A Fish Tale

[Celerity]

Long before Moby Dick, Herman Melville set off on a Polynesian trip that became a famous literary hoax.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/swindle-fraud/fish-tale



I can offer only the sketchiest explanations for how I came to occupy the top floor of a pleasantly wide banker’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where the sun pours in through two high windows until midafternoon, glancing off the painted surface of the desk where I have lately been composing manuscripts on a little Olivetti manual typewriter. I purchased the typewriter on the street while in the company of my daughter, who shares my pleasure in beautiful old things that have survived the general shipwreck. Putting your grandmother’s stuff out on the sidewalk is the birthright of every American. We define ourselves in the present by forgetting the past, an auto-da-fé that illuminates the rituals of self-invention, which allows us to make ourselves up from scratch, or to sell chewing gum to the masses, or to move to California, the land of oranges and movie stars and a place my longtime companion Herman Melville imagined when he wrote the Gold Rush into his novel Mardi.

Americans have always flitted back and forth between the present and whatever imagined future might dissolve outstanding complications and debts. Our penchant for self-invention has led to misunderstandings between Americans and nearly everyone else. But those who understand this driving quirk may admit that it is the source of much that is useful and particular, if also maddening.

I do my own arbitrage on the top floor of my house, which I rent together with my wife. The three floors below my sunlit aerie, which faces out toward the harbor, are noisily occupied by my older children—a son, age nine, and the aforementioned daughter, age five—according to a custody schedule approved by New York State family court. The aforementioned wife is also the mother of our infant son, Elijah, whose namesake is the prophetic old salt who warns Ishmael against boarding the Pequod in Melville’s Moby Dick. Our two Siberian cats, Herman and Melville, run up and down the stairs and wedge themselves behind the washer-dryer, until the creak of a floorboard sends them off like a shot onto the landing, with the sound of cat claws sliding and scraping on polished wood. When they get tired of these shenanigans, they will come curl up on my lap, which makes it devilishly difficult to work the Olivetti.

Having grown up not far from here, in a lower-middle-income housing project where the junkies left broken syringes at night in the sandbox, where I played among them the next morning, I can’t fault you for wondering how I pay for this whale of a house. Any honest man sans a private fortune will give you the same answer: I hustle, and play the angles, while keeping two steps ahead of the bill collector. At the end of the month, I take the kids to school in a cab and then I hunt for spare change in the cushions of my couch, until I gather a hoard that is sizable enough to exchange for a sandwich. The weight of the hustle is squarely on me, which is basically how nature intended it.

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