I met David Lynch. He looked a lot like my dad, who had just died.

David Lynch was a real weirdo that I got to meet once. He was always a very strange figure for me, in part because of his remarkable resemblance to my father in certain images. In the 1990’s I recall once walking into the convenience store near the University of Oregon campus where I worked a graveyard shift, to see that feature about Lost Highway, and thinking “Why is my dad on the cover of the Rolling Stone?”

My dad was a bold marauder and a hell of a singer himself, so there is probably an alternate universe where that discontinuity makes sense for completely different reasons. And so in that moment, I was stuck like a skipping record trying to make sense of it, snapping back and forth between realities.

Lynch with Reznor on the cover of Rolling Stone

I had a bizarre conversation about it that night with one of the creepiest night shift customers you could ever ask for, who would come in and spin hair raising yarns about his secret kingdom and the ‘dead things’ that lived there. There’s more to his story, but that’s a whole different can of worms. Suffice to say that he was more interesting than mopping floors and had a wicked sense of humor, so I would often entertain his insanity. But that night he wouldn’t stop pointing out the cover and telling me he thought it reminded him of someone.

Because I look like my dad I knew exactly what he meant; in fact my then-girlfriend had an inked sketch in her book when we met that I originally had thought was evidence of her having a crush on me, but really it was her rendition of the famous director. I loved his movies, but I had not up to that point ever seen a photo of him, and so I first learned of the resemblance from her artwork. When my creepshow customer brought it up, that felt like a worm on a hook I didn’t want to swallow, so I played dumb. Which of course meant he just kept bringing it up, that night and for weeks. So at that time when my actual father was playing renegade and nobody knew where to find him, I had to look at his face on that cover all that month.

It gave me a lot of time to think about the mystery of identity in a world where your face is who you are.

Probably someone important

A decade later I got a chance to meet Lynch in person. It was 2005. My dad had passed a few years earlier in October 2001, less than a month after 9/11. That time was a timult for me for more reasons than just those, but the gravity of the time left a deep scar in my psyche that made me even weirder and more tangled than I was before. (I’m completely normal now.)

When I met Lynch, those scars still itched, and it was incredibly uncanny to see the man in person. I was in school pursuing film studies, and was helping out with a stop on a speaking tour for Lynch’s transcendental meditation foundation. I was of course a fan of his films, but despite my knowledge of the resemblance I knew next to nothing about his real life persona. I had only a few images over the years to prepare me, but I knew I was in for a jolt.

It was a doozy. The physical resemblance to my dad was that much more apparent in the flesh, and I was brought to face the visage of this persistent interloper in my reality, creator of worlds that I loved, walking around wearing my dead father’s face.

I’m the tall one in the back trying to act normal while navigating a warped reality.

The next shock was that nothing else about him was the same. Nothing. You’d think that I might have gone digging to learn this in advance, but this was in the era before time travel; YouTube had been created only a few months prior, and nothing was really there yet. Nobody really had that research reflex built in as a habit. So here I am, shaking hands with a small man who was a titan in the field that I wanted to enter, but totally shellshocked as to how to mitigate my chaotic interior hearing a stranger’s voice coming out of this familiar face. My dad was much taller and had a much deeper voice… and completely different physical and vocal mannerisms.

And yet their facial expressions were mockingly identical. It was as if some smaller weirdo with a squawky voicebox was borrowing his shell to take out for a skinwalk. It begat this thankfully rare moment of unfounded reality that sticks with me intensely, and that I often revisit in dreams.

And of course… all of that feels perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the great director. In later years, when I was making money on the side by screenwriting, I considered pitching Lynch a concept based on these bizarro experiences. I never did reach out to David, but perhaps I should have. I had been too flummoxed and probably too scared to use that one opportunity to make a connection to a man who held my dream job and had invaded my dreams. And it stayed that way.

Now I am free to imagine that scene as he might have directed it, without the encumbrance of more likely realities. If there’s something that comes after this place, I like to believe they might both get a kick out of it.

David Lynch and Denny Yarbrough