Читать книгу Free Magic Secrets Revealed - Mark Leiren-Young - Страница 9

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The Black Metal Fantasy

Randy Kagna was the textbook teen definition of cool. Randy never had trouble finding girls who would make out with him. A good-looking guy just shy of six feet tall, he had an easy laugh, a perpetual toothy grin, Rick Springfield’s hair, an endless supply of locally grown marijuana and a basement apartment in his mom’s place with doors that really locked. And thanks to failing grade ten, he was eighteen in grade twelve—which may not have thrilled his parents, but made him pretty much irresistible to sixteen-year-old high school girls.

When he produced The Black Metal Fantasy he’d been out of school a year and his charm was working just as well for him in the real world. Randy’s motto: “Nooooooooooooo problemmm.”

Randy did have one problem though, his Achilles’ crush: Lisa Jorgensen. She may have been the only girl on the planet who liked him as “a friend.” So even though he was probably getting laid with more frequency, by more girls, than any other guy in Vancouver, at least in our neighbourhood, all he could think about no matter what—or who—he was doing, was Lisa.

So Randy hatched a plan. It was the type of devious, ingenious plan only a mad scientist or a teenager in love could possibly come up with. Maybe it was the dope, or maybe he got the idea from studying Hamlet the second time he took English Lit, but since Lisa wanted to be an actress, he’d write a play for her. She’d be the leading lady. He’d be the leading man. The play would be the thing. And, in the play, they’d kiss. They’d never kissed before and Randy was convinced that once his lips touched hers, magic would indeed take place. And that magic would lead to love—or at least sex. Lots of sex.

Lisa looked like she’d been genetically engineered to mate with Randy. The stuff teen dreams were made of circa 1980, she was 5'9" and had the type of open, friendly smile and genuine, contagious laugh that made movie stars millionaires. She and Randy met when Lisa’s family moved in across the street back when they were both in elementary school. For Randy it was love at first sight.

Lisa thought Randy was sweet.

Aside from being a good-looking guy with a lot of drugs, an easy smile and a devious master plan, Randy was also a magician. Doug Henning, a goofy kid from Winnipeg with even longer featherier hair than Randy, a bushy moustache, Bugs Bunny’s teeth and impossibly colourful tie-dyed T-shirts had just made magic hip for the first time since the word “hip” was invented.

After Houdini died in 1926, magic pretty much went with him. There were still a bunch of guys in cheap tuxedos cutting women in half and making things no one wanted to see in the first place disappear, but even the best of them succeeded better as nostalgia than entertainment. When TV was at its corniest and shows like Ed Sullivan featured special guests spinning plates or making little mice talk, magic on the tube looked stodgy, slow and tacky.

Henning was the first “rock and roll” magician and through his mix of charm, energy, and all-new takes on classic illusions, he somehow made audiences believe in magic again. Instead of trying to fool people, Henning tried to make them feel a genuine sense of wonder. And it worked.

Randy had fallen almost as hard for Henning as he had for Lisa and just after the first time he saw Henning on TV surrounded by enthusiastic, beautiful and barely clothed assistants, a fourteen-year-old Randy signed up for a beginner’s magic course at the Jewish Community Centre.

He learned a few tricks from the teacher, a tuxedoed birthday party magician who performed as “the Amazing Kendini”—who was about as amazing as his stage name suggested. Randy snatched the sponge ball from his master’s hand within a few weeks.

That’s where Randy and I first met. We didn’t talk, though. He was fourteen. I was twelve. It would have broken several natural laws of adolescence for us to even acknowledge each other. Besides, from the first time I saw him palm a coin it was obvious he was really good. And I was … okay.

Randy might not have been able to focus on school work, but he quickly earned an A+ at manipulating coins, cards, ropes, ribbons and any illusion he could afford to buy from Jacko’s—the local “joke shop” that specialized in classy gags like fake vomit, whoopee cushions and pepper-flavoured gum. It’s possible the most useful thing Randy picked up from Kendini was Jacko’s address. Even though he started with store-bought magic, Randy instantly stood out from other would-be wizards because he ignored the “snappy patter” on the cardboard cards that came in the same plastic bags as the tricks. Randy created his own routines and revamped every trick he bought, or learned, to make it faster, funnier and more exciting—like how Henning might do it if Henning bought tricks from Jacko’s. And he started performing everywhere. You couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without him making something appear or disappear, or being asked to pick a card from one of the half-dozen decks he always seemed to have in one of his pockets.

