Magic Is Dead, page 2
But, over the years, poker became a way for my mother and me to bond; amid the Texas hold ’em boom of the mid-aughts, I myself began to play competitively. We’d play a lot: pickup games, legitimate tournaments, whatever we could find. We’d try to help each other get better. She’d stand outside during breaks, a cigarette perched between her fingers, and pick at a cuticle with the long, sharpened tip of her thumbnail, thinking about the lies she told wrong and how she could hone her deceptions once she returned to the table. I’d stand outside with her during those moments and think, That’s my mother. And I’d admire her for being so true with herself, with what she hoped to get out of this game, of deceiving those sitting across from her at the card table. Poker became our time together—just a mother and son becoming a couple of liars for the weekend.
She’d always want to play, all throughout my twenties. So I was excited to sit down at a game up in New Hampshire, if not to win some money then just to be with her for a day. I waited for her outside the office building, eating lunch at a picnic table on the lawn, and watched the neighbor’s dog chase a family of geese. She pulled up in her junky little Toyota Camry and stepped out. I walked over and gave her a hug. She smiled. We had time before the tournament started, so I took her through the back entrance into the office building. We climbed the stairs, cut right, and walked over to my room.
“I changed the locks,” I told her, taking out my keys, “just in case someone from the building comes. That’ll at least buy me some time to figure something out.” I opened the door. “But it’s not bad, right?”
“Holy shit, Ian!” she exclaimed, laughing. “This is actually really nice! Hell, I’d live here!”
“Yeah, I mean, the air mattress deflates during the night,” I said, pushing my hand into the squishy plastic bed, “but it’s not that bad. That’s where I work,” I continued, pointing to my desk, which sat in front of the window facing the bay. “It’s actually been really nice up here. And there’s central air-conditioning.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re working things out,” she said, touching my arm and smiling. “I knew you would.”
We walked back down to the car and drove to the poker room. Poker is legal in New Hampshire, so the space felt like a real casino. A manager checked your ID, signed you up for the tournament, gave you a seat assignment, and exchanged your cash for chips. Dealers wore uniforms, and the tables were laced in felt, ringed in padded leather, and dotted with cupholders. Waitresses scuttled about, taking drink orders, and the sound of tossed chips and shuffling decks filled the room. The tournament was in the back, and forty players had signed up. By chance, my mother and I were assigned to the same table. We took our seats and waited for the game to begin.
The first hour was fairly slow. Nothing big came my way, and my mother played only one hand (she folded before having to match another player’s bet). Over the next hour, I played a series of hands, but got beat and lost most of my chips. My mother played slow, letting the other players (all middle-aged men) conclude that she was just a table tourist. And then, on one hand, she raised. A guy at the other end of the table, potbellied with a five o’clock shadow and a grimy T-shirt, shot her a look, curled his lip, and threw in his chips. They continued back and forth the entire hand—she’d bet into him, he’d call her bet, and the next card was dealt. On the last round of betting, he went over the top with a huge raise—all in, everything he had. She peeked at her cards, glanced over at me, and matched his raise. The dealer called for them to turn over their cards. She’d had a straight the entire time, crushing his two pair. Her lips peeled back, revealing a sly grin. She wrapped her arms around the sea of chips and pulled them to her chest. The guy grunted, got up, stuffed a cigarette into his mouth, and walked toward the exit.
I got busted out shortly thereafter, and my mother played for a few more hours. She got beat a few times and, eventually, got knocked out. She grabbed her purse, shrugged her shoulders, and we walked out into the parking lot. We got back into the car, stewed in our defeat for a couple of minutes, and drove toward the center of town, back to the office building. It was a sunny day, clear and bright, and a warm breeze blew in through the windows. My mother sparked a cigarette.
“How are the stories going, honey?” she asked, taking a drag.
“Going really well, actually,” I said. “I just finished the Shaq piece, so that should be published soon.”
“I’m really excited to read that one. You were such a big fan of his when you were a kid. Do you remember when Dad took you to get his autograph?” She smiled.
