I clicked “send” before I could second-guess it and shut the browser. I was riled up all over again, thinking about this second-rate talent wielding his authority. Yours in magic. Give me a break. Then again, what use was talent anyway? The truth was, you didn’t need much talent to fool a Scout troop or even a roomful of drunk attorneys. And all of my experience and technique hadn’t prevented my show from going horribly awry tonight, so I supposed that understanding your audience was a talent, too. Then again, some audiences didn’t merit being understood. Then again, what the hell was I even talking about?
Twenty-seven, man. It felt old. And on a dreary, drippy night like tonight it wasn’t lost on me how many people never made it out of that year, people whose talents far exceeded my own: Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin. Kurt Cobain. Amy Winehouse.
Otis Redding, I’d always thought—but I was wrong. He didn’t even make it past twenty-six.
Tonight could hardly have gone worse. And yet I’d made it home again without going down in a plane crash or overdosing on heroin or meeting any of a thousand tragic ends.
Call it a win, girl. Go to bed.
I awoke to sunlight. I got out of bed and made a real breakfast, a couple of over-hard eggs and a slice of toast.
In the living room, Ethel was preening. Julius, the fatter bird, jumped down from his wooden bar with a thud to peck at his food. There’s nothing exotic about doves, they’re just white pigeons, but they’re gentle, steadfast creatures, the avian version of Labrador retrievers. When I was done with breakfast, I dug through the junk drawer for Scotch tape to restore Brock McKnight’s hundred-dollar bill. (Fact: currency that’s been taped together remains legal tender.)
After taping half of the bill together, I put on some Chopin. The “Fantaisie-Impromptu.” Talk about technique. Hell, talk about magic. If I were ever to be granted three wishes, two of them would be to have the fingers for a piece like that. I tore off some more Scotch tape and reattached the third piece of the bill. Sunlight streamed soothingly through the half-open shades, and I let myself imagine that somewhere in New Jersey all that serotonin and vitamin D were having a similarly back-from-the-dead effect on my volunteer from last night. Maybe Lou Husk’s eye was better this morning. Maybe it would all be okay.
Then came the knocking on my door.
It was the police. That overconfident thump-thump-thump on the outer door sounded like every cop show, the officers smug with their warrant.
I’d never been arrested before. My pajamas were still on. Would they let me get dressed before parading me, handcuffed, to their squad car?
I went out to the small entranceway. The door lacked a peephole, so I opened it and got blasted by frigid air.
It was just some kid. Thirteen, fourteen. Spiky blue Mohawk, and those earlobe expanders. Whatever they’re called.
“Why do you do that to your ears?” I asked him.
The kid was short and I was up a step. He tilted his head up toward me and said, “Forget my ears.”
“I’m just asking.”
“So you asked.” He coughed, and spat onto the cement beside him. “You want me to shovel your car out of the snow?”
The morning was intensely bright. I made a visor with my hand. “What’re you talking about? There’s no snow.”
“Yeah, but when there is.”
The kid was all points. Pointy hair, pointy chin, pointy nose. Pointy elbows sticking out from his arms, which were crossed in front of him. He hugged himself. It was too cold for the Public Enemy T-shirt he had on, and he was hopping from foot to foot. Any closer to him and I probably would’ve heard the wind whistling through his earlobes.
“Explain this scam to me again?” I asked.
“Ain’t a scam. I’ll make sure your car is always ready to roll,” he said. “Fifty dollars for the whole winter.”
“But you’re not going to do that,” I told him. “You’ll take my money and that’ll be the last time I ever see you.”
“That’s not true. You have my word as a Christian.” He pointed across the street at the brick apartment building. “I live right there. First floor.”
I distinctly remembered seeing a very old woman watering the flowers in front of that unit. He was probably lying. Then again, when had I last seen that woman? There were no flowers out front anymore. A lot of people came and went in ten years. Babies grew up. Kids became teenagers and moved away. People died all the time.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“I think this is such a stupid idea I’m almost willing to do it as a sociological experiment.” I was still feeling a little giddy that it wasn’t the cops.
