Magic is dead, p.4
Magic Is Dead, page 4
Eventually he found a fat-stacks game at a country club in Huddersfield, just twenty minutes from his home. At first, the men refused to let him play, but after he lied that his father was a member—“He’s always here. He drives that silver Mercedes. You definitely know him”—they let him buy in. Instead of crimping cards, Madison tried out different moves: dealing from the bottom of the deck, as well as a simple shift, where a card is moved within the deck. He got away with it. The golf buddies didn’t have a clue. He played a few games with them over the next few months and built up a rapport. After one weekend game, one of the guys told Madison where to find the real money: The Talbot Inn in Barnsley, about fifteen miles away.
The next weekend, Madison went to the pub. He hung around until closing, sipping beers, waiting for the game to begin. Around two in the morning, after the last patrons left, the barman signaled Madison into the back room, revealing a table with five chairs. “It was real money—you couldn’t sit down with less than five hundred pounds,” Madison told me. After successfully working his subtle cheats at the country club, Madison’s confidence was high. But on his first deal, ten minutes into the game, disaster struck.
“I fucked up,” he told me. Another player saw Madison stacking cards to the bottom of the deck. Looking the man in the eye, Madison knew he was caught. Without saying a word, he bolted for the door. But it was locked—no way out. Madison got the shit kicked out of him. The men left him on the sidewalk, bloody and bruised, with a broken leg and collarbone, a handful of cracked ribs, and a concussion. Madison woke up in the hospital and he phoned his father, who offered to put him up. “I always joke that my hands were completely left alone,” he told me, holding them out as if inspecting their survival. As he recovered, he kept practicing sleight of hand. But he found a new, less dangerous application for his skills: magic.
Madison has since become one of the most respected sleight-of-hand artists in the world—and one of the most elusive. A cult figure whose history of card cheating created a distinct allure and upped his street cred, he rarely makes appearances in public, and his presence on social media is equally sparse. He cloaks himself in an alter ego: an edgy, gravel-voiced, irreverent vagabond. His entire persona—viewed primarily on Instagram and other social media networks, which are crucial tools modern magicians use to brand themselves and interact with others in the community—is highly calculated and steeped in mystery. He treats his career as a piece of performance art and has dubbed the character he has created “the architect,” a nod to the fact that the character may be building him—the one in control—rather than the other way around. In many respects, he doesn’t even consider himself a magician, but rather someone dedicated to the art of deception, whatever form it may take. In magic, he is the epitome of the underground. This was the Madison I met, more than a decade into his career.
In 2013, Madison began to seek out other young guns who he felt were trying to redefine the notion of what a magician could be. “I wanted change, so I went looking for people who could be part of a movement,” he told me. He felt magic was on the cusp of something monumental; the young generation had started to find their footing, and he knew, as the subculture continued to change, that he was becoming an admired figure—that he had the power to create a wave if he put together something big. Madison had an idea: if he could round up the world’s best talent into one cohesive group, he might be able to influence how people approached and consumed the craft and highlight some of the most revered young talent in the game. He wanted to prop up those he respected, and also be seen as the ringleader of the next generation of magicians.
He decided to create the52, a secret society of the most innovative performers and creators of illusion, deception, and mystery, and quickly found a handful that impressed him. They performed difficult maneuvers in new or unique ways, invented their own tricks and routines, and were savvy with how they marketed their brand of magic: slick videos posted on Instagram or YouTube, an enticing element of character embedded in their persona, and the chops to back it all up in person. They were paving their own path, not following the hokey formula of traditional hacks.
First, Madison asked his close friend Laura London to help recruit new members and launch the now-infamous club. Together, they became cofounders of the group. As one of Britain’s most successful magicians, Laura is a television regular, and even once performed for Queen Elizabeth. She has spent her entire career proving that a woman’s role in magic isn’t limited to that of a scantily clad assistant; they can fool you as good as anyone else. The duo had been friends for a few years, and confided in each other, not only about how they wanted their careers to progress, but about how they hoped magic would mature in the years to come. Laura was pioneering a woman’s place in magic, and Madison trusted her judgment more than anyone. He wanted someone’s vision to complement his own. She was the perfect partner in crime.
