MANSFIELD — On a cold night in July 2016, David Kirst awoke to the feeling that he was leaving his body.
He was laying in a hospital bed in Galion after being diagnosed with a very rare disease. His fiancée slept a few feet away in a cot.
“Something was pulling on me … like a grandmother pulling on your arm when you know you did something wrong,” Kirst recalled. “All I heard was a noise so loud it was like a million trains and chainsaws going off at one time, but yet it was so peaceful and calming to me it was as if I was talking to my mother in her bosom.”
Kirst pauses a moment to collect himself, a tear rolling down his bearded face. He remembers very clearly the feeling of seeing himself laying in a hospital bed, from somewhere above. He tried reaching for himself, but something kept pulling him away.
“I know it was God,” Kirst said, his voice breaking. “Because He showed me parts of my past that never made sense to me.”
David Kirst was born in 1976 at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, a penitentiary in Marysville, Ohio. He was taken from his biological mother and adopted into a family with 25 other children from all parts of the world, raised in the Mansfield area.
Kirst attended Lexington Schools until age 18, but never graduated. From there he moved to Des Moines, Iowa until ultimately moving back to Mansfield in 1999. He worked as a waiter at Wooden Pony Brewing Company – these days, the Wooden Pony is known as City Grille.
After an accident rendered Kirst’s car useless, he resigned himself to walking back and forth from work to his residence on West Fourth, just past the old E&B Market. It was at least a half mile walk, no matter the weather. When the seasons changed to winter, Kirst would walk down Park Avenue and cut through the Holiday Inn for a moment of warmth.
“One time I was walking towards the back door and they had a piano off to the side, in the corner,” Kirst recalled. “I had a song in my head and as I was singing the song I walked past the piano and hit a note, and by chance it was the same note I was singing.”
That song was the 1989 hit “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx. Striking that note on the piano sparked a curiosity in Kirst, and he challenged himself to learn how to play the song.
“Every day as I went to and from work, I would stop in the Holiday Inn and play a little bit,” Kirst said. “When you’re first teaching yourself the piano, let’s face it, you’re going to suck. So I’d get maybe five or six minutes into a session and the security guard would kick me out.”
Six months went by, with Kirst teaching himself to play piano in short five-minute sessions during his walk to and from work every day. He never learned to read music, simply played by ear and applied himself during his short sessions.
One Saturday night, Kirst got about 10 minutes into his piano sessions and realized he hadn’t been kicked out yet.
“As I was playing I let loose and let myself get lost in the music,” Kirst said. “When I got done playing the song I stopped and grabbed my backpack to leave, and as I stood up a whole bunch of people started clapping and it scared the living dickens out of me.”
As it turns out, Kirst’s piano playing interrupted an event attended by the late George Voinovich, then governor of Ohio, and then-Mansfield mayor Lydia Reid. The attendees were so impressed by Kirst’s playing, they paused their event and filtered into the lobby of the Holiday Inn to hear him play.
Word spread of Kirst’s impromptu performance. A few days and a number of news stories about him later, Kirst received a visitor. A production studio had heard about his accidental concert through the local media, and wanted Kirst to produce beats at his studio.
It was something Kirst had never considered. While living in Des Moines, Kirst had gained experience in audio recording with a live band, but studio work? That was uncharted territory.
“It was something I fell into, I started producing hip-hop and R&B beats for records under this company,” Kirst said. “Before it was over I was teaching him about his own equipment, and I became known as one of the best music producers in Mansfield, totally by accident.”
Kirst’s reputation led him to working with an aspiring rap artist in Mansfield to create a recording company called Secret Society Records from 2001 to 2003. He recorded four albums, including three hip-hop albums featuring other local artists and one 18-track R&B album called “Through My Eyes” that he recorded and produced himself. Meanwhile, the other artists Kirst worked with became what he called “hood famous,” only notorious among their family and friends.
“The whole point of this was to make it, so I thought, maybe I need to lead by example and not just talk the talk but walk the walk,” Kirst said. “I sold 20,000 copies out of the trunk of my car and stores here locally. I was thinking my other people would follow suit, but instead I think it intimidated them to where it was really hard to get them in the studio at that point.”
Kirst took a break from music for more than a decade after the closing of Secret Society Records. He moved down to Florida, and forgot about the producing reputation he once held in Mansfield. Then, he got a phone call.
In May 2015, Kirst received a phone call with a Los Angeles, California area code. The call was from Brian Nagel, a Westlake, Ohio native who had created a company now based in L.A. called Steel House Productions.
“They asked me if I’ve ever done cinematic recording before, because they’d heard about my audio recording from a gentleman I worked for when I did sound in the 1990s,” Kirst said.
