Читать книгу Free Magic Secrets Revealed - Mark Leiren-Young - Страница 13

7

The Dove Pan

We had a problem. We had a lot of problems. The biggest and best illusions we had were also the ones that looked the cheapest and tackiest if you got too close to the stage—and we had to assume the illustrious Brad Bowen was going to walk around our stage after the show and kick our magical tires. So the guillotine was out. We knew the Metamorphosis might work if we could borrow a nicer blanket and find a fancier helmet, but it didn’t seem fair to ask Marvin to be part of the showcase, since he was too young to tour with the show.

Randy had a few ideas for big tricks he wanted to design, but he needed money and even though we knew we could get all the money in the world once Rainbow was on board, no one had any ideas for raising funds right away. Randy tried to borrow money from his mom, but she still hadn’t forgiven him for ruining her favourite sheets.

No money, no Metamorphosis and no guillotine meant the only magic we could use to prove we could tour the world were birthday party tricks. How were we supposed to dazzle the great and powerful Brad by making sponge balls appear, conjuring cupcakes out of a “dove pan,” spinning a few scarves around, and cutting and restoring rope?

While everyone else in my grad class was trying to do silly things like graduate, I was trying to figure out how to turn a handful of party tricks that could barely impress seven-year-olds into a magic spectacular that would dazzle the most important promoter I’d ever heard of. This all sounded exciting when Jane suggested it—but now it was terrifying. Every day at school whenever I wasn’t searching for Sarah, Kyle seemed to be searching for me to ask if I’d figured out the script yet. A month? What was I thinking?

One night when I was supposed to be finishing several class projects, working on the school paper and learning my lines for the school play, I saw a used car ad on TV—or maybe it was a parody ad on Saturday Night Live—where the crazy salesman yelled at late-night viewers about how he could afford to make such impossible deals. His answer: “Volume, volume, volume.”

The next day after school I asked Randy for a list of every illusion he owned, every illusion he could afford and every illusion he could fake. Then I got him to explain which ones took skill and which ones were all about gizmos and gimmicks. A general and particularly ironic rule of magic is that the smaller the trick, the tougher it usually is to do. It takes practice, coordination and skill to make a quarter vanish and pluck it from behind someone’s ear. All it takes to make an elephant disappear is millions of quarters. If you can afford to buy the big illusions, you can do them. Most decent card tricks require weeks, months or even years of training to do well, never mind professionally. But all it takes to shoot fire is a fire-shooter, or well-placed flash pots and a guy like Norman sitting in the wings with a finger on the detonator. Once Randy and I broke down which tricks didn’t require training I gave those to Kyle and Lisa, so everyone in the act could do something magical.

Then I condensed the story to cut down on the quest. Santar and Oryon would both do a bit of summoning, conjuring weapons in tricked-out versions of the tin that makes cupcakes appear—except instead of cracking eggs in it, they’d use fire. You can never go wrong with fire.

Doug Henning might have changed the face of magic, but he hadn’t changed the pace. Most illusions Henning did were still presented with a big set-up, a flourish and a break for applause. If anyone else was doing an illusion or effect every minute, we hadn’t seen them. And, if we were lucky, neither had Brad Bowen.

Once we had the script, we rehearsed the illusions for a couple of hours every day after school for three weeks. Because there was no Metamorphosis, there was no Adoma and that meant I got to watch from the audience with cousin Jane and Brad Bowen. When Jane walked in with Bowen she looked as nervous around him as we were around her. He wasn’t a big guy, but he walked around like he was. He wore jeans and a fancy suit jacket and looked like important Hollywood people looked on TV shows.

The lights went down, then up. I watched Brad watch the showcase and his eyes were everywhere—taking in every illusion, examining studly Kyle, sexy Lisa and charming Randy.

Oryon and Santar met, monologued at each other, fired fire-shooters, flashed flash pots and, just when it looked like they were going to wreak havoc with a phenomenal Henning-level illusion … black out.

