I Lie for Money

by Steve Spill

  We did a substantial business serving upside down margaritas—no glass necessary. Customers laid their heads on the bar, mouths open. With a bottle of Triple Sec in one hand and Roses’s Lime in the other, I poured, and then I quickly switched the two bottles for sweet & sour and tequila, completing the task until mouths were overflowing. Customers just had to sit up and swallow.

  Regulars brought friends in from far and wide for our margaritas. If they winked and tipped in advance, the newcomer would get a special upside down margarita. When they sat up their face was met with a cream pie. Actually, it was a coffee filter filled with whipped cream.

  “This is the craziest bar in town,” said one smartly dressed young man to his equally decked-out friend. They ordered Heineken drafts and the first guy secretly let me know his buddy was a first-time visitor. Just as the beers were served, I pretended to accidentally knock one over. The stranger jumped to his feet to avoid ruining his clothes while his friend burst into uproarious laughter. The knocked-over glass was a fakeroo with solid contents, a means of initiating newcomers to the fun at The Jester.

  The gag over, I removed the fake glass and served real beer. The instigator didn’t notice the switch. “Look, it’s a fake beer,” so saying, he grabbed the newly served glass and threw the contents into his friend’s face.

  Suddenly the music stopped, the lights went up to last-call brightness, and the magic show was on. Bob and I would do a total of about ten minutes of our best stuff, the crowd would cheer, the lights would go down, the rock music cranked up, and we’d be back serving drinks. That’s how it went from late afternoon until the early morning hours night after night after night. Sometimes we locked the doors and kept going beyond the legal hours and I went home in daylight.

  Customers were just as wild, raw, and often more spontaneous and ridiculous than we were. In the winter knit beanies and ski caps were popular and I had a trick where I asked to borrow one. A girl put her lacy red bra on the bar, “will this work?” and then she kindly showed everyone where it came from—her chest. The crowd cheered, and she made several new friends.

  One summer we had a bowl of goldfish sitting on the back bar. Now and then, we apparently grabbed a live one outta the water, popped it in our mouth, and chewed it up. In reality, we just pretended to eat the live sushi. Actually, a secret switch was made and we ate carrots cut to an approximate goldfish shape. It was a great trick.

  People started to hear about the goldfish-eating and wanted to see it done. A regular customer brought in a younger brother on holiday from college. The brother was impressed with the fish stunt, and I let him in on the carrot secret. I told him, “In the next hour we’re going to ask for volunteers. Raise your hand and I’ll put a carrot in your mouth—you’ll be a hero.” When the time came, I put a real live wiggling goldfish in his mouth. The carrot was the bait, and the college kid was the fish that was filleted; everyone cried laughing.

  One night I opened the bar and the first person through the door was an attractive young girl. She asked, “Are you into yoga?” In a fraction of an instant she was on the floor going through various contortions. I excused this rather bizarre behavior as part of the phenomenon of people saying strange things and behaving even more strangely at The Jester. “Why don’t you get up on the bar so we can get a better look at what you’re doing?” She swiftly stripped down to a sheer leotard and happily knotted her legs behind her head, intertwined with mangled arms, both legs straight up on either side of her head. Thereafter she visited The Jester every couple weeks. Her many bar-top performances never failed to be crowd-pleasing events.

  A number of well-known names of the time got into the spirit of the place and surprised us, including Buddy Hackett, Ted Kennedy, Cheech & Chong, Jimmy Buffet, Hunter Thompson, and Farrah Fawcett. In those days, before cell phone cameras, tabloid TV, and the Internet, Bob and I often witnessed the questionable, inappropriate, and embarrassing antics of captains of industry, movie actors, and sports stars.

  The Jester environment ran the gamut from innovative magic to spontaneous outrageous comedy, an irreplaceable training ground I was privileged to be a part of. The principal thing I learned at The Jester NOT to do with my life was to be perpetually plastered, wasted, loaded, and stoned. Those days are long over for me. A quick word to my younger readers: in the long run, there are three types of people who can’t handle constant drugging, drinking, and smoking—magicians, comedians, and everybody else.

