anything.”
Randy only hesitated a moment. “You do if you want to be in the show.”
Barry couldn’t believe it. He didn’t care, but he still couldn’t believe it. “You firing me?” Before Randy could respond, Barry started laughing again.
And even though he’d never seen her, the image of Norman’s cousin Jane the promoter flashed before Randy’s eyes as he answered, “Yeah.”
“Cool,” said Barry. He started laughing again as he shuffled out the back door and changed my life.
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
