Seeing Double
To Elaine, I’ve always been David J.
Per Wikipedia, “David John Haskins, better known as David J, is a British alternative rock musician, producer and writer. He is the bassist for the gothic rock band Bauhaus and for Love and Rockets.”
I met Elaine maybe 25 years ago, during my very brief stint as a Future Leader.
I was already past 40 and had never supervised a single employee when a bigwig at my employer tapped me to attend a gathering of up-and-coming go-getters from all over the country. I would retire about 15 years later with that managerial record intact, having never developed any discernible leadership skills. To this day I think my sponsor just liked me and thought sending me to this conference center outside of Washington would boost my self-confidence.
It didn’t. I spent most of my time there feeling cowed by the accomplishments of my peers, most of whom were younger than I, and wondering why I’d been transported from my quiet office job writing and editing articles about physical therapists to sitting in breakout groups among fledgling department heads and CEOs. There, I was instructed to think outside the box, creatively problem-solve and come up with ways to inspire my team. The jargon-choked exercises struck me not only as irrelevant to my professional path, but as almost parodically lame.
One really nice thing did come from the event, though. During a mixer that first night I got to talking with this super-cool chick with the reddest hair imaginable.
Elaine was working for a library system in Ohio at the time. Unlike me, she was a bona fide Future Leader. Now in her 50s, she’s the director of marketing and communications for a law school.
My recollection has always been that we bonded over a discussion of Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness’s Independent People, which helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Given the facts that I’d been drinking at the time and that it seems preposterous to me now that we’d both read that particular novel, let alone bonded over it, I recently asked Elaine for verification.
She confirmed that we spoke “at length about Halldor.” I then asked her why she decided right then and there that I was David J — it’s what she calls me and what I answer to in texts and emails, and on those rare occasions when business brings her to Washington, D.C.
She texted back, “The DJ origin story is thus: I believe all it took was for you to be tall, thin, cool, high cheekbones and strawberry blond to make you fit neatly into my goth framework! Sometimes when I picture you, I actually picture David Haskins with sunglasses, so the lines between you two have blurred.”
The Englishman David Haskins is indeed wearing dark shades in a black-and-white photo from 2014 on his Wikipedia page. He’s 67 now, so his hair probably isn’t strawberry blond anymore. But then mine isn’t either at 66.
It’s gotten me thinking about doppelgangers.
Webster’s defines a doppelganger first as (a) a double (“She had seen his doppelganger”), (b) an alter ego or (c) a person who has the same name as another. The second Webster’s definition is “a ghostly counterpart of a living person.” David J is still alive, but given his goth provenance and the fact that he wrote the lyrics to Bauhaus’s first single, 1979’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” the idea of him as my ghostly counterpart is amusing and seems apt.
In the German language, per Wikipedia, doppelganger means “double-walker.” It is usually capitalized, with an umlaut over the “a.” It has long been one of my favorite words to say. I like it so much, in fact, that in my previous blog I once paired it with alliteration — another linguistic love — to create the headline “The Dynamic Doppelganger.” That piece was about Eric Ries the famous and fabulously successful tech entrepreneur — a guy who’s a generation my junior and would not have been out of place at any gathering of Future Leaders on his way to fame and fortune.
I haven’t been compared visually to many famous or even niche-notable people over the course of my life, but the few times it’s happened they’ve been musical artists with whom I arguably share a body type.
I have another friend who’s long held that I am David Bowie’s doppelganger, which of course pleases me because society’s consensus is that he was a person of androgynous beauty. I’ve tried telling her that if I even approach Bowie in the looks department, it’s only now, with the former Thin White Duke having been transformed into the Skeletal Dead Rocker. But she insists that she sees Bowie in me.
Then there was the time in 2008 when I was staying with my friend Ron and his family in Tokyo for a week. He’d sometimes sit in on jams at a bluegrass club in the Ginza district called Rocky Top. We went there one night, and a patron shouted in English that I looked just like Mick Jagger.
Huh?
