“Nossir.”
“Then good-bye.”
“I came to you because it began with you but there’s a million others. You can’t stop me.”
“I’m just trying—”
“—I’ve-got-to-do-this-thing!”
Merlin looked across. “Hey, you’re crazy, aren’t you, Withers?”
“… yessir …”
“How old?”
“Be nineteen.”
“How much you got; I cost.”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“From what?”
“My dad helped run a health club in San Diego the last couple years. It’s his life insurance money.”
“We’d have to start from the top, unlearn all the shit you picked up.”
“I’m a terrific learner.”
“You also thought you were a terrific magician.”
“Okay I’m a shitty learner.”
A nod from the giant. “You just started learning.”
Lesson number one was holding cards in your hands. That was all. Corky couldn’t believe it. But those were the instructions. You went to sleep with a pack of cards in each hand and you woke up that way and when you took the bus, you carried the cards and you carried them to the cafeteria, putting them down when you ate but that was all, and in the movies you carried them and ran your fingers along the edges, getting the feel, getting the feel, you weren’t going no place until you had that feel, and Merlin told of Baker, the Princeton kid who was the greatest hockey player of them all and how he used to flash across the rink in total darkness, guiding the puck blind, because if you had to look for it, if you didn’t feel without seeing, forget it.
Merlin lived in what the real estate people called an “interesting” area between Wilshire and Pico near Fairfax, but what it really was, was a slum on the make, though there were still enough old Jews and aspiring blacks and musicians and artists to make it bearable. Corky took a room at the nearest Y and bought a small mirror and a close-up pad, a thin sponge, and he sat and stared at his hands in the mirror holding the cards and when lesson numbers two and three came, they came together, strengthening the ring and the pinkie. You needed the one strong for dealing bottoms and the other for any kind of decent pass and Merlin said that with most, the thumb was too strong if anything, the index and middles strong enough. But the ring and the pinkie were problems, especially with the left hand and both hands had to be the same if you wanted to be great, so Corky sat in front of his small mirror in his Y room and he did lifts with his pinkie, stretches with his ring, then reversed the procedures, over and over till his fingers started cramping. That was good, Merlin said, the cramping showed you were serious but you had to wash your hands awhile then, get them warm so the muscles would stop their rebellion.
Then back to the mirror, back to the mirror, you had to get the pinkie strong, look out for the ring, work the pinkie, work the ring, forget the cramping, keep at it, keep at it, you had to keep at it if you wanted to be great.
Merlin was great. Corky could tell that the second week of his apprenticeship when the giant brought him along to an Elks’ smoker in the Valley and Merlin did his close-up stuff, an escape or two, some terrific silk changes, but the audience liked it better when he talked. Merlin made terrible jokes about always getting mistaken for Cary Grant—his jokes seemed mostly to kid about his beauty—and they gave him a decent enough round of applause before they went back to their serious drinking and Merlin picked up fifty in cash from the chief honcho, then drove Corky back to the Y, on the way asking what he thought of the first Cary Grant joke and Corky said fine, why, and Merlin said I was covering a mistake, you always got to have something ready, Leipzig made mistakes, I make mistakes, remember the knife throwing story and Corky asked what that was and Merlin said it was from a play where an actor had to throw a knife at a wall and what the actor said was, if the knife stuck, “I’m the best in town” and if he missed he said, “I used to be the best in town.” Remember that advice, and Corky said he would and when they were at the Y Merlin said, get lots of sleep, tomorrow we begin with the palm.
There are coin palms and card palms. For coins you had to know the classic and the edge and the thumb, those were crucial, but the back palm and the back thumb palm were handy to have around too. For cards, you weren’t going anywhere without the diagonal palm and the swing palm, the top, the flip over, the crossways and the bottom.
When you went on in coins you had to get your switches and your flips and then all the vanishes. Cards had a different world of sleights: lifts and deals, shuffles, slips and, naturally, the passes.
Corky was good inside a year, good but not, no one needed to tell him, great, and his money was gone but that wasn’t as tragic as it might have been since Merlin had a little stroke after the tenth month and Corky moved in with the giant for what at first was going to be temporary, tending him, sleeping on the couch, talking magic, working magic, reading reading reading the bookshelves through, and when Merlin was around and active he liked the company, he’d always had it, he’d married the dumpling when he was still in his teens. So Corky stayed, and drove the old man’s station wagon to jobs, assisted with the act, and when it came time for the major swings up along the coast, Corky chauffeured and watched and packed and learned, when he wasn’t quite twenty, that he was, astonishingly, good at picking up girls in bars, secretaries and stews and clerks, and at first he thought it was some kind of fluke streak he was riding, but eventually he realized it had to do with a pleasing impression, that’s what they said mostly, he seemed to be nice.
He hoped they were right, thought they were too. And prayed fervently that they never changed their minds.
