Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  Katharine and I had started dating the year before, and she had come to LA for an internship at UCLA so we could be together. We’d lived in the same hall in college and met one week when we ran into each other on the street, in the library, in the dining hall, everywhere. She reminded me of a pioneer or a frontier woman from the Old West—confident, tough, capable, curious—like she didn’t quite fit into the modern age and must have come from somewhere else. I thought she was the most mysterious person I had ever met.

  UCLA put her up in campus housing in Westwood. Santa Monica Boulevard stretches across Los Angeles from east to west and we lived essentially on the same street, but separated by forty-five minutes of driving and maybe ten thousand dollars per square foot of property value. Compared to my neighborhood, Westwood felt like Disney World. Some days I drove to the UCLA campus to read the magic books I couldn’t afford on one of the benches outside their art museum and wait for her to be done. On the weekends we drove to the beach or went hiking in the hills. One afternoon we were goofing around and a dog named Norton ran away from his owner and caught our Frisbee in midair. You can still see his teeth marks in the plastic.

  So we had some good adventures, but I couldn’t escape from the crushing worry about money, and I was running out. I had spent most of my savings on the theater rental—If you build it, they will come—but I was losing hundreds of dollars a week. This was supposed to be the big launch of my career as a professional magician. As an artist I was better than ever, but I was learning quickly that you can be a good artist and still fail. One Thursday night I walked onstage and started the show.

  “Wait, I’m sorry,” I heard from the audience. “Am I really the only person here?”

  I squinted through the stage lights and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the front row. He wore a thick green sweater even though it was July in Los Angeles, and he held a paperback novel open on his lap. He was the only one there.

  I couldn’t believe it. I knew ticket sales had been slow, but I’d hoped a few people would walk in at the last minute.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “You mean I am the only person stupid enough to pay fifteen dollars for a ticket and drive all the way to North fucking Hollywood to see your show?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m going to go. Can I get my money back?”

  “Maybe I could show you some magic one-on-one,” I began.

  “No thanks. I’m going to go.” He stood up. I opened my wallet and handed him a ten and a five. He didn’t make eye contact. Then he left. I stood onstage with the props for the show loaded in my back pocket. Two unopened water bottles waited on a stool. The room was empty.

  “Hey Nate.” The sound guy came out of the booth in the back. “That’s pretty rough, brother. Can I buy you a beer?”

  I looked up.

  “No—thanks, though. I have the theater until midnight and I think I’m going to just hang out here for a bit.”

  “You got it. Have a good night. See you next week.”

  I stood in the room and looked out over all the empty seats. I had spent the week before working on a new illusion. It was a sharp twist on a classic illusion, keeping the same underlying structure but changing the way it played out for the audience so it felt surreal rather than spectacular. I didn’t want to do magic that would shock, surprise, or dazzle. I wanted it to creep up on you like an episode of the Twilight Zone. I wanted it to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, like waking one morning to discover a hidden staircase in your house or a secret door you never noticed before in the back of a closet. C. S. Lewis got it exactly right. You don’t find magic through a spell or a handful of enchanted beans. You find it just beyond the mundane and the everyday—a door behind some coats in the wardrobe that somehow leads to Narnia. And I knew I had found a way to put all of that into a magic trick. The night before, I’d stayed up until three or four, writing and rewriting the script for the performance and running though the presentation. It was ready, and I knew it was great. And now there was no one here to see it.

  I looked down at the floor and then started going through the new piece anyway. Magic doesn’t work without an audience. It’s not like music, where you can close your eyes, turn up the volume on your guitar, and pretend you’re playing for a packed house. Magic is interactive theater. You can practice the individual pieces, but it only ever exists in its entirety in the minds of the audience, so you can’t do it justice in an empty room. Still, I wanted to see how it felt to move through the paces on a real stage.