I told Ron that I guessed all occidentals must look alike to the locals. But then, Japanese culture has this quality of being a funhouse mirror in which everything Western gets refracted in strange ways. I think the movie Lost in Translation got that right. I still have a Rocky Top coaster. Its tagline — “American Music Deep in Your Heart” — hopes to be memorable but just sounds odd. In such a country, it is within the realm of possibility, I’ll grant, that the leather-faced yet viscerally sexual rock god Mick Jagger — 15 years my senior — could be my doppelganger. (This make me wonder if I should have spent my 20s teaching ESL in Yokohama and hitting the bars at night.)
I asked Elaine about her purported doppelgangers.
“Oh gosh, I’ve gotten a ton of people (strangers and friends) telling me I looked like people though the years,” she wrote. “Tori Amos (a lot), Cate Blanchett, Shelley Duvall, Tilda Swinton. In the past year, because I am older with wacky hair and colorful clothes, Vivienne Westwood. And a couple of weeks ago in Whole Foods I could hear two Gen Z college girls buzzing behind me. They got up the nerve to tell me that I looked exactly like Ariel the Disney mermaid! So, yeah, people see red hair and it reminds them of someone.”
My friend Karen reminds me of the British actress Sally Hawkins, with her thin build, brown highlighted hair and welcoming smile. She gets that from other people, too, she tells me, along with comparisons to Diane Lane and Pam Dawber. Natalie Wood “a long time ago,” she adds. “Folks may mix up persona with appearance at times,” she told me. “I’ve been mostly amused when compared to these stars, but also flattered.”
My wife tells me that the only comparison she ever got was when someone told her she looked like Janis Ian at around the time the song “At Seventeen” was on the radio. The autobiographical hit was sung from the perspective of an ugly duckling who learned, at the titular age, the bitter truth “that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles.”
That doppelganger suggestion was not appreciated by a teenaged Lynn.
My friend Joe tells me that people often pair him with business investor and television personality Kevin O’Leary, aka “Mr. Wonderful” from the first season of Shark Tank. He doesn’t find this wonderful, because O’Leary is 70 and looks it. Joe is 67 and works out a lot, as a gym rat and Dragon Boat oarsman. To me, the only visual commonality is that both men are bald.
I emailed my brother Ken for details about a memorable doppelganger story I’d last heard in maybe the 1980s.
Although many details are hazy “due to beer consumption or more likely the fact that this was 47–48 years ago,” Ken responded, he and his two traveling companions, “in a fit of bravado,” pulled into a dive bar on the luckless side of Greenville, South Carolina, at the tail end of a trip to somewhere. They were headed back to Furman University, where they were undergraduates. It was the kind of establishment where the main window was covered by plywood because a customer had shot out the glass. The odds were high, a bartender informed the interlopers from academia, that it was just going to happen again. Thus, there was no point in restoring a view to the outside.
An inebriated guy at a neighboring stool was overheard slurringly telling his dog, sprawled next to him on the floor, that the establishment’s weathered barmaid — who, Ken wrote, “seemed to double as the bouncer” — looked “just like Cher.”
The gender was right and her hair was straight and black, Ken and his buddies agreed, but any likeness to the singer-actress ended there. The bar’s Cher was “thicker by far,” Ken wrote, and missing a number of teeth. Ken and his friends might have shared a laugh or at least exchanged grins at the improbable comparison as they sipped their beers, but they thought the better of it. “We decided to move on before someone got the idea that we had looked at them funny,” he wrote.
This got me to thinking how, per the old jingles, if weekends were made for Michelob and Schaefer is “the one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” alcohol is tailor-made for doppelgangers.
“Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time?” Mickey Gilley once sang. By the same token, guys lose their beer guts, hard edges melt away and wrinkles vanish under dim lights with neon accents.
So, maybe my alleged resemblance to Mick Jagger wasn’t so much cultural misapprehension as a case of a few too many Asahis, Kirins or Sapporos.
David Bowie? That particular friend of mine writes great fiction. She has a tendency, I think, toward the fanciful.
I know very little about David J. I’ve never sought out photos of what he’s looked like at various ages. That’s purposeful. I like looking at that Wikipedia photo in which he radiates, well into middle age, a sangfroid I’ve never had.
I like knowing that someone still deems me his doppelganger.
