Finnan Westcott
ENGL 11000
Professor Metenko
15 September 2021

Dome Jabbar

Lots of people will tell you life is about what you achieve. Setting goals and going after them to become who you want to be. The way I feel about it, life is about experiences and putting yourself out there. It’s what happens to us, what we do in situations and what we take from them that makes us human. To me, it’s kind of like putting your hand in the Gom Jabbar, the “Pain Box” from Frank Herbert’s sci fi novel, Dune. Now this isn’t really a story about me reading that book. At all.

I’ve studied and done all sorts of acting for most of my teenage years. I was introduced to acting when I started going to a day camp where the campers would make dinky little films. People around me started to encourage the skill so I began to run with it. I was performing in small stage productions of this or that and then it was time to apply to Highschool. I ended up landing at a specialized arts school where I’d be acting everyday. At this point in my life I really wanted to become an actor. Young actors usually come with something called a ‘stage mom’. A ‘stage mom’ is a sort of stereotype that describes a woman with a child actor. She sort of acts as her kid’s acting agent, and these mothers can be a lot to handle. Mine was always texting me about jobs she would hear about from God knows where (all her little sources). One day she texted me about a modeling job for $300 bucks. This sounded pretty good to me but it came with a catch: I’d have to shave my head. I’d be a young cancer patient on a pamphlet to raise money for research. Oh, and they wanted to know my suit size. But there was no further screening or auditioning needed; willing to shave your head and wear a suit, you got the job. I thought all of this was all pretty hilarious and extreme; it felt like a good opportunity to put myself out there in a crazy way. So I said, “sure… I guess I can do that.”
So now let me tell you a little more about this pain box. The Gom Jabbar is a hollow cube, roughly the size of a tissue box, missing one of its sides. It serves as an existential test for the people of Dune, a test that is administered by a wise old priestess. She asks one to place their hand in the box and under no circumstances should that person remove their hand. She tells them that if they do, she will poison them instantly. Now you may be thinking, big deal, I put my hand in boxes all the time and have no trouble keeping them there. This box, the Gom Jabbar, is special. It gradually submits whatever is inside of it to a magical force that is painful. It becomes gradually more painful the longer something is in it. This might not sound like any test you’ve taken but I think it’s brilliant considering its purpose. The impetus for the creation of the test is to tell whether or not a person truly is human. Let me put it like this: only a true human could put mind over matter, use their rational mind despite overwhelming discomfort. It’s almost like the delayed gratification test. Put a marshmallow in front of a child but tell them if they don’t eat this one, they’ll get two instead. Take your hand out of the Gom Jabbar now and stop the pain, but die a second afterward. Well, sort of anyway.

After pledging to the photoshoot I had three weeks to sit on it, the idea of shaving my head. This job came at a time when I was starting my freshman year of High School. I was about to get thrown into what pop culture considers the most horrific social setting a week before the shoot. Now my mind started racing and I was having these severe mood swings as the days ticked by. What the hell am I doing? Am I really doing this? It can’t be real. It’s hilarious – what a crazy story to tell everyone. I’ll be a folk hero at school, they’ll call me ‘The Bald Headed Hero’. Or the ‘Bald Headed Sucker’. Wait, I’m going to look so stupid! What kind of social suicide am I committing right now?
With three days left until the job (and a few days of High School with a full head of hair behind me), I told my mom to email them and make an excuse, or just tell them I lost my nerve and couldn’t do it. I was willing to trash my professional reputation which didn’t consist of more than a couple of obscure commercials. She emailed with the news that I had gotten cold feet and they emailed back; “We already bought the suit. How does $350 sound?” Again, I agreed. It wasn’t the money, it was a combination of feeling guilty about the suit and a warped sense of bravery and adventure. At this point in my life I hadn’t read Dune and I had never heard of something called the Gom Jabbar but still, as much as I was dreading the experience I thought it might end up being good for me. Also, an extra fifty bucks can really break a man’s will.

So now it’s the day before the cancer-research-pamphlet-photoshoot, or whatever it was they were making. I had run out of time. No more pondering. Time to do this thing. My sister helped me shave my head but she decided to stream the whole process on social media, exploiting me for some humor with her friends. I was dying of embarrassment throughout the whole thing but kept soldiering through – no turning back now. Then it was all over. My hair was on the floor and my head was now hypersensitive. I could feel everything, even the faintest draught. The world was suddenly a much colder place. I could see birthmarks all over my head that I’d never thought existed, and my silhouette was alien.

I had school that next day, before the shoot. I went to my first couple periods of class with my hat on. I was thinking of a bunch of excuses to tell my new friends (I had lost a bet, etc.) for when the time came because the actual reason began to sound humiliating to me. By the time I got to drama class, I could sense the buzzing from my peers – and the buzzing was about me and what was going on underneath the hat that I had worn to conceal my newly smoothened head. My face was flush red, blushing isn’t fun with skin as pale as mine. I forced myself into a calm and decided: I need to own this moment. I stepped up in front of the room just before class started and told everybody to gather around. I took my hat off and everyone howled and went berserk at the sight before them. It was chaos; my classmates filled with shock and disbelief and probably more horror than I wanted to think. I knew there were a million funny things to say but every time I went to open my mouth and speak there was a catch in my throat; I was still extremely uncomfortable without my hair.

That afternoon, I made my way out to Brooklyn for the shoot. Off the subway walking, I began to notice I was in a hasidic community. It all started to feel a whole lot more I found the address, knocked on the door and it was opened by a large, congenial Hasidim. Looking past him, everyone was – this was clearly a Hasidic photography studio. I entered and after some nervous pleasantries, was handed a yarmulke, a big fur hat (came to find out this is called a shtreimel), and a black suit in just the size I had specified. It was starting to make sense to me now and I also had the burning sense that my mom knew all of this. She thought better of cluing me in because had I known about this last detail I may have never gone through with the shoot.

Putting on the suit in the dressing room, all I could do was text my mom in a panic. But I knew she wouldn’t help me. I grinned and beared it, left the dressing room as a full-blown Hasid (I’m Irish Catholic and absolutely look it) and followed the congenial big guy up to the studio. As we started taking photographs, I was asked about my own faith and I told them we were Catholic but not really practicing. They sensed my self-consciousness so they started telling me stories of their lives, about their sons and daughters. Slowly I stopped feeling as if I was on display and felt a part of their work. I was doing good and I felt safe with people who put themselves out there in front of me.
And then the day was over, time for me to put my raggedy jeans back on and resume my life. The man who had originally greeted me, stayed close during the whole shoot and eventually saw me to the door and thanked me. There seemed to be an understanding between us in that moment. I felt warm (my head wasn’t even cold). Walking out into the street, it was the sweetest sense of release I’d ever felt. The feeling didn’t come just from being done with it, but a satisfaction in myself. I pushed through what was shaping up to be a complete disaster, I liked these guys. I liked it. I donned a suit and put on their identity for a while. And I learned just how accepting and understanding we as people can be, especially when someone is vulnerable.

So the whole thing about the Pain Box is that whoever can put their hand in, feel the pain but get past it can become the Kwisatz Haderach, an extremely important being in the Dune universe. So the priestess tells me to take my hand out and she spares me for my efforts. So what does this mean? It’s mind over matter. If you can endure the pain, you’ve shown that your “awareness,” as they say in the book, was strong enough to overcome your base instincts. You’re ready. In this case my base instinct was to get the hell out of there.