Fooling Houdini, page 27
On the Saturday before the show, I conferred with Wes. I hadn’t been to Rustico II in a while, because I’d been busy working on my act and spending time with Kate, and I could tell he’d already begun to write me off.
When I arrived at the pizzeria, I found Wes standing outside sucking on a cigarette, even though it was freezing. Shivering in my hoodie, I showed him the special gimmicked sketch pad I’d constructed, which made my second trick possible. I thought it was pretty ingenious, but Wes only shook his head.
“It’ll never work,” he said, ever the Dutch uncle. “The spectator will notice the tension.” He took a long pull off his menthol. “When’s the gig?”
I told him the show was in three days.
“Oh, you’re fucked,” he said, and threw down his smoke.
But for once Wes was wrong. Three days, one pep talk from Kate, and half a Xanax later, I found myself onstage. The house was standing room only, despite the weather—a Nor’easter had dumped a foot of snow on the city that morning—and the show went off without a hitch. When the secret name materialized on the deck after the eighth faro, the volunteer, a tall young woman named Lennon, covered her face. “Oh my God!” she screamed, and the audience went wild. Not only did they seem to like my tricks, they also seemed to like me, maybe because I wasn’t trying to be somebody else. I felt surprisingly relaxed onstage. Okay, the Xanax helped, but it was more than that: I was having fun.
“I think magic is an art very closely related to poetry,” Tamariz says. “The poet manipulates words, and the magician manipulates objects. We are transcending reality in order to produce something poetic, something beautiful, something interior.” For the first time, I felt like I’d found the poetry in my magic.
But I wasn’t prepared to rest on my laurels just yet. My mission wasn’t over. Another challenge awaited me, one I’d been preparing for and dreaming about ever since I’d been red-lighted at the Magic Olympics.
There was one more audience I still needed to face.
DOING MAGIC FOR LAYPEOPLE IS one thing. But performing in front of fellow magicians is something else entirely. As IBM convention chairman Terry Richison put it, “Performing for a roomful of magicians—whew—that takes a lot of guts.”
For me it was the final test, my last labor.
A shot at redemption.
I’d come a long way since the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, both as a performer and as a person. Looking back, I was amazed at how much I’d learned. Not only had I mastered hundreds of moves and dozens of mind-blowing tricks, but I now had an original act I could take with me anywhere. It was a far cry from my Olympic routine, which I’d basically stitched together with shoestring and chewing gum.
At this point, trophies were beside the point. I wasn’t looking to win a prize. I simply wanted to face my fears and prove to myself—and to the judges—that I could hang with the big boys. (And by big boys, I mean high school kids, in several cases.) I also wanted advice on how I might further tighten my act.
So with Kate by my side providing moral support and last-minute performance tips, I flew to San Diego for the IBM Gold Cups, the most prestigious annual close-up competition in the world.
And guess what? I didn’t win.
One magician who did was a high school kid from Acton, Massachusetts, named Shin Lim, a half pint in a white suit with a cunning card to mouth—wherein a signed selection appears folded up inside the magician’s mouth. Fortunately, as a physics student, I was accustomed to being bested by Asian kids several years my junior.
But I more than held my own. The IBM always attracts top-notch talent, and 2010 was an especially strong field. There was LA card star Nathan Gibson, a sleight-of-hand prodigy who had lifted seventeen close-up trophies by the age of eighteen. Swedish magician Johan Stahl—whose radical new sleeving system, called “sleeveless sleeving,” allowed him to vanish objects with his cuffs rolled up—had won the SAM nationals earlier that year and was an odds-on favorite. But he’d have to beat twenty-three-year-old Ben Jackson, a tall Texan who’d taken first place at the 2010 World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas four months earlier. There was even a young man who had juggled swords on America’s Got Talent. “I got to the semifinals,” he told me, exposing a mouth full of metal. “America didn’t vote enough for me.”
Each of the twenty-eight competitors in close-up had to perform his or her—there was one her—act three times, each time in a different room. My first two heats went off without incident, but in the third room something terrifying and unexpected happened.
