Magic Is Dead, page 22
Clusters of round tables wrapped in white tablecloths fill the main floor, flanked on one side by a long bar and, on the other, leather booths. The waitstaff wears black tie and the hostesses, glittery gowns. A massive chandelier bursts from the ceiling in a sea of pleated red cloth. A navy curtain, crusted in gold-tinted gems, anchors the rear of the stage and two curved staircases fall down its sides from the balcony and into the main dining area. French music filled the room as I entered, all walking bass lines and female vocals. The entire space was awash in a blue-and-red glow, with candles centered on each table. The well-dressed crowd filed in and took their seats.
Laura scurried into the back room to change into her performance attire. Patrons eat dinner before the stage show begins, and Laura performs tableside magic between courses, her aim to get guests warmed up for the evening’s main attraction. She emerged in a low-cut, floor-length black dress with rhinestones running along the bustline. She walked around, greeted the waitstaff, sat down at a nearby table, and pulled a deck of cards from her purse. Patrons began to take their seats. She waited anxiously to begin.
Laura pounced after guests finished their first course. Her tableside routine is just under five minutes and fits snugly within the window between salad and entrée. Some of the waiters came by and shared insights about the types of guests at their tables. Acting like her sociological spies, the waiters know Laura tries to hit the liveliest tables first to incite a large reaction that can be seen by the whole room. If Laura’s performance is a big hit, it makes the entire dining experience more memorable, and the waitstaff was there to help create that magical aura. I followed her as she bounded from table to table, repeating her card-based routine. She stopped at a table of young women, probably in their early twenties, who were celebrating a birthday. They were high-energy, downing flutes of champagne, and were immediately intrigued by Laura’s dress and off-kilter haircut.
She began with her version of Dai Vernon’s Ambitious Card routine. A signed card, after being put in the middle numerous times, keeps magically appearing, with a snap of her fingers, back at the top of the deck. She spoke quickly as she performed, and her patter had a tinge of self-deprecating humor, which is a great screen for misdirection.* She also performed a two-card transposition, a trick that I can also do. Laura had one of the girls sign a card, cradle it in her palm, and press her free hand down on top of it. After it was secured, Laura signed a card of her own. She held it out in front of her, gave it a gentle wave, and turned it over. She now held the girl’s card, scratched in her signature. “Wait, if I have the eight of spades—your card—where is mine?” The girl opened her hands and turned it over. It was Laura’s card, her signature scrawled on its face. The girls didn’t shout or scream. They just stared at one another. One girl mouthed the words What the fuck to her friend, followed by a long drink of champagne.
I recognized the third phase of Laura’s routine. She took back the girl’s signed card, put it into the deck, and began to shuffle. “But it doesn’t really matter how much I shuffle, because your card has already disappeared,” Laura said. Laura glanced over at me and winked. She knew I was following along. It was the same trick she performed to me in that dark alleyway outside of Blackpool. “That box has been sitting at the center of the table the entire time,” Laura said, picking it up. She shook it. Something knocked around inside. Laura lifted the flap, pulled out a folded card, and handed it to the girl. She opened it and screamed. The entire table began clapping.
Guests finished their dinner and we sat down to watch the stage show. Laura’s friends came and joined us, a crew of fellow performance artists: singers, actors, and dancers, most of whom were women. The stage show, titled The Seven Deadly Sins, was hosted by a foul-mouthed, crude-humored gay man who tortured members of the audience with his cutting wit and performed in a series of sin-themed musical skits full of acrobats, sword swallowers, and fire breathers. At the end of the show, the host announced that Laura would be performing more magic downstairs in the VIP bar.
As guests shuffled to the bar’s entrance, Laura quickly changed into more casual attire, hooked me by the arm, and led me downstairs. The room was cramped, warped by neon lights and thumping bass. Laura bounced from guest to guest, several of whom she had performed for upstairs during dinner. She adjusted her effects, focusing more on one-off visual tricks rather than tiered narrative routines—it was loud and crowded.
She approached a fashionable couple and signaled to the deck in her hands. They both nodded excitedly. She fanned the deck, the universal gesture to choose a card. The couple picked one, took a peek, and placed it back into the center of the deck. Laura removed a small piece of paper from her pocket. She placed it gently on top of the deck and then leaned into the couple and asked if they had a coin. The man pulled one from his pocket, and Laura gestured for him to place it on top the piece of paper, at the deck’s center. She took a lighter from her pocket and flicked the flame to life. A grin spread across her face. She brought the flame closer and closer to the piece of paper, which ignited in a burst of light, engulfing the coin. When the smoke cleared, a hole appeared in the deck, running from the top to the middle. The coin sat at the bottom of the hole, as if melting a canal through the deck. It rested on a card midway down. Laura spread the cards and gestured for the couple to remove the card on which the coin stopped. The couple glanced at each other in disbelief and slowly went for the card. They flipped it over and screamed. The man threw up his arms and his drink spilled all over his date’s dress. She didn’t seem to notice.
