Fooling Houdini Page 2

  My specialty is close-up magic, or what the Europeans call micro magic, a school of conjuring that dispenses with the bisected showgirls and materializing fowl of stage illusions in favor of intimate effects using small, unassuming props: cards, coins, cups, balls, rings, ropes, rubber bands, thimbles, and cutlery. Close-up magic is the kind of magic that happens, as they say, right under your nose.

  The close-up prelims would be staged in a 280-seat auditorium that, for the duration of the events, would be known as the Vernon Room, named after the most influential sleight-of-hand expert of the twentieth century, The Man Who Fooled Houdini. The story is legend. At the height of his career, Houdini boasted that no man could fool him three times with the same trick. Magic, of course, relies heavily on the element of surprise, and even the greenest conjuror knows never to repeat an effect for the same audience. (“Once is a trick, twice is a lesson,” goes an old saying.) Years passed, and the challenge went unmet. Then, one night in 1922, during a SAM dinner held in Houdini’s honor at the Great Northern Hotel in Chicago, Dai Vernon, at the time a complete unknown, drew a pack of Aristocrats from his coat pocket and executed a deceptively simple version of the Ambitious Card routine, in which a signed card returns to the top of the deck after being placed in the middle. Ringed by his disciples in the mirrored banquet hall, the man who had proclaimed himself the greatest magician in the world blanched in disbelief. Houdini was stumped.

  Vernon repeated the effect no fewer than seven times before Houdini and his wife walked out in defeat. Ever since that night, the Professor, as Vernon came to be known, has held an exalted place in the foolers’ pantheon, and the Ambitious Card, often called the perfect trick, remains a staple of virtually every magician’s repertoire, including my own.

  The fortune of a Magic Olympics hopeful rises or falls on the strength of his routine, a five-to-ten-minute act performed before a panel of eight judges. It’s a lot like figure skating. Marks are handed out for technical skill, originality, showmanship, entertainment value, artistic impression, and magic atmosphere, on a scale of zero to one hundred. If, in the opening minutes of his act, an entrant fails to meet FISM’s minimum skill level requirement, a red lamp is illuminated, signaling instant disqualification. Curtains are drawn and the contestant is sent packing.

  The foreman of my close-up jury was slated to be none other than Obie O’Brien, leader of the ultrasecretive FFFF, or Fechter’s Finger Flicking Frolic, the Templars of magic. Each year the FFFF holds an invitation-only convention in upstate New York widely regarded as the most exclusive gathering of close-up magicians in the world. Being invited to the FFFF is like becoming a made man in the Mafia. It means you have arrived. Also on the judging panel was Roberto Giobbi, whose Card College, volumes 1–5, had replaced The Royal Road to Card Magic as the standard elementary text. When the time came, I’d have to perform for the guy who’d literally written the book on card magic—and from whose book I’d learned most of what I knew.

  Not only that: I’d have to fool him.

  AS I ENTERED THE VERNON dressing room to prepare for my act, I saw eight small cubicles, each outfitted with a table, a chair, and a mirror. A TV monitor had been set up on the landing so that the competitors could watch the acts, and several magicians were gathered there when I walked in. One of them sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed and hands doing some sort of prayer-like maneuver. Next to him stood Canadian cruise ship wizard Shawn Farquhar, up first, and just about the last guy I wanted to follow. A fourth-generation magician, Farquhar had notched forty-seven international victories and was the only person in history to win the International Brotherhood of Magicians competition in both stage and close-up. He took home a pair of silvers at the last Olympics, but was now after bigger quarry: “Grand Prix or gold,” he told me, as we chatted for a moment, “then I’m done.”

  Before each act, the challenger is announced. His country, magic society, and the president who consecrated him are named. More than just a formality, this custom is meant to establish accountability between the Fédération and its numeraries, for FISM statutes expressly forbid a president from approving anyone who is “under FISM level,” and societies deemed in breach of this rule face suspension from future games.