Just as I was about to begin, a tall white-haired man sauntered in and took a seat in the front row. He looked like a basset hound in a navy blazer. I recognized him immediately. It was frost-faced former IBM president Obie O’Brien, the head judge who’d presided over my elimination at the World Championships in Sweden. He was such a big deal that he even had a prize named after him. Each year, the winner of the people’s choice award receives an OBIE, a wooden plaque worth a free registration to the following year’s convention and a coveted invitation to the FFFF.
Seeing him walk into the room, I felt as if a trapdoor had opened up under my feet. Time seemed to slow down. Red lights began flashing in my head. For a moment, I felt completely paralyzed.
Then I remembered Wes’s sage advice—no matter what happens, keep going—and an odd calm came over me. I started my act. Before long, eight minutes were up and the audience was cheering. Several of the judges had smiles on their faces. It was my best performance yet.
At that moment, I knew it didn’t matter if I won or lost. I no longer cared. I’d done what I’d set out to do. As I struck my set and gathered up my props, I looked over at O’Brien and smiled.
And he even smiled back.
SIPPING A V8 ON THE long northeast slope of the flight back home, thirty thousand feet above the Grand Canyon, I thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and how this saying also holds true, perhaps especially so, in cases where the technology in question is the human brain.
Every truly great idea, be it in art or science, is a kind of magic trick. A colleague of physicist Richard Feynman once referred to him as a magician of the highest caliber. “Even after we understand what they have done,” he said of geniuses like Feynman, “the process by which they have done it is completely dark.”
But what many of these great thinkers seem to have in common is a love of games and a belief that we do our best work when we’re fooling around. As Isaac Asimov once put it, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I’ve found it!], but ‘That’s funny.’ ”
Frank Lloyd Wright conceived Fallingwater while playing with toy blocks. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with puzzles and games and tricks. When Feynman found himself in a rut after the Second World War, he realized it was because he’d stopped having fun. “I used to enjoy doing physics,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I used to play with it.” Less than a week later, he was eating at the university cafeteria and he saw someone toss a dinner plate in the air. The peculiar wobble of the plate intrigued him. Shrugging off the skepticism of his peers, he began tooling around with the physics of dishware. Years later, he described this as a major turning point. “There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was,” he wrote. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” Not surprisingly, a similar spirit animated David Bayer and Persi Diaconis when they first began their work on the mathematics of card shuffling. “We started out just playing,” Bayer told me. “We were just amusing ourselves.”
As young children, we learn almost exclusively through play. Why should adulthood be all that different? Once thought of as a static organ, the adult brain turns out to be remarkably plastic. Fresh brain cells sprout from injured tissue. New connections form as our neurons rewire themselves. A recognition of the importance of play, not just during childhood, but well into adulthood, lies at the foundation of the new science of neurobics, or brain fitness, a rapidly growing field that aims to keep a graying population mentally sharp with a daily dose of puzzles and brain teasers. The secret to keeping your mind young, we now know, is to continuously revisit the conditions you experienced as a child, when everything was new and mysterious and you hadn’t yet figured out the rules of the game.
Magic is about re-creating these conditions. It lets us suspend adulthood and retrieve, however fleetingly, that childlike sense of astonishment that was once our resting state but fades as we age.
As fun as it is to fool people, it’s just as fun—more so, even—to be fooled. There’s nothing I enjoy more than seeing a trick and having no clue how it’s done, because it means there’s some new principle at work that I have yet to learn, and behind that, a creative mind at play. This is the feeling of communing with genius—not unlike learning a new concept in physics or listening to a beautiful piece of music.
Being fooled is fun, too, because it’s a controlled way of experiencing a loss of control. Much like a roller coaster or a scary movie, it lets you loosen your grip on reality without actually losing your mind. This is strangely cathartic, and when it’s over, you feel more in control, less afraid. For magicians, watching magic is about chasing this feeling—call it duped delight, the maddening ecstasy of being a layperson again, a novice, if only for a moment.
