Fooling Houdini, page 15
But Wes, as always, was full of surprises. He welcomed me at the table without any hesitation, offering me a seat next to him as if nothing had happened. I was shocked. Of all the people who’d read my article, he was the last person from whom I’d expected a show of mercy.
Moved by his kindness, I all but broke down. I told him I felt awful about the incident and regretted the article—all of which was true. He put his arm on my shoulder and measured out a smile. “I know,” he said, softly, with a flicker of approval. “I know.” He’d just come back from a cigarette break, and I could smell freshly smoked Pall Mall menthols on his breath. Minty death. “But it’s good to hear you say it.” After that, all was forgiven.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about an Italian coin expert named Giacomo Bertini, who was in town for the elite FFFF convention and was giving a lecture and teaching a workshop at the SAM later that week. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Wes wheezed. “He’s got the best classic palm I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t look like anything. It really doesn’t.” As with everything, Wes knew the score. He had a copy of an underground DVD containing some of Bertini’s top-secret material, which had been put out by a close-up worker in Chicago. Bertini had now become somewhat of a star on the international coin circuit.
Afterward, I contacted Ken Schwabe about making arrangements to see Bertini. “This is unofficial,” Ken said, very hush-hush. “I’m not speaking to you now as chairman of the lecture committee, because the workshop is not actually affiliated with the SAM.” The upshot was that I could attend the workshop, because that was Ken’s pet project, but if I showed up at the SAM lecture, I’d be greeted with torches and pitchforks.
The workshop was held at an undisclosed location. Only after being screened by Bertini and paying the fee was I given the address. Apparently they were worried about party crashers, something I honestly wouldn’t have expected at a six-hour Saturday afternoon coin workshop given in Italian.
I met Ken in person to give him the cash. He counted it twice, discreet as a drug dealer, and told me in cloak-and-dagger tones that it was nonrefundable. I was to await further notice. That night he e-mailed me the coordinates of the secret location, which of course turned out to be the same place we always met.
The workshop was well worth the price of admission. Bertini was a brilliant thinker, and his technique was mathematically exact. Around hour five, I started wondering what the motivations were for devoting so much time and effort to something so esoteric. By now I’d spent enough of my life sessioning with magic fiends to know that the Bertinis of the world weren’t in it for money or fame. Listening to Bertini go on at length about the proper handling of the classic palm—the angle of the coin, the attitude of the fingers, all laid out with millimetric precision—I realized that his was a life devoted to the rendering of an aesthetic vision. I imagined that, for him, the coins were like abstract symbols in a mathematical equation, representations of an ideal reality, one of infinite dimensions. “This right here is as powerful as the Statue of Liberty,” a wise magician once said to me as he raised a half dollar in the air and held it up to the light. “Size doesn’t matter.”
As I left the workshop that night still cradling these thoughts, I ran into a WASPy man in his mid-forties with floppy gray hair and blue eyes whom we’ll call John. My article had not pleased him. “You made a lot of enemies,” he told me bitterly. “Much bigger than you might know.” He was speaking very fast and almost in a whisper. “You’re just a loose cannon, and it’s really dangerous.” He paused, and his voice got even quieter. “The signal you’re sending out is that you don’t give a fuck.”
We walked outside and he quickly worked himself into a rage. Standing in the middle of the street, he read me the riot act, and I stood there and took it. The thing that had angered him the most—even more than the exposure—was the fact that in my byline I’d identified myself as a professional rather than as an amateur. This, to him, was inexcusable. “Don’t ever pass yourself off as a pro ever again,” he hissed at me. “It’s rude and wrong and you lied.”
Several minutes later, after he’d vented most of his anger, we began to have a more measured discussion. Even though he’d bawled me out in the middle of Ninety-sixth Street, I appreciated his candor, and it was clear to me that it came from a place of genuine passion. Also, I’d seen his chops and he was clearly very skilled. (He’d trained with the great Slydini.) We shared a cross-town bus—he also lived on the Upper West Side—and talked about the ethics of magic.
