Reading Moby Dick got me Stabbed in the Face
A celebration of the power of books from a six-year-old's misadventure
Note: This is a true story, dialogue improvised in good faith.
I was six years old when I read Moby Dick.
Admittedly, mine was an abridged version for early teenagers from the school library. Raw Herman Melville, especially the bit in the middle that spontaneously turns into a play, would’ve easily bested me. Nevertheless, reading something for kids twice my age was a feat in which I took great pride. I wasted no time in poorly retelling the story to the two neighborhood kids with whom I wrestled in the mud on a near-daily basis.
“There’s this big white whale!” I tried to explain as we threw pinecones at each other in suburban Portland, Oregon. No face shots. Grappling was fine. “And this sea captain is so mad. He wants to kill the whale and goes on a ship. And they fight and he dies!”
The brothers I played with were an excellent outlet for the seething bloodlust within my tiny boy system. Mine was a well-mannered, only child, NPR-listening, deeply in debt, early career doctor mom and lawyer dad small starter household. I had plenty of toys, but real world weapons, especially guns, were conspiculously absent. Even hyper masculine action figures the likes of Superman were censored. My toy chest contrasted sharply with my two friends who were homeschooled with religious Texan parents and three sisters. BB guns, NERF guns, foam swords, G.I. Joes, bows with suction cup tipped arrows, and even laser tag gear made their homestead a Rated G armory.
Once, in a fit of pure pent up murderous inspiration, I chewed a piece of buttered toast into the shape of a pistol. Armed with toast gun, I harassed our old white cat Emily who hated me since infancy. Many a time she kept me from entering some hallway with a salty hiss, the sting from the scratch or two she managed to lay on me relived. Emily hated my dad as well, mom the only other living thing on the planet she loved—and loved dearly with sensual back arcs and deep purr. But oh, how the tables turned! The foul puss glared at me as I danced around her with renewed confidence, Pew! Pew! Pew!-ing with toast gun.
“Norris!” my horrified mother disarmed me easily and threw toast gun into the garbage.
I was going to eat that… I wanted to say.
Thankfully, the three of us little boys were proper barbarians when on the loose, the brothers’ saintly golden retriever Dusty often tagging along. Play with these two was always triumphant conquest themed, either over an imaginary common enemy or each other. Our addiction of fashioning sticks into dueling sabers was so severe that we were banned from playing with sticks altogether as per inter-family parent council ruling.
“You’ll put your eye out,” was the party line, so wrestling and pinecone wars were the new standard. Still, Moby Dick infected my brain slime in the obsessive way of six year olds. There’s some strange, ancient force behind why six year olds posses this neurotic compulsion to infinitely rewatch a single Disney princess movie or replay the same board game until all around them are driven insane.
“Please! For the love of God, let’s try checkers,” parents beg. “Anything but Candy Land again!”
My child-session was Moby Dick, and I was like the people of Close Encounters of the Third Kind building dirt mounds due to subliminal alien programming. I even dreamed of Moby Dick, particularly the final battle between man and whale. The child-session worsened when some adult told me Moby Dick was based off a true story. In that instant, the wider Earth and humanity was defined as a perpetual man-versus-whale struggle. I was being kept on the sidelines in suburbia Portland as part of some sick illuminati conspiracy.
The obsession was so absolute, no taboo was safe. My father kept a pocketknife safely in a drawer of his desk, and I—who had never stolen anything—pilfered it, fleeing into the hedge on our property that served as a pseudo-treehouse HQ. The depths of my derangement knew no bounds, for I broke yet another sacred rule. Yes, I had in my possession a stick, and this was no ordinary stick. Longer than my height and spry as a hickory switch, this was the eye destroyer that gives parents nightmares. I took my father’s stolen knife to this symbol of danger, sharpening an end into a harpoon worthy of Captain Ahab. I worked on the thing over the course of days, the calls to dinner sending me into a scurry of hiding evidence.
“You seen my pocketknife anywhere?” dad may have asked mom over dinner. “The dang thing isn’t where it normally is.” I ate my meatloaf in silence, sickened and thrilled at my first fully cognizant deception.
