First in Death
John Haysmith is not what I expected. The tall and lean man enjoying a coffee in a diner booth in front of me and not far from his home in suburban Austin is a contradiction. He's a far cry from the overweight, hunched man sitting in his darkened basement, wiping Cheeto dust off his fingers and onto his pizza grease-stained shirt that I assumed he was. It's his hobby that instantly filled in the blanks of who I assumed he would be, but like most things on the internet, the truth is always different.
Haysmith belongs to a small and unaffiliated group of people from all over the world who partake in a daily contest. It's a dark and almost morbid activity, but the results are everlasting until the internet or Wikipedia ends.
Each day, Haysmith listens intently to the news. He prowls pop culture sites and eagerly waits for a few distinct words to show up as an alert on his iPhone.
"Passed away"
"Has died."
"Will be remembered"
Once he sees these, he gets to work. "Is" becomes "was." "Dids" flood out of his computer. "Used tos" follow. When he's done, and if he's quick enough, his name is immortalized in Wikipedia's canon. John Haysmith is part of a small contingent of people who eagerly await the death of celebrities, athletes, authors, politicians, and notorious criminals so that they can change the celebrity's biographies in Wikipedia to the past tense. Once he's done, his name is plastered on the change log for that celebrity's page with a timestamp. And if he's been quick enough, his name will be next to a timestamp that's closest to that famous person's time of death.
"Michael Jackson is my white whale, so to speak," says Haysmith, shaking his head. I updated Farrah Fawcett's page and basically shut down for the day, assuming no one else of import would die on the same day. Then my phone blew up with news of Jackson's death about three hours later, but I was too far away from my computer to make any changes."
He may have missed out on updated Michael Jackson's page a few minutes after news of the King of Pop's passing hit the news outlets, but he is proud of those he can lay claim to.
"James Gandolfini, Carrie Fisher, Tom Wolfe, Charles Manson," Haysmith ticks off his fingers, and a prideful smile appears on his face. "Sometimes we get false flags, you know, shitty reporting. I spent a good five minutes updating George H. W. Bush's page before it was confirmed that he was, in fact, not dead. [It] really bummed me out."
Haysmith's chief rival is a homemaker named Penelope Pemberton, who lives in the village of Leamington Spa in the UK. Just mentioning her name causes Haysmith to shake his head.
"She's a cheat. An absolute fucking cheat. She F.N.R.s, and that's taking the art out of it."
I press him for the meaning of "F.N.R.," and he explains how Pemberton copies the dead celebrity's page into Microsoft Word and does a "find and replace" to change all the necessary words to past tense. She then re-uploads the text into Wikipedia. It's quick but not without errors. In the small community of self-styled "Death Dockers," using tools outside of Wikipedia's editing software is considered a no-no.
"She got Bowie because of F.N.R., and I tell you what, his page was riddled with mistakes. Just because he no longer does something, doesn't mean his music doesn't continue to do something in the present tense."
Editor's note: Penelope Pemberton refused to comment on this story.
After Haysmith's coffee is finished and the check is paid, he stands up and shakes my hand to leave. In his pants pocket, his phone vibrates quickly. Excitedly, he pulls it out, expecting to see the horrible news of someone's death.
"It's just the wife asking when I'm coming home." He puts the phone away and looks sullen. "It's too bad. I hear Kirk Douglas could go at any minute."