He and Merlin moved all across the West, Nevada, Colorado, every place big enough to have an order of Elks or some Freemasons, Lion’s Clubs, Knights of Columbus, Pythian Sisters. They went to cocktail parties in Seattle, fund raisers in Ashland, Oregon; trade shows, women’s clubs, sales meetings, and between jobs, Corky sat by his mirror and worked, improving his forces, getting the estimations down, flourishes of all kinds, many his own. He was starting to invent his own moves now, maybe not better but different from before, things that never existed were starting to flock to him.
Once that started, Merlin pointed out the Stardust.
“What’s that?” Corky asked. They were seated in the wagon, driving home after a tough time in Santa Monica. Merlin was aging badly. The Cary Grant jokes were carrying him now.
“Club.”
“So?”
“It’s a regular nightclub. Sophisticated. But for you, special.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna like this,” Corky said.
“You’re getting very good, Corky.”
“But?”
“No. You are. It’s time you went out on your own.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to like it.”
“You never yet performed in all your life alone.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You’re going to have to face it someday. I don’t mean helping me set up either. I mean going out alone on a stage. You against them and you come out champeen. It’s time.”
“No it isn’t.”
“How old are you please?”
“What difference does it make, I’m not ready.”
“You’re goddam near twenty-six and you are ready. This place”—he gestured to the Stardust—“it’s perfect for you. Mondays anyone performs. No pressure. You just sign up early enough and the first couple dozen do an act. Sing, tell jokes. They never get magicians hardly. You’d be a novelty. I know they’d take to you.”
Corky shook his head.
“You’re not skyrocketing with me exactly.”
“I’m learning.”
“Learned.”
“Let’s go home.”
Merlin started the car. “What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid, I’m just not great yet.”
“Remember what I said that
first day?”
“That I was crazy, you mean?”
Merlin nodded. “Don’t let me turn out to be right.”
The next weeks Merlin’s work took another drop, and he raised Corky from a 10 to 25 percent partner. Corky wasn’t doing any performing, but everything else was his responsibility now. Pinning the gimmicks into just the right places on Merlin’s magic suit. (He couldn’t do straight close-up anymore, only stuff with gimmicks and fakes.) Making the bookings, driving the car, setting up the act in its entirety. Merlin got more reflective, going back a lot to when he worked with Cardini getting equal billing, how he stumped Thurston once with a sleight of his own that he worked into The Miser’s Dream. How he, the last week his wife was alive, spent all the time with her in the hospital, got so he could catch her thoughts.
Corky didn’t know what was true or wasn’t, but on general principle, he believed it all.
They went, to humor the old man, to the Stardust on a Monday, sitting in the back, watching the entire three hour show. The owner-MC introduced the acts, explained that none of them had ever performed before—“and if we’re lucky won’t ever perform again” somebody shouted from the audience but the MC shut him up with “I thought they got you last week for child molesting” and there was laughter and some applause.
Then the talent started. The MC read each name out from a card, giving an intro the performer had written himself. Then the MC went to a corner table, took a big hourglass, and turned it upside down. “You’re on,” he said as the hourglass touched the table, and the first talent jumped onto the stage, nodded, bowed, quickly turned on a small tape recorder, made sure it was going, faced the crowd again and said, “I don’t want to say that my wife’s a rotten cook or anything but last night she woke me and said, ‘Herbie, Herbie, I think there’s thieves in the kitchen, I think they’re eating the pot roast I made tonight’ and I said, ‘Go back to sleep, what do we care, as long as they don’t die in the house.’ ”
He was the best comedian.
He was followed by a lit major from UCLA who froze halfway through her Ronald Reagan imitation. After that came a young man who sang, a cappella, ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ two middle-aged men who played harmonica duets, a black comedian who said “motherfucker” constantly, three black high school girls who tried the Supremes, a piano player/composer/comic who sang his own ballad called “Charles Man-son Was a Good Dancer” plus a lot of other people who wanted to be Bob Dylan, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.
When it was over, Merlin just said, “Bullshit you’re not ready.”
Corky had nothing to reply.
But from then on, he really started to work. He sat silently in his room hour after hour, studying his hands in the mirror, producing aces, putting cards into the middle of the deck only to have them instantly appear on the bottom, then they were back in the middle, then they jumped to the top. He dealt seconds for hours on end, taking the next to the top card perfectly, and Merlin watched him once and no one knows how hard dealing seconds is except another magician and Merlin, Merlin said out loud, “Head of the fugging class.”
Corky began polishing his spring flourishes, sending the cards flying from one hand to another, then the drop flourish, the cards almost reaching the floor. He did one hand cuts and double cuts and false cuts and triple lifts, which are extraordinarily hard, where you lift the top card only you don’t, you take three and hold the three out pretending they’re only one and when he had that pat he did the quadruple lift which is that much harder because when you have four cards held out, they have bulk, they seem thick, and it becomes almost impossible to handle them as one card unless your hands are extraordinarily graceful.
Corky’s hands were that, even on bad days.