“Huh?”
“Forget it,” I said, though now it was bugging me that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the woman from across the street. I never even knew her name.
“If it snows,” I told him, “then come back and I’ll pay you a few bucks to help get me out. Deal?”
“No, no deal.” He watched the sky. “Man, I hope it snows tonight. I hope you get stuck.”
“Hey, look, don’t get all mad at me.”
“Well, I am mad. You’re calling me a liar and a thief.”
“I’m not calling you anything.”
“Yes, you are. Lady, you need to trust people. Plus, my mother’s really sick.”
“Oh, my god.” The kid really needed to work on his patter. “You’re going with the sick mother routine? Oh, brother. Hold on. Wait here a minute.” I went back into my apartment and returned with the unattached quarter of the hundred-dollar bill. “This is worth twenty-five dollars,” I told him, “but it’s of no use to either of us this way. Understand? Do a good job, and for Christmas I’ll give you the next piece. And so on. And it’s real, so don’t lose it.”
Fact: three-quarters of a bill is still legal tender. So I wasn’t giving up anything. But the kid didn’t know it. He eyed the quarter of a bill and jammed it into his pants pocket.
“Who lives upstairs?” he asked.
“Why?”
His blue eyes were full of hope. “I could do his car, too.”
“It’s a her,” I told him, “and she takes the bus.”
“Figures,” he muttered, his renewed entrepreneurial spirit dashed again. Without another word, he walked away from me.
“Hey,” I called after him. When he turned around, I asked, “Want to see a really good coin trick?”
He studied me a moment. “Nah. Nobody wants to see that.” He spat on the ground again and walked away.
4
A few minutes past two that afternoon, I was sitting opposite Brock McKnight, a marble coffee table between us. His office looked like the movie set of Serious Lawyer, Esq.—large (and surprisingly tidy) desk of dark wood, leather chairs, abstract artwork in muted tones, bookshelves filled with legal volumes that I hoped were more than props. I had just signed Brock’s one-page engagement letter authorizing him to be my attorney, and he was showing me that he was on the case.
“Lou ended up at University Hospital last night, not a clinic,” Brock said. “That projectile of yours made an impressive gash in his cornea.”
I winced.
“That’s the good news,” he said, glancing down at the legal pad in front of him. “The bad news is the hyphema.” And before I could ask: “Bleeding between the iris and cornea.”
“I feel terrible,” I said.
“And remorse might come in handy at some point,” he said, “but first the facts. He’s sensitive to light and still in considerable pain. We won’t know about any long-term vision damage for a while. Often a hyphema will heal, but it’s too soon to tell. And Lou of all people knows not to file a lawsuit until he reaches MMI—that’s maximum medical improvement. So it could be weeks until he files. Could be months.”
My head was throbbing. I asked him what it all meant.
“Besides the medical bills, there’s the driver he’s hired, there’s going to be lost wages, and pain and suffe
ring—definitely he’ll want pain and suffering, given all the witnesses who saw him in pain, suffering.”
“What do I do?”
“You? If you have a rich uncle, now would be a good time to reach out.”
I thought about my upcoming December gigs, my Reasonable Rates, and knew I was in big trouble. There was no house to mortgage, no savings account to deplete, nothing to cash in. No rich uncle.
“I’m broke,” I told my lawyer.
“Then get unbroke,” he said.
That’s when I asked him if he still had that card cheat’s name handy.
“For real?” His eyes widened. “Because that was just some late-night bullshitting. And anyway, you said last night—”
“I have something else in mind,” I told him. And without getting too much into the details (I’d only come up with the idea on the drive over), I mentioned the magazine article I thought I could get paid to write for some decent money—at least a couple of gigs’ worth—comparing card magicians to cardsharps.