This was back when every girl in high school had a poster in her locker of a Bee Gee or a Wanna Bee Gee like Leif Garrett—who was the same age as Randy. After the set was over Brad didn’t look at us, didn’t talk to us, just stared, hands folded. We all watched, waited for … something … anything. Brad took in the onstage tableau one more time, then turned to Jane, muttered something and left without saying a word to any of us. It was obvious he hated it, until the auditorium door swung shut behind the man from Rainbow. Jane leapt to her feet, jumped on our stage and shrieked, “You’re gonna be huge.” It seemed crazy, but maybe it wasn’t.

Randy hugged Lisa, Kyle hugged them both. I looked at Norman and we didn’t hug, but we nodded to each other. It was official—we were gonna be huge.

“I can’t wait to see the script for the real show,” said Jane.

The real show …

I barely had time to wonder if I was part of it when Randy turned to me. “So I guess we’re writing that together, right, buddy?”

I was working on a real show … for Rainbow. Screw graduation. Screw university. I’d made it. I was plotting my new life plan when I heard Jane add, “And we’ve gotta come up with a plan for your tour.”

A plan … I didn’t have any idea what kind of plan Rainbow needed—none of us did—but as long as the point of the plan was fame, fortune and travelling North America with Lisa Jorgensen in skimpy costumes, we were in. After Jane left to meet Brad, the rest of us sat on the stage, basking in the residual magic.

The next night, I visited Randy’s apartment for the first time. A few months earlier Randy had found a job and moved out of his mom’s basement. He was working for the one employer in the world who would never notice or care if he came to work stoned, or occasionally called in sick to work on a magic show—the federal government. Thanks to a friend of his mother’s he’d scored a clerical job, something to do with printing Unemployment Insurance cheques. He was still performing magic for parties, benefits and special events, but as good as he was, there wasn’t enough of a nightclub scene in the city for magic tricks to pay the bills for much more than buying more magic tricks. But The Black Metal Fantasy was a chance to change that.

With the money from the new government job, Randy rented a bachelor pad on Broadway—a generic commercial strip that was starting to move upscale as older apartment blocks were being knocked down to create new stores and office complexes, so Randy’s building was destined for the wrecking ball.

You could smell Randy’s place from the hall. It smelled like … happy skunks. And disinfectant. And something else I didn’t recognize. I sniffed again when we stepped inside. “What’s burning?” It smelled sort of like … flowers.

“Incense,” said Randy. I nodded sagely or perhaps patchoul-y, like I knew what incense was.

Randy’s bedroom had black light posters and dirtier porn magazines than I’d ever seen before. Playboy was risqué, Penthouse was raunchy, but Hustler was … the women in there scared me. Not only did none of them look like Sarah, they looked like if they met Sarah on the street they’d beat her up and steal her stuff.

I followed the bass line of Dark Side of the Moon into a living room that was basically a couch bed, a few tables, a stereo, a TV with a flaming red skull candle perched on top of it, and stacks of abandoned takeout food containers.

I started pacing in circles while Randy sucked on something that looked like a small blue aquarium designed to drive fish crazy. Then he offered the fish tank to me. I shook my head, he shrugged, sucked on it again, coughed, and tried to figure out what we’d do for the big show.

After the album was over and the only profound thought we came up with was that we needed another hot girl or two in the cast, Randy wanted a snack, so we decided to walk four blocks to the nearest 7-Eleven. Randy grabbed a big bag of neon orange-coloured cheese things. I tossed in a few quarters to feed my addiction and grabbed a Coke Slurpee. “We wanna be like Star Wars on stage,” I said as we walked back to the apartment.

“Bigger than Star Wars,” said Randy. “If this works it won’t just be a play, we’ll do the movie and then …”

I knew where he was going and I was already there, dreaming of coloured panels and glossy covers illustrated by Neal Adams, picturing the awesome cover of X-Men 59 with Cyclops standing alone against the Sentinels. “Comic books,” said Randy. And for the first time I knew we were soulmates. “Heavy Metal comic books.”

Okay, maybe not total soulmates. I preferred Marvel, or even DC, but sure, Heavy Metal would work.

“And cartoons.”

“Cartoons would be cool. I love cartoons.”

“So it’s not just a story,” I said.

“It’s an epic,” said Randy.

