Fooling Houdini, page 16
“I said put away the cards, or you’re outta here. I’m not gonna ask again.”
I shrugged him off, breezily fanning the deck. It’s not like I was dancing half-naked on the pool table or doing bumps of cocaine in the bathroom—both of which I’d seen there in the past. I was doing magic, for heaven’s sake! What harm could there possibly be in that? Ignoring him, I resumed my card trick, and he slammed his palms on the wooden bar top, snarling like a rabid dog.
“Get the hell out of here!” he roared. “You’re eighty-six’d, you hear me! Get out! And don’t come back!”
As I became ever more embroiled in the magic subculture, I also started dressing differently. First came the earrings—silver studs in both ears. Then the leather cuff on my left wrist. Then the ring on my right forefinger.
The ring doubled as a prop. A few years back, an innovative New York close-up expert debuted an effect at Obie O’Brien’s FFFF convention in which a ring visibly materializes on your hand. Afterward, when he published the trick, every young magician on the East Coast took to wearing a ring on his index finger. At a party one night in Manhattan, where several of my magician friends had gathered, a young woman inquired about this shared taste in jewelry. “Is that a gay thing?” she asked. Inquiring minds wanted to know.
Gradually, I shucked my urban schoolboy outfit for a more flamboyant punk-hipster look. Progress? Maybe not. My friends said I looked like an aging eighties rocker. I suppose it was all about misdirection. Maybe the rings and studs and wrist cuffs would divert attention away from my crow’s feet and the little yarmulke of thinning hair at my crown. Still, it did wonders for my confidence.
With my souped-up look and growing stash of moves, I was a new man. I felt like a caterpillar metamorphosing into a much cooler caterpillar, one that could do amazing tricks. I could visibly penetrate an inflated balloon with a cell phone. I could pass a quarter through a bottle, a cigarette through a quarter, and a pen through a dollar bill. I could transmute the dollar into a C-note and then make it appear inside a lemon. I could shoot fireballs from my hands. I could magically change the color of my shirt. I could apparently dislocate my shoulder and bend my pinky finger in half the wrong way. I could link and unlink three borrowed rings, then vanish one of them and make it appear on my shoelace, or inside a lemon. If ever I were asked, I had no trouble making three ropes of different lengths appear to be the same size. I could produce salt in an endless stream from my hand. Or pepper. Or both. I could shred a signed card into julienne strips and restore it by lighting it on fire. I knew how to change a lemon into an egg and vanish it on command, and whenever anyone wanted to see me pull a fifty-foot rainbow streamer from my mouth, I was only too happy to oblige.
Can you do a trick with this penny?
Sure, I can! Watch it levitate eight inches above my hands and vanish into nothingness. Then appear inside a lemon.
Thanks to Wes, I was performing my Ambitious Card routine on a regular basis, and getting stunned reactions. It had become one of my go-to effects. The cards were now like an extra appendage, an extension of my body—a feeling with which, I imagine, Richard Turner was well acquainted. I was an ace at the three-card monte and could have started my own mob if I’d wanted to. I could rifle cards out of the deck McBride-style—whirring projectiles that spun through the air like helicopter blades—and catch them in my other hand on the descent. I could dead-cut to within three cards and riffle-shuffle one-handed.
I could even do the spin change I’d seen that gorgeous Belgian girl perform in the lobby of the hotel at the Magic Olympics, with which she’d mesmerized the entire late-night crowd and made herself the objet d’amour of every straight male within eyeshot. I still had sweaty Botticellian dreams of her spinning cards in a giant clam shell, hair spilling in rivers down her milk white shoulders as a choir of wind nymphs whistled “Kiss from a Rose.” (In addition to academic success, financial security, and a normal adult social life, magic had also hijacked my fantasies.) I could only execute one change—not five—and was still struggling to get both hands spinning simultaneously. Even so, I felt pretty cool when I showed the kids at Tannen’s and they swayed their heads in awe. “Dude, you do that sick,” one of them said. “That’s sick.” Being sick had never felt so good.