The52 quickly became known as the new generation, the ones beginning to shake things up in the world of magic. They took the antiquated image of a magician and flipped it on its head. They vowed to no longer associate with the stereotypes of top hats and scarves, rabbits, and doves—lame crutches that can dumb down magic from an art form to a joke. To them, magic was something to be revered, and magicians could embody a modern mystique. “Every single person in the52 has something special about them,” Laura told me, adding that some members are not necessarily magicians, but have contributed to the industry in other ways. They have inducted photographers, artists, a professional forger, hypnotists, and reformed card cheats. “Everyone we choose to become a member is an artist in their own way,” she told me, “and they each have a specific role in the group.”
Madison wanted membership to be a lifelong allegiance. As in Fight Club, one of his favorite films, where wearing a black eye to work and coughing up blood demonstrated your dedication to the group’s ethos, he needed his inductees to prove their commitment to the52. With only fifty-two spots in the club, one member for each card in a deck, being inducted was a serious offer. As he began asking other magicians to join, assigning each member a corresponding playing card—their identity within the group—he tacked on another induction requirement: For it to be official, you had to get your card number and suit tattooed on the inside of your middle finger. Madison, the Nine of Clubs; Laura, the King of Diamonds; Ramsay, the Four of Spades; and so on. The other members obliged, never doubting Madison and Laura’s vision.
But the group didn’t make an official public announcement. Madison and Laura always wanted it to be shrouded in mystery, as a means, primarily, to garner some hype in the community. It was teased to the magic world only through photos of people’s tattoos and, when Madison would speak about it, through a simple but provocative mantra: Magic Is Dead. Madison and Laura built a website for the52, but it’s merely a landing page showcasing a single disclaimer: By invite only. For the hundreds of thousands of amateur magicians who follow the members on social media platforms like Instagram—where the inclusionary finger tattoos are shown off and the hashtag #the52 is a signal to the public of membership—there was very little to grasp in terms of what it all meant. But of course, that just added to its appeal.
Within comment threads on Instagram, I saw some followers refer to the group as the Illuminati of Magic, while others tried to figure out what it takes to become a member. Many asked pointedly what the club was all about. Some fans even got their own tattoos, thinking it automatically qualified them for membership. (It obviously does not.) In the end, no one really knew what it meant, aside from the fact that some of the best young magicians in the world were members, and that it was likely founded by Madison and Laura. It was cloaked in secrecy, with only cryptic details teased out to the masses. Was it a club? A quest? Or something more sinister? No one knew for sure. While the mystery and exclusivity sparked curiosity, it also heightened members’ influence over their fans and followers. Other magicians respected them.
For the52, you are sought out by the founders based on your approach to the craft. It’s that simple. It’s not uncommon, too, for members to be recruited for more than a year before being asked to join. Many of the members not only perform magic professionally but also invent new tricks for other magicians, acting as private consultants, an occupation that predates Houdini, or to be sold on the public market through online retail shops.* These are roles that, although technically behind the scenes, really run the game in the world of magic. Ramsay and Madison are hired to do both of these things, while Laura dedicates herself mainly to performance.
Their take on magic has garnered nods of approval from the industry’s most legendary performers, including Penn Jillette of the famed magic duo Penn & Teller, who told me, “I’ve seen the best magicians of my generation and none of them can touch the younger guys.” He appreciates the ideology behind the52 and how it differs from flashy, mainstream magic. “Criss Angel wants to be seen as something supernatural,” Penn said. “These guys in the52 want to be seen as artists.”
When I first learned about the group, there were forty-four members, leaving eight remaining slots. Laura and Madison told me that they had an idea whom they’d choose, and what their roles would be, but they needed to finalize their plans. It was hyperexclusive, and admitting new members was a serious undertaking. In Blackpool, I pressed for more details about the club and its plans, but Laura only smiled and said, “We are very, very close. You’ll see when the time is right.”
