This parody was originally written about two years ago, for the final project of a course on Herman Melville. Somehow, this spoof was rewarded with a passing grade, rather than being thrown out of the school onto my ass.

This story contains a lot of politically incorrect humor. If anyone is gay, has ADD, or is any kind of cultural minority, I apologize in advance. Do know that all jokes targeted at the afore mentioned groups are just that-jokes.

You may need to be familiar with the book "Moby Dick" to find this parody funny. But for goodness sake, don't put yourself through that just to read this parody! I don't want your mental breakdown on my conscience.

Lastly, if Herman Melville's ghost is reading this, I hope he doesn't sue me for this parody. I respect what an enormous undertaking it must have been to write "Moby Dick," and how ahead of its time it was in its messages. (It was still a bit of a torture to read though.)

I do not own "Moby Dick."

CHAPTER 1: The Chowder Inn

Call me Ichabod. Please. Everyone thinks they're being clever by calling me "Ichabod Crane," or "Itchy," but it's not clever. It's weird and annoying.

Some time ago, never mind how long, I decided see the grassy part of the world. And by "decided" I mean I was unemployed, and the only person who would even glance at my resume was an eccentric ex-naval captain, who was hiring hands for a hunting trip across Kansas, to catch prairie fowl. My job would take place aboard a Duck (you know, those boats with wheels that you can take on land and on the river, like they have at Wisconsin Dells, and then when the tour is over the tour guide makes that lame joke, "Now you've looked out the rear end of a duck!"—but I digress). I admit I hadn't had much experience either hunting or working aboard a ship, at the time. I was a writer, and had just recently lost my job at the local newspaper—for reasons I'll never be able to fathom. Those dry journalists don't use nearly enough words in their articles; I was merely trying to help, and they would have benefited greatly from my advice. I guess they didn't understand my genius. But I'd show them. I intended to write about my experiences aboard Captain Ahole's ship, and once it became a hit, they'd be begging me to come back and teach them how to write as elegantly as I could.

I looked forward to my new job, for who doesn't love a chance to see the prairie? After all, whenever a great artist wishes to paint a landscape, and has already done mountains and rivers and the like and has utterly run out of ideas, what is always his backup plan? Why, the grassy plains! Where do all of the most artistic crop circles pop up—the woods? The mountains? No sir, in the grassy farmlands! Why even Disney, after using up the forest, the jungle, and the ocean for the settings of their talking-animal movies, finally set one story in the grasslands of Africa, and what do you know, "The Lion King" was a huge hit! Even spawned a Broadway musical! I saw that play once in Milwaukee, and it was a mind job, I tell you. I've never seen such intense colors and designs anywhere—except that time when I still worked as an editor, and my typewriter had been given a fresh ink ribbon. You take one whiff of that stuff baby, and BOOM, you're higher than a class of second-graders on Ritalin—

Oh dear me, that's what I had forgotten! My Ritalin!

A thousand pardons my dear reader. You see, when I don't remember to take my Ritalin before narrating a story, I can go off on all sorts of odd tangents, and then no one has any idea what I'm talking about (not even myself sometimes!). I made a mental note to pick up my meds before stepping aboard the Peapod. I was sure that my readers would not want me going on tangents like that throughout the entire story! This would be a very important story to tell. Someone might die, after all. And I'd probably learn some very important moral lesson that I needed to pass on to my readers. And in that case, I should certainly want to be narrating the clearest, most coherent way possible.

Now then. I found myself at the river port where the Peapod—our boat—would board the next day. I would have to find a place to spend the night here, in the town of McNugget. My choices were "The Crossed Harpoons," which looked far too expensive; "The Cuttlefish," where someone was having a very rowdy wedding or bar-mitzvah; and a "Days Inn," with an outdoor pool the size of a bathtub that had a layer of dead insects floating in the water. Not the best selection. Just then a fourth building caught my eye. An old looking building, from which swung a half rotted wooden sign which read: "The Chowder Inn." It was in about the same condition as the "Days Inn," which meant that I could afford it, and because it wasn't the "Days Inn," it would be better than just sleeping on the sidewalk. I felt an ominous presence as I approached the building, with a tad of foreboding and a side of eeriness. I pocketed my thesaurus (for I knew this would be a long story, and if I didn't save some adjectives for later, I'd run out), and stepped inside.

The "Chowder" was your average inn, complete with dim lighting and filled with gruff looking sailors sporting eye patches and striped shirts. It looked like a typical hangout for ruffians, and as I stepped into the lobby I almost instantly felt like more of a badass. Like a cowboy, I swaggered into the bar, imagining what could happen in here. I pictured being confronted by some alien bounty hunter, who was after a price that my ex-employers from the editing room had put on my head…and just as he's about to shoot me, I say some witty one-liner and then blow him away with my blaster! Or maybe I'd just get a drink at the bar, where I'd meet some foreign refugees running from Nazis, who needed to obtain exit visas so they could escape to the safety of the Americas—and one of them would be a hot French babe desperate for my help. (Yes, I know I was already in America, but I wasn't thinking of that at the time.) The possibilities were endless.

"Sir? Hello?"

I yelped like a little girl and jumped a little. The innkeeper behind the desk had startled me. I composed myself, and he continued.

"Like I said, we don't have any empty rooms left. But if you want, you can share a room with the harpooner on the second floor."

I thought it over. I don't generally like sleeping two to a bed. I had to share the bottom of the bunk bed with my brother Todd for a whole year when I was ten years old, after we accidentally set fire to the top bunk while we were playing campfire with Dad's lighter. Todd always hogged all the blankets, plus he was like an octopus in his slept. And that was with a family member. I didn't want to begin to think about how awkward all of that would be with a total stranger.