  THE LEMON TRICK

  Bob and I each became known at The Jester for particular feats of magic we performed individually. Those particular tricks became signature bits, because our regulars were hardy souls who seemed to have no purpose in life except to bring in newbies and request that we show them their favorite mysteries. Tourists paid the bills and locals helped promote us to them. I was best known for my rendition of The Lemon Trick. I did not originate the idea, but I did re-envision the effect—the trick as perceived by the audience, the method, the secrets and details that make the effect effective, and how the effect and method are presented.

  It was back in 1969, when I was almost fifteen years old and got hired to do a show for a bunch of Cub Scouts (which put me on a search for tricks that would pack small, play big, and cost little or nothing), that I was first introduced to The Lemon Trick. It was Dai Vernon, one of my mentors you’ll be reading about later in this book, who told me about a vaudeville sleight of hand magician, Emil Jarrow, and The Lemon Trick. I started fooling with this bit back then, developing various methods and routines, but it wasn’t until I had the opportunity at The Jester to workshop the trick dozens of different ways for dozens of different audiences weekly, that it gelled into a funny, elegant hit with audiences. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Some new tricks fall into place rather quickly for me when I test them. Some are tried and discarded easily, based on audience reaction, others, like this one, can take years to simplify and routine into a thing of beauty. After Vernon described how The Lemon Trick looked, he didn’t tell me how it was done. The Professor gave hints, but no directions.

  He said, “You’re a very clever boy. It’ll be good for you to figure it out. You’ll come up with something; just don’t stop thinking too soon.” It was a challenge I was happy to accept. By 1969, I’d been a student of magic for several months shy of a decade and was a fixture at the Magic Castle, a private club for magicians, for a few years. I had become absolutely obsessed with the craft and had seen each and every magician at the Magic Castle perform numerous times, literally dozens of guys. Not ONE of them did The Lemon Trick. So I never saw a properly performed example of how it might look in person.

  Nor could I find it in the definitive original five-volume encyclopedic authority on magic tricks, Tarbell Course in Magic. I found the section on tricks with paper money, which included Scarne’s Bill Change, Grant’s Slow Motion Bill Transposition, LePaul’s Torn Bill, Topsy-Turvy Bill . . . but there was no sign of Jarrow’s Bill in Lemon Trick.

  How could this trick be such a winner in the 1920s and it was not even mentioned anywhere in Tarbell? And out of all the dozens of great magicians at the Castle, I hadn’t seen or heard of even one guy doing it since the place opened in 1963? The reason was, at least partly, that Jarrow never published a how-to guide for his peers, and apparently never taught or authorized his invention for use by anyone; although there’s irrefutable evidence that unauthorized copycats existed in his day. How I happened to develop my particular Lemon Trick formula—and “happened” is the proper word since the evolution of the routine, like a good many in my repertoire, was not purely a matter of calculation, but a case of extensive trial and error—will require that we go back to the description of the trick Vernon gave me in 1969:

  “Jarrow borrowed three bills, paper money of any denomination, which were tightly rolled together into the shape of a fat cigarette, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and the bundle was held by a volunteer. A lemon was placed under a drinking glass.
Jarrow pulled the handkerchief out of the guy’s hands, and the cash was gone. The lemon was cut in half, and stuck in one of the halves were the rolled-up borrowed bills.”

  The Professor went on to tell me that the trick was Jarrow’s closer; he became famous for it, and it helped make him a vaudeville star. “During the early twenties when a theater marquee advertised the then-new stage illusion, Sawing A Woman in Half, which was at the peak of its popularity, the marquee across the street, where Jarrow was appearing, advertised his act as Sawing a Lemon In Half.”