From my left, Madison leaned in and, in a clear, serious voice, said, “We are out to change magic forever.”
4
Locked In
The brain stem is the smallest part of your brain, about three inches long, roughly the size of your thumb. It plugs into your spinal cord and is composed of three parts: the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla oblongata. The midbrain oversees your vision, hearing, and eye and body movement. The pons assist in motor control and sensory analysis. The medulla maintains more vital bodily functions, such as breathing and heart rate. The body does its job correctly because of the brain stem, which is flanked by two arteries the size of a shoelace. Another, the width of a pencil, drives right up its center. Blood flows from your heart and into your shoelace-thin vertebral arteries before bottlenecking into your pencil-thick basilar artery. The point where your vertebral arteries and basilar artery meet, at the brain stem’s base, is shaped like a wishbone, with eight smaller arteries branching off and wrapping around the brain stem itself. These little creeks of blood feed the brain stem, granting you the opportunity to live.
Because the brain stem is a direct extension of the spinal cord, it acts more like a relay center than a rod-and-piston. If your brain is an engine and the spinal cord its wheels, the brain stem is kind of like a transmission. It communicates some of the brain’s most basic directives to the rest of your body. It tells it how to behave. The brain stem houses all the regulatory devices that power, oversee, and dictate how the body operates, and when blood circulation is cut off from the brain stem, the loss of these simple yet critical functions results in a very specific clinical diagnosis: brain death. Your body isn’t necessarily dead—it still works, with the help of a machine—but your brain’s ability to tell it what to do is kaput. Once the machine’s plug is pulled, your heart will stop beating and your lungs will stop working (the medulla already choked to death in the back of your skull), and your brain will invariably starve itself of oxygen and you’ll die. In a weird and ironic way, your brain will kill itself—an organ-specific suicide. It’s kind of like drowning but without the necessity of water.
And, so, when that blood clot—a dark, knotted, disgusting black gremlin of a thing—dislodged from somewhere in my father’s body and jammed itself dead center into his basilar artery, the brain stem’s lifeline, we knew it was all over. It permanently damaged the midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata (the poor, poor medulla), and cut off any semblance of communication between his brain and body—the two sides of the human anatomy that made him whole. He had the stroke at home but would endure four days of breathing through a machine (again: the poor, poor medulla) before he was officially pronounced dead. But to me, my father died in our living room on that clear, sunny, unusually crisp Saturday afternoon in May 2001. It was two and a half weeks before my fourteenth birthday, just a normal day for all of us—until everything went wrong.
There is an unspoken rule in entrepreneurial, blue-collar towns: if you want to get ahead in this world, you have to work Saturdays. They were basically part of the regular workweek for my dad, and went like this: up at five, chug a cup of coffee and smoke a few cigarettes while the truck warms up, be out the door by six, and, if you could help it, back home by two to do chores for the wife and play with the kids. Ambition was a drug for my father, and he always worked Saturdays. He had to. In May 2000, a year before his death, he and my mother moved us from the one-story ranch near the center of our small Massachusetts hometown to, on its outskirts, a big house in the woods. My mother painstakingly designed the home—a broad, two-story colonial with an airy, open kitchen and high-ceilinged den—for two years preceding its construction, which my father participated in from foundation to finishings. It was their dream home. It was where they were supposed to grow old together.
This Saturday in May was not unlike many others before it. Saturdays in spring consisted mainly of family time: catching up on homework, watching television, or running errands with Mom or Dad. It was a day so ordinary it became almost trivial. Sometimes, after my father came home from his half day of work, we would drive his truck to the dump and unload that week’s worth of trash. Growing up, this was one of my favorite activities. I felt like a man helping Dad unload the truck. He would sometimes even let me drive after we finished. The road at the dump beelined from the landfill to its exit along a four-car-wide dirt track, a straight shot with no turns and very little obstacles to avoid. My father would slide the seat back and let me climb up onto his lap. He took care of the pedals, my hands on the wheel. He’d crawl along the dirt road, foot hovering over the brake while his hands—big, thick, blue-collar hands, the hands of a man I wanted to become—floated above mine, ready to divert disaster if needed.