It was John’s view that if magicians wanted to keep their material secret, they shouldn’t publish it at all, not even in professional journals. I admired the consistency of his position, even though it was a little radical. “I’m a secretive SOB,” he said, shrugging. “I couldn’t be more old guard. I grew up in a place where it was one old man telling one young man a big secret. I’m a relic. But I get it that there really is this active conflict now. This whole information thing. We don’t understand the full ramifications of a fully searchable database.”
He apologized for yelling at me, and I apologized for playing fast and loose with the honor code, and by the time the bus emerged from Central Park we were like old friends. “Love the craft,” he urged me as we stepped off the bus and prepared to go our separate ways. “That’s the main thing. We all wanna be somebody else. But the job of the artist is to be who you are.”
This sort of fealty to the craft for its own sake was something I may not have given enough credit when I published my article. Then again, what discourse does beauty have with secrecy? Magic is so much more than a collection of techniques. And art requires honesty as well as imagination. So, while I regretted having offended the people who’d devoted their lives to magic, as time went by I also felt a renewed commitment to rethink the traditions many of them espoused.
With this in mind, I decided to start my own magic society. Columbia had a club for just about everything—chess, video games, anime, motorsports, model UN, Latin dance, Klezmer music—but nothing for magicians. This struck me as an egregious oversight on behalf of the student activities office—one I aimed to redress.
In forming my on-campus magic society, I reached out to clubs I thought might have a similar target demographic, including the Columbia science fiction club, the kung fu society, and the women’s water polo team. I decided at the outset that ours would be a magic society cast from a different mold. There would be no oaths and no rituals. Anyone could join. The only requirement was an interest in magic and a willingness to learn.
Two people showed up to the inaugural meeting of the Columbia Magic Society, a female undergraduate from China named Yintiang who spoke very little English, and an enthusiastic French MBA student named Jean who wanted to learn magic so he could meet women. On the first day, I taught them the rudiments of my Ambitious Card routine. They both seemed thrilled.
It started out small but grew quickly. At the second meeting, there were twice as many people. Over the next several months, our numbers doubled again. Soon we had our own little community of aspiring magicians.
I realized that, going forward, many magicians would see me as an apostate, just as John had. But if anything, being blackballed from my local society only strengthened my resolve, fanning the flames of my obsession and drawing me ever deeper into this bizarre world.
* * *
* Though some have tried. In April 2011, French footwear designer Christian Louboutin sued rival Yves Saint Laurent for issuing a red-soled shoe, claiming that red soles were his trademark. A federal court dismissed the case. “Awarding one participant in the designer shoe market a monopoly on the color red,” wrote the judge, “would impermissibly hinder competition among other participants.”
Chapter 7
It’s Annoying and I Asked You to Stop
One of my biggest fears is that someday I’ll be audited. Not because my taxes aren’t in perfect order—I’m very OCD about saving receipts and keeping track of my expenses, a habit I learned from my father—but because it would bring me face-to-face with a very difficult and decidedly lose-lose dilemma in which I’d have to choose between going to jail for tax fraud and disclosing to another adult, in naked detail, just how much money I’ve spent on magic over the years. (That, and I’d have to fess up to eating at Arby’s multiple times while traveling to magic conventions.)
“Mr. Stone,” the auditor would say, “According to our records, you spent more money last year on—no, wait, this can’t be right—you spent more on magic than on food or rent?” Then he’d ask me what a topit was, and instead of explaining to him that it’s a pouch sewn into the lining of your coat for vanishing small objects, I’d tell him it was a secret, citing the magician’s code, and spend the next several years behind bars. Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly how it would go down, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
Decks of cards were one of my biggest expenses. I was up to a pack-a-day habit. (I liked my cards crisp and new, and I found that they quickly wore out from all the abuse I put them through.) It didn’t help that I’d developed a taste for Richard Turner’s traditionally cut Mandolin cards as well as fancy Tally-Ho decks, with their glossy linoid finish and stylish fanbacks, over regular old Bicycles. I now ordered them online in bulk.