Steel House Productions was preparing to film a movie in Ohio, partially in Crestline and partially in Cleveland and its surrounding areas. The movie was “ClownTown,” a horror film following the story of friends getting stranded in a seemingly deserted town and finding themselves stalked by a gang of violent psychopaths dressed as clowns.
“When I got out there, the cinematographer had twisted his knee, but when I commit to a project I’m all in,” Kirst said. “I went ahead and jumped in on dragging around his equipment and setting it up, really busting my butt to get the job done right. They liked my attitude and work ethic so much, they let the guy they hired for the Cleveland project go, and signed me on for the whole film.”
In this, Kirst displayed the philosophy by which he’d lived his whole life – if you work hard and apply yourself, you can accomplish anything. Even playing a private piano concert for Ohio’s top government officials. Even earning two official movie credits for “ClownTown” without any official training.
“I’m the type of person, when I see an opportunity, I shut the heck up and open my ears wide open,” Kirst said. “I listen to everything people say because you’d be surprised at what you can learn by listening.”
Kirst wrapped up work on “ClownTown” in June 2016. He celebrated the 4th of July holiday with his fiancée in Mansfield, and the following weekend received a call from a modeling agency asking if he would appear in a modeling shoot for a fire safety company magazine. Having previous modeling experience with an agency out of Akron, Kirst accepted.
Wanting to bulk up for the shoot, Kirst spent the days leading up to the shoot lifting steel weights with his brother, which he had never done before. The next day, his muscles were so sore he could barely lift his arms. He took a muscle relaxer the morning of his shoot, but couldn’t keep the pills down.
“I thought it was because I took the pills on an empty stomach,” Kirst said. “We’re driving to Marion for this modeling shoot, and when we got halfway into Galion I started feeling a really intense vibration in the tip of my toes and fingers. I started breathing really hard like I couldn’t catch my breath, and I started sweating. I thought I was dying.”
Unbeknownst to him at the time, Kirst was suffering from rhabdomyolysis – a rare infection that causes the breakdown of muscle tissue, releasing a damaging protein into the blood. The infection was brought on by his weight lifting in preparation for the modeling shoot.
Kirst instructed his fiancée to drive straight to the hospital in Galion, running every red light on their way there. He took two steps inside the hospital door, and collapsed.
Kirst felt a big jolt and awoke from his out-of-body experience at 3:37 a.m. – numbers that he very clearly remembers to this day. He had tears rolling down his face, and felt his body burning hot but he was not sweating. He’d had an epiphany.
“God told me that I needed to get my commercial driver’s license,” Kirst said. “He knew what my part in life was, my reason for being here. He knew I needed a job to sustain my bills, and give me a little money to save up and use to follow my dreams.”
A week later, Kirst left the hospital and drove straight to the BMV to pick up a free booklet on obtaining a commercial driver’s license, or CDL. He locked himself in a room and studied the booklet for two days straight. On the third day, he took the test for his CDL and passed with flying colors.
These days, Kirst works for Shelly Smith & Sons LTD: Auto Shippers in Mansfield. He is driving a 2016 Lincoln MKZ and living in a condo in Ontario, all at the age of 40. His hours at Shelly Smith & Sons allow him to work plenty of overtime and save enough money to pursue his true passion: the film industry.
“It’s all because God showed me exactly what to do, and because I listened to what He told me to do,” Kirst said. “I never in a million years thought I would be where I am now, it blows my mind.”
In the past year and a half, Kirst has been involved with six different films. Recently, he signed on for a new superhero television show called “The Blueprint Saints” scheduled to air this fall. And a few weeks ago, he was in Cleveland shooting a movie with Matthew McConaughey.
Acting was something Kirst had always loved, even through school. Hard work, life experience and a bit of divine intervention has given him the courage to pursue his dream.
“A dream of mine was always to be able to make it, and what I mean by that is, not to be famous,” Kirst said. “What I want to do is be financially secure where I don’t have to worry about not only my own bills, but be in a position where I can help other people who are in the same position that I was in.”
Kirst has big plans to do exactly that. He recently created an LLC named “419 Productions” with the purpose of creating both music and film right here in Mansfield. Kirst has interest from producers in Nashville, Tennessee and Los Angeles in his music, and has been in talks with Steel House Productions about using music for an upcoming film.
When Kirst does make it big, he plans on bringing all that success back to Mansfield in order to employ others interested in the entertainment industry. All of which he plans to do with the help of the Lord.
“I pray that the day comes where I can be in a position where I can really help people, because I have big plans,” Kirst said. “I really want to bring filming aspects here to Mansfield and put Mansfield on an international stage again, but back in a positive light.
“I’ll be damned if I go to my grave and not try my hardest to change that in other people’s views,” he said. “This is my hometown. This is where I’m from. I don’t take that lightly.”
