Magic Is Dead, page 27
“Okay, great,” I said, taking out my marker. The blank card was already removed from the deck and on the table in front of us. “So, everyone has a best friend, right? Someone they can count on, someone who will always be there for them, someone that, if needed, would always come to lend a hand, yeah?” They both nodded in agreement.
“Okay, so, what I want you to do is think of this person. Picture this person in your mind. And I want you to write down their first name, here, on this blank card. But I don’t want you to tell me who it is, or show me the card, and I am going to turn around while you do it and when you’re done just place the card facedown on the table. Got it?” The couple nodded, and I turned around.
“Okay, we’re done!” the girl called out, excitedly.
“Done? You sure? I don’t want to see,” I said, turning back around with a dramatically slow twirl. The man stood with his arms folded, the girl fidgeted with the necklace slung around her neck, both of them eager to see what I had in store, at where this was going. The sea of people surrounding us, the entire casino, seemed to go fuzzy and quiet. Even the camera, pointed at us, faded off. It was just the three of us in this moment.
“Okay, great. So, we have your best friend, here, on this card,” I said, looking up at the man while grabbing the card off the table, still facedown.
“And they may come back to help you a bit later, but for now we should put them in a safe place. So, can you . . .”
I reached over and grabbed the box, put it in front of them, and placed the deck down, now holding only their signed card.
“Open the box for me. Yup, make sure it’s empty. Now, what we’ll do . . .”
I slowly brought the card toward the box.
“. . . is put your best friend in the box. Close it up for me and, ah, place it wherever you’d like.” He went for the table’s far end. “Yeah, over there is fine.”
I grabbed the deck off the table.
“Now I’m going to ask you to pick a card. You’re going to have to remember this card. You think you can handle that?”
The couple nodded.
“So just tell me to stop wherever you’d like,” I said, dribbling the cards into my left hand.
“Stop!” they called out, nearly in unison.
“Right there?” I asked, eyebrow raised. They nodded.
“Okay, take your card,” I continued, placing the deck on the table while they looked at the card.
“Now,” I said, “put the card somewhere in the middle. Anywhere you’d like.”
The guy gave his girlfriend the card and she placed it into the middle of the deck. Then she squared up the cards with her fingertips, its edges smooth.
“Perfect. Now,” I said, grabbing the deck, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. Magicians are really good at estimation, so when I saw you put your card into the deck . . .”
I lifted it up, gesturing to it.
“. . . I guessed that your card was maybe halfway down, twenty-five or twenty-six from the top. So now, I really want to mix up the cards,” I continued, beginning to shuffle.
“Your card is now somewhere in the deck,” I said. “But, honestly—ah, man—I don’t think I can find it. . . .”
I paused for dramatic effect.
“But I think you can.”
Then I pinched the deck between thumb and forefinger, like a delicate stone, and handed it back to the man.
“And I think your best friend can help you,” I added, gesturing to the box, which sat at the other end of the table.
“So, what I want you to do is think of your best friend, and I want you to spell his or her name, one card for each letter.” He placed one card from the top of the deck on the table for each letter in the name. One. Two. Three—six in total.
“Okay, so your best friend,” I said, resting my hand atop the cards on the table, “got you to this card,” I continued, pointing to the top card of the deck, still resting in his hand. “I want you to place this card into my hand, facedown.”
And he did. A single card rested in the palm of my left hand. I held it gently, like a baby bird. I looked over at Lloyd, who steadied the camera on me. Behind him, I saw that the entire room was now watching me perform. Everyone stood fixated on my hand, ready for the reveal. I looked back at my spectators. Their faces were nearly cast in stone, eagerly awaiting what I was going to do next.
I had so thoroughly layered the trick that, by now, it’s likely they didn’t even recall me putting their signed card into the box. It was so long ago: misdirection by time.*
“So, if your best friend helped you, if your best friend came to your aid, this should be your card.” I paused, glanced down at the card, took a peek, and looked back up at the couple. “The queen of spades?” I asked. They gasped and looked at each other.