  Often when magicians do a torn and restored trick with a playing card or a newspaper or a dollar bill for that matter, one torn piece is kept by a spectator, so that when the rest of the destroyed paper is magically restored, there is one piece missing, and the retained one is shown to fit in like a puzzle piece, “proving” the restored paper is the originally destroyed one. When a magician makes a playing card vanish and reappear in his pocket or an envelope or his wallet, often the card is signed by a volunteer, also as a proof, for the same identification reasons. So I asked The Professor if Jarrow used either of those methods of identification to verify in the audience’s mind that the vanished three bills were the same ones that appeared in the lemon?

  He said no torn corners, no signatures, no written serial numbers, but that one identifying factor was the combination of bills borrowed was always different. One time it might be three fives, or a ten and two singles, or a twenty, a ten and a two dollar bill. The Roaring Twenties were a sustained period of economic prosperity—in addition to the currency we have today, there were also five hundred-, one thousand-, five thousand-, and even ten thousand- dollar bills in circulation. On top of that, Vernon said that people always recognized their money. What? Of course, when I presented my teenage version of the trick as described, none of my crowd was positively convinced that the vanished bills were the same ones that appeared in the lemon. It seemed odd that wasn’t the case in Jarrow’s time . . .

  Until I discovered that 1910’s American paper money was 25% bigger than 1920’s money, and 1920’s money was 25% larger than today’s currency. The bills Jarrow borrowed for the trick were up to 50% larger than today, making it an easy matter to recognize blemishes, such as, for instance, a coffee stain on a president’s face, and low-digit serial numbers on the various denominations were a quarter to a half-inch tall in the 1910s and 20s. The kind of paper money in circulation before July of 1929, when the Treasury Department began the distribution of the small bills we know today, was just plain HUGE.

  Along the road to my development of an interpretation of Jarrow’s trick, I made a few key decisions. My first decision was to positively authenticate the magical transposition of just one bill. I felt that in the audience’s mind that would enhance the mystery, simplify the presentation, strengthen the effect, and negate any purpose in borrowing three bills.

  As I mentioned, there could be various methods of authentication. Someone could write down the serial number of the bill before it vanished, a torn corner could be held by a helper and after the vanished money appeared in the lemon the torn corner could be matched to the bill, or someone could autograph or initial their name on the cash before it transposed from one place to another.

  Yet there are inherent problems with these methods. Though the great thing about the torn corner idea is that it’s very visual, and everyone gets it as a convincer right away, the issue is that a minute later, the smart ones realize the possibility that the tiny corner could have been easily switched for one torn from a bill previously put in the lemon. The serial number idea doesn’t even have the instantaneous visual like the corner, and it’s no secret that stacks of consecutive serial numbered bills are available at any bank— erase the last digit and you have the same duplicate bill solution like the torn corner. Again, it’s too easy for the smart ones to figure out. The autograph has the instant visual of the corner, negates the idea of a switch or duplicate bill; hence, as far as I’m concerned, it is and always will be a crucial factor in maximizing this mystery.

  So the decision was made to use one signed bill. The next issue to conquer was the timing. The best effect you can get with a magical transposition—that’s the category The Lemon Trick falls into—is when the time between seeing the thing in one place, and then another, is reduced to instantaneous. If a person vanishes on stage, than a fraction of an instant later appears in the audience, the effect is amazing. For the same trick, if the person disappears and ten minutes later is spotted in the crowd, it might be great, but it wouldn’t qualify as amazing.

  Maybe audiences way back when were less demanding and more easily impressed—who knows? When I vanished the money from under a handkerchief, the time lapse was too long between actually seeing the borrowed money and its reappearance in the lemon. After even a few seconds, many were thinking and some even wondered out loud, “Hey, is the money still in the handkerchief or are they holding a wad of nothing?”

  It was an easy task to put the cash in an envelope and burn it before it appeared in the lemon and make the sequence a laugh riot with clever comments, but as far as heightening the mystery, there was the same time lapse problem. Ideally one needed to see the autographed currency vanish and in a fraction of an instant see the very same signed-money appear in the lemon. My solution was an at-the-fingertips barehanded disappearance of the cash.