The next idea was mine. I wish it had been Randy’s, I really do, but it was mine. I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. George Lucas had announced that Star Wars was going to be a trilogy, too—maybe even a modern epic. And I’d just studied classical epics in English Lit. We were learning about Dante’s Inferno, so I knew proper epics were nine parts. They started in medias res—which was either Latin or English Lit for “in the middle of the story.” Nine parts. That’s why Lucas had labelled the first film in his Star Wars saga “Episode IV.” So maybe it wasn’t my fault. Maybe we should blame Lucas for convincing us that every great story had to be part of a trilogy, which meant our story had to be part of a trilogy. Yes, I absolutely blame George Lucas and his damned Jedi mind-tricks for the fact that the next words out of my mouth were “Let’s make it a trilogy!”

Randy loved the idea.

I loved the idea.

It was brilliant. It was obvious. If we were gonna be huge—if we were going to be the next Star Wars or Lord of the Rings and create a new mythology that would take over the world, it had to be a trilogy.

“So we know the ending,” I said. Every trilogy has the same ending. The final battle. The end of the quest. Good versus evil for control of The Force, the fate of the Shire, all the cosmic marbles. “But what’s part one?”

“Oryon’s story.”

“Oryon’s story. Cool.” I said “cool” a lot. I still say cool a lot. “What about Kyle?”

“He can be in it. We’ll need a few scenes with Santar—to set up episode two.” We went back to Randy’s place, he started rolling a joint, and I started pacing in circles again and asked Randy what Oryon’s story was.

“I dunno,” he said. “You’re the writer.”

For the showcase I didn’t have to worry much about plot, never mind character motivations, but to tell the whole story I needed to know the history of Medemptia and the origins of all our heroes and villains. Every hero needs an amazing secret origin story. But the less Randy gave me, the more fun I could have making it up myself. It was time to find out what I had to work with. “Let’s start with the magic,” I said. This time instead of asking for a list of all the tricks he had, I asked what tricks he always wanted to do, what we could build, what we could buy. “What’s the coolest stuff we can do?”

“Pretty much anything if we’ve got enough money. I’ve got some wild ideas. Stuff nobody’s ever seen before.” Randy started scrawling on a legal pad. I started pacing, trying to imagine the coolest trick in the world.

A few minutes later Randy passed me his notes. Then Randy lit his joint and was about to put it to his lips, when he stopped himself and offered it to me.

“That’s okay,” I said, waving him away.

“You sure you don’t want some?”

I shook my head.

“It’ll help you write.”

“It’s okay,” I said again.

“No problem,” said Randy. “More for me.” Randy inhaled, coughed, smiled.

“What’s the coolest trick you can imagine?” asked Randy.

I’d always loved escapes. When I first learned magic I’d practised with ropes and locks and handcuffs. I’d practised twisting my wrists so that if anyone ever put me in handcuffs or tied my wrists I’d be free in seconds. I knew about Houdini’s water escapes, the tricks Houdin did to convince a tribe in Africa that he was a God and pretty much everything Henning had ever done, but I’d never tried to dream up new illusions before.

Randy tried to help me by breaking down the basics. “There are really only a few tricks—appearances, disappearances, levitations, escapes, psychic stuff—everything else is pretty much a variation on the theme.” He’d scrawled down his favourites and decorated them with hand-drawn stars and lightning bolts. The more lightning bolts, the more he liked the trick.

Levitation.

Decapitation.

Walking through a mirror.

Transformation.

Fire appearance.

I could already picture the effects—and the audience’s reaction. “You can really do all this?”

“No problem.”

“Cool.”

“You sure you don’t want some?” Randy offered the joint again.

“No thanks.”

“How are you supposed to write this without drugs? I was stoned the whole time I wrote the first script.”

That explained a lot.

“I always figured you for a major stoner,” he said.

Everybody did. One night I’d been working late on the student paper and everybody started sharing their most humiliating drug experiences. Even our sponsor teacher joined in, talking about the time in college when she tried LSD, climbed on the roof of her apartment and was convinced she could fly. After everyone else told their stories, they turned to me. I was the editor. I had to have a story. A great story. “I’ve never tried drugs,” I said. Everyone laughed—including my sponsor.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I’m not going to narc on you.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing and my sponsor shook her head, like I’d betrayed her. She’d trusted me with her story about trying to fly off a building and here I was claiming I’d never smoked a joint.

I had no problem with the idea of marijuana.