I could now conceal multiple coins in my hand without the coins “talking”—that is, making unwanted noise—and still use that hand to sign autographs or swirl a snifter of brandy. This is an important skill because, to really sell a vanish, you want to convince the audience that your hands are empty, even if they aren’t, by means of an unspoken gesture, such as dusting your palms or picking up another object. This sort of ruse is known as an acquitment, or subtlety, and there are hundreds of variants. Perhaps the most famous example, although not widely known as such, is the magic wand. The myth, of course, is that the wand channels the magician’s power. But the magic wand’s true power is in making the hand that wields it appear otherwise empty. A guilty, or full, hand looks more natural when holding a wand, a psychological subtlety that throws the audience off a palm. The wand is thus said to acquit the hand. Of course, almost anything can do the same job as a wand—a pen, a cup, another coin, or even a simple gesture.
I could also release coins from a classic palm one at a time through a slight variation in the pressure of my grip. After I became proficient with half dollars, I upgraded to silver dollars. I could even shoot the coins out of my palms with my hand muscles—a move I first saw at the Magic Castle when I was a kid. It looks like the coin floats out of the hand, as if somehow falling upward. It’s done by squeezing the coin with the palm muscles and releasing it under tension. I remember practicing it until my palms were bruised stiff, but my hands were too puny at the time. Now I could launch a coin eight inches vertically, and I was more proud of this accomplishment than I was of having gone to college. Laypeople accused me of using strings and magnets and special coins, which I took as the highest form of flattery—like being asked if you’d had abdominal liposuction when in fact all you’d done were loads of crunches. Magicians, meanwhile, viewed me with newfound respect. When I showed Wes, the faint seam of a smile wrinkled his long bearded face. “Not bad,” he said, and cleared his throat. “But it’s no twenty-eight inches.” He was referring to Japanese virtuoso Shoot Ogawa’s gravity-defying muscle pass, for which he held the world record (twenty-eight inches!) in what has become close-up magic’s answer to the Olympic high jump.
I found myself using magic in nonmagic contexts as well. I’d do card moves with credit cards, coin sleights with poker chips or anything vaguely circular. I sleeved pens and phones and cutlery and whatever else would fit in my cuffs. If I’d wanted to, I could’ve been the ultimate shoplifter.
Even the simple act of paying for things became a magical affair after I replaced my wallet (a present from my father) with a magical “fire wallet” that burst into flames every time I opened it. (After which you can close it back up again and use it like any other wallet.) The fire wallet was a scene-stealer, for sure, and well worth the hundred dollars I’d spent on it, although it may have landed me on an FBI watchlist after I tried to sneak it on an airplane. I probably should have heeded Jeff McBride’s advice. “Confetti is the new fire,” he often says, citing post-9/11 security measures. “Any trick is better with confetti.”
Magicians are notorious for throwing up red flags at airports and border checkpoints, especially when birds are part of their cargo. At the Magic Olympics, a Norwegian dove act named Davido was pulled from the opening stage show at the eleventh hour due to an avian flu scare. If he’d brought his doves into the country, a sullen Davido told me, “they could have killed them at the border.” A similar incident occurred a few years earlier, when a precision bird handler from the United States was stopped at the Canadian border and told he couldn’t bring his doves into the country. Unfazed, he released the birds into the air and drove on without them. Reaching the other side of the border, he parked the car and called to his flock. Hearing their master’s familiar warble, the trained birds flew back into his trunk on command.
As my confidence grew, I started gigging again. At first these were small shows in living rooms and in the backs of restaurants—fifty dollars here, seventy-five dollars there—much like the bar mitzvahs and birthday parties I did in high school. But as I got better, and my confidence grew, I began charging more. Soon my fee went up to $100 an hour. Before long I was making between $300 and $500 a show—what one friend called “prostitute money.” (I guess, in a way, I was turning tricks.)
I did a wedding in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a baby shower on Long Island, a dinner for a detachment of Wall Street stiffs at a posh social club in SoHo, a Halloween party in Tribeca, a law firm Christmas party. I was hired by the Anti-Defamation League, Cornell University, American Express, and a nonprofit organization called Asian Women in Business (which, in addition to hiring me, had also booked a paper cutter named Master Cheng, who made sure I knew that he was the main act). It felt great when people paid me to perform. Then again, I imagine just as many would have paid me to stop.