“Yeah, it was such a trip to be around him. But I just found something else that I’m thinking about.”
“Another sports story?”
“No. It’s kind of weird, but I’ve been talking with this guy—he’s a magician.”
“A magician?” she said, laughing.
“I know, pretty random, but he doesn’t look like a magician. His name is Chris Ramsay. I found him on Instagram—he’s got sixty thousand followers. He has this super slick style—beard, tattoos, backward hat, this whole cool, streetwear vibe. It’s hard to explain, but he also has a YouTube channel with a bunch of performances, and he’s insanely good.”
“So, what are you going to do? You think it’ll turn into something?”
“I don’t know, but he’s part of this entirely new generation of magicians. No one knows much about these guys in the mainstream media. Could be a cool story—get me out of this rut, you know?” We pulled into the parking lot of the office building. She stopped and threw the car into park.
“You’ve never been someone to turn down an adventure,” she said. “You get that from me.”
“Yeah, he mentioned something about a magic convention in England in the next couple of months. He said I should go with him.”
She looked at me. “Well, you’re going to go, right?”
2
Blackpool Problems
The alley was narrow and dark. A sharp wind cut down its center. Chris Ramsay thrust his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and, trudging through the darkness, his leather boots licked the pavement. A sturdy six foot three, he wore a full beard under ice-blue eyes, and tattoos spilled onto his wrists from beneath the sleeves of his crew-neck sweatshirt. I pulled my jacket’s zipper to my chin and walked behind him toward our rendezvous point.
We stopped in front of a bar. “Dude,” he said, pointing to the sign above the door, its letters hung in the wash of a dingy yellow light. The Liars’ Club. He smiled. “This must be the place.” We entered and walked down the stairs.
Although Canadian (who can easily pass as an American), Ramsay was born in Herbolzheim, Germany, a small town in the southwestern nook of the country, a stone’s throw away from France. His father was in the military, and they moved around a lot: Germany to Ontario, then back to Germany, back to Ontario, Germany again, New Brunswick, Quebec City, Montreal. He attended more than a dozen schools throughout his childhood, always the new kid, the perpetual outcast. The language barrier didn’t help, either. Although he spoke German, French, and English, his accents were always off. He was bullied a lot but did his best to win over kids in class. He had a leg up on them: he knew a few cool magic tricks.
Ramsay first fell in love with magic when his grandfather showed him a simple vanishing-coin trick. Captivated, he began to perform basic effects to classmates at school. He’d gather kids around his desk and pull out a napkin and a penny. He’d place the penny on top of the napkin, fold it up like an envelope, and hold it in his hands. Then he’d grab two corners of the napkin and quickly unfurl the paper. The penny had disappeared.
The penny was coated in soap, which acts like an adhesive, and when he unflapped the napkin, the penny merely stuck to its backside, unseen by the spectator. “I’d go to school with napkins and pennies and chunks of soap in my pocket,” Ramsay told me, laughing. Although a dumb trick, the psychological effect it had on him was profound. “Seeing your peers be impressed by you for the first time created an incredible sense of confidence that I never felt before, especially as a kid coming into new schools all the time,” he told me. At that age, however, magic was just something Ramsay did to fit in. He didn’t think it could become a job or have a prominent role in his future. To him, it was a means of survival amid a tumultuous, jackknifed upbringing.
After high school, Ramsay moved to Quebec City, 160 miles northeast of Montreal, and began selling drugs—all types of drugs, as long as he and his crew were making money. It was a bad crowd and a dangerous lifestyle, but it paid the bills. Looking back on it now, Ramsay thinks his life of crime as a young adult was an extension of the compulsive shoplifting he did as a child. The thrill of stealing or switching price tags on expensive items also mirrored the euphoria he felt while performing magic. But, by age twenty-one, three years into the drug-dealing game, he had had enough. “One night, I called my mom at three in the morning and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’” She drove the three hours from Montreal to Quebec City and brought him home.