  Farquhar marched onstage brimming with confidence in his lavender suit and caution-yellow tie. He’d been doing his act since 1997, a gloss on two classics, both scorchers. First was his signature Ambitious Card routine, in which the signed card winds up inside a new cellophane-sealed deck in its correct location. I had no clue how he did it. Judging by their schwas of wonder, the audience, mostly magicians, didn’t either. His closer was a version of the cups and balls, the oldest recorded magic trick, which started off normally enough but ended with the cups revealed to be solid slabs of steel. The guy was a master.

  I was waiting in the wings when I heard the announcer call out my name. Fighting a rising panic, I almost fled. But something stopped me. I thought of my parents, who had flown in from Spain to watch me perform. I thought of my SAM brethren, their honor in my charge. I thought of the guys rooting for me at a neighborhood bar back home, my favorite place to practice. I thought of Richard M. Dooley, who’d placed his trust in me, commended me to his peers, and asked nothing in return. I thought of my girlfriend Rachel’s good-luck card with the coven of barefoot warlocks drawn beneath the heading “KNOCK THEIR SOCKS OFF!”

  I stepped out into the light.

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” I BEGAN, “back in the Renaissance, magic and what we now call science were one and the same. Today we view the two disciplines as separate, but I know a little something about physics, and I can tell you that the laws of magic and the laws of physics are but two sides of the same coin.” As I said this, I gestured at a small blackboard behind me, on which I’d scrawled some formulas, and produced an Eisenhower silver dollar from thin air.

  I rolled the silver dollar in my fingers and tossed it into my left hand. Just then I heard a loud “clink,” and I felt as if all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. A drop! Mortified, I knelt down to pick up the coin, and some sympathy applause followed as I vanished it with a retention pass—a false transfer that exploits an intrinsic lag in the brain’s visual frame rate.

  After the vanish, I ditched the coin in a secret pouch (a “topit”) sewn into the lining of my coat—a kind of magical colostomy bag. Actually, the topit is an old pickpocketing tool (the “poacher’s pouch”) repurposed to great effect by mid-twentieth-century magicians. It is sometimes said that the magician’s best friend is a good tailor. Unable to find the right fit in New York, I had mailed my coat to a seamstress in Vegas who specialized in fabric manipulation for magicians. I thought for certain her topit would bring me luck. Wishful thinking.

  Directly in front of me was a three-by-five-foot table covered with green felt cloth, where my two volunteers—a well-dressed man with an ambitious comb-over and a matronly woman of about fifty—were seated, regarding me with a mix of confusion and pity. Clearly they weren’t impressed.

  Behind them, in the front row, sat the judges, four to one side of the center aisle and four to the other, all of them looking very stern. Staring at them, I could feel my nerves going into overdrive. My face was flushed, my vision blurry. I could hear myself speaking at warp speed, but was powerless to slow down. My hands trembled and were slick with sweat, which made holding on to the coins all the more precarious. Nor did it help that there were nearly a thousand people in the crowd, including my parents, television crews, and reporters from all over the world, cameras bearing down on me from every angle.

  I managed to eke out the next phase of my routine—another series of coin tricks—without too much grief, but things got scary when I pulled out a deck of cards for the finale. First, I was supposed to give the deck a blind shuffle—a false shuffle that leaves the order of the cards unchanged—but my hands dipped below the table, violating a rule as old as card cheats. (This is not unlike letting your guard down during a prizefight.) The audience snickered, and I could all but see the judges shaving points off their scorecards.

  Much to the crowd’s dismay, my hands stole beneath the table again a few beats later, this time to grab a secret duplicate card on my chair. More withering laughter. What’s going on? I thought, This wasn’t what I’d anticipated. Their patience exhausted, the audience began to turn on me. Scattered heckles congealed into an uproar. I fought to remain calm as I asked my female volunteer to pick a card, my hair damp with sweat, my hands trembling. I felt as if I were performing magic for the first time in my life. I cut the deck, all tremors, struggling to remember my patter, and dropped the cards into my lap. This was supposed to be a sneaky deck switch, but it fooled no one. I was so panicked I didn’t even see the devilish glare of the red lamp bearing down on me. Next thing I knew, the Spanish judge was waving for me to stop.