Besides hanging out with Wes, I also met a younger generation of magicians who rejected the orthodoxies of the Society in favor of magic’s more experimental side. Among these rebels was John Born, the wunderkind from Kansas I first encountered at Rustico II. In exchange for helping him edit a six-hundred-page manuscript on cheating at Texas Hold ’Em loaded with new techniques, Born shared some exquisite secrets with me. I also met a diminutive twenty-three-year-old graphic designer with stunning sleight-of-hand chops who was working with the great Paul Harris on a ten-DVD set filled with new material; an amateur who ran a blog on which he bashed the skills of lesser conjurors; and a rising star from Ohio, named Joshua Jay, who wrote a monthly column for Magic magazine called “Talk About Tricks.”
There was a collective sense of excitement among these young magicians, a feeling that magic was on its way up. To them, the world of magic more closely resembled a cutting-edge science or an avant-garde art movement than the staid, vaudeville-era relic of popular imagination. It crackled with innovation and creativity. When speaking about their craft, they peppered their effusions with adjectives like new age, state-of-the-art, and high-end, as if describing some bold new technology. To hear them tell it, the golden age of magic was upon us.
Magic was evolving at a remarkable pace, in part because it seemed to be tapping into cutting-edge ideas from psychology, behavioral science, and mathematics. This in turn generated a great deal of conceptual excitement among this new breed of conjurors. Not that Wes with his PhD in computer science was an intellectual slouch. But as I was beginning to realize, there were a lot of high-octane intellects in the magic world. As an aspiring physicist, I found this especially seductive, even more so than the dark side of cons and cheats. By now I’d become convinced that physics and magic recruited some of the same cognitive engines. Both require a similar sort of mental gymnastics. Both are profound acts of the imagination. Both encourage you to think critically, challenging you to move beyond the quiet comfort zone of your daily experience.
All that being said, the biggest draw is that it’s just plain fun to fool people. Anyone who claims otherwise—that fooling people isn’t one of magic’s central joys, one of its primary pleasures—is being dishonest. To truly astonish someone, to freak them out so badly they can’t sleep at night, to blow their mind and make them question their sanity—that, to me, as to all magicians, is heaven. It’s one of the chief upsides to becoming a magician, aside from the fact that black is very slimming.
All that polite blather about magic being a gift that brings joy and smiles is all well and good, but what it’s really about is the incredible rush that comes from shattering someone’s grip on reality. To see the disbelief in their eyes, that look of sheer bewilderment just before the tension dissipates into laughter and a crackle of applause—what Wes calls the WTF moment—few pleasures can compare.
The real brilliance of those early David Blaine street magic specials was their eye for capturing this definitive moment. The passersby he stopped on the sidewalk were the real stars of his show, and those tight reaction shots of strangers freaking out in the middle of the street while Blaine stood by looking vaguely stoned were as astonishing to watch as any big stage illusion, even after you learned how the tricks were done. For the audiences at home, the main draw was watching people watch Blaine—who appeared to be a total cipher, a weird sort of urban shaman wandering the streets aimlessly and yet making all these incredible things happen. Hiring the co-creator of Cops to give the show an unvarnished reality TV feel—distancing it from the shows of blousier magicians like David Copperfield—was also a minor stroke of genius. It’s difficult to overstate the influence those shows had on the magic world. Wes’s disdain for so-called Blainiacs notwithstanding, David Blaine inspired an entire generation of young magicians—me included—and transformed the way people think about the craft to an extent not seen since Houdini.
The renowned psychologist Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost expert on lying and deception, has given a name to the pleasure that we all derive from fooling others. He calls it duping delight. Duping delight is basically the frisson of excitement that comes from pulling off a good lie. Simply put, it’s fun to mess with people’s minds. How much fun it is, according to Ekman, depends on three factors: the gullibility of the target, the size of the lie, and the amount of respect we win by telling it.