  I stood on the stage in the empty theater, trying at least for a moral victory. All I could hear was the audience from my show at Ames High—despite my failure with the lightbulb illusion they had stood at the end of the show, cheering and shouting so loud I could still hear it five years later. Now every seat was empty and I was in trouble. Every week I lost more and more money, and if I ran out I would have to move on, go home, or get a real job. I had risked everything on this summer in Los Angeles, and if it didn’t work—if I didn’t end the summer with an agent, a TV show, or some kind of employment as a magician—I didn’t know how I could keep going.

  The Westwood Village Theater stood on a corner down the street from Katharine’s apartment and I went there sometimes to spend more of the money I didn’t have and see a movie. The room was a vast, cavernous temple to the cinema—more than a thousand seats stretching back into the darkness, the screen rising like an altar. I went there to take refuge in the theater’s air conditioning, see the movies, and think about magic. I was worried.

  I was worried that movies were simply better than magic tricks as a vehicle for amazement. In Houdini’s day the world had never seen Star Wars. They hadn’t seen the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. When Blackstone’s audience watched his lightbulb float through the theater they had never seen the liquid metal Terminator chase Arnold on his motorcycle. As a young boy I had become interested in magic when I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and imagined myself casting spells on the playground. Now you could go to the theater and see it all for yourself—not just the dragon or the ring, but also the magic. And it looked spectacular. Movies had reached a point where they could show you anything the director could imagine, and I worried that the modern audience was so inured to marvels that seeing the extraordinary had become an everyday occurrence. Turn on your television at any time of day and within about fifteen seconds of flipping through the channels you will see something—an alien, a superhero, a ghost or a monster or a spaceship hurtling through the heavens—that would have been miraculous in the golden days of magic.

  How do you compete with Star Wars? How do you take an audience of people who have been to other worlds and other times, who have stormed the beaches of Normandy and watched the Titanic sink into the ocean, and show them anything that could register as even remotely amazing?

  Houdini had worried about the same thing, even in those early days of cinema. Magicians revere him as a hero but forget that he spent much of the last half of his career trying to get out of the magic business. He wanted to become a movie star. He formed a production company—the Houdini Picture Corporation—and starred in a number of his own films. He played Quentin Locke, the secret agent for the justice department who used his abilities as an escape artist to solve crimes, track down bad guys, and fight for justice. He played Haldane, a secret service agent who used much of the same skill set to do much the same thing. His movies featured grand stunts that would have been impossible to perform in a theater—jumping from wing to wing of two flying biplanes, rolling under the wheels of a moving truck, swimming through the rapids to rescue a woman just feet from the edge of Niagara Falls. They weren’t camera tricks. He actually did them.

  One afternoon I walked down Sunset Boulevard looking for Houdini’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I had assumed his star was awarded for his work as a magician—the first magician to earn such a
star, I thought—but it wasn’t. It was for his movies.

  I saw a lot of movies that summer, and I learned something about the role of the magician. A filmmaker isn’t using special effects to deceive an audience—they’re not the purpose of the film but rather one of many little tools available to help bring the audience into another world in order to tell them something about this one. This is the key. A film can show you the most extraordinary, impossible occurrences and make them look absolutely real, but unless these impossibilities are used in the service of a story that can tell us something about ourselves and the plight of the human being in our own world, it’s a bad movie. Ultimately a movie has to give you something real.

  All of this may sound blindingly obvious to others, but for me it was a stark indictment of my own craft. With a few notable exceptions, the standard magic show had become pure entertainment, a progression of tricks, one after another, like a movie filled with car chases, explosions, and fight scenes but lacking characters, story, or soul. And because this is what the audience seemed to expect from a magic show—flashes of spectacle punctuated by snappy one-liners—how could you give them something else without losing them? How could you give them Stanley Kubrick when they expected—and wanted—Michael Bay?