At last my harpoon was carved to my liking and ready for the big reveal. I met with my two comrades, harpoon in-hand.
“Let’s play whaler!” I proposed with braggadocio, harpoon held high.
“Whaler? What’s that?” one of the brothers asked.
“It’ll be just like in Moby Dick,” I said. They likely rolled their eyes, sick to death of my incoherent babbling about the book they’d never read. “One of us will be the whaler, and he’ll throw the harpoon at someone who will be the whale.” The brothers looked to one another.
“Ok… but who will want to be the whale?” one asked. “Won’t he just get hit with the stick?” This is when my eyes gleamed and chest puffed out.
“I will be the whale!” I announced with pride and pointed to my comrades’ swing structure. “That’s the ship. Take this and throw it at me, just like Captain Ahab.” Whatever misgivings the two little boys had vanished at the prospect of throwing such a magnificent weapon at someone, and the three of us raced to the swing structure. They climbed to the top, ready in position. My imagination fully activated, and, yes! We were upon a foul sea. I became the white whale, fully descending into character in a way that would warm a drama teacher’s heart. Low to the ground I swam, breaking the surface with a half-pirouette and full throated song.
“Moooo-waaaaaaah!” I howled, unaware that the classic whale sounds I knew were more humpback than the clicks of sperm whales like Moby Dick. My friend threw the harpoon and I twirled away, the stick landing ineffectually on the bark chips. I tossed it back up to him without breaking character.
“Pfffft!” I mimicked a whale’s blowhole, running about with exaggerated swimming motions. Again, the harpoon landed non threateningly and I tossed it up.
“Yarrr!” my friend was getting into it now. The next toss missed again, but landed closer with the tip halfway stuck into the ground. After tossing it up to him again, I crossed under the swing structure and gave it a few hearty shakes. He threw, another miss. We continued like this for some time, me keening in a sort of dance and he getting more riled up with each missed throw.
I, lost in my carefree imagination as the whale, met the intense eyes of Captain Ahab and in that moment knew my fate. With the flawless form of a Greek warrior from The Iliad, Captain Ahab threw his harpoon true. What a shot! If a track coach saw this throw, my friend would surely have been put on a path to the Olympics for javelin. The sharpened end of the stick, the one I carved with my own hands, landed with a flank-of-beef thwap square between my eyes. The shaft tumbled away, leaving its wooden tip as snarly splinters in my forehead. I don’t remember much after contact, not even pain. Bright red blood ran freely and stained my hands. Moby Dick’s death in the book is ambiguous, but in my lived version he lies slain. As Captain Ahab transformed back into my friend—six years old and full of fear at breaking the rules—he died as well.
I was brought to the hospital and offending wood bits were removed. The mean twiggy pieces exist in a vial somewhere as one of those morbid hospital keepsakes one accrues over a life. When interrogated by the parents as to what happened, my friend—terrified of confessing that we were playing with forboden sticks—pointed to an innocent stray length of pipe and claimed he hit me with that instead. Naturally, this sent the adults into a proper panic. Fortunately I was in and out of the hospital easily with a neat little forehead scar between my eyes. I was overly proud of that scar into my teenage years when it nearly healed away. A white coat wearing grown up told me that half an inch either way and I’d have lost an eye. While I’m thankful for my full vision, I must admit sometimes I think about what a character I’d be with an eyepatch earned over a childhood reenactment of Moby Dick.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of a book in my opinion. Between all the contemporary #standwiththebanned activism and fiery discourse about books being some conduit of global change, I read books because of their magical power that compelled six-year-old me to dream, break rules, seek adventure, get my comeuppance, and receive a little wisdom. I don’t read to fuel a cultural revolution and I don’t write to change the world. To live—really live—is more than enough. It is the Great Blessing which even the most grateful of us admit they can hardly fathom.
The hissing sands of your hourglass fall into the lower chamber as you read these words, Ishmael. Sharpen your stick with your father’s stolen knife. Defy the overprotective mothers who throw your toast gun in the trash. Become the whale and earn your scar. Read! Write! Live! From the first written story of Gilgamesh to you scrolling down this page, there is no finer way than this.