Just before Vernon died, comedian and amateur magician Dick Cavett asked him if there was anything he wished for. Vernon’s answer, like his magic, was simple.
“I wish somebody could fool me one more time.”
Magic Terminology
AMBITIOUS CARD A classic routine wherein a signed card rises to the top of the deck after being placed in the middle. It was an Ambitious Card effect that fooled Houdini.
ASCANIO SPREAD A method for showing five cards as four.
BACK FINGER CLIP The concealment of an object, usually a card or coin, at the back of the hand, clipped between the index and second fingers.
BACK PALM The concealment of an object at the back of the hand, gripped between the index finger and pinkie.
BLIND SHUFFLE A false shuffle that leaves the order of the cards unchanged.
BOOK TEST A classic of mentalism in which the magician divines a word or phrase randomly selected from a book.
BOTTOM (OR BASE) DEAL A trick deal in which the bottom card is dealt instead of the top card.
BREAK A gap secretly held in the deck to mark the location of one or more cards.
CARD CONTROL Any of a number of sleights for moving a card to a desired position in the deck.
CHARLIER CUT A one-handed cut.
CLASSIC PALM The fundamental concealment in coin magic; the coin is held between the muscles at the base of the thumb and little finger.
CLASSIC PASS The rapid transposition of two halves of a deck. It’s done by pivoting the top half under the bottom with the middle and ring fingers.
CLOSE-UP MAGIC Magic performed at short range, in an intimate setting, with small props.
COLOR CHANGE The visual transformation of one card into another.
COOLER/COLD DECK A presequenced deck of cards secretly switched into play during a game or routine.
CULL A move used to isolate and control individual cards during a shuffle or spread.
CUPS AND BALLS An ancient effect in which three balls transpose, multiply, vanish, and reappear beneath the mouths of three cups. A typical cups-and-balls routine uses three wide-mouthed, stackable cups. The balls vanish and reappear under the mouths of the cups, penetrate the solid bottoms, and at the climax, large objects called jumbo loads are usually produced: lemons, giant balls, live animals. There are hundreds of variations, and most magicians know at least one.
DOUBLE LIFT A sleight for turning over two cards as if they were a single card.
EGG BAG A gimmicked bag used to vanish objects, including but not limited to eggs.
ELMSLEY COUNT A false count used to conceal one or more cards in a packet.
FARO SHUFFLE A shuffle in which the deck is cut exactly in half and the cards are perfectly interwoven.
FLASH An accidental revelation.
FLASH PAPER Sheets of paper, made from nitrocellulose, that flash brightly when ignited and leave no ash.
FLOURISH An embellishment, e.g., a coin roll or card fan.
FORCE A choice controlled by the magician.
GAFF 1. (n.) A gimmick.
2. (adj.) Gimmicked.
HAND MUCKING A method of cheating at cards in which the cards one has been dealt are switched for cards secretly removed from play earlier in the game.
LAP To drop an object into the lap while seated.
L’HOMME MASQUE LOAD A move in which a coin is secretly transfered from one hand to the other by means of a waving motion.
LOAD 1. (n.) An object to be produced. A jumbo load is an especially large object, usually produced as a finale.
2. (v.) To place a load in a desired location by secret means.
MANIPULATION (MANIP) A mix of flourishes, vanishes, and changes usually performed with cards, coins, or balls.
MATRIX/COIN ASSEMBLY An effect wherein four coins placed at the four corners of a mat or cloth magically assemble at a single corner.
MENTALISM A branch of magic that simulates telepathy, telekinesis, and other psychic acts.
MIDDLE DEAL A trick deal in which a card from the middle of the deck is dealt instead of the top card.
OUT An alternative ending to a trick gone awry.
PALM Any of a number of sleights for concealing objects in the hand.
PK (PSYCHOKINESIS) A branch of mentalism that involves psychically bending and moving objects, especially cutlery, keys, watch dials, and coins.