The first of these factors refers to how hard the target is to fool, and it explains why magicians take heightened delight in fooling other magicians. Sure, it’s fun to fool laypeople, but they’re easy prey. It’s far more thrilling to hunt your own kind. As a result, magicians are constantly engineering new ways to dupe one another. A hierarchy of foolmanship, a who-fooled-whom pecking order, rules the conjuror’s domain. This gladiatorial spirit in turn drives considerable evolution in the art.
Ekman’s second variable concerns the practical difficulties involved in pulling off the lie. In magic, this corresponds to the skill level of the effect and how likely you are to get caught. The third factor, meanwhile, sheds light on why magicians hold tournaments and share war stories. “Criminals have been known to reveal their crime to friends, strangers, even to the police in order to be acknowledged and appreciated as having been clever enough to pull off a particular deceit,” Ekman has observed. Magicians are much the same. With magic competitions, which began a half century ago and have since blossomed into a global enterprise, magicians have turned duping delight into a live sporting event.
The siren song of duping delight was what had driven me to compete at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, and it was also why I was training for the IBM close-up tournament in July 2010. I only hoped that this time around I could make a better run of it. I certainly could do no worse.
In hopes of avoiding another ego-shattering nosedive, I began making frequent pilgrimages in search of secrets. I followed the lecture circuit like a Deadhead. If I had been younger, I would almost certainly have attended Tannen’s Magic Camp—a summer retreat for tricksters age twenty and under—and I did consider lying about my age and using makeup. But such drastic measures were unnecessary, because even without Tannen’s, there were still plenty of places to go. If anything, I had too many options. Magic has become so specialized that each branch now has its own convention. There’s one for mentalists (people who read minds and bend spoons) and one for card cheats who work with gambling sleights. There are two separate coin magic conventions and an annual gathering for people interested in Extreme Card Manipulation, those flashy acrobatic card flourishes. The bizarrists—magician-storytellers who use tricks to conjure up elaborate fairytales—have their own meet-up in Connecticut. And 2009 saw the birth of the first online-only magic conference. There are magic conclaves and cruises, magic charities, and magic ministries. There’s something called the Midwest Magic Jubilee. All told, there are over one hundred magic conventions each year. And the number keeps growing.
I went to the IBM convention in Nashville, the SAM in Buffalo, the World Magic Seminar in Vegas, and the Blackpool convention in England, the largest convention in the world. I hit up the International Battle of Magicians in Canton, Ohio, home of the NFL Hall of Fame. I flew to Lima, Peru, for the FLASOMA competition, the Latin Grammies of magic. I attended the inaugural Magic-Con, a convention led by XCM prodigies Dan and Dave Buck and patterned after the TED model.
In the process, I accumulated a frightening amount of plunder: chips from practically every casino on and off the Strip; a scrapbook full of souvenir eight-by-tens; several Rolodexes’ worth of business cards; a Magic-Con Moleskine notebook that I used as a diary; an extensive collection of leaky convention pens, badges, lanyards, and pins; and a drawerful of ill-fitting hats and shirts. I could have decorated a Christmas tree with all my name tags. And because every conference is required by law to provide its attendees with souvenir tote bags, I soon had a closetful of those as well.
One of the amusing things about conventioneering is seeing some of the other conferences with which you intersect. At the 2009 IBM, we shared the convention center at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville with the North American Irish Dancing Championships—tweens in Celtic curls and powder white makeup trotting around with their stage mothers. At the SAM in Buffalo, it was World War II veterans (the U.S.S. Little Rock 2009 Reunion), and at times I had trouble distinguishing their wispy pink scalps from those of the magicians. In other cities, I happened upon a porn convention, an electronics expo, a powerlifting exhibition, and—get this—a physics conference. I felt a pang of guilt when I saw physicists hard at work as I teamed up with a group of high school kids who were busy “mindfreaking” unsuspecting guests at the hotel. All the while, Saturdays with Wes in the luxuriant gloom of Rustico II served as my reference point, a place to which I continually returned for guidance.
