I became a magician by accident.
When I was nine years old I learned how to make a coin disappear. I’d read The Lord of the Rings and ventured into the adult section of the library to search for a book of spells—nine being that curious age at which you’re old enough to work through thirteen hundred pages of arcane fantasy literature but young enough to still hold out hope that you might find a book of real, actual magic in the library. The book I found instead taught basic sleight of hand technique, and I dedicated the next months to practice.
At first the magic wasn’t any good. At first it wasn’t even magic, it was just a trick, and at first it was just a bad trick. I spent hours of each day in the bathroom, running through the secret moves in front of the mirror above the sink and getting lost in the possibility that if I became good enough I could make the coin disappear. I dropped the coin over and over, a thousand times in a day, and after two weeks of this my mom got a carpet sample from the hardware store and placed it under the mirror to muffle the sound of the coin falling again and again to the floor. I had heard my dad work through passages of new music on the piano, so I knew how to practice—slowly, deliberately, going for precision rather than speed—and one day I tried the illusion in the mirror and the coin vanished. It did not look like a magic trick. It looked like a miracle.
One of the lessons you learn very early on as a magician is that the most amazing part of a magic trick has nothing to do with the secret. The secret is simple and often dull: a hidden piece of tape, a small mirror, a duplicate playing card. In this case the secret was a series of covert maneuvers to hide the coin behind my hand in the act of opening it, a dance of the fingers that I learned so completely I didn’t even have to think. I would close my hand, open it, and the coin would vanish not by skill but by real magic.
One day I made the coin vanish on the playground. We had been playing football and were standing by the backstop in the field behind the school. A dozen people were watching. I showed the coin to everyone. Then it disappeared.
Imagine for a moment that you are at school. You see someone holding a quarter. Then, without warning or context, the quarter disappears. Or imagine that you see anything that would qualify as impossible. A man walks through a wall. A garbage can levitates. The pages in your hand turn into a pigeon and fly away. This would not be a small experience. It would, in fact, be one of the defining moments of your life. Your instinct would not be to applaud or laugh or turn jovially to the person next to you on the train and offer an explanation as to how your book could have disappeared. It would not feel like a piece of entertainment—it would feel like a car crash or an explosion, or a violation of the laws of nature and a direct, crippling assault on your fundamental sense of certainty about the ways of the world. The appropriate response to something that feels truly impossible is not applause: the appropriate response is fear; fear and, as you are running away, some hidden, pure, secret joy that maybe the world is bigger than you thought.
In any case, they screamed. They yelled, laughed, scrambled away. Everyone went crazy. This was great. This was Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings terrifying the guests at his birthday party by putting the One Ring on his finger and just vanishing in front of everyone.
The teacher on duty crossed the playground to investigate. Mrs. Tanner was a wiry, vengeful woman who dominated her classroom with an appetite for humiliation and an oversized plastic golf club she wielded like a weapon, slamming it down on the desks of the unruly and uncommitted. Once she swung it directly at Aaron Gray, stopping the head of the club just a few inches from his face, which dissolved immediately into a crumpled mess of tears and shrieking, sobbing fear. Aaron Grey was a bastard, to be sure, but Mrs. Tanner was worse.
She marched toward me and demanded to know what was going on. The coin vanished for her, too. She stopped. “Do it again,” she said, and I did. I’m sure my hands were shaking, but when I looked up everything had changed. This was someone else entirely. It’s possible that Mrs. Tanner didn’t jump up and down and scream with quite as much volume as the third graders, but I will remember the look on her face—the look of wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonder—forever.
Two certainties. First, this was clearly the greatest thing in the world. I had never seen anyone react to anything the way my teacher had responded when the coin disappeared. I kept seeing her face—the stern, authoritarian façade melting into shock, fear, elation, and joy, all at once. The kids, too. The same new kids at the same new school had been transformed for a moment from a vaguely indifferent, vaguely hostile pack of scavengers and carnivores into real people. If you could make people feel like this, why wouldn’t you do it all the time? Why didn’t everyone do this? For anyone—but especially for a nine-year-old boy at a new school—this transformation is almost indistinguishable from real magic.
The second certainty was harder to reconcile. I had uncovered a mystery. The more I thought about it, the stranger it became, and even now it intrigues me as much as it did that day on the playground.
Here it is: all of it—the chaos, the shouting, the wide-eyed wonder—all of this came from a coin trick. As amazing as it was for my audience, the moment was far more amazing for me. I knew that it was just a trick and I was just a kid. But the reactions of the students and the teacher were so much greater than the sum of these modest parts that I didn’t know how to explain them. I was back under the piano again, hearing the creaking and straining of the instrument bringing out a sound that was maybe from that piece of furniture but certainly not of it. The weight of this disparity is hard to overemphasize. Something incredible had happened that day on the playground. I might have caused it, but it had not come from me. I had inadvertently tapped into something visceral and wild. I could still see the teacher’s face. I could still hear the shouts of fear, astonishment, and joy. The joy was the hardest to explain. Surprise comes easy, but joy never does. I was an alchemist who had somehow—unknowingly, unintentionally—discovered how to turn lead into gold.