Laura continued with the tricks in the basement. I stood by her side, waiting for the reveal, for the audience’s reactions. The dim lighting made it hard to see, but if she held her hands still for a moment, you could make out a red tattoo on the inside of her finger—a clue of the life she leads outside of this place, in the shadows of magic, a life she has built for herself.
We took the train home together. It was late, and we sat in silence most of the way. When we came to my stop, Laura put her hand on top of mine and said, “I’m so glad you came, so glad, Ian. Let’s get dinner tomorrow, yeah? I have some things to do during the day, but I’m free after that.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, and stepped off the train.
The next day, I met Laura at a restaurant near her apartment. A little pub, with wooden booths and Union Jack flags hanging from the ceiling, it served typical English fare: Scotch eggs, chicken liver, fish and chips. A soccer match blasted from the TV hanging above the bar, and small pods of men clutched pints of beer and watched the game. We checked in with the hostess and made our way out to the rear patio, where it was quiet. The sun had just started to set, and lights strung overhead popped on. The waitress took our order and brought us a round of drinks.
“So, Ian, tell me, did you always want to be a writer?” Laura asked.
“No,” I said, matter-of-factly. “Growing up, my dad was a tile man—houses, supermarkets. He was really talented. He always talked about blue-collar jobs: building things, and he wanted me to be an engineer, or something along those lines. When I was younger, I was always really good at math, so it was an easy path for me. I loved fixing things, solving problems. And then, two weeks before my fourteenth birthday, my dad died. He literally came home from work on a Saturday, had a stroke, and died a couple of days later.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, I was always really close with him, and I had always seen myself becoming a version of him. I looked up to him. But after he passed away, I didn’t really have a tangible connection to that anymore. So, in high school, I kind of shifted my view on the world a little bit. When I was sixteen, I took a creative writing class, and that’s when I realized I wanted to be a writer. In college, I worked for one of my school’s professors, and, my first day, I walked in and he told me I had to start writing for the school’s newspaper. So, I started writing articles, and I fell in love with it. The job of a journalist is to go out and experience things, however crazy or mundane they may be, and then translate those experiences to the reader. And that, to me, was the most fascinating job in the world.”
“And your mom? How did she cope?”
“This was her soul mate, right? When she graduated high school, she got in an RV and toured the U.S. She played pool—and was a really good poker player. She met my father and they fell in love and got married and when she became a mother, she put that kind of life aside, to be the caretaker, a life that required self-sacrifice. They worked their way up, built their dream house, the whole thing. And then he passed away. My mom needed to find a way to find herself again, a way to feel like she was doing something solely for herself. So, she started playing poker again, and she’s been playing continuously for fifteen years now. We play together a lot, actually. And, I’ve realized, my mother has kind of a similar life as you, in some ways—the caretaker, this maternity figure to all the other people, who is also still trying to achieve her dreams.”
“Oh, wow—poker? That’s amazing. And what a great story, for you to, almost unintentionally, fall into this journey with magic, where you were already fascinated with something similiar, sort of because of your mum. That’s really great. I kind of see more now why you want to do this. It makes more sense. It’s easy to say, Oh, I met these guys and it was fucking great and I want to write about them, but this, now, has a real nice poetry about it. It seems it has come full circle.”
“The one thing that I have come to realize, as I’ve gotten to know everyone better,” I said, “is that everyone carries a little bit of deception around with them their entire lives.”
“Find me a man or a woman who has no secrets.”
“Exactly.”
“She could forget about everything else.”
“Yes, exactly, just forget about all the shit.”
“She sounds like an incredible woman. And she must be so proud of you.”
20
Fooling Bourdain
My trick was evolving, and fast. I worked on it nonstop. It became more refined in its concept, more streamlined in its presentation, and more deceptive in its reveal. It was almost ready to pitch to a big retailer as a product that could be sold online and performed by other magicians. I was so close.
What had started as a basic find-your-card trick morphed into a multilayered, plot-driven routine. Throughout spring and summer, I thought deeply about what I wanted the trick to do—what kind of experience I wanted to share with the spectator. I tinkered with structure and style, theme and topic, and finally came away with a more detailed sketch of what I wanted to create. For one, I wanted to move away from the rudimentary find-your-card principle. There were so many more rich and nuanced options out there that could elevate mine from a one-dimensional trick to a profound performance.
Magic tricks can be broken down into seven main themes: appearance, where something is produced from nothing; vanishing, where something disappears; transposition, where something moves from one place to another; restoration, where an object is destroyed and subsequently brought back to its original state; transformation, where an object changes from one thing into another; telekinesis, where something floats or moves on its own; or stunts, like the bullet catch or a Houdini-style escape. Some of my favorite tricks fell under the transposition theme. I loved when an object instantly appeared somewhere in which it was not originally placed.
So, I started there, and included a facet that, at the onset, was mandatory: information, specific to the spectator, that is freely chosen. But, again, my effect’s original version had a flaw. If I was going to, say, use someone’s birthday or address or phone number to make the trick work, I would need to be able to research them before performing the effect. That heavily diminished its spontaneity. I wanted to be able to perform the trick to anyone, anytime, and in any situation. Moreover, I needed a specific piece of spectator information that could also create a plot line. This would give the effect a deeper sense of purpose to the person on which it was being performed.