I had a filing cabinet full of magic pamphlets and racks full of magic-related magazines. My e-mail in-box was perpetually flooded with tantalizing subject lines from all the magic newsletters and websites I’d subscribed to.
If you could REALLY bend coins, THIS is what it would look like.
Stop your heartbeat in public.
Create fire with your mind.
Reveal a phone number . . . on your spectator’s SKIN.
Cut yourself IN HALF.
Vacuum cleaner + deck of cards = ULTRA clean vanish.
(And my personal favorite . . .)
Universal Nut. This is much more than a pocket puzzle!
Pretty soon I needed a separate bookcase just for my magic library, and my media console could no longer hold all my magic DVDs. I did the math once, and it was shocking. A Ducati 1198 Superbike—that’s what I could’ve bought with the money I’d spent on tricks.
Then there was the human toll. I missed family events and weddings and major social occasions. My friends, initially delighted by my obsession (free magic!), soon grew weary of it (lots of free magic). Before long they would only agree to go out with me if I promised not to do card tricks the entire time.
The Columbia University physics department wasn’t too thrilled, either. For my final presentation in Condensed Matter Physics, I performed a card trick wherein the ace of spades, which I shot out of the deck one-handed, was supposed to represent the photons emitted during nuclear magnetic resonance—the physics behind MRI. It didn’t make much sense, quite frankly, and my teacher, a long-haired Japanese man, seemed truly perplexed.
A far more glaring insubordination occurred midway through my first semester, when I begged my Quantum Mechanics professor—a prodigy named Norman Howard Christ (rhymes with “tryst”), who completed his PhD in one year, at age twenty-two, and wore the same outfit (white shirt, tie, beltless charcoal slacks) every single day—to postpone our class’s midterm by a full week so I could attend a five-day workshop on card and coin magic in Las Vegas. He reluctantly agreed, which was a small miracle in and of itself, but I wasn’t exactly scoring any points with him or the other professors in my department by flying off to “magic camp” during exam week. It didn’t take long before word got around that I was spending more time doing magic than physics, and my grades mirrored this inauspicious duality.
When in the spring of 2008, during my second semester, the dean of the physics department called me into his office to discuss my lackluster performance on the graduate qualifying exams, pushing his thin wire frames up the long beak of his nose and holding my test at arm’s length like a soiled diaper as he said, “We hear you’re also a . . . magician?” I prayed for an earthquake or an aneurysm just to end the excruciating awkwardness of the situation. (If my wish had come true, the coroner would have found a Kennedy half dollar palmed in my rigor-mortised right hand.)
Magic was even getting me in trouble with the woman I’d started dating roughly a year and a half after Rachel left.
“It’s annoying and I asked you to stop and you wouldn’t,” she screamed at me one night after we got home from drinks at a squeaky clean martini bar on the Upper East Side. She was standing on the threshold of the bedroom—the angry spot—her hips cocked and her straight brown hair half-obscuring her face. “I feel like I’m constantly having to be supportive of your magic.”
“Well, you know, it’s just addicting,” I said, shimmying the half dollar in my right hand from back finger clip into classic palm, then transferring it gracefully into my left hand with the L’Homme Masqué load. “And, you know, I’m in training.”
Her eyes flashed hazel in the light. “Well, maybe then you need to not go out with people, and you need to just stay here and do magic all the time.”
Which really wasn’t fair, considering that we’d met thanks to magic. It was a grad student mixer, and the first words out of my mouth were “Here, hold this,” as I handed her a coin. Then I made it vanish and reappear underneath her watch. People often ask me if magic is good for getting girls, and the answer is yes. But it’s also good for making them disappear.