“I’d read that article,” he said. “And the two of you would hit it off. You speak the same language.” He went over to his desk. “How’d you get into all that anyway? Magic.”
I skipped the part about my father’s old boss giving me my first magic kit when I was eight. It wasn’t a memory I liked to dwell on. “A man named Jack Clarion taught me,” I said. “And when I was eighteen I won an international sleight of hand competition. I was the youngest winner they ever had.”
“A prodigy.”
“David Copperfield gave me my medal.”
“No cash prize?”
“Five hundred dollars,” I told him, “and a booking agent.” I didn’t bother to clarify that my agent had dropped me years ago.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Brock said, pulling a deck of cards from the top drawer. He tossed the deck, still in its seal, onto the coffee table. “You have duplicate queens, obviously. But how do you get rid of the duplicates before the final reveal? That’s the part I don’t understand. But I’m right about the extra queens, aren’t I?”
I watched his face watching mine. He was used to getting what he wanted. “What?” he said. “My grandfather was a lawyer in Maryville, Tennessee. Sometimes he got paid in chickens, and I’m sure the farmers were attached to their birds, too.”
I sighed. “Write it down first, please. The name and contact information of your cheat.” I said this while picking up the pack and slitting the seal with my thumbnail. While he went to his computer and jotted down the information on a slip of paper, I opened the card case, removed the cards, and fanned them out to remove the four queens, which I set on the tabletop beside the rest of the deck.
“He’s a particular fellow,” Brock said, handing me the slip of paper. “A little curmudgeonly. Not charming like me. But damned if he isn’t in a league all his own.”
I glanced at the slip of paper. “You don’t trust me with his full name?”
“That’s what he goes by,” Brock said with a shrug. “Now come on, your turn.”
I pocketed the paper. “And you swear you’ll keep this a secret?”
“Scout’s honor,” he said.
Laypeople always assume that an elegant trick must have an equally elegant method. But one of the true secrets of magic is that this is rarely the case. And with sleight of hand the secret is never a mirror or harness or contraption but rather five- or ten- or twenty thousand hours of practice. The artistry is in the execution, not the secret. It’s in learning to hide what ought to be in plain sight.
I could have told him right then how to do the Four Queens, magician’s oath be damned. But then he would know. He’d think: Oh. A vague disappointment, and then he’d be on to the next thing he wanted.
Better, always, to leave them full of wonder. Then at least you know you’re still needed.
I picked up the stack of queens. “These ladies,” I said, counting off one card at a time, “are very close, practically sisters, on account of having to live in a world created by the kings and jacks.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed.
“You can’t imagine the pressure on them, with the demands of royalty, not to mention all that pomp and forced propriety.”
He sighed.
I continued: “That’s why, whenever they can, the queens always—”
“Stop.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Enough.”
“Hey, you asked. That’s how that trick is done. The ladies find each other.” I stood. “Now remember, you’re sworn to secrecy.”
Jack Clarion’s magic shop was on Route 1 in Edison, in a strip mall between a nail salon and an unrented storefront. As I stepped inside, the door closed behind me, sleigh bells jangling. I stood in the entrance a moment while my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
At the other end of the store, Jack barely glanced up. He stood behind the glass countertop demo-ing a trick to a woman and her kid. I walked farther into the narrow store. Instead of watching Jack, the kid was smearing the countertop with his palms. I could tell he’d never paid attention to anything in his life. He’d take whatever trick his mother bought him today and try it once without reading the instructions before shoving it under his bed forever.
I waited off to the side while Jack rang up the lady’s order and she and the kid left and the door jangled shut. Then I restocked a few supplies—borderless playing cards, flash paper, twenty yards of green magician’s rope—screwing up my courage to tell Jack what had happened last night at the Hyatt.
I decided to ease into it. “So remember that magazine editor I met over the summer?”
“You mighta mentioned it two or three hundred times,” Jack said.
