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5

The Naja Haje

I hated the JCC. It was where I discovered I couldn’t swim—at least not without glasses. And since I wasn’t allowed to wear glasses in the water, I couldn’t swim. It was where I joined the Cub Scouts and was forced to wear khaki shorts and a green Cub Scout cap that made me look like a lost Christmas elf. My only memory of Scouts, before I went home vowing I’d never go back, was running away from Lenny Levitt, who had caught me, punched me and stolen my only merit badge. I think my badge was for something seriously macho like … comic collecting.

Then there was a very non-Jewish Halloween festival where my younger brother, David, and I were blindfolded and led through a section of the varnish-scented auditorium where people howled and moaned and we had to stick our hands into bowls of cold pasta and peeled grapes that some older kid told us were entrails and eyeballs. David was scared. I might have been too—but I was pretty sure no one was going to let high school kids get their hands on entrails and eyeballs.

So I’d never been fond of the JCC—or the auditorium—which was a shame since it was only a dozen doors down the alley from my house. But Sarah was taking a Hebrew class after school at the JCC and since she knew I lived nearby we walked there together. She went to her class and I walked by the auditorium to get to the exit closest to home. That’s when I heard Randy shout, “The blood bag didn’t break. Again.”

“Sorry, man,” said Norman.

“This is a joke,” said Kyle. “We don’t even have an Adoma anymore and we open in a week.”

And that’s when I poked my head in the auditorium door and saw Lisa in her demon-spawn harem outfit. Princess Leia was still a few months away from appearing on screen in her chain-mail bikini. The most risqué thing anyone had ever seen in pop culture was a photo of Farrah Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit where you could see how cold it was when the photo was taken. This was definitely a more innocent age. “Hey,” I said.

Lisa nodded in my direction and kept walking.

“Hey,” said Kyle.

“Mark, right?” asked Randy.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Randy. “We’re doing a show.”

“Maybe,” said Kyle.

Randy flinched, then recovered. “We’re doing a magic show.”

“I don’t remember Kendini teaching us about guillotines.”

Randy laughed. “I forgot you were in that class.”

I hadn’t realized he’d known I was in that class.

“You invented that matchbox trick.”

I couldn’t believe he remembered.

Sarah Saperstein wasn’t my only crush. Like Randy, I was also crazy about Henning. Just the idea that someone from Canada could be the best in the world at anything was exciting. I was also smitten with a TV show starring Bill Bixby as a magician who used his skills to solve crimes. And when I was a little kid my Grandpa Chase used to pull coins from my ear and do card tricks that I always thought were, well, magic. I was one of those kids who always looked at the ads on the back of the comic books: “Free Magic Secrets Revealed—Astonish your friends and impress the girls!” But I was more interested in understanding tricks than performing them.

Kendini had shown us a plastic “vanishing box” that made coins disappear, but even if you couldn’t see the trap doors, the thing looked like it was gimmicked. It was hard to imagine anyone over the age of six not realizing that nothing remotely magical had happened. I looked at it, saw how the false panel on the bottom worked, went home and experimented with creating a similar false bottom in an ordinary sliding matchbox. When I performed my trick for the class, everyone was impressed but Kendini. He’d seemed kind of pissed off, grabbed the matchbox from me and, before I could object, started taking it apart in front of the class. After he discovered the false bottom and the missing penny, he rendered his verdict. “Clever,” he said. Then he handed me back my now-mangled homemade trick. As soon as the class was over I tossed it in the garbage.

I was especially fascinated by where magic came from. I wasn’t particularly interested in how tricks were done, so much as what kinds of things were possible. Instead of studying Kendini’s mimeographed diagrams and corny patter, I’d gone to the library and taken out books on Houdini and his inspiration, the great French magician Robert Houdin. Then my mom bought me a book that became my instant favourite—a history of ancient magic. So while I was supposed to be memorizing the routine for “cups and balls,” I was obsessing over everything from the tricks that convinced people the Delphic temples were run by mystic oracles to the kind of snake magic historians believe Moses used when he transformed a stick into a serpent and scared the hell out of the pharaoh. According to my bible, Walter B. Gibson’s Secrets of Magic, it was an Egyptian cobra, the naja haje—a nasty asp that can be temporarily paralyzed if you apply the right pressure just below its head.