I tried explaining to her that there are a lot of ways to enjoy each other’s company, like being together and alone at the same time, but she was having none of it.
“It’s boring! It’s boring for me because I’m not sitting there playing a game.”
“I can talk when I have cards in my hands.”
“Yeah, but you’re distracted.”
“I’m not distracted. It’s just something I’m doing all the time,” I lied. Truth is, I’d been very distracted—at the bar and, before that, at the movies. (I barely remember the plot of Slumdog Millionaire.) I was trying to get down that damn push-off double lift from the David Blaine videos. It was killing me.
“I tell you what I’m feeling and then you proceed to ignore it. So I’m trying to figure out: Are you choosing to ignore it because you just don’t care? Are you ignoring it because you want to piss me off and ultimately this is the mechanism that you trigger to destroy any good thing that we have going? Or are you really just completely unaware? I guess that’s what I’m wondering.”
Silence hung between us for a long while. Then she stiffened. “Hello?”
I snapped out of my daze. “What was number two again?”
We broke up not long after that.
And yet none of this stopped me from embarking on an accelerated Navy SEAL–style training regimen that included daily practice sessions and a steady diet of magic literature. This meant putting my graduate studies officially on hold and taking a leave of absence from one of the top physics programs in the world. At least for now, I had committed myself to studying and writing about magic full time.
When the news got around to my family, they were less than pleased. Even though my father was the one who’d first planted the seeds of my magic obsession, when they finally blossomed he was more than a little freaked out by his creation. This was not a pretty little nosegay, but a Little Shop of Horrors monster. In his mind, magic was a fun hobby—nothing more—and once it started getting in the way of my academic life, it became a problem, like a video game addiction or a propensity for exposing oneself in public. I had the distinct sense he was beginning to regret having bought me that magic kit years ago. “I just hope I live long enough to see you get your PhD,” he said to me not long after I started at Columbia. At this rate, he would have to live a very long time.
At a family clambake in New Hampshire, one of my cousins, a cheery teacher named Bruce, pulled me aside wearing a serious look and reaffirmed the family consensus. “I hear you’re thinking of leaving school to do magic,” he said. Before I had a chance to respond, he began shaking his head from side to side. “Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t,” he said, over and over, his head swiveling back and forth like a robot gone haywire. Finally he found his thesis: “Don’t do thaaaaat.”
But it was too late. Magic had begun bleeding over into every aspect of my life. In the pie chart of my daily activities, it occupied an ever-larger slice. Eventually I had to face the facts. My hobby had metastasized into a full-blown obsession. I was a high-functioning magicaholic.
I practiced everywhere. At the library. In line at the bank. While serving on jury duty. In the waiting room at the doctor’s office. At the gym (where I kept a set of magic-lecture notes in my locker). On the subway (where I once dropped a deck of cards on an old lady’s head). In the checkout line at the supermarket. I brought cards and coins with me to the movies, much to the annoyance of whoever happened to sit next to me. I’m surprised I was never struck by a car, given how often I walked around in a haze, preoccupied with the latest sleight I was learning. There’s something Zen-like about practicing a pass or a double lift over and over until it gels in your hands. It became a form of meditation for me. Magic was my yoga. And because mastering the art of palming involves learning to conceal objects while your hands are otherwise engaged, I went through much of my daily life with coins palmed in both hands—on the subway, at dinner parties, in the shower.
I’d go to restaurants and do magic for the waitstaff and wind up in the back entertaining the line cooks. I performed for strangers on the train. Whenever I went out, it was a chance to beta test new material. Magic became my primary social outlet.
One night, I got banned from my local bar for doing too much magic.
“Put away the cards,” a large, bald-headed bartender told me in the middle of a trick I was doing for a fellow grad student also at the bar. “You can’t hustle in here.” Evidently, he thought I was trying to con drunk people, monte-style. I assured him it was only magic, but he wouldn’t listen.