  “That will be all,” he said flatly.

  What?

  “It’s over.”

  There are many ways to lose at the Magic Olympics. You can fail to qualify, run out of time, get eighty-six’d on any number of technicalities—but nothing compares to the disgrace of being red-lighted in the middle of your act. This indignity befell only one competitor at this year’s close-up competition: me. I hadn’t just lost; I’d been humiliated. Oozing shame, I scooped up my tackle and dashed offstage. Scrambling upstairs, I ditched the chalkboard behind a curtain in the dressing room and hurled the rest of my props into the nearest trash bin. I wanted to disappear, and in a moment of anguish, I vowed never to do magic again.

  STILL LICKING MY WOUNDS, I eventually worked up the nerve to head downstairs and brave the crowds pouring out of the competition rooms. I couldn’t tell what was worse, the mockery or the sympathy. Couples approached me arm
in arm offering condolences sufficiently grave to have been occasioned by the death of a relative or a diagnosis of inoperable cancer. A Swedish mentalist told me in all earnestness that in twenty (twenty!) years I would look back on this and laugh. “I hope you don’t stop competing,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder. Then he leaned in closer. “If it had been an Asian guy, he would probably stop with magic forever, because it would have been such a humiliation,” he said. “But you Americans . . .”

  My father, always my biggest fan, greeted me with a pat on the shoulder and a bromide about having given it my best, which did little to lift my spirits. According to him, it was a “real honor” to have been invited to the Olympics, and I think he believed it. Almost two years later, he was still carrying his official Magic Olympics tote bag to work every day. In fact, I’m pretty sure he kept on carrying it until it finally wore out.

  THAT NIGHT, I FOUND MYSELF sitting at the bar a few feet from Lennart Green, winner of the gold medal at the 1991 Lausanne games, and a hero of mine. A former doctor, Green had suffered humiliation and defeat at the 1988 Olympics in The Hague when the judges, baffled by his unusual repertoire, accused the underground card man of using a trick deck and planting stooges in the audience to shuffle the cards for him. (The use of audience confederates at the Magic Olympics is strictly forbidden.) His effects, the experts maintained, were impossible otherwise. But Green’s act, a heroic display of skill masked by well-feigned clumsiness, relied on no such trickery. During his many late nights at the hospital, Green had devised a complex new machinery of card sleights that had since revolutionized the field, shattering many long-held assumptions about what was possible with a deck of cards. When Green returned to the Olympics three years later, he performed the same act but allowed the judges to shuffle and examine the cards. This time, he routed all his opponents.

  Green was tall and lumbering, with huge hands, Coke-bottle glasses, and a boyish mop of hair. Aware of his interest in science, I engaged him in a conversation about physics and math, subjects he seemed to know a lot about. I felt intimidated talking to one of my heroes, but Green was generous and obliging, and he invited me to have a drink with him in the foyer. We drank beers on the couches, at a glass coffee table, surrounded by his usual flock of young devotees. Also with us was white-haired head judge Obie O’Brien, who’d presided over my elimination. He said I got DQ’d because my hands had dropped below the table—a real rookie mistake.

  Green, it turned out, was a big puzzle head, and I edited a monthly puzzle column, so the two of us traded brainteasers. After scribbling a few puzzles on paper, Green rooted around in his leather bag and produced a small wooden block with a cylindrical cutout on one face into which a smooth, cone-topped cylinder fit loosely. The goal was to extract the loose piece without lifting the block off the table. Pinching the cone between the fingers wouldn’t work because it slipped out due to the smoothness and slope of the wood. “There are many solutions,” Green said, “but only one elegant solution.” Meanwhile, O’Brien looked down at the block dismissively.

  I stared at the block for a few minutes, and then it hit me. I inhaled deeply and blew a sharp puff of air straight down at the cube. The cylinder rocketed out of the block, and I caught it mid-flight. “Bernoulli’s principle!” I cried, unable to hide my emotion. O’Brien furrowed his brow. “It’s how lift works,” I explained. Rising to his feet, Green shook my hand and smiled. “Very good,” he said. “It was the elegant solution.” And for a brief moment, I felt redeemed.