Starting from scratch, Ramsay got a job tending bar in downtown Montreal. That’s when he started getting serious about magic. “You are dealing with a place that has low light and loud music. I had power, too, being behind the bar. I had all the key ingredients to help cultivate my magic,” he told me. “It was a great way to get extra tips, too.”
Jay, a regular at the bar, would come in every Friday night and put down a wager: If Chris could fool him three times, he would give him a $50 tip—a lot of cash, considering that $100 was the normal bounty for a shift. Every week, the same thing: $50 for three tricks. But Ramsay quickly began to run out of material. So, over the next few years, he devoured as much instructional content as he could and honed his skills.
After getting sick of the bar scene, he eventually landed a job at a regional tile and marble company and was soon promoted to one of their wholesaler’s public relations teams because of his charismatic personality. He always did a little magic when meeting with clients, who in turn hired him to gig at their private events. But his dream was always to become a respected member of the magic industry—inventing new effects and routines, consulting for other magicians, pushing magic forward as an art form—and hopefully becoming a community centerpiece.
We had talked a lot about his upbringing and love for magic, and his rise to fame in the time since, but he said I needed to see the scene myself. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” he told me one day in late summer, while I was still living in the office building in New Hampshire, just before my mother visited me. “I think it’d be a good idea if you came to Blackpool, England, with me in February. You need to meet Madison and Laura.”
With the added encouragement from my mother, I booked a flight. It was my chance at something big. What did I have to lose?
Laura London and Daniel Madison waited for us in the back of the bar, huddled around a small table, nursing a round of drinks. A petite woman in her thirties, Laura beamed a large smile framed by scarlet lips. Her hair—an asymmetrical crimson bob—veiled sneaky, compact eyes. She wore a formfitting black dress, leather-fronted, with velour sleeves dotted in a midnight-purple leopard print, equal parts elegant and over-the-top panache.
Madison was decked out in all black, and the wide-cut collar of his T-shirt revealed tattoos running underneath his collarbones. They carried over onto his arms and down to his hands, with the faces of his knuckles and the sides of his fingers also scrawled in ink. His black hair was messy, and his thick eyebrows pinched down toward his nose. He held a deck of playing cards and, just before greeting Ramsay, put them into his back pocket.
“It’s been too long, my friend,” Madison said, resting his hand on Ramsay’s shoulder. Then he turned to me and said, “Ian, hey. It’s great to meet you. We’ve heard a lot about you.” He reached out and shook my hand.
“It’s great to be here,” I replied, kind of awkwardly. It took me off guard that Ramsay had been speaking to them about me. I was just a curious writer. What could’ve prompted them to talk among themselves and agree to meet with me? Laura stood behind him, a smile creeping across her cheek under her jagged bangs. We ordered a round of whiskey, clinked glasses, and drank up.
This meeting was, in fact, a secret.
Just after I showed up in Blackpool, Ramsay informed me, to my great excitement, that Daniel Madison and Laura London had agreed to meet with me. “They’re down in Manchester,” he said. “We can’t tell anyone that we are going to go see them, but we should leave soon.” Despite being two of the most well-known magicians in England, Madison and Laura keep much of their daily lives concealed from the public, including when they are out having drinks or meeting old friends. It seemed strange to me—why not just come to Blackpool and hang out?—but Ramsay explained that their social reservations were part of their “brand,” whatever that meant. So, we made the hourlong drive south, and after arriving in the city center, we turned down a tiny side street, texted Madison to make sure we were in the right spot, and made our way to the bar.
After getting our drinks, Madison and Ramsay each took out a deck of cards and began doing sleight-of-hand maneuvers: a series of complicated and visually stunning shuffles, hiding cards in their hands by palming them, secretly maneuvering cards from one spot in the deck to another. They only got to see each other a few times a year and were clearly excited to show each other some new moves. I watched as the cards fluttered between their fingertips, moving effortlessly around one another, flourishing, nearly escaping their grip. It was not only an incredible display of dexterity, as if each finger had a mind of its own, but of dedication. I later learned that it takes years to handle a deck of cards with such grace.
