Fooling houdini, p.5
Fooling Houdini, page 5
Now there were actually two Saturday afternoon sanctuaries, the second being the private downstairs room at Maui Tacos on Fifth Avenue, where local IBM president Doug Edwards held court. Wesley James was the reason for the schism. A few years back, in a rabid dispute over the provenance of an old magic trick called Cling Clang (wherein a flower petal or a piece of tissue paper is transformed into an egg), Wes slugged Doug Edwards—who is twenty years his junior and a black belt in karate—sending him flying across the room and splitting the community in two.
Wes had worked alongside some of history’s greats. He was one of the few surviving members of an ultrasecretive underground community led by Dai Vernon and Chicago card genius Edward “The Cardician” Marlo. Wes was also one of the original members of the invitation-only FFFF Club led by Obie O’Brien, the head judge who voted me offstage at the Magic Olympics. Wes still went most years to the FFFF convention upstate, but claimed it was no longer elite enough for his taste. “Back then it was really small, and you had to perform,” he later told me. “Today they’ll let anybody in.” Some say Wes is the greatest underground magician alive. Others say he’s just an asshole.
I’d met Wes once or twice before, but never made much of a connection. His personality was somewhat akin to the sound a truck makes while backing up. For many years he refused to lecture, even to magicians. But I was told that, now retired and probably nearing his own Broken Wand Ceremony—he sucked down menthol cigarettes like candy—he had started unloading bits and pieces from his vast stockpile of secrets. Maybe he’d be willing to break off some knowledge in my general direction?
I found Wes at Rustico II, sitting at the head of the table, a fisher king flanked by his disciples, some of whom I recognized. To his left was Bob Friedhoffer, a foul-mouthed Brooklyn magician who uses magic to teach science to kids. Friedhoffer looked like a bloated George Carlin, a short, stout, fireplug of a man with thin strands of silver hair slicked back in a tight ponytail. Woolly tufts of chest fuzz sprouted Chia-like from under his polo shirt, and his breathing sounded effortful. He was what you might call a Darth breather. Next to him was a former mathematician named Jack Diamond, a wan, mousy guy with curly white hair and powder blue eyes.
John Born, a twenty-six-year-old Wichita transplant who’d recently won the IBM close-up competition, was at the other end of the table, sporting short sleeves and a leather newsboy hat. (Apparently some of the IBM folks occasionally patronized Wes’s salon despite the schism.) A silver half dollar danced and rolled in Born’s right hand, seemingly on autopilot. He closed his fist over the coin, then opened both hands again, palms out, fingers splayed like a starfish—empty!
In the middle of the action sat Wes, leaning back in his chair like he was above it all. Grizzled and haggard, he was almost seventy but seemed older in a way, his face drawn and cratered, lengthened by a mangy doorknocker beard the color of sandstone and rust. What remained of his silver hair clung to his temples by sheer force of will, arcing across his rutted brow like broken telephone wires and down the hulking span of his back in a yard-long Manchu queue. But his hands were those of a much younger man, having been preserved, it seemed, at the expense of the rest of his body, and they moved with the elegance of a concert pianist’s.
I edged my way to the table, gnawing on a slice of mushroom pizza that tasted as if it were from the Jurassic era. Wes was showing Jack Diamond an obscure “hand mucking” technique, a diabolical switch of a facedown pair during a round of poker. Say the game is Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular variety of serious poker, and you don’t like your hole cards, the two facedown cards dealt to each player at the start of every hand. Mucking is a way to improve on fate and tilt the odds against your opponents by slyly subbing in a better pair secretly copped from the deck and palmed away earlier in the game. In this particular mock deal, Wes had found 2-7 off suit, the worst starting hand in Hold ’Em. He casually peeked at his cards, partially obscuring them for a split second beneath both his hands—nothing unusual. Except that when he turned the cards over again moments later, he now had a pair of aces in the hole.
Burning with curiosity, I pulled in closer. Wes acknowledged my presence dimly, if at all. I unsheathed my cards and warmed up with a few double lifts and riffle shuffles. Inching into his field of vision, I executed a spread pass, a move for transposing two halves of a deck, and one that I felt I’d pretty much mastered.