“Yes!” they said.
“Well,” I started, leaning forward, hovering the card just over the box, “next time you see Robert”—a gentle shake of the card, turning it over—“you should say thank you.”* When they saw that I was holding not the queen but the signed card, they gasped.
“What. The. Fuck,” the girl said, slapping her hand to her forehead.
“Wait,” I said, “if the signed card is here . . . what’s in the box?” The guy grabbed the box, opened it, and pulled out the queen of spades. Applause floated over from the crowd, carrying through the room. Off in the distance, Ramsay smiled at me and raised his glass in the air.
We filmed two more performances, each of them equally flawless in their execution, the reactions enthusiastic and genuine. I even fooled a magician with the trick. After we finished, everyone took turns giving me hugs and hoots of congratulations. Ramsay wrapped his arms around me and said, “I am so proud of you, bud—from journalist to a real magician!”
We hung around the bar for a little while longer and then made our way to the house of Chris Kenner, David Copperfield’s executive producer. He lives just outside of town and Chris and his wife, Nicole, have a blowout party every year during Magic Live. Everyone is invited.
Someone was handing out freshly grilled burgers and cold beers, and crowds of people took turns going through Kenner’s movie memorabilia collection, chock-full of mementos from Hollywood classics like Star Wars and various Quentin Tarantino films. Magicians gathered around tables on the patio, jamming on tricks as usual. I bounced around and chatted with friends, reveling in the congratulations. Eventually I sat down at a picnic table with Ramsay, Xavior, and Jeremy. Doug McKenzie, Alex Pandrea, and Laura stood nearby. A cool breeze rustled through the leaves and music cranked from the speakers, the sound of shuffling cards breathing through the noise.
These are my people, I thought to myself. I am one of them now.
Only Daniel Madison was missing.
23
Kill the Architect
Ramsay broke half a million subscribers on YouTube.
“Crazy, right?” he said, sauntering down Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. He made the trek to New York City three weeks before Christmas for YouTube’s Next Up Conference, held at their headquarters in Manhattan. This event brought together some of the platform’s up-and-coming content creators for a long weekend of collaboration. He had done smaller creator camps in Toronto, with other Canadian YouTubers, but this was his first time being flown to New York. People from all over the world made the trip. They included a climate scientist, a bodybuilder, a sketch comedian, an impressionist, a tech critic, and a transgender man who transitioned in real time on his channel. They all had free rein on the space and an unlimited supply of equipment—all the tools you’d ever need to film videos and post them online. Ramsay was also slated to speak to the YouTube staff during a party on the last day of the event. He planned to put on a little magic show in the process, of course.
Ramsay had run outside to grab me, and we went back upstairs to the studio, situated on the sixth floor of the Chelsea Market building in Manhattan, a few floors above a wing of Google offices. Ramsay had just finished the first of two videos with Mike Boyd, a Scottish YouTuber whose channel documents his adventures learning random things. One of Mike’s most recent videos, which netted him more than three million views, documented him learning to stack dice by swirling the cubes in a cup. They decided to collaborate: Mike would show Ramsay how to stack dice and Ramsay would reciprocate by teaching Mike to spring a deck of cards like a magician.
They chatted about production style, shot sequence, and introduction format for their next video. They set up in a 1950s-style diner set, at the far end of the space, with three cameras homed in from different angles. Their conversation quickly diverted into comparing metrics, likes, clicks, reach, engagement, shares, and comments—picking each other’s brains, trying to figure out how to hack into their viewers’ watching habits for a more engaging (and lucrative) experience.
Mike took a walk around, quickly rehearsed his lines, and sat down in the booth to start filming. I stood behind the cameras and kept an eye on the lenses’ focus for them, but I couldn’t help but reach into my pocket to check my phone. My trick was slated to drop that day, four months after we filmed it in Las Vegas, and I eagerly awaited the notification.
I had called Adam Wilber two days earlier. His segment from Penn & Teller: Fool Us had just come out (to much fanfare and gossip among magicians online) and he was nearly done with the cover design for his book on creativity. I wanted to congratulate him on both.