Merlin’s days got better, strength returned in partial quantity, they did another hop skip and jump tour up the coast, to Portland and back, touching base with all the Elks and Lions and any Rotarian order of any persuasion that had even the tiniest entertainment budget, and when they returned to Merlin’s L.A. home it was the holiday season, party time, and he did a lot of private shindigs, sometimes mingling with the guests, usually standing at the end of some room or other, telling his Cary Grant jokes, doing his routines, like the Miser’s Dream, a favorite of his and a classic piece of business where the magician asks for a hat from the audience and it’s empty and his sleeves are empty but then wham—wham—he’s producing coins from the air, six, eight, a dozen half dollars, and the way Merlin worked the trick, he had the halves pinned to the inside of his magic suit and Corky placed the money in piles of four so that Merlin could misdirect with the hat, flick one of his giant hands to the familiar spot, pull out four more coins, on and on until the audience, if he did it right, applauded spontaneously, and now he had fourteen and now sixteen and he misdirected with the hat, waving it up and jingling it and the audience watched the hat as they were supposed to and Merlin’s right hand stopped working, he tried another grab, no good, and Corky was running forward from his place in the corner of the room before the old man really started to drop completely and his right leg was giving on him and all he said was “I must be getting old” before Corky grabbed him, stopping his crumple midway.
Merlin finished his fall the following Tuesday when they put him in the ground.
“You got till the end of the month,” the landlady said to Corky, who nodded. They were standing in front of Merlin’s apartment, the day after the burial. “If you want to keep it, I don’t mind that if you pay.”
“No money.”
“Till the end of the month, then,” she said, and went back upstairs where she lived. Corky watched her go. Ten days wasn’t a whole lot of time.
Except that one of them was a Monday.
He went to the Stardust that very night and asked for the owner. Eventually the guy came out. Corky recognized him from when they had been there a year ago; his beard was grayer now.
“It’s about the amateur night,” Corky said.
“That’s Monday.”
“I know. But I’d like to put my name down now. Corky Withers.”
“We don’t work it that way—you show up Monday afternoon after four—the first two dozen are it. All very American.”
“How early do I have to be here to be sure to get on do you think?”
Shrug. “Depends.”
“I mean, is it better to go first or in the middle or at the end do you think?”
“Depends.”
“Are there ever people here to see you? I mean, if somebody was terrific, would there ever be maybe an agent or manager or like that do you think?” and before the guy could shrug or speak, Corky said, “Depends.”
The manager looked at him. “You don’t wanna make the audience nervous, y’know.”
“Oh I would never do that.”
“Yeah?—well you’re making me nervous right now.”
“Monday,” Corky said. The manager started to leave him. He glanced in at the stage. Business wasn’t much. “One last thing? If someone, say, comes on a Monday and is, for example maybe terriffic, would you hire him to work here regular?”
“Once that should only happen,” the manager said.
Corky ran back to his cards. Five minutes wasn’t much time, so you had to program it right. Start off easy, end big, but always leave a little something in reserve. If they wanted an encore you had to have a topper so—
An encore?
Just get through it, jerk; just do it right, so they’ll never forget you and always hold you kind in their hearts.
Do it right.
Do it right.
Corky put in sixteen hours on Wednesday before he broke, walked around the block a little, napped, made some coffee, got back to it. Another eight hours was plenty, didn’t want to empty the gas tank before the race started. Again he napped, a good one. Friday another eight on, four off, eight on, then Saturday he hit it big, staying glued to his mirror, watching his hands, looking for the least clue that might b
low it for an audience.
Do it right.
Do it right.
Sunday he began to taper off. Don’t leave your fight in the gym. He had his routine down so that depending on applause (if he got applause—thinking about applause was maybe even a little less helpful than worrying over encores) it would run four minutes thirty to four-fifty-five. No point in stretching for the full five or running over. If it only took four-ten, that wasn’t gonna hurt either. Don’t push. Always leave ’em laughing. Less is more.
He got to the Stardust at eleven Monday morning.
It didn’t open till four.
He laughed out loud. A good sign. He hadn’t panicked or berated himself. He thought about going back to his mirror, working some more but enough was enough, he’d done his eighty hours for the week, better to take your mind away.
A James Bond double feature was playing in the area, and that seemed just about perfect. He checked the time when he went in, saw that if he stayed for both features he’d be cutting it a little close, so he stayed for the first and half the second and got back to the Stardust at quarter of four.
Thirty people in line.
Please, no!
He counted again. Thirty—wait though—a bunch of them were talking—they knew each other—moral support—and one bunch of four looked like a group of some kind—it was gonna be fine, it was, it was, he’d worked too hard for it not to be.
He was given number twelve. The bearded manager remembered him. “I don’t know if it’s a good position or not,” he said.
“Depends I guess,” Corky answered. Then: “What happens now?”
“Fill out the card—name—address if you want—agent if you got one—and how you want me to introduce you. Put that part in quotes. Then you’re on your own.”
Corky nodded, wrote an introduction on a card, handed the card to the manager. The manager gave him a number. A red plastic 12. “I’ll call your number and you come on. Be here by eight-thirty, show starts at nine.”