After Borges

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After Borges Dan O'Brien (bio) There is another me who wrote plays I have neither seen nor read. Once I received a rejection meant for him; the works in question, if I recall, were Frantic! and City Banker. Of course nobody likes to be confused with somebody else. Except once when I was an interloping neophyte at Bread Loaf in the '90s, lounging in an Adirondack chair in a meadow of freshly mown hay, and a slightly older woman asked me, Are you the Dan O'Brien? And I answered Yes without thinking because it felt nice; soon we cleared things up. She had been referring to the buffalo rancher with alopecia whose books I have since read. He's good. He's popular for some reason in France. We shared an agent for a New York minute but she wanted me to write like him, or because mine was a memoir she wished my life was more like his, maybe not with buffalos but bees. Have you considered beekeeping? she queried. Then there's the comedy writer with my name; the biracial American decathlete who struck gold in Atlanta; a young queer bearded poet known more formally as Daniel; a bearded West End D.O'B. treading the boards in Mamma Mia! (And these are just the Dan O'Briens I've heard of—Googling my name is an exercise in mortification; maybe that explains the beards?) I know personally a bearded TV actor who erroneously receives my royalties from time to time. He usually tells me. We meet for coffee. He lives on Sunset now. His wife's a playwright but for a long while, at least according to IMDB, this Dan O'Brien was married to my wife. In a play once he played me; it was a play I wrote and I played me too, two sides of me wrestling. Psychologically. We look similar, though he's a bit bigger. Which reminds me—don't ever tell anybody that they resemble anybody else. Just don't do it! Especially if you're tempted. I was giving a reading as a young man in Providence, bescarved and impassioned and depleted after, when a slightly older couple approached: Do you happen to know X in Iowa? Or was it East Anglia. I did not. Softly they shook their heads. You look so much like him—tatterdemalion-chic: the same thrift shop pea coat, same threadbare thrift shop wide wale corduroys, gaunt hips and severely belted waist, fair face and bold beard. You are [End Page 103] the spitting image of our old friend, they declared. Him before he forgot who he was. You are his avatar, the woman whispered. I thanked them and raced home to my OED (remember the OED?) and after perusing the definition I had no idea what they meant, or what it was they truly wanted. This was before the movie. At least X had a name and not the everyman appellation I've been saddled with. My parents did their best to name all six of their children almost anonymously. To protect us from teasing, they reasoned. From any humiliation that they were not personally administering themselves. So I felt I had to take it as my task to distinguish myself somehow. The one and only. Which is foolhardy and reminds me of that first Dan O'Brien, the playwright—I had meant to say this at the start: he went on a blind date once with a playwright who'd later become my friend, though I've lost touch with her, I don't know why honestly, maybe because she's more successful than me and writes TV crime procedurals now; or maybe things were always blurry? because looking back I wonder if she stoked the tiniest flickering interest in me when I was somebody else, somebody striving desperately to be whom he wasn't. Anyhow she told me this Dan O'Brien lost her interest when he mansplained to her, prizing open yet another steamed mussel, decanting a flowery Sauvignon Blanc: "Oh, I don't write anymore. Why should I try? Dan O'Brien has already said everything Dan O...