“You’re also up for some praise, dude,” he said. “Your trick comes out on Friday.”
“No way!” I shouted, running around my living room. “This is so weird,” I added, plopping down onto my couch, laughing.
“You deserve it, man. Just check the site, and we’ll be blasting it on Instagram and whatnot, too.”
Just after Ramsay and Mike finished, my phone pinged. It was a notification from Ellusionist’s Instagram account: “Ian Frisch, in his first offering to the magic community, debuts FLIPSIDE, a highly deceptive transposition effect. Watch it now!”* The caption sat below a photograph Doug McKenzie had taken of me the previous summer at the pier near my house. The Manhattan skyline blurred in the background and “FLIPSIDE,” in bold white text, ran down the image’s left side.
I quickly posted my trailer to Instagram, which was the introduction I filmed in the suite at the MGM Grand, with a monologue overlaid atop visuals of me performing the trick. I barely remembered filming it, but my excitement jumped off the screen (again, more like a deranged game show host). Within minutes, my phone buzzed like crazy, with everyone commenting on my trailer and shouting me out on their Instagram stories: Big moves! Hell yes! BOOM! Fuck yeah, dude!
Jeremy called me as I scrolled through all my notifications, his voice tinged with laughter and mock confusion. “Hello? Is this Ian Frisch, the famous magician?!” he said, me giggling on the other end. “I saw you on Ellusionist!”
“Thanks for calling,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it without all of you coaching me along.”
“You did what some people have spent a decade working toward,” he said. “Good for you, buddy, good for you. You’ve officially made it.”
Ramsay was still chatting with Mike Boyd when I tapped him on the shoulder and showed him my phone.
“Ah! Shit! It’s up!” he exclaimed. I hadn’t told him it was supposed to drop today. “Oh, shit dude, this is dope.” A sarcastic grin stretched across his face. “Looks like they didn’t drop your trick after all.” He turned back to Mike. “Boyd, I am gonna head down for a smoke.” I went with him. As we stepped out onto the sidewalk, tourists buzzed around us. A blade of cold air cut down the street. Ramsay pulled out his phone.
“Come here. Let’s blast your shit,” he said, tossing his butt onto the ground. He opened Instagram and centered the camera on his face. “What’s going on, guys?!” he started. “Outside the YouTube space with my homie Ian Frisch.” He panned the camera to me. “Follow him on Instagram but also check out his latest post. He just released his first contribution to the magic industry—really cool trick, lots of really nice card magic going on so, go support him. Peace!” He clicked the camera off and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He threw his arm around me, just as he had our first night in Blackpool, and said, “Well, I guess you’re a real magician now.”
As the days went on, I started getting DMs and emails from strangers. One guy sent me a fairly lengthy email that read, in part: “It’s a really good and clean effect. I love the efficiency of the moves. The part of the video that most impressed me is when you mentioned you’ve only been dabbling for two years. That’s fantastic!”
Comments on the trick’s page were equally positive. One magician wrote: “I have been a huge fan of Chris Ramsay for a couple years now and I have always loved Ian. It’s awesome to see him contributing!” The fans, however, did not exist without detractors. Someone composed a long tirade on Instagram against the trick, which read, in part: “It’s unoriginal. It’s not magical. There is no clear effect. Technically, it’s a piece of garbage.”*
I ran high on pride and adrenaline for days. But there was one person who never called—didn’t text or reach out with a DM on Instagram: Daniel Madison. I hadn’t heard from him in months. He’d gone dark again: unwilling to speak to anyone, closed off from the world, stuck in his own head. He ignored every text I sent, every call I made. But he had been posting on Instagram—cryptic messages that I puzzled over for days. One read: We don’t exist. I tried to own my body. So that it would no longer cage me. Inadvertently creating cages. That would torment. And enrage me. And now I am nothing more than an effigy of an ego. That I used to be. So, fuck it. I am no longer me.