“You’re flashing,” he said.
What?
“When your thumb juts out like that it’s a dead giveaway. The thumb should stay tucked in at all times, like this.” He showed me his take on the move. He was right. The thumb was a tell. Oops.
Still trying to impress him, I whipped out my ribbon-bookmarked pocket edition of S. W. Erdnase’s The Expert at the Card Table, the card cheater’s bible. I’d bought it at Tannen’s only an hour earlier. It was a virginal copy, its spine still unbroken. I hadn’t even read the table of contents. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice.
If Wes was impressed, he didn’t show it. Instead, he let me know right off the bat that his knowledge of Erdnase was vastly superior to mine. “There are fifteen mistakes in Erdnase,” he said, gruffly. “Eight that are universally acknowledged, four more that only a few people know of, and three that only I know about.”
Frustrated, I put down the Erdnase and took out my physics book, Jackson’s fearsome Classical Electrodynamics. If I wasn’t going to learn any magic, I thought, I might as well get the jump on this week’s homework. The man responsible for my assignment was Professor Miklos Gyulassy, of Szolnok, Hungary, a notorious hard-ass who once threw away an entire class’s midterm exams in disgust when he deemed them unworthy of being graded. You might say Gyulassy was Columbia’s answer to Wes James.
To my surprise, the physics book piqued Wes’s interest more than my magical overtures and lame attempts at talking shop. “What are you studying?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. I told him, and he gave a low groan. “If nothing else, a PhD gives you some credibility,” he said, meeting my gaze for the first time. “Whether or not it should is another matter.” Wes, I was surprised to learn, had a PhD in computer science (although during his multidecade professional magic career, he billed himself as a “Professor of Enchantments”). Soon we were talking about quantum mechanics, computers, card counting, the mathematics of shuffling, and deck memorization. Science turned out to be our common ground.
Pivoting off our discussion of physics, I mentioned that my presentation of the Ambitious Card routine—the famous trick that fooled Houdini—drew on my knowledge of quantum physics. Creating your own Ambitious Card routine is a rite of passage among magicians, for whom the effect serves as both a calling card and a secret handshake. (“Show me your Ambitious Card” is a common greeting among conjurors.) The Ambitious Card is the 100-yard dash of magic, the SAT. It’s to sleight of hand what the Beethoven sonatas are to concert piano. And while the basic template is more than a century old—a card bubbles to the top after being placed in the middle—magicians are constantly reinventing the effect. In 1982, for instance, a version surfaced, and won gold at the World Championships in Lausanne, that culminated with the signed card escaping from a deck that had been hog-tied Houdini-style in a three-foot coil of rope.
My spin on the trick was all about the patter—the story I told while performing it. “In the quantum realm,” I would say, as I put the card in the middle of the deck, “particles can tunnel through impassable barriers, the microscopic equivalent of David Copperfield walking through the wall of China.” (That’s right, I was combining magic and physics. Watch your back, Tom Brady.) Wes seemed to like the idea but was less than flattering about my technique.
“No, no, no,” he rumbled, grabbing my hands. “That’s not right.” He molded my fingers into a more forward grip, freeing them up to cover the bottom half of the deck, protecting it from exposure. This way, the lower two fingers of my right hand screened the move, making it undetectable. “I spent a whole day trying to teach Johnny Thompson this,” Wes said, sipping his diet soda. “But he was so used to doing it the other way that he just couldn’t get it.” (Johnny Thompson, aka The Great Tomsoni, was a seasoned Vegas showman now in his late seventies.)
I gave it another shot. “No, straight back,” Wes said. “Keep these fingers relaxed.” He gestured at the lower three fingers of my right hand. “Always point your index finger directly to the left of the left-most line of vision.” This, I later learned, was a general principle for neutralizing angle issues.