But it was the big illusions that really appealed to Randy—the stuff Henning did on TV. Randy didn’t want to make coins and cards disappear, he wanted to vanish an elephant. Forget levitating scarves, he wanted to make women fly across the stage—preferably half-naked women. During his spare time—which was whenever he showed up to class—Randy designed illusions in his notebook. Instead of the details of who attacked whom, when and why during which World War, he’d doodle elaborate creations that would let him fly across the stage—if he could only find a few thousand dollars to build them. It was during one of those classes, when everyone else was learning about the Treaty of Versailles, that Randy first envisioned The Black Metal Fantasy.

The coolest comic in the world was Heavy Metal. It was drawn by crazy French artists who loved battle scenes where people got maimed, bled and died for women who barely wore enough chain mail to cover their seins. If Randy could live in a comic book, it would be Heavy Metal. So that’s where the Metal came from.

“And what could be cooler than black?” he said, when he first shared his vision with Lisa. And who could argue with that?

Fantasy—with a capital F—that’s what Randy was all about. He was going to bring a Heavy Metal comic to life and put it onstage, complete with a kick-ass rock soundtrack. That was The Black Metal Fantasy.

It would have magic, it would have music, it would be a thousand times hipper than Henning and best of all, it would have a climactic love scene where he would make out with Lisa Jorgensen.

After he graduated, Randy started performing at clubs. He also did benefits, and visited hospitals and old folks’ homes to cheer up the inmates. He began to develop the show, building the tricks with his friend Norman. While they were making the guillotine, they realized the show could be huge. That’s when Norman told Randy about his cousin Jane. “Jane works for Rainbow,” Norman told him. Rainbow. No explanation was required. Rainbow had promoted every concert Randy had ever camped in line overnight to buy tickets for. Rainbow presented Fleetwood Mac.

“She’s a promoter,” said Norman. “She says magic’s huge right now. Everyone’s looking for the next Henning. I told her it was you.”

Randy knew how to make the show huge. He needed Kyle.

Kyle Norris was an actore.

No, that’s not a typo—you absolutely need the “e” at the end to get the full effect. He was a serious actore. He took classes outside of school. His teacher probably preferred to be called a “coach.” He wanted to be a star. But you couldn’t be a star when the only TV series shooting in the city was about chasing lost logs. If you were serious, you had to move to LA.

This was years before every kid in every high school everywhere had headshots and resumés and a self-proclaimed agent promising to score them a shot at appearing on whatever TV series or movie-of-the-week was filming in their town that month.

Kyle looked like the kind of kid I usually walked across the street to avoid. He dressed in the uniform Brando defined as trouble—and timeless cool—back in the fifties: jeans, a tight white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. But Kyle had a brain. He tried not to use it in public—that would have destroyed his image—but he read more sophisticated books on his own time than any of the assigned reading he ignored. And his big brother had turned him on to blues and jazz and types of rock that most teenagers would barely recognize as music.

He also had a girlfriend he’d been with forever—or at least forever in high school years. Kyle was with Wendy, the hottest girl in grade eleven. So maybe he wasn’t trying to have sex with anybody besides Wendy, but he always seemed determined to make sure every girl he met was at least considering the option.

Kyle was supposed to be my secret weapon for my grade twelve writing and directing class. He was going to guarantee me an A.

I knew Kyle’s secret. I knew he was in love with theatre because I read the newspapers and I’d seen his name in the review of an angsty musical drama about tough New York kids showing their sensitive side—a sort of high school Chorus Line. Kyle got rave reviews, but he didn’t tell anybody at school about the show until it was over, to make sure nobody he knew saw it. Kyle got rave reviews because he cried—and there was no way he was going to let anyone from our high school see him cry. If they did, he’d have to kill them.