He also posted voraciously on YouTube. One video depicted him trashing his office—shredding pages of self-published books, ripping apart self-branded merchandise, massacring decks of his namesake playing cards, tattooing himself in ink mixed with whiskey. A cover of Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” played in the background. The title of the video, “NOCERE,” is Latin for “to harm, or hurt.”
Madison also quit Ellusionist, a move that I had known he wanted to make for some time. Like Ramsay, he felt trapped by the confines of the industry, and he wanted to be his own man, not a product monkey for an online retail outlet. He posted a video announcing his decision. He also talked about how the “architect was dead.” He looked off camera, to the side, while he spoke, as if being interviewed by someone—perhaps another version of himself. “If I am in a position where I can’t be me, whatever ‘me’ is—‘me’ doesn’t have to fucking exist to begin with—but whatever this is that I am following, if that can’t be allowed to grow and develop in its own directions, then obviously I’ve got to move on.” He explained that the architect was a metaphor for the character he had created, and how, after all these years, it had come to rule him. But now that person, that stage of himself, was dead. It was no longer in control.
Most of these videos and posts centered on distancing himself from the magic industry, but I couldn’t help but see them as a larger metaphor for Madison as a man and as an artist. To me, his alter ego, and all it represented, became a cave in which he had fallen and could not escape. He had gone so deep, wrapped himself in the shadow of his alter ego so tightly, that he could hardly break free.
I had so many questions about Daniel Madison, questions I worried I’d never have answered. What if I have inadvertently become a sleight in Madison’s years-long magic trick? What if, with me, he saw an opportunity to fully divulge everything about himself—a way, perhaps, for a sliver of truth to leak out into the public, a kind of transparency he so deliriously wanted but for which he didn’t have the right tools? What if I was the one really being deceived? What if I was simply part of an elaborate plan: the record keeper for the52, brought in to help show the world the truth about deception—the perfect opportunity to prove how the art form has changed? And what if everything I write is a bullet that will enter into Madison’s chest on the stage that he alone sees, finally dropping the curtain—vanishing once more, this time for good? What if this was his plan all along? Suddenly everything that had happened felt steeped in deeper meaning.
The last time we spoke, just after I returned from Vegas in August, Madison said he and Laura were trying to fill the remaining spots of the52. There were only a few cards left. We were nearly done. It was almost over. But to me he was still a shadow, an enigma. And I had no idea what would happen next.
My trick debuted on Ellusionist just before Christmas and, for the first half of 2018, I still hadn’t heard from Madison directly. He posted on social media with a high degree of regularity, led primarily by a marketing campaign for a new deck of namesake cards, his first off Ellusionist’s payroll and under his own name. But then, in May, he wiped all of his social media. His Instagram profile went blank, his YouTube channel scrubbed clean. Shortly after, he posted an out-of-focus photograph on Instagram holding his passport. “One-way ticket to who gives a fuck,” the caption read. He broke down. He hit rock bottom.
A few days later, I received a text: “I’m in rehab. Come see me in Leeds?”
I booked a flight immediately.
A lot had happened in the last six months. Ramsay’s reach on YouTube skyrocketed: He hit 100 million total views and broke 1 million subscribers, nabbing the infamous gold-plated plaque that is sent to creators who break the million-follower mark. Laura secured a months-long, multi-city lecture tour in the United States—her first big jaunt overseas, no doubt spurred by her successful run of CHEAT in Britain, the premiere of which would land her on the stage at Magic Live in Las Vegas later that year (she also gave a speech about her idol, Mercedes Talma, at the Magic Circle’s Historical Conference). Xavior, still plugging away at his apartment in Queens, celebrated his one-year anniversary of YouTube as a new business model. When he started, he was over $20,000 in debt. In his first twelve months on the platform, he netted a healthy six-figure profit for himself and Lost Art Magic. I, too, had landed a slew of stories in high-profile outlets, not to mention my life-changing journey through the underground world of magic, underscored by releasing my own trick. Everything was happening the way it was supposed to.
