Every squirrel I see out my office window is indistinguishable from the others, so why, on some level, should this not be true for humans? True, you have to adjust for height, weight, hue, and gender: there are no female David Kirbys, to my knowledge, though a Pat or Chris Kirby could go either way. But after that, we’re pretty much alike, possibly because we prefer it that way. As Eric Hoffer said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”
Still, it was unnerving to go on Facebook to see if there might be another person with my name and within seconds found myself staring at a photograph of a David Kirby who is a biologist and is thirty years younger than I am and has the dark hair and beard that I don’t have and lives thousands of miles from me in the Pacific Northwest.
I didn’t add to my Facebook friends list at first—I didn’t know I was supposed to—but soon I was getting friend requests from others, including pretty underdressed girls with names that seemed calculated to sound hot (“Savannah Raven”). A military man who sent me a picture of himself in uniform and told me I was “an epitome of beauty” and didn’t reply when I told him there was no such thing as “an” epitome. I figured I’d get a better quality of friend if I did the asking myself, and soon I was well on my way to the 5,000 maximum friends that Facebook allows.
Including the other David Kirbys. I only asked people named “David Kirby” or “Dave Kirby” for their friendship: no “David Kerby” was wooed, no “David Hilton-Kirby.” A surprising number indicated that they’d only be Facebook friends with someone they already knew, which strikes me as a bit sniffy, though perhaps that just meant they didn’t want to be bothered by the Savannah Ravens and sexy soldiers of this fallen world. In the end, I unearthed close to a hundred new Davids and befriended eighty-plus of them.
That’s not a lot, but it could be the tip of a considerable iceberg. I’m skeptical of extrapolation: someone once pointed out that in 1970, there were seventy-three licensed Elvis impersonators, and twenty years later, there were three thousand eight hundred and forty, so if you extrapolated those numbers out a thousand years or so, that would mean that in the year 3000, seven out of ten human beings on the planet will be Elvis impersonators.
Fun! How could you be ever sad again if well over half the people you see standing at an ATM or coming out of a 7-11 with a Cherry Limeade Slurpee had bushy sideburns and jet-black hair that looks as though it’s been slathered with melted yak butter and are wearing a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit with a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate? Still, if I managed to locate a hundred or so other David Kirbys, and these from the mere fraction of humanity that has signed up for Facebook, then surely there are a hundred thousand more out there, not to mention the new DKs being dragged squalling and kicking into life every day.
Considering that my 23andMe report says my ancestry is 81.7% British and Irish, I wasn’t surprised to find that most of the David Kirbys I turned up on Facebook were from those countries and the US, Canada, and Australia. Three were Black, which I am not. None, as far as I can tell, are poets, though maybe they simply weren’t eager to publicize that fact. Several all but threw themselves into my arms, and we swore inviolable vows to meet once the coronavirus scare has gone away.
Once a year or so, I do clean up my friends list, cheerfully decapitating those who don’t post on their own pages or who signal that they’re not best pleased with the content on mine. These passive-aggressive types are stalkers of sorts; it’s like running into someone you don’t know that well who says they watch you through your window at night and that you should really get rid of those blue pajamas because they make you look fat. Off with their heads! That’ll never happen with the David Kirbys, though. I’m clinging to these guys for life. To decapitate one of them would be to bare my own neck to the guillotine. By the way, one of the first DKs I befriended turned out to be Erectile Dysfunction Dave. Before Facebook, we’d just email each other every couple of years when our checks got mixed up. Now we tease each other almost every day.
The word “doppelgänger” may have popped into your mind at this point, but these fellows hardly qualify, since a doppelgänger is a look-alike, which these Davids aren’t. Too, your garden-variety doppelgänger is a harbinger of bad luck, which doesn’t apply here, at least not yet. No, each of my DKs is more like an alter ego, which is like a fraternal twin. Call each an Alter Ego Lite, if you will, since I’ll never meet the majority of them in person.
I have asked people I know if they’ve had an experience similar to mine and gotten predictable results. Lysser Oberkreser affirmed that, to her knowledge, there are no other Lysser Oberkresers, whereas Rick Johnson said, “just try to imagine how many Rick Johnsons there are in the world.” Both he and I have lived in Tallahassee for years, and “at one time there were five Richard E. Johnsons in the Tallahassee phone book,” said Rick. (He added that “bill collectors don't want hear that you are not that guy who defaulted on a Mercedes in Kansas.”) Apparently “David Kirby” has a just-right quality that situates it somewhere between “Lyssa Oberkreser” and “Rick Johnson,” attracting neither too little attention nor too much.
It’s a certainly a far cry from having a celebrity name. A quick internet check will tell you that there’s another Taylor Swift (who happens to be a man), a second Sinead O'Connor. There’s a Donald Trump who’s the CEO of a cancer institute in Virginia. Can you imagine making a dinner reservation or ordering a sweater from J. Crew and bracing yourself as you say, “Trump, Donald Trump”? There’s an essay in the Spring 1990 edition of The Threepenny Review by a man who tells what it’s been like to go through life with the same name as the scarfaced child killer with the steely Mandarin fingernails who stars in the Nightmare on Elm Street movie and its sequels. When a friend says it would be weird if a lunatic tracked him down and killed him because he thought he was “the real Freddy Krueger,” the author wails, “But I am the real Freddy Krueger!”
That grad-school roommate I mentioned earlier was an eighteenth-century scholar, and his dissertation was on Mary Toft, a field worker who claimed to have given birth to a litter of rabbits; her case was examined by the Royal Society and satirized in the caricatures of Hogarth. The public’s embrace of l’Affaire Toft may have given my roomie a glimpse of the times we live in today, when 40% of us embrace an ex-president who thinks climate change is a hoax and a virus can be cured by injecting bleach.
But what if my roommate were right? What if there were only a few human prototypes on earth and the rest were copies? What if we found out that, as a race, we were more alike than different? In an increasingly atomized world in which our leaders seek to drive us apart rather than unite us, that might not be the worst thing.