I kept drilling, straining my hand muscles and stretching my fingers out as far as they would go. I felt as if I were doing splits, and it actually hurt. “You’re too tense!” Wes bellowed at me. “The spectator will spot any tension!” This was another general principle, I came to realize. Moves should look and feel natural, Wes insisted, because even if the spectators don’t detect the move itself, they can sense the exertion behind it, which lessens the believability.
Wes’s pedagogical method didn’t exactly help me relax, but I took a deep breath and gave the sleight another try, and another, practicing over and over again for more than an hour. It was a knacky move, but finally, after doing it a hundred times or so, I felt something click, like a dead bolt latching into place. Wes’s face brightened. It was the first time I’d seen him show any hint of excitement. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it! You’ve got it!”
I worked with Wes for the rest of the afternoon, four arduous hours of intense magical training. By the end of that grueling first day, my hands were throbbing, my back was as stiff as a poker, and I was exhausted. “Keep practicing,” Wes told me as I turned to leave. “It takes me twenty-one days to train a muscle.” But I knew it would take a lot longer than that to master what he was teaching me.
Still, my meeting with Wes had been inspiring, and it motivated me to work harder. It felt good to have found a potential mentor. Maybe I was deluding myself, but even after one day, I felt I’d improved. Later that night, while hanging out at a bar with some fellow magicians, I heard through the grapevine that Wes thought I showed potential, but that I was “rough around the edges.” I recalled the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Yoda tells Luke, “Control! Control! You must learn control!” I chose to take it as a compliment. Coming from a Jedi master, it was a ray of hope.
ONE WEEKEND TURNED INTO MANY. Saturdays at the pizzeria became my newest ritual—harking back to the one that began in my early childhood, when my father would take me to the magic store on the weekends. My friends and family soon learned not to call me on Saturdays; I observed the magic Sabbath more faithfully than the Hebrew one. (I may be half Jewish, but I’m all magician.) Little by little, Wes took me into his confidence.
A typical weekend started at Tannen’s magic store, formerly in the heart of the Garment District and now on Thirty-fourth Street. After that, I’d usually head a block south to Fantasma, the hip new magic and toy emporium that opened its doors in May 2004, in direct competition with the bellwether Tannen’s. There was a lot of bad blood over this. The owners of Tannen’s talked about Fantasma as if it were a hostile army advancing on their turf, fearing that an around-the-corner rival might push them into Chapter 11. And they had a point. Tannen’s was a lot like the record store in the film High Fidelity. It was small, nondescript, a lightly trafficked shop that never advertised. There wasn’t even so much as a sign outside to alert the foot traffic on Thirty-fourth Street that miracles were for sale inside on the sixth floor. The kids who manned the counters were foul-mouthed slackers who made no attempt to please the customers and push their inventory. Instead, they insulted the clientele and made dick jokes while arm-punching each other.
Fantasma, on the other hand, was all about eye candy. Pictures of celebrities adorned the walls, the floor was crowded with original Houdini artifacts—including his famous substitution trunk—and a rabbit named Rambo scurried around in a cage by the left counter for all to pet. (Most days, Rambo looked like he had combat shock from all the petting.) Every few minutes, an animatronic Houdini descended from the ceiling and unstraitjacketed himself. Roger Dreyer, the store’s owner, was a smooth-talking salesman who was tireless in promoting his brand. He hosted magic parties for A-listers and hawked his wares at all the major conventions. The store even had a sign, a great big one smack in front of the subway entrance on Thirty-third Street, the better to lure in tourists who, once inside, rarely left empty-handed. There was always a novelty item or a children’s magic set on sale.
After picking up experience points at both shops, and dropping cash into their tills, I’d head over to the pizzeria and rendezvous with Wes. He was always there. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, cockroaches would continue to flourish and Wes would still be at Rustico II every Saturday. His motto might easily have been that of the U.S. Postal Service: Neither snow nor rain . . .
The only time he wasn’t at Rustico II was on the last weekend in April, when he attended Obie O’Brien’s FFFF convention in upstate New York. He never went on vacation. On Memorial Day weekend, when the pizzeria was closed, I half expected to find him sitting outside with his back against the corrugated storefront security door. While others came and went, Wes was a constant, the first to show up and the last to leave. He came at around noon, as if it were his job, and left just after six without having to consult the time on his Casio calculator watch. After sixty years and more than three thousand Saturdays, the rhythm had been starched into his ganglia.