But I was in eighth grade now—nearly fourteen. We had a lot of trash in the garage, I remember, and I hoped that, after dumping it, maybe he’d let me take the truck on my own, with us sitting next to each other as equals. So, I lounged around, waiting for two o’clock. On that day, he came home earlier than expected, maybe around noon. He looked sick, in pain even. The small sacks of skin under his eyes hung off his sockets as if filled with water. His face glowed an off-white, like old milk. He told my mother that he was going to take a nap for a few minutes. Maybe that would help, he said. He went into the living room and lay down on the couch. I was in the kitchen when I heard him stagger to his feet and cry out for my mother in a slurred grumble, as if his mouth was full of rocks: Pam.
He hobbled toward the kitchen but fell into the wall before he could reach its tiled floor. He vomited everywhere. My mother screamed, latched on to his shoulders, and dragged him back over to the couch. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911. She gave the dispatcher our address but was afraid that they’d have trouble finding the house. She kneeled down next to my father, catching his vomit in a bucket, and told me to wait for the ambulance at the end of the driveway. I bolted out the front door, cut through our front yard, and ran down the driveway. I wore only a T-shirt and the shadows of the trees were thick and black. I felt very small standing there in the darkness thrown down by the trees. It was cold, and I was scared that the ambulance wouldn’t see me. I stood out there for what seemed like a long while. Maybe they were lost, I thought. I heard the siren, a far-off screaming, before I saw the lights come around the bend. I waved them into our driveway like a parking lot attendant and chased after it back to the house. The lights flashed so bright that I had to look at the ground as I ran.
The eldest of five children, my father was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio. It’s a foul, poverty-stricken city, the shell of a former steel manufacturing hub, a land of lost hope. My father grew up in a housing project, a broken home plagued by substance abuse and domestic violence. His father left his mother, Darlene, when my dad was a young kid. She drank and dated, a lot of both, after that. The home was a revolving door of different men who always treated her poorly. His family was quintessential white trash. And he always knew, if he wanted to survive, he had to get out.
In his early twenties, he moved to Houston, where he met my mother. She was tending bar in that junky roadside shack, having just finished her cross-country road trip. He took a stool and they talked. After her shift was over they talked some more. They shot a few games of pool together. They saw each other the next day and the day after that. They quickly fell in love and, one day, closed their eyes and threw their collective finger down on a map: LaFollette, Tennessee. They packed their bags and moved. They got married and quickly relocated to nearby Knoxville, where my father worked construction jobs and took business classes at the University of Tennessee. This was also where, in 1987, I was born. This event sent them back to Massachusetts, where my mother grew up. She had a big family, with a slew of brothers and sisters, and they saw an accessible support system while they built a life together. They raised my sister (born a few years later) and me in a series of small, dumpy houses in the area while my father started and expanded his tile business. They kept expenses low and saved money to build the big house in the woods. It was the perfect plan: a real family, the dream narrative, a true love story.
My father’s family, who still lived in Ohio, kept in touch with us over the phone and through birthday and Christmas cards, but I didn’t get to see them all that often. I loved my grandmother, Darlene, with her hillbilly accent and warm demeanor, who mailed me dollar-store trinkets and candy and whom my father flew from Middletown to Massachusetts to visit us whenever he had extra money. My father had a love-hate relationship with his mother. He hated what she represented—that selfish and self-destructive mess he came from, a stigma he found repulsive—but he couldn’t help but take care of her. My father was deaf in his right ear, a consequence, he always said, from battling mumps as a child. After he died, my mother reviewed his medical record and found that the real reason he was deaf was that, when he was a kid, Darlene hit him over the head with a cast-iron frying pan. He never told her the truth.