Even a nine-year-old knows this is impossible. You could only do that with real magic.
I became a magician because I loved the experience of awe and wonder. Also because I thought a good magic trick might impress girls, frighten bullies, stupefy adults, and generally lead to a life of mystery and adventure. When the coin vanished on the playground I felt as if I had found a secret path into another world and I wanted to see where it led.
The Ames Public Library was my only real link to the world of magic, and there I uncovered the secret architecture of deception invented by magicians to create marvels. I learned everything I could find: technique, theory, sleight of hand, misdirection. Of the many misconceptions the general public holds about the world of magicians, the belief that we are particularly good at keeping secrets is the most baffling. Even a modestly funded public library contains entire lifetimes of material—how to find a chosen card, how to pick a lock, how to levitate a dollar bill, and on and on—and for a child these discoveries do not feel like magic tricks. They feel like a hidden map to buried treasure or a letter that falls down your chimney on your eleventh birthday that says Dear Harry, you are a wizard. Here in these books of magic the impossible became possible and the world of fiction was suddenly and unexpectedly made real.
From the beginning I could see that behind the deceptions in each of the magic tricks lurked something very real—larger, but harder to see. Even though the tricks were ostensibly “fake,” the experience of the audience was genuine, palpable, and more than a little unsettling. The young magician discovers the disarming ease with which a good piece of magic can open a window to something raw and untamed within the human spirit that is usually kept private and shielded from the public view.
I remember doing magic for a friend of my parents one afternoon—a burly, gregarious man from Chicago who liked to slap you on the back and grinned as though everything was an inside joke. He started watching politely, face frozen in that vanilla-frosting smile adul
ts reserve for children when they want to communicate just how completely they are paying attention, but then the magic happened and all of that dropped away. “Holy shit!” he shrieked. “Holy shit! Art, did you see that?” He looked at my dad, and then down at me again, his face a rapture of unbridled joy and incredulity. “Holy shit!”
What strange current passes through the mind of a grown man as he jumps up and down in the kitchen shouting “Holy shit!” at a ten-year-old boy whose magic trick requires nothing more than a duplicate playing card and a piece of double-sided tape? Certainly this was a clue to something essential. You can only see so many grown, sober, educated adults jumping up and out of themselves with amazement before you begin to suspect that the magician is tapping into something primal, even universal, that goes far deeper than anything gained or lost through age and experience. Everyone assumes that magic is best appreciated by children, but any magician in the world will tell you that while you might be hired at the birthday party to entertain the kids, it’s the adults watching from the back of the room who react with the most depth and emotion.
A year or so later, David Copperfield—the most famous magician in the world—brought his international tour to Ames, Iowa, and my fate was sealed. I still remember coming home from school with my brother one day that fall. The house felt different. My mom appeared, smiling in the doorway, and before we even dropped our backpacks to the floor she said, “Do you know what I did today?” Clearly, it was something wonderful. “Do you know who is coming to town? David Copperfield is performing at C. Y. Stephens Auditorium and we’re all going to go. I got tickets today and we’re in the third row.”
She dropped to her knee and handed me a newspaper clipping showing a man standing astride a motorcycle on a stage filled with light and smoke. DAVID COPPERFIELD—BEYOND IMAGINATION—LIVE ON STAGE.
I knew about David Copperfield somehow, though at this point I had still never actually seen a magician. Ames doesn’t get a lot of magic shows, and I hadn’t seen any of the TV specials, so my only knowledge about how it should look came from books. And now the biggest magic show on the planet was coming to a theater just down the road.
The night of the show I’d insisted that we arrive at the theater early to make sure we had plenty of time to be excited in our seats before the show began. My brother and I had dressed up for the occasion—one of the two or three times in my entire childhood that I wasn’t wearing sweatpants—and my parents parked the car and walked us toward the towering, monolithic C. Y. Stephens Auditorium. It rose from the parking lot like a mountain, the tallest building in town. A line stretched around the theater and in the back we saw three semi trucks with COPPERFIELD spelled out along the side. All day at school we had been talking about the show. Apparently that Sunday the youth pastor at one of the churches in town had condemned magic as the work of the devil, infusing my fourth-grade classroom with controversy, and someone at my dad’s office who had seen the show in Chicago a month before wasn’t allowing her children to go because she feared the magic would frighten them. My parents thought we could handle it, but before the show they talked to my brother and me about everything we would see—specifically, that these were illusions performed by a magician and we didn’t need to worry. I clutched my ticket and handed it to the man at the door. Then we went in.
As we found our seats, I looked around the room. It was full, and, surprisingly, full of adults. My brother and I were maybe the youngest ones there. This was not children’s night at the theater. The sound system blasted something modern and loud and smoke filled the darkened stage and billowed out into the cavernous hall, catching the overhead houselights and transforming this auditorium into someplace strange and vaguely ominous. The room crackled, as if a spark would set off the whole thing. Even before the start of the show this was the greatest night of my life. I was ten years old and living in the middle of the cornfields, and the most famous magician in the world was about to walk out onto that stage and blow the whole city away.