  I am not the first magician to identify this problem. That summer I came to see the theatrics of David Copperfield, the stark realism of David Blaine, and the artful construction of Penn and Teller’s show as heroic attempts to pull away from the vapid, empty showmanship of the stereotypical magician and to give the audience an experience that rose above mere deception. I loved them for it. Some of these efforts worked better than others, and I had my own thoughts about how it should be done, but the discovery of this idea, or ideal—the magic trick as a vessel rather than an end in itself—changed the shape of my summer. I was broke and headed for imminent ruin, certainly, and no one was coming to my shows, but I felt as if I had discovered how to split the atom.

  The next week, attendance was better—I had maybe twenty people in to see the show. It went well, and afterward a man in his midthirties waited in the lobby to talk for a minute. He had a shaved head and wore black-rimmed glasses.

  “You’re probably losing a lot of money on this, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you’re an idiot. Did you rent this theater?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you do anything other than put an ad in LA Weekly?”

  “Well, I handed out some postcards—”

  “Yeah, you’re an idiot. But that was a great show. It wasn’t a very good show, mind you. Your transitions are terrible and I think you should probably get a haircut, but I like the intensity.”

  “Thank you,” I said. His analysis of the show was right on—it wasn’t very good in a technical sense, but I thought it contained a kernel of greatness and was thrilled that he had seen it, too.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Can I give you a piece of advice?”

  “God, yes.”

  “You don’t want to be here. Come back to LA when you have a name and a marketing budget. Go out and do a thousand shows somewhere else. Learn how to play to your strengths. Learn to cover your weaknesses. Right now you’re just flailing around up there.”

  I felt deflated and didn’t know what to say.

  He pointed to the untouched stack of postcards on the table in the lobby advertising the Nate Staniforth Magician show. “Can I take one of these?” I nodded. They certainly weren’t doing much good there on the table. He studied it, and then turned it over and read the back.

  “Good luck, Nate. I’ll see what I can do.”

  A week later, I got a call from an agent asking if I’d like to do a college tour. Just like that. I couldn’t believe it. I was at Katharine’s apartment when the call came in. She could tell the call was important, and we stood in her kitchen with our heads together and the phone between us so we could both listen. Afterward we danced around the room as if we had survived a shipwreck and finally made it to shore.

  TOUR

  A magician’s tour is like a fisherman’s voyage. For months the fishermen live on land, laying in stores and preparing their ship. Then one day they disappear to the sea and enter another world where the bureaucracy of daily life falls away. At sea, life shrinks to the immediacy of the job at hand and the relentless pursuit of the fish drives the passage from day into night and night into day far more than any turning of the globe. When Melville wrote of the voyage in Moby-Dick he knew that intent and purpose guide such an expedition far more than landmarks, charts, or celestial navigation. The actual location never matters. A magician’s tour, like a true sea voyage, is a place unto itself, a wilderness somehow larger than the sum of cities, venues, hotels, and airports within it. It’s a place of constant, restless, searching movement—a hunting ground where you leave behind home and table and bed and go out to find what you are looking for. “It’s not down on any map,” Melville wrote. “True places never are.”

  When I began touring I was unprepared for every aspect of the journey. The scope, the scale, the late nights, the early mornings. Any sense of accomplishment at finally being able to tour with my show was replaced within the first week or so by the realization that I had ventured into the deep and didn’t know how to swim.

  When you’re successful you can plan your tour so you work your way slowly across the country, doing a show in one town and then performing in the next town a few hundred miles away the next night. But when you’re just starting out you go wherever you can get work, and so a tour schedule ends up hauling you from one side of the country to another from day to day, and you might cross the country four times in a week just to work as often as possible. No one pays you for the nights you’re not working, so during a tour you try to do a show every night if you can.