Within the array of tattoos blanketing all of their hands, I could make out that each had a tattoo in the same place, a card symbol on the insides of their middle fingers—the Four of Spades for Ramsay, the Nine of Clubs for Madison. Laura had the King of Diamonds.
After another round of drinks, we all went outside to smoke, and Laura pulled a deck of cards from her purse. The backs were cherry colored, similar to her hair, and I started to sense that this was all part of her shtick, her brand.
“Pick a card,” she told me, fanning the deck. I pulled out the ten of spades. She handed me a marker and told me to sign it.
“There’s no other card like this card because it has your name on it, right?”
I nodded.
“If I take the ten and I place it in the middle, would you be amazed if I made it jump from there”—she touched the card, its edge protruding from the deck—“to there?” she asked, moving her finger to the top of the deck.
I nodded again. She pushed the card fully into the middle, shook the pack, picked up the top card, and turned it over. It wasn’t my card. She laughed. “I can’t do that. I wish I could! But maybe you can help me.”
She turned the top card back over. “Just click your fingers for me.”
I snapped my fingers. She turned over the top card. It was the ten of spades, complete with my signature. “Oh, wow. You’re good,” she said. She then took my card and placed it back into the middle and had me push the card in until it was flush with the rest of the deck. She asked that I snap my fingers again. Snap.
She turned over the top card. There it was: the ten of spades.
“Ah, come on!” I exclaimed.
“Now,” she said, “I am a sleight-of-hand artist. And because of that I am able to control this card.” She spun my ten of spades on the tip of her middle finger like a basketball. “I’ll give you an example. If I flick through the cards, I can count very quickly. So, if I do this”—she dragged her thumb along the corner of the deck and stopped halfway through—“this is the twenty-sixth card, which makes your card”—she slid it into the deck—“in twenty-seventh position. Now I know exactly where your card is. I can control it and place it wherever I like.”
She cut the deck twice, shuffled it, and cut it again. “And the reason I can shuffle these like this is because your card is no longer inside the deck.” She fanned the cards out, faceup, in front of me. The ten of spades was gone. “So, if your card’s not here, where is it?”
Laura took a step to her right and looked down at the pavement. Three feet behind her, tucked within a shadow that ran alongside the alley’s brick wall, lay the deck’s box. She crouched down and picked it up, a grin creeping from behind her jagged bangs—that same sly smirk from when I first walked into the bar. She stood and gave the box a shake. Something inside knocked around.
She handed it to me. I opened it and pulled out a card that had been folded twice. I flattened it out. In my hand rested the ten of spades, with my name, in black ink, on its face. I froze, the card still faceup in my hand. I was at a loss for words. What just happened?
Laura broke the silence, whispering, with that grin still spread across her face, “That’s yours to keep.” I slid the card into my front pocket. We stood out in the cold for a little longer before parting ways. “We’ll be in touch,” Madison said.
With that, Ramsay and I headed back to Blackpool. We sat in silence for most of the way, tired from a day of traveling, my mind still spinning from Laura’s routine. The conflict that arises after seeing such a mind-blowing magic trick sat in my gut like a rock. On one hand, I wanted to know the method—to understand how I had been so thoroughly deceived. But, on the other hand, I loved the feeling of being tricked by someone so supremely talented. It’s a strangely delicious pill to swallow: I enjoyed being the fool. It was almost liberating.
As I dropped Ramsay off and watched him saunter toward the entrance of his hotel, I couldn’t help but feel that I had fallen in with a gang of thieves or a touring rock band—not a group of magicians. And these weren’t like any magicians I had seen before. They seemed to be plotting something, in cahoots—the tattoos on their fingers, each of a different playing card, must’ve had something to do with it. Ramsay climbed the stairs to his hotel, turned back, and flashed a tiny smile before going inside.