When a sorcerer—or saviour—threw the naja haje to the ground, the angry snake would snap out of its trance and start doing the slithering snake thing. The trick was obviously a big hit at Egyptian birthday parties, weddings and bar mitzvahs.

For my one and only birthday party appearance as a magician, I hooked up with another kid from Kendini’s class, my friend Ari. I wrote our patter and came up with the routine, but Ari did most of the performing, partly because he owned more tricks than I did. My cousin Adam and his two dozen seven-year-old friends were impressed enough to shut up and watch us take over their living room for about fifteen minutes. They were especially enthusiastic after we used Ari’s “magic pan” to turn a few broken eggs and a mess of ingredients into chocolate cupcakes—so my auntie Judy paid us twenty bucks. Even though the show was a success, I’d decided to retire after that. I never needed to perform magic again … but I still loved watching it.

“What kind of show are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s a rock and roll magic show,” said Randy.

“It’s a play,” said Kyle. “Two sorcerors fighting over their disciple.”

“Cool,” I said. It was pretty obvious the disciple was Lisa.

“We’ve already sold three hundred tickets,” said Randy.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I was incredulous, impressed, jealous. It was pretty obvious why Kyle chose this over my play.

“Wanna buy a ticket?” said Randy. “Only a buck fifty for students.”

Before I could answer, I saw the look on Kyle’s face. It was almost possible to hear the tumblers clicking into place. “You act,” said Kyle.

“Sometimes.”

“And you’re tall?” said Kyle.

He phrased it like a question, so I said, “Yeah”—but now I was getting nervous.

“And you were in Kendini’s class,” said Randy. “You know magic.”

“Well, I haven’t practised since we were kids, except for some escapes but …”

Randy and Kyle exchanged smiles, then Randy grinned like a game show host. “Wanna be a star?”

Before I could answer, Kyle chimed in again. “He’ll look great with the beard.”

“Get up here,” said Randy. “You’ve got lines to learn.”

It never crossed my mind to do anything besides what I did next—jump onstage. I only had one question. I asked Kyle when Randy went outside to get Lisa. What did a magic show about a demon dimension have to do with the Jewish Community Centre?

“Randy’s dad works here. As long as no one else has it booked we get the place for free.”

By the time Lisa was back from her smoke break I had Barry’s goatee glued to my chin.

I soon discovered that I had to wear a helmet, too. And so did the grade eight kid, Marvin.

Although everyone remembers Houdini for his underwater escapes and handcuff challenges, the trick that first made him famous was “The Metamorphosis,” which was his classic escape. It’s pretty much the classic escape—and the prototype for almost everything every magician has miraculously escaped from ever since. Houdini was chained, stuffed into a sack and thrown into a crate. His assistant—originally his wife, Beth, would stand over the crate, lift a curtain and one, two, three …

When the curtain fell Houdini was there, posing triumphantly on the box.

Magic.

Then Houdini would undo all the locks and open the crate to reveal that Beth was inside, now wearing the same shackles the master escape artist had miraculously shed.

Randy couldn’t afford to buy the box—it would have cost thousands of dollars from a big US magic shop—and he wasn’t sure he could build one, but he’d figured out a way to perform his own Metamorphosis. Instead of a crate he’d use a helmet. Oryon would summon another powerful good wizard, or demigod, or spirit, or benevolent all-powerful mystic creature to help in the battle against Santar and, in order to conjure this ally, he would need Zephyr’s help. Marvin/Zephyr would put on a helmet that covered his head and Randy/Oryon would circle around him, holding his mother’s purple silk bedsheet. Zephyr would take one end of the sheet. The other would be held by Oryon until it was passed to Norman—who had no secret identity and was holding it offstage. As soon as Norman had his end of the bedsheet, Adoma (that would be me) crawled as quickly as possible onstage and slipped under the helmet Zephyr was holding. Then Zephyr crawled offstage—hidden by the sheet—and Randy wrapped the sheet around me, although the audience assumed he was wrapping Zephyr/Marvin.