Brackish and brooding, Wes smiled rarely and laughed even less. He croaked more than he talked, his gravelly Brooklyn prizefighter’s baritone an homage to Burgess Meredith. His eyes were like dog tags pierced with bullet holes. He professed hatred for David Blaine—who used to inhabit these Saturday haunts before he became famous—and cherished grudges like pets, including one against Roger Dreyer, owner of Fantasma. “I’ll never set foot in there,” he said to us one afternoon, his face darkening and his voice cracking like dry cigar paper. And yet, for all his cragginess, Wes presided over his ragtag team of weekend wizards with unassailable dignity. Solomonic in his bearing, he radiated wisdom. I couldn’t help but admire the guy.
Originally from Florida, the eldest son of an airplane mechanic who was stationed in Jacksonville during World War II, Wes moved to Brooklyn in 1945, at the age of nine. “I grew up in a very tough neighborhood,” he told me with an air of pride. “I may have a PhD, but I’m a street kid.” He earned his doctorate from NYU in computer science, a field that, in 1956, was still in its infancy. Wes’s dissertation was on something called modular programming, and until a few years ago, his thesis was still on display at the Boston Museum of Computing.
After graduate school, he took a job in IT before becoming a full-fledged professional magician, working trade shows and nightclubs and hospitality suites for the next two decades. During those years, he was often on the road seven days a week. When he eventually grew weary of traveling, he retired from professional magic and started a custom hardware and software development company, which he sold after the death of his partner in 1993. But magic has always been his one true passion, the torch he carries through life.
This passion first took hold, as it often does, on the weekends. “It was always Saturdays,” he said. “Back then we met on the Lower East Side. After that I’d usually go to Flosso’s store.” Al Flosso was the legendary “Coney Island Fakir” who owned Martinka and Co. magic store from 1939 until his death in 1976. “Every Saturday I would show up there and listen to the guys talk about things. Al would throw me out—‘get out of here and don’t come back, ya hear!’—and the understanding was I’d buy coffee for everyone and come back. Then he’d secretly pay me. He’d always ask, ‘You got enough money to go home?’ Because a lot of kids would spend every dime.”
Wes met Dai Vernon in 1946, at the age of ten, when his mother began allowing him to take the Fourth Avenue local into the city after school. “I used to go up to Max Holden’s Magic Shop. His wife took a liking to me and she introduced me to Vernon. I didn’t know Vernon was anybody important. We would go downtown to the Forty-second Street Cafeteria during the week, when Holden’s would close at five p.m. Vernon would ask me to do this or that and then he would give me pointers. He’d critique what I was doing. Or he’d show me stuff and ask me if I could figure it out. And that was kind of the basis for our relationship. Very few of the older guys would even talk to kids. So Vernon was an exception in that regard. It’s sort of not by accident that he got the nickname the Professor, because he liked teaching.”
It was the beginning of a relationship that would last until Vernon’s death in 1992, at the age of ninety-eight. A year before he died, Vernon sat in on a performance of Wes’s at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. “He’d never actually seen me do a whole formal close-up performance,” said Wes. “He sat there with a big shitty grin on his face, just pleased as punch. And that’s the last I saw of him.” Wes’s voice seemed to catch on the last few syllables, and his eyes took on a filmy aspect. “At least he got a chance to see what I turned into.”
Like his master, Wes also seemed to enjoy teaching. Every time I’d show up, he’d hunch his shoulders and shuffle in his seat and ask me what I was working on. Saturdays at Rustico II reminded me a bit of my weekly piano lessons as a kid. If I’d been practicing, I’d march up to the Steinway and sweep the back of my shirt out from under me with a maestro’s poise. But if I’d slacked off, I’d sit in shame and listen to Mrs. Goldsmith sight-read the nocturnes I was supposed to be learning, mentally checking off the minutes until my mom swung by to pick me up.