  CURLED UP IN A WINDOW SEAT on the long flight home, high above the ocean, I rehashed all that had happened over the course of the week and was filled with regret. Before coming to the Magic Olympics, I’d thought I was a fairly competent magician. As it turned out, I had only been fooling myself. My tricks were derivative and, I’d learned, ridiculously impractical pipe dreams. (They were, as one online commentator succinctly put it, “crap.”) Unlike Green at The Hague, I’d been eliminated because I was genuinely bad. I had no business trying to pass myself off as a world-class magician. A world-class hack was more like it. A champion loser.

  Wounded and humiliated, I’d sacrificed not only my dignity, but also my will to perform. Though it pained me to think it, I knew my love affair with magic was over, and like any long-term relationship that abruptly comes to an end, this breakup was fraught with heartache. Sure, I had lots of fond memories. And, who knew, maybe someday, with enough distance, we’d manage to become friends again. But at that moment all this seemed achingly far away. For now, it was Splitsville. Magic and I were parting company. And the breakup had not been mutual. I’d been cruelly, callously, and unceremoniously dumped.

  Chapter 2

  Mystery School

  After the flogging I received at the Magic Olympics, I went off the grid for a while. I stuffed my impressive collection of magic gear into my World Championships of Magic tote bag and stowed it in the back of my closet. I stayed home most of the time and sulked, wallowing in self-pity and watching bad TV. When I did go out, I no longer carried cards and coins in every pocket. If friends or family members requested a trick, I would wince and change the subject. Although my doctor told me I was nuts, I was convinced I was experiencing signs of PTSD. I had nightmares of walking into a SAM meeting only to be greeted with deafening silence, followed by a roar of laughter and an outburst of hooting and unkind epithets. Head judge Obie O’Brien’s ghost-white face haunted me in my sleep. I was afraid to show my face in the magic community and abandoned my weekly ritual of shopping at Tannen’s magic store on Saturdays. I felt like Clark Kent after he loses his powers in Superman II. My goal of becoming a magic hero had never seemed more distant. I was washed up—finished, as they say in showbiz.

  Things only went from bad to worse. Two months after Stockholm, Rachel told me we needed to talk. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes swiveling nervously around the room, as if watching a fly.

  “I’m going to Venezuela,” she said.

  “Like, on vacation?”

  She threw her arms around me.

  “So . . . Not a vacation?”

  No, not a vacation. She had been awarded a Pulitzer fellowship, a swanky travel grant for Columbia University journalism students looking to work overseas. Her plan was to spend a few years in Caracas, apply for wire jobs, then maybe go to Africa. Of course I was happy for her. Wasn’t this why she’d gone to journalism school in the first place? Of course I’d miss her. Of course we’d Skype. But she was leaving forever, and no amount of magic could make her stay. By October she was gone, and I was alone with my misery and my Sinead O’Connor albums.

  I did finally get some good news the following spring, when I found out that I had been accepted to a PhD program in physics at Columbia. I’d been interested in physics for a long time, but for several reasons (pot, pot, and more pot) I hadn’t pursued it. Instead, I’d majored in English as an undergrad, a decision I later came to regret, if only because—as my Spanish relatives were quick to point out—didn’t I already speak English? As part of my work at Discover magazine, I often interviewed physicists about their research, and the conversations intensified my curiosity. In time I realized that I wanted to be on the other end of the phone. So, while working at Discover, I started taking physics classes at Columbia and moonlighting in an experimental astrophysics lab, with the goal of eventually quitting my job and going back to school full time. Now, after several years of hard work, I’d finally reached this goal.

  The lab I worked in was run by a young experimental physicist who specializes in cosmology, the study of the origins and structure of the universe. Our group built balloon-borne instruments to measure the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. The CMB is the earliest radiation to have emerged after the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. Loosely speaking, the CMB is the echo, or heat signature, of the early universe. If the Big Bang were a camera flash, the CMB would be the afterimage that lingers on your retina after you close your eyes.