I don’t remember the show. The specifics don’t matter. Amazing things happened and at the end we all stood and clapped for a long, long time. At some point during the performance I remember looking over at my parents. They looked like children. These were no longer adults. Whatever time and age had put upon them was gone. I had never seen my dad smile like that before, like a kid at a magic show.
When the applause finally ended I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in my seat. I wanted to live there and feel that way again and again. If you could use your life to give people the experience we’d just had at the show, why would you do anything else? Children can want something with more keening power than anyone, and in this moment—and all of the ones that followed—I wanted to do magic above all else. Take everything else but leave me this. I will give anything.
HEROES
The history of magic is an improbable lineage of grand masters, rebels, rejects, thieves, traitors, geniuses, and inventors, and before long I had found an entirely new set of heroes. Magic draws people in from all levels of society—the list of great magicians throughout history includes impoverished immigrants and royalty—and their stories were larger than life, filled with mystery, adventure, and courage. In Ames, Iowa, the prospect of becoming a professional magician was as exotic and unlikely as becoming a pirate, and so to me, these magicians weren’t mere entertainers so much as valiant knights who fought back against whatever it is in the world that dampens the fire and spoils the dreams of lesser men. Somehow they had broken free of the invisible weight that drags the gaze of the aspiring astronomer or poet down from the heavens and fixes it on another—safer—line of work. I’d sit on the floor of the library between the shelves with Melbourne Christopher’s Illustrated History of Magic and James Randi’s Conjuring open beside me and read about these emissaries from another world where magic was real and anything was possible.
I learned about Blackstone—the cabinet-maker-turned-illusionist who invented one of the greatest illusions of the twentieth century. He strode to the front of the stage, stripped off his coat, rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and displayed a simple white lightbulb. The stage lights dimmed slightly. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the lightbulb began to glow.
Today, in an age when we have batteries the size of aspirin, this would not amaze anyone. In the 1920s, when the smallest battery was the size of a saltshaker and far too large to conceal inside a lightbulb, the sight of a bare, unconnected lightbulb illuminated at the fingertips was a headline-grabbing, show-stopping sensation. But this was just the beginning.
On Blackstone’s command, the lightbulb began to float. It rose from his hands and levitated from one end of the stage to the other—through a hoop to dispel the notion of threads—and then out over the heads of the audience. Slowly, silently, the single glowing lightbulb glided eerily through the cavernous theater. It was a sensation.
Blackstone wasn’t alone. I learned about Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French watchmaker who became a celebrated magician in Paris before the French government sent him to suppress an uprising in Algeria. The revolt was incited by a quasireligious group who passed off sleight-of-hand magic as actual miraculous power to assert their authority, and in 1856 Emperor Louis-Napoleon commanded Robert-Houdin to perform his most amazing feats for the leaders of the tribe. Robert-Houdin was ordered to demonstrate the superiority of French magic—and, by proxy, French rule—making him perhaps the first magician since Merlin to be sent into battle to subdue an enemy with magic.
I learned about Carter the Great, the Ohio farm boy who became a real-life Indiana Jones and barnstormed his way around the world at the turn of the century, fleeing from bandits and searching the globe for great illusions as he traveled from continent to continent with his elaborate stage show. I learned about Thurston, Kellar, Dante—the history of magic is filled with stories of great magicians and the impossible feats they invented, and I devoured everything I could find.
But mostly
I learned about Houdini.
Today, a child sitting on the floor between the shelves in the library is far better equipped to see Houdini as he really was than is any modern adult. For a theater audience in 1899—or a young person today—the Magician-in-Tuxedo was not a cliché. For them, the figure of the Magician stood not at the ostracized periphery of popular culture but instead much closer to the center. In the age before movies or television or the Internet, an audience seeking marvels went to a magic show, and Houdini was the king of magicians. He toured the United States, the UK, Europe, Russia, and Australia, and everywhere he went Houdini created a sensation.
In 1900, the twenty-six-year-old Houdini and his wife, Bess, traveled to Great Britain hoping to find work in the West End theater district. With no contract and no referral from an American theater, Houdini set out to impress the London theater elite with an escape from the most famous police force in the world, Scotland Yard. I could picture him—short and athletic, like a boxer, wiry hair standing on end and his black frock coat blowing out behind him as he marched down the Victoria Embankment. The story goes that he stormed into police headquarters to proclaim that he was the great Harry Houdini, the very man himself, and could escape from anything in the world. Scotland Yard superintendent William Melville overheard this boast and immediately dragged him out into the street, pulled his arms around a pillar, and snapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. “This is how we treat Yanks who come over here and get themselves into trouble,” he said, and promised to return after lunch to set him free. As he turned to walk away, Melville heard the handcuffs clatter to the pavement. “Wait a minute,” Houdini said, falling into stride next to the astonished superintendent. “I’ll join you.”
Here Is Real Magic Page 2