A best-friend plot, I thought. Combined with a transposition ending. That’s perfect!
The trick’s theoretical foundation became this: A spectator writes the name of their best friend on a Joker or blank card without me seeing it, and places it in a safe location, like in the box or their wallet. They then choose a random card from the deck (let’s say the jack of hearts), memorize it, and put it back into the stack. The cards are shuffled. Their chosen card is then found using their best friend’s name, spelled out in some way, with each letter of the name represented by a single card—a nice little tension builder for the climax. But when the card is revealed, it’s not their chosen card at all. It’s the card with their best friend’s name on it. Then they open the box. Tucked inside is the card they picked from the deck, in this case the jack of hearts.
I thought the concept was intriguing. I loved the fact that the spectator’s friend became the key to me “finding” the card, and that there was also a twist at the ending. The spectator thinks the trick is centered on finding a chosen card using a bit of hidden information, but the opposite becomes true: it’s a transposition. Moreover, it seemed original. I wouldn’t be ripping anyone off. It looked like I had devised an effect that was completely fresh. It was all mine. So, I developed an idea that I knew, at least on its face, had some merit. Now, how the hell could I make the trick work? I wanted desperately to feel legitimate among the magicians who had let me into their world, that I wasn’t taking their acceptance lightly, and the pressure was on to figure out this trick.
It goes without saying that one of the benefits of being in the52 is that I had access to the world’s best minds in magic. My effect had a series of problems that needed to be engineered—a gauntlet of locked doors for which I needed to find a set of keys. First, I needed to figure out how to switch the best-friend card with the card that would subsequently be chosen.* So: what would be the most deceptive way to make the switch? I needed someone who knew moves. I called Daniel Madison.
We went through the trick’s beginnings step by step. The small, in-between moments typically reveal opportunities in which to pull off a sleight, so it’s crucial to intimately understand every step of the trick in order to dig in and insert a deceptive method. “So, they sign the card,” Madison said. “Is your back turned while they do it? Do they hand it back to you? Where is the box during all of this? Are you sitting down at a table? Standing up at a bar?” I hadn’t thought of all these contextual details. Even the smallest things, it seemed, were crucial when it came to inventing a trick from scratch. We settled on this: I would turn my back while the spectator wrote on the card, and then I would instruct them to place it facedown on the table, or bar, or whatever surface was nearby, when they were done.
I’d then turn around, pick it up, and explain that their best friend could come into play later on, but for now we should put them in a safe place—like in the box. As I reach for the box, I would execute a top-change.* A top-change is a move where the card in the hand is seamlessly swapped out with the card on top of the deck. The duplicate of the card they will choose in phase two of the effect would be on top—I’d figure out a way, in phase two, to force them to choose this specific card—and, after the move, it would now go into the box, with the signed card taking its place on top of the deck. They would then think that the signed card is in the box, but because of the top-change, it would be the duplicate of the card they would then “freely choose.” But, despite the sleight, Madison told me, you want to make sure the spectator still feels like they are in control. To accomplish this, I’d grab the box, place it in front of the spectator, and ask them to open it. They’d see it was empty and would be holding it while I slowly place their “signed card” into the box. No funny business, right? They’d set it off to the side for the time being. Now phase two could begin.
Ramsay came to New York City over the summer to film a few YouTube videos. On this trip, he scheduled a public meet-up for fans at Tannen’s, the magic shop in Manhattan. Dozens of kids packed into the little shop, eager to meet their idol, get a photograph, and maybe even show Ramsay a few tricks. I filmed the entire event for him, standing on my tiptoes, holding the camera above the crowd. After a while, I took a break, stood off to the side, and gave my arm a rest. A young kid, barely a teenager, came up to me, holding a playing card and a Sharpie. “Will you sign a card for me?” he asked. “Sure, man, of course,” I replied, taking the marker. When he turned the card over and handed it to me I saw that it was the two of clubs.
Xavior came to Tannen’s as well, and after the event we headed back to my apartment. I told the guys that Madison had helped me with the first phase of my trick, but now I was kind of stuck. A bigger problem presented itself: I found a way to secretly get the signed card on the top of the deck, and the duplicate in the box, but in order for the trick to continue I needed to figure out two things: a way to force the spectator to choose the duplicate card, and a way to see the name written by the spectator on the blank card. We sat around my place and brainstormed.
There are numerous ways to secretly catch a glimpse at a card, but I needed to see the whole thing in order to read the name written, not just an index tucked up in the corner. This made things much more difficult. We pondered the issue. Not only did we need to find a way to peek an entire card, but it also had to be a justified movement. Anything out of the ordinary would arouse suspicion.
“Wait,” Xavior said. “What if you had a short card?”
“Yes!” Ramsay exclaimed, slapping his hands together. “You could peek the signed card and force the other card on them at the same time.”
I sat there in silence. “What’s a short card?” I asked. They both burst out laughing. Although I had come a long way in the past two years, there was still a lot I didn’t know about magic, or what methods could make a trick work, but, despite their poking fun at me, I felt proud that they continued to share their expert advice.