"Otherwise," the innkeeper said, "You can always just sleep on the bench there."

"I'll give that a try." I said, relieved to have another option.

He gave me a strange look. "Well actually I was being sarcastic. But I guess if you really want to, suit yourself."

I tried to make myself comfortable on the bench, ignoring the noise of the other customers at the bar, who were watching the football game on TV. It was much harder to get sleep here than I'd thought. The bench was too hard in most places, and too sticky in others. I tried to shift around, but then found that my pants had become stuck to the bench with A.B.C. gum. They were nice pants, too, dang it. While I sat there, trying to peel gum off the back of my slacks, a shadow suddenly loomed over me, and before I had time to react a 300-pound Wisconsinite in a Green Bay Packers jersey and a cheese-head plopped himself on the bench to get a better view of the game. As I struggled to escape the dark smothering mass, I felt another odd sense of foreboding, as if this were some sign from a higher power that a death by some gigantic creature awaited me in the near future.

Somehow, by the mercy of that higher power, I was allowed to claw free of the death trap and breathe the fresh air again. I promptly returned to the front desk and asked, "How about that harpooner?"

The harpooner wasn't in the room when I arrived, and I really didn't feel like waiting for him. Fighting for your life under what feels like the weight of a blue whale takes a lot out of you. So I climbed into the bed. For two wonderful hours, I dreamed about my new mission aboard the Peapod. I bravely defending the ship by firing lasers at the attacking Tie Fighters that swooped down from overhead, and used my revolver to shoot the invading Nazis that swung aboard our ship, so that the sexy French woman who totally digged me could escape to safety.

My dreams were interrupted around midnight, when the door creaked opened. The harpooner had returned to our room. Peeking from under the sheets, I saw he was a rather tanned fellow. Like, solid brown. Well, I told myself, this was Kansas after all. I supposed working on a farm in the sun all day would do that to even the palest person. But wait, he was a harpooner, not a farmer... Okay, so he was out harpooning whales or giant squids in the hot Atlantic Ocean, and that gave him his tan.

What terrible bruises, I thought looking at his arms and face. I had never seen bruises that shade of yellow and purple on anyone before. In fact, they didn't look like bruises at all. Maybe, I reasoned, maybe the sun just did that to your skin, in certain parts of the world. It made sense. The sun tans you so much that you get so brown, that there aren't enough brown coloring chemicals left for your skin to use up, so instead it starts trying other colors like purple and yellow…all right, I was grasping. He was probably just a student from some art school, who got himself covered in wacky colored paint while working on the set of some play based on a Dr. Seuss book.

Then the harpooner turned around, and I was able for the first time to see his face. And that was when the terrifying realization sank in…

It

was

a

black

guy!

With a shaking hand I yanked the covers over my head. My fantasies of being a rugged space pirate and a Nazi-killing patriot had flown out the window faster than my plans for Prom Night after Ma saw my last report card ("Ichabod, how the hell do you fail shop class?!"). His tan, his facial features, his tattoos, his shaved head, it all came together now. I was sharing a room with an African, a cannibal!

Now, this must seem very ignorant of me. But you see, I had never met such a person in person before (was that a bit redundant?). I was extremely young at the time, and had grown up unusually sheltered. Grandpa Willis had told me his version about what those of African heritage were like. How they cooked you in a spigot over a cauldron, and then ate you in a pie with gravy and cranberry sauce. How they shrank your head, and then hung it as a trophy over their doors and Christmas trees. Dear god, to spend all of December hanging on a tree, having to listen to little brats bawl underneath me about how they didn't get the exact race car or Barbie doll that they wanted…and to then spend the other eleven months of the year in a box in the basement, suffocating in Styrofoam peanuts... I whimpered as the cannibal approached the bed.

"Who's there?!" He looked around the room wildly, ready to strike with his harpoon.

With his keen native tracking skills, he had heard my barely audible whimper.

Or maybe it was when I started screaming, "Take my wallet! Take whatever you want, just please don't cook me Mr. Cannibal! I don't want to be a pie—I don't like gravy!" (I don't know why the film Chicken Run came to my mind in that moment of panic, but, well, there it is.)

"What's going on here?" the innkeeper burst into the room.

I pointed a shaking finger at the cannibal. "HE'S GONNA EAT ME!"

The innkeeper laughed. "Relax, mate. Old Queerqueg here wouldn't hurt a fly. You just startled him, is all. Go back to sleep, both of you."

I looked from the innkeeper, and back to the African—Mr. Queerqueg. The cannibal was staring at me as if I was from outer space. Heh, now there was a funny thought. Me, the alien from outer space, and him, the ordinary Earthling. And that's when I realized it. It was all a matter of perspective! For in Queerqueg's mind, it was I who was the bizarre alien, sneaking up on him, and he was the ordinary-looking and heroic space pilot, preparing to strike back in self defense. But he wouldn't have to, I decided. From then on, I would treat him like I would any other stranger. Grandpa Willis wouldn't approve of my befriending a non-white person. But on the other hand, that guy called my DragonFoce CDs "Devil music," so what did he know?

I greeted Mr. Queerqueg, and he smiled and greeted me in return. He then invited me to share a smoke with him. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Queerqueg took out a small, funny-looking glass idol shaped like an Easter Island head, and done up in colorful designs like an Easter egg. He introduced his idol to me as Aqua-Buda Man. He filled Aqua-Buda Man with some earthy plants, and we took turns inhaling the smoke from a long tube that extended from Aqua-Buda Man's blue lips. And as I lay back down to sleep next to my new friend, I looked up at the ceiling and smiled. The colors I saw up there outdid "The Lion King" and my ink ribbon back home by a long shot.