RETENTION PASS A false transfer that exploits an intrinsic lag in the brain’s visual frame rate known as persistence of vision. To perform a retention pass, pinch a coin at its extreme edge between the thumb and first finger of your right hand and place it openly in your left palm without letting go. Begin to close the fingers of the left hand. The instant the coin is out of sight, extend the last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract the coin. The left hand makes a fist while the right casually palms the coin and drops to the side. When done convincingly, the viewer actually sees the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. Magicians call this getting a good burn.
RIFFLE SHUFFLE A common shuffle wherein the cards are cut into two stacks of roughly equal size that are then riffled together.
SECOND DEAL A trick deal in which the second card from the top is dealt instead of the top card.
SPIRIT HAND A fake hand used as cover for behind-the-scenes work.
SPREAD PASS A move for transposing the two halves of a deck in the act of spreading the cards.
STACK A prearranged deck of cards.
STAGE MAGIC Magic that typically involves large illusions and props performed in a theater.
STOOGE An audience member who is in league with the magician.
STREET MAGIC A style of close-up magic popularized by David Blaine in which the magician wows random spectators in public.
SUBTLETY/ACQUITMENT A false display, e.g., showing the hands as empty while palming a coin or card.
SWAMI GIMMICK A secret writing implement used to simulate precognition.
TALKING Unwanted noisemaking by props, especially coins.
TENKAI PALM A palm in which a coin or card is held parallel to the floor against the palm by the curled tip of the thumb.
THUMB PALM A palm in which a coin is clipped edgewise in the fork of the thumb.
THUMB TIP A fake thumb used to conceal small objects.
TOPIT A hidden pouch sewn into the lining of a coat.
TOSSED-OUT DECK A classic of mental magic wherein the magician divines the names of several cards selected from a deck that has been tossed out in the audience.
XCM (EXTREME CARD MANIPULATION) A form of modern card artistry characterized by exotic and technically demanding flourishes. XCM is often likened to juggling with a deck of cards.
ZARROW SHUFFLE A blind on-the-table riffle shuffle.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible had a number of outstanding magicians not been willing to share their insights and expertise with me—and for that I will be forever grateful. Wesley James taught me more about magic, and life, than I ever thought I could learn in a pizzeria. Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger helped open my eyes to the rigors of the craft. Richard Turner was a true gentleman and more than generous with his time. Armando Lucero and Paul Vigil motivated me to seek out elegance and beauty in the art. Joshua Jay shared his extensive knowledge with me on numerous occasions. Juan Tamariz was a constant source of inspiration who fooled me every time. Teller, Simon Lovell, Ken Schwabe, David Roth, Bob Friedhoffer, John Born, Asi Wind, Benzi Train, Cheng Lin, Jack Diamond, Eric Decamps, Doug Edwards, Ricky Smith, Max Maven, Magick Balay, Derrick Chung, Jonathan Hidalgo, Tony Chang, Michael Feldman, and George Silverman all lent a hand at various stages in the researching and writing of this book.
I am indebted to the many scientists with whom I communicated and/or collaborated. I am especially grateful to my coresearchers at the New School for Social Research—Arien Mack, Clarissa Slesar, Jason Clarke, and Muge Erol—who let me use their facilities and helped me design the watch-stealing experiment; and to Dave Bayer at Columbia for all the time he spent teaching me about card shuffling. The Columbia University Physics department, meanwhile, deserves a medal for putting up with my antics. Thanks also to Joshua Foer, for teaching me his amazing memory techniques, and to Nava Chitrik for her mathematical insights and programming expertise.
I am deeply grateful to my editor, Tim Duggan, for his expert guidance, patience, and encouragement; to Emily Cunningham, for her many helpful suggestions; to Jenna Dolan, who skillfully copyedited the manuscript; to Katherine Beitner and Leah Wasielewski, for their marketing and publicity skills; and to everyone else at HarperCollins for their hard work on behalf of this book.