I didn’t get why it was illegal since pretty much everybody I’d ever met had tried it and I’d never seen anyone pick a fight because they’d had too much dope. But since I’d started high school everyone—friends, teachers, even family—assumed I was taking drugs because of my writing. One reason for this was that I loved stoner humour like Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon, but I had no clue it was stoner humour. I wrote stories about potato chips laced with microchips created to take over the world. I once brought a potato into class with a plug sticking out of it and declared it, “the electric potato”—it could do everything a regular potato could do AND it was electric. My other fake products included such absurd concepts as shell-less eggs and caffeine-free cola. “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they make a cola without caffeine.”

I also used to buy postcards wherever I went and filled them out as if I was an alien tourist. Then I’d send them to my favourite writing teacher (who I’d address as Xonthar), list all the beautiful sites I’d seen ... and disintegrated.

And since that was my idea of funny, and this was Vangroovy, every time people read one of my stories they’d ask, “What were you on when you wrote it?”

I was proud of my imagination and the idea that people thought it wasn’t my imagination, that it was some combination of chemicals spinning my synapses, really offended me. I decided that as long as I was going to be a writer I was never going to do drugs. If I had an idea, I wanted to make sure it was mine. So the strongest drug I regularly ingested while writing was my ever-present Coke.

“You’re the writer, what do you want to do now?” It was a question, but it was also a challenge. Maybe Randy didn’t need me. Maybe he could write this himself or bring in another writer, someone with a wild, drug-fueled imagination or ...

I tried to imagine the world’s coolest trick, something amazing, something impossible. And as I stared at the burning skull candle I knew what we had to do.

“Set the audience on fire.”

Randy almost dropped his joint. “What?”

“Wouldn’t that be the coolest trick ever?”

“Burning down the theatre?”

“Not burning down the theatre. Lighting the audience on fire. But not for real—just making them think they’re on fire. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate illusion? It’s always about getting the magician in trouble, right? Making them think the magician’s gonna die. The ultimate—that’s gotta be scaring the hell out of the audience. Making them think they’re gonna die. That would be the coolest trick ever.”

Randy stared at me. “Yeah.”

“So you can’t do it?” I laughed. Randy wasn’t laughing though. The fire sparked something.

“I think you’re right. Let’s do something to the audience. We can’t set them on fire but …”

Now he stared at the skull candle, focusing. It was like he was talking to the skull, not me, when he continued. “We can make an audience member vanish. What about that?”

It wasn’t perfect, but as Randy said it, I realized we were onto something, something amazing. Maybe not the coolest trick ever, but really cool. “I got it,” I said. “Why not kill someone?”

Randy grinned.

I started to pace again, full speed. “We grab someone, kidnap them or hypnotize them or whatever and we bring them onstage and kill them. Light them on fire, cut them in half, put them in the guillotine, whatever, but we kill them. That’ll freak everybody out.”

“You want to kill an audience member?”

“Yeah!” I was pacing so fast I was practically jogging. “That’d be cool. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a real audience member. We can …”

“A plant?” Now he jumped off the couch and started to pace too.

“Yeah. But nobody will know it’s a plant. When we grab our victim, they’ll freak, they’ll scream. In a real magic show people volunteer, right? But this isn’t a real magic show—we’re in a demon dimension. So what if we grab someone and they try to make a run for it. And then …”

“We kill them.”

“Exactly.”

“Can we do it?” I asked.

“If it’s a plant.”

“Can we light them on fire?”

“We’d need a lot of mirrors.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Too expensive.” Then, “We could do a vanish!”

“No,” I said, and I was completely sure of myself now. “They’ve got to die. Onstage. You always see the magician or the assistant do the life and death stuff. And all the volunteer guy from the audience ever does is check the chains, or hold a stopwatch, or something boring. I want the person from the audience to be the one in chains. And since they’re not part of the show, once we kill them, we leave them dead. Let them bleed all over the place. Let the audience wonder what really happened. We won’t even let them take a curtain call, won’t let them leave the theatre till everyone’s gone. I mean the audience probably won’t fall for it, but maybe …” And I grinned.

We were going to kill an audience member. That would be cool.

“You’re right,” said Randy as he stubbed out the remains of his joint. “You don’t need drugs.”