  The days often began in the middle of the night. On most mornings the alarm rang at three o’clock, maybe three thirty, and I’d get up to take a shower. If I had remembered to preload the hotel room coffee machine I’d flip the switch before heading into the bathroom, but hotel coffee was always a mixed blessing: it wasn’t so much the bad taste but the fact that with two roller suitcases I didn’t have any extra hands to hold a cup on my way to the car, and I certainly wasn’t going to sit in the hotel room at three in the morning to casually sip a cup of coffee. The ability to maximize sleep by relentlessly paring down the time needed to get ready in the morning comes early in the life of a frequent traveler. If the flights were delayed or traffic clogged the roads and made the drive longer than expected, I might have to walk onstage in whatever I was wearing, so this required at least a minimal amount of care. Still, I could go from a dead sleep to walking out the door in twelve minutes, including a shower.

  At this hour the day looked bleak. Ahead, I’d have a two-hour drive to the airport in Charlotte, for instance, followed by a three-hour flight to Minneapolis before my connecting flight to Seattle for the show that night. When I landed in Washington I’d have about an hour to get my bags, pick up the rental car, and check in to the hotel before I was due at the venue for load-in, sound check, and, finally—after fourteen hours of travel and preparations—the show, after which I would return to the hotel and get four hours of sleep before waking up and doing the same thing again the next day. And the next day. And the next day.

  The trick was to ignore the long-term view of the day and break everything down into a series of next steps. Later I’d run through the show in my mind and prepare for the jarring act of walking out onto the stage in front of five hundred people, but at three o’clock in the morning, the show was still in the far-off, unthreatening future. As I climbed into the rental car and opened the can of coffee strategically purchased the night before and left to chill in the cold car overnight—a detail that looks pitiful and pathetic as I write it here but felt in this predawn hour like a monumental, day-changing victory—the tasks
immediately ahead of me were simple. I’d drive for two hours through the dark, sleeping North Carolina countryside. I’d drink my can of coffee. I’d listen to Dan Carlin, probably, or maybe NPR. And in this way—step by step, day by day, I would tour my show around the country.

  Katharine and I had been married in the summer and lived in a small apartment in Chicago with a beautiful old cast-iron bathtub and unreliable hot water. I was twenty-three years old and Katharine was two years younger. She worked as a nurse and I gave almost a hundred performances that first season. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when we were together, Katharine and I would walk to the grocery store down the street and buy a cheap bottle of wine to share after dinner, and if I had a particularly good month we might go to the Thai restaurant a few blocks from our apartment and sit on the rooftop patio with noodles and beer. But mostly I was on the road, and when I was away I felt as if I had been gone forever.

  One evening I finished a show in Virginia and flew to Spokane, Washington, first thing the next morning. The drive to Moscow, Idaho, from Spokane follows the state highway along the creek through Hangman’s Valley and then climbs abruptly through the hills to a long, high plain of grassland running on and gently upward. If your timing is good you’ll have the road to yourself. You’ll rise and fall with the road and follow it between hills as it stretches away to the south, and if you didn’t love this part of the country when you started, you will by now. It looks like Scotland, or the wilder parts of Iowa, but much closer to the sky.

  All of this would have been easier to appreciate if I hadn’t felt like death. I had a terrible case of the flu and a plastic bag from the gas station ready in the front seat in case I couldn’t pull over in time. When I got to the Super 8 motel in Moscow I spent an hour propped up against the toilet. Then I took a shower, changed my clothes, and drove to the theater.

  By the time I finished setting up the show backstage I knew I was in trouble. I looked pale and was having a hard time keeping water down, and I’m sure I was dehydrated. On the back of one of my tour posters I had written out a new set list for the show and taped it to the front of the stage. I had scrapped most of the audience participation because I didn’t want to have anyone up there with me if I had to run offstage, but this meant I was going to have to talk more than usual, and I was worried about so much talking. When you’re trying to communicate with an entire audience you use your whole body and fling your words to the back of the room with your eyes and your fingers and your intentions as much as your voice, and I didn’t know how I’d be able to do that for an hour when I couldn’t even keep a sip of water down for more than a few minutes.