  So I figured that out—they’d see the bill disappear, instantly the lemon was cut in half, and stuck in one of the halves was the tightly rolled up borrowed money. Not too bad—or so it seemed. But it was not too good either. Audiences were impressed, and all went well, except that only a few seconds after the trick, people were saying, “. . . Was the bill really in the lemon? Is the money wet? Does the cash smell like lemon?”

  Convincing proof needed to be embedded in the audience’s mind that the money was really inside the lemon. So I kept the style of vanishing the money, and its instantaneous reappearance in the lemon to create the magic moment, but I did it in a way so that spectators were certain a moment later that the bill really had appeared at the center of that juicy fruit.

  Instead of the instant image of half a lemon with a rolled-up bill snatched from it, my solution, when the lemon was cut, was that only a speck of green was visible. The knife was used to dig the bill out of the lemon, selling the fact that it was really embedded in the meat of the fruit.

  But there were still a number of other bits of polish to make this a winner. As a magician who stood behind a bar making drinks between doing tricks, there were a lot of distractions in our rowdy saloon that could take away your audience’s focus.

  What helped to capture a crowd of eighty to ninety drinkers, and riveted their attention on a small trick with a lemon, were a few strategically placed human anchors. Instead of one volunteer loaning and signing the money, I engaged other helpers at either end as well as in the middle of the bar, widening the focus of the trick into more of a production. Vernon was the man who taught me that most magicians stop thinking about a trick too soon, and I never wanted to be lumped into that group. Here’s how the finished product looked:

  A bowl of lemons sat on top of the cash register with a little sign that said “Lemon Trick.” When people wondered what that bowl of lemons with the little sign was all about, I was happy to show them if they were kind enough to loan some money.

  “. . . A twenty, fifty, or one hundred dollar bill works best. Okay! Let’s give John D. Rockefeller a big applause for coming up with the hundred bucks.” As the crowd gave John the clap, I tossed his hundred dollar bill into the tip jar and said . . . “For my next trick . . .” everyone laughed, I retrieved the bill, “. . . just kidding, we’ll go ahead and do the trick with this five John gave me . . .” It really was John’s hundred, my comment was just another joke.

  With a felt tip pen I drew on the money, “The first thing we do is put the glasses on Franklin so that he watches the trick as carefully as you folks do. One of the few federal offen
ses you’ll see here.” I pointed to a pretty girl seated in the middle of the bar, “Who are you, what’s your name? Good to meet you. Please take the pen, and on the front, the back, or if you’re really clever, on the edge of the bill, write your name. Thank you, oh isn’t that nice, she also wrote her phone number . . . and it’s an 800 number.”

  I walked the length of the bar pointing out her signature, then folded the bill four times so that it became a small packet with her autograph still visible. Folding instead of rolling, so the signature was still visible, was a tiny detail that enhanced the trick start to finish, because those close to the action noticed the name both when the money disappeared and instantly when it later reappeared in the lemon, virtually impossible to arrange if the bill were rolled up.

  The hundred was clipped into a doctor’s hemostatic clamp—the type that look like scissors and are commonly used by pot smokers—and handed to a man at one end of the bar. “You get to be the barbeque tongs monitor . . . actually that’s a vital surgical tool—roach clips. Hold it up high so everyone can keep an eye on the money with her name.”

  The clips were a nice way to display the bill until it was needed, but I started using them because after the trick, occasionally intelligent onlookers said the bill in the lemon might have been switched by tricky fingers for the signed one upon its removal. That’s not the secret, but also not a bad guess. Using the clips to remove the bill at the trick’s finish negated that speculation.

  At the other end of the bar I handed a big steak knife to a guy, “You get to be the knife monitor—you look like you might be familiar with knives. Hold it high, about even with the roach clips. I hope you like the trick. You look a lot like Charlie Manson . . .”