After a show, a man had come up to me with his kid and introduced himself as Bruce Steadman, deputy editor for Men’s Quarterly. He’d described himself as “an amateur but very serious magician” and raved about my performance. I was beyond flattered. Then he said, “I also really enjoy your writing in Magician’s Forum,” and I was flattered all over again.
Magician’s Forum was a newsletter Jack had started up eons ago: for years a mailer, now a quarterly email. I was an occasional contributor—I would teach a trick, coins or cards or rope or whatever. Always a household object. Always sleight of hand. Writing for Jack didn’t pay anything, but the deadlines made me keep coming up with new ideas, and I felt I owed Jack for introducing me to magic.
The magazine editor had handed me his business card and said, “If you have any magic-related stories you think could work, feel free to pitch me.”
Guys handing me their cards was nothing new. They like the magic, and I’m five-eleven barefoot, and my dark brown hair is almost down to my ass, and sometimes I feel like a giraffe at a dog show. Usually men’s business cards end up in the nearest trash can but: Deputy editor. Men’s Quarterly. Pitch me. I felt I could do it. But I’d been waiting for the right idea. Or the right motivation. Now I had both.
“I think I finally have a pitch,” I told Jack.
Jack sighed, or maybe wheezed. “What exactly is this idea of yours?” He was seventy-two and looked ten years older. His face was saggy and gray, and probably his opinion shouldn’t have mattered to me anymore, but we went back a long way and I had learned plenty from him. And he had learned from the best: Cardini, Slydini—that whole greatest generation of -inis who’d performed in an age long before camera tricks and CGI, back when our eyes weren’t accustomed to being deceived.
“I want to profile a professional card cheat,” I said. The moment the words left my mouth I realized they would go over about as well as my card-in-the-eye news would. I braced myself and forged ahead. “I was thinking about how card magicians and card cheats have a lot in common, except that a card cheat has more at stake. Because if he gets caught he could end up at the bottom of a lake or something. I want to see what a magician might be able to learn from someone like that.” I watched his eyes, hoping for agreement or understanding. “I think people might be inte
rested in that. Magicians, but also regular readers. It’s interesting, you know?”
“Remind me exactly what part is interesting?”
“You know—the whole thing. What? What’s the matter, Jack?”
But I knew.
“Let me make sure I’m getting this right,” he said. “You have a chance to tell a million readers about the art of conjuring and you’re gonna spotlight a fucking cheat?”
What he meant was, nothing is more honest than a magic trick. It was a point of serious pride for Jack. Over the years I’d heard various iterations of the same lecture: how you know a magician is going to make you see something that isn’t possible, believe something that isn’t true. How the deception is fair because of the pact between magician and audience. How we’re in it together. How done right it’s a game we can both win.
Cheats, though (and here Jack would fake spit), they ruin it for everyone. With a cheat there’s no pact, and there’s only one winner, and it won’t be you.
I didn’t disagree. And yet: we admire the professional cardsharp, don’t we? Even though it’s only a thief thieving. We admire the cheat’s skill because it’s based in refinement. This was nothing I could ever say to Jack, but I wasn’t alone in thinking it. Other magicians felt this way, too, about cardsharps—even the greatest sleight of hand artist who ever lived.
“What about Dai Vernon?” I asked Jack now. “He spent years chasing down the best cheats.”
“You, with all due respect, are no Dai Vernon.” With a rag he started wiping down the glass counter where the kid had greased it up. “And don’t go falling for that center-deal nonsense.”
“He learned it,” I said.
“It’s lore,” he said. “It’s patter.”
“It’s documented. Go online.”
He shook his head. “Dai Vernon was a master, but cheats and con men were his whiskey and hookers. It was a big weakness. Don’t let it become yours.”
And that, right there, was Jack—a purist with a mortgage, a dwindling client base, an ex, and grown kids who didn’t talk to him anymore. Jack’s best trick was making other people disappear.
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