Magicians aren’t supposed to share their secrets, even under threat of death, so I wouldn’t normally reveal the tricks to a magic trick, but I doubt there are a lot of magicians building their careers around an illusion that requires their mom’s bedsheet.

After I was in place, Oryon would do his mystic summoning ritual and Zephyr would slowly, ever so slowly, begin to grow. Marvin was a shade over 4'. I was almost 6'2". That’s why Kyle was so excited about my height. While Oryon was still gawking at his minion’s transformation, I’d start to laugh—a maniacal evil villain cackle—then throw off my helmet to reveal …

“Adoma!” Oryon would shout. “How did you breach my mystical defences? What have you done to Zephyr?”

It sounded cheesy and obvious and when I rehearsed it, it felt cheesy and obvious. I definitely got how this would have cracked Barry up. It made me want to laugh, too, and I wasn’t stoned. But by dress rehearsal, Marvin and I managed to get the switch down to a few seconds. Even Kyle was impressed. Randy had figured out how to do the Metamorphosis—a legendary transformation—with a borrowed bedsheet and a toy helmet he’d liberated from the JCC daycare.

Once I appeared, I delivered my message from Santar in quasi-olde English telling Oryon he was doomed and would never rescue Gamatria. Then, as I screamed, “Prepare to d …” Oryon would zap me with a mystic whammy and I’d wander offstage like a zombie. Very cool. After Zephyr and I conquered our transformation, it was time for Randy to rehearse the big finale.

Oryon was finally, finally, leaning over to kiss Gamatria when Lisa pulled away. “Why do I have to kiss you?”

“Because it’s in the script. Oryon just rescued you and …” Randy looked like he was drowning.

“I know it’s in the script,” said Lisa, “but it doesn’t make sense. I mean, she’s Santar’s disciple, right? He’s been brainwashing her for, like, years. So why would she suddenly be all over Oryon? Wouldn’t she think he was the villain?”

“But she was supposed to be Oryon’s disciple and Santar kidnapped her and …” Randy pleaded, almost whined, “they’re soulmates.”

Lisa wasn’t sold. “I think she’d be afraid of him. Mark, you’re a writer. Do you think it makes sense?”

It was the first time Lisa had really spoken to me. And she wasn’t just acknowledging me, she knew I was a writer. We’d been in a few classes together, but I didn’t think she’d ever noticed me. My zombie trance shattered. I looked over at her and tried to focus on her eyes and not her low-cut top.

“Well, Oryon does rescue her,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Randy. “See, Oryon rescues her.”

“But Gamatria still wouldn’t trust him,” I continued. “It might be more powerful if Oryon is desperately in love with her but …” I grinned, I really liked this next idea. “She doesn’t remember him. Like a mystic amnesia spell.”

“That’s cool,” said Lisa. “I like that.”

“Me too,” said Kyle. “It’s way more powerful.”

I couldn’t believe the girl in the harem outfit was excited about my ideas. “You know what might be really cool? If Gamatria made out with Santar and Oryon had to watch—so you’d see his heart breaking. Then he’d really want to kill Santar.”

“I like that,” said Lisa. “That’s nasty.”

“Yeah,” said Kyle. “That has layers to it.”

“No,” said Randy with surprising intensity. “It’s too late to make changes.”

“Well, I’m not kissing Oryon,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Let’s just try it once,” suggested Randy. “I mean, Oryon is rescuing you.”

“But she thinks he’s kidnapping her,” I said. “Wouldn’t she try to kill him?”

If Randy had any real magic powers he would have made the rest of us disappear while he rehearsed his big love scene with Lisa.

Instead, Norman interrupted. “We’ve got to get back to it. They’re kicking us out at ten.”

“No kiss,” said Lisa.

“You’re right,” said Randy softly. “It doesn’t make sense.”

None of us understood why Randy never quite looked happy that week—even after we sold out all four hundred tickets.