We weren’t friends, since hanging out with me publicly would have been social suicide for him—but we’d gotten to know each other in grade eight when I’d traded essays for his best friend Danny’s early attempts at shop projects like birdhouses and coat hangers. It was a brilliant deal for both of us. Danny passed English and I avoided the humiliation of failing all my mandatory tech classes.

When I told Kyle I was writing a play with a part for him, he said if he liked the script he’d do it. I acted, too, but I only acted in school plays—and I always had fun—but it was the writing that appealed to me. Since I went to a school with a “progressive” English department, which meant we had a lot of American draft dodgers teaching whatever they thought was cool, there was a grade twelve course in “playwriting and directing.”

Mike Denos, a balding thirty-something draft dodger with a Bay Area California drawl, taught the course like it was a university work-study program. He’d give us our assignments then send us away. Other than making sure we checked in for attendance, all he wanted from us were three original scripts before the end of the year. We also had to direct three scenes and a one-act play. If I could have skipped everything in school and graduated with honours, I’d still have shown up for that class. I was the first and only kid in the history of our high school, possibly any high school ever, who took extra English classes as my “fun” electives.

I didn’t want to direct. I just figured if you wrote your own plays you had to. Directors were for Shakespeare and Shaw and Tennessee Williams—or at least for writers who were over seventeen.

Mr. Denos picked one of my scripts to compete in the provincial high school drama showcase. The play was called Mistaken Identity. A few years later, when I was accepted into the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, I discovered that every student writer in history had written at least one story, play or poem entitled Mistaken Identity.

My play was about two perfect women who were both smitten with an arrogant, self-obsessed guy with no obviously redeeming features. I’ve since learned that every straight male playwright has written this script at some point in their lives—often, tragically, in their forties—and I think only Woody Allen has ever made the story work. The only thing I’m proud of about mine is that I got it out of my system at seventeen.

The lead character was supposed to be played by Kyle, who was the type of guy two women would fight over, even without a particularly good explanation. I imaginatively named the lead character “Kyle.” But after I finished the play, after Kyle said, “Not bad, I’ll do it,” he changed his mind. We were about to start rehearsals when Kyle told me he’d been cast in a play outside of school, so he wouldn’t have time for mine.

After I lost my lead, Mr. Denos said I could cast any guy in my class, which meant I could choose from three potential leading men: Jackson, a 250-pound rugby monster who took the course in the hopes of an easy pass; Graham, a dope dealer who’d spent the last two semesters in and out of a detention centre and took the class in the hopes of an easy pass; and me. A decade later, I might have made the daring choice to cast a woman and turn it into a hot lesbian triangle. But this was 1980—cable TV didn’t exist, and the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, so I’d never heard of lesbians, hot or otherwise. I cast myself.

This created an even bigger problem, because while I felt totally comfortable directing either of the girls to passionately kiss Kyle, directing them to kiss me felt, well, creepy. My two perfect women were twins—my friends Hannah and Heather—and while the idea of making out with either of them was certainly appealing, the idea of telling them when and how to kiss me … I couldn’t do it. So my tale of steamy romance lost all steam when Kyle bailed. The only kiss I left in the script was a peck on the cheek from Heather at the end of the play right after her character told mine, “It’s all over.”

When we appeared at the drama festival, the adjudicator—a professional actress who looked like the Wicked Witch of the West’s baby sister—pronounced my performance “dreadful.”

“You don’t enunciate,” she decreed. “You’ll never be an actore,” she said, complete with the faux British theatre accent perfected by so many Canadian actors of the era. She praised Hannah and Heather, said the blocking was, “very strong,” then dismissed us with a backhanded wave. I couldn’t be consoled, not even by Heather’s lovely hug.

“She didn’t mention the writing,” I said. “Not one word about the writing.”

It wasn’t until that afternoon at the JCC that I’d discovered that instead of making out with Heather and Hannah in Mistaken Identity, Kyle had decided to star in The Black Metal Fantasy.