Magic Is Dead Read online

  Dedication

  For Mom. May you always catch on the river.

  Epigraph

  Deceiving others . . . That is what the world calls a great romance.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: This Is Me Now

  Part I:

  Welcome to the Underground

  1: A Way of Life

  2: Blackpool Problems

  3: Magic Is Dead

  4: Locked In

  5: A Break from Reality

  6: A Vessel for Something Bigger

  7: Cheat

  8: Happy Pilgrims

  9: An Actor Playing the Part of a Magician

  10: The Rules of the Game

  11: Cardsharps

  12: At the Table

  13: The Two of Clubs

  Part II:

  Every Once in a While, the Lion Has to Show the Jackal Who He Is

  14: Young Bloods

  15: Just a Simple Plan

  16: Spies, Snitches, Skullduggery, and Scheming

  17: By Any Means Necessary

  18: Origins

  19: Not Just a Female Magician

  20: Fooling Bourdain

  21: Behind the Scenes

  22: Flipside

  23: Kill the Architect

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. I have, however, allowed myself certain storytelling liberties, including, for the sake of structure and clarity, compositing certain conversations and adjusting the chronology of a few events. Although I found these measures necessary to create a clear and complete body of work, I have not embellished the content of my experiences, or the experiences of other characters.

  Prologue

  This Is Me Now

  Time was running out. Everything was falling apart.

  An army of slot machines dinged and whirled like a lazy, out-of-sync marching band. Corset-clad waitresses, faces layered in makeup, waited at the bar to pick up a fresh round of drinks. Off in the distance, tourists hitched up their belts, tossed fistfuls of chips onto horseshoe-shaped blackjack tables, and puffed on cheap brown cigars. I was almost jealous of them: the thrill of the big bet, the whizz and click of the roulette wheel, the ffffph of the card next dealt. But I wasn’t here to gamble.

  I slumped low in my chair, nearly defeated, stewing in the stale air of the casino bar, crumpled cigarette butts piled in the ashtray in front of me. Orphaned playing cards—aces and threes and jacks, hearts and clubs and diamonds, dropped and discarded after a long week—littered the carpet at my feet, taunting me. It was our last day in Las Vegas and my big reveal was crumbling. I needed to improvise, to do something—anything—to pull off my scheme. I had been setting it up for weeks. I couldn’t let myself fail.

  I was surrounded by magicians. They stood all around me—some of whom, over the past year, had become my best friends. There was Jeremy Griffith, the card junkie from Los Angeles; Xavior Spade, the no-bullshit sleight-of-hand master from New York City; and Chris Ramsay, the bearded and tatted-up YouTube pioneer—the guy who had gotten me into this mess in the first place. It had been a year since I first fell into the underground world of magic and became friends with its key players. Everything had been building up to this point. I couldn’t let it all come tumbling down.

  It was now or never.

  We were in Las Vegas for Magic Live, the largest magic convention in the United States. Each August, thousands of professional and amateur magicians flock to the Orleans, a depressing casino a mile south of the main strip and a few years past its prime. Bits and pieces of the themed décor, or at least the lifestyle associated with the slouchy wetness of New Orleans and the Gulf states, peppered its game room floor, and all the magicians invariably gathered at the Mardi Gras Bar for drinks and talk. This little Bourbon Street–themed lounge had more or less been our home since we showed up a few days earlier. I figured that I had plenty of time to pull off my plan. I thought I was all set.

  I had been keeping my secret for months, and it was nearly killing me. But I had devised a scheme and I was determined to stick to it.

  “Ramsay,” I called out. He was chatting with Xavior. “Come over here. I want to show you something that I’ve been working on.”

  He walked over, and I pulled a new deck of cards from my backpack. My heart raced and my hands shook as I fumbled with the box’s cellophane wrapper, my fingers effectively turning to useless nubs.

  Ramsay chuckled sarcastically. “Let me know when you get that figured out, bud,” he said, turning to walk away.

  “You open it, then,” I said. He took the deck from me, tore off the wrapper, and sliced through its adhesive seal with his middle finger—the symbol for the four of spades tattooed on its side, near the deepest knuckle. He handed the deck back to me and I took the cards out of the box.

  Ramsay hiked up the sagging waist of his jeans, swiveled his baseball cap backward, stroked his beard, and waited for me to begin. My heart lodged itself in my throat. I wasn’t sure words could get past the dense pulse.

  “Just point to a card,” I said, stretching the cards out like a ribbon as I drew my hands apart. Ramsay pointed to one near the middle.

  “That one?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Let’s have a look.” I squared up the stack and turned it over, revealing Ramsay’s selection.

  “The two of clubs,” I said. “Good choice. Now, let’s take your card”—I pulled it from the deck, held it in my right hand, and placed the rest of the deck on a table next to us—“and just . . .”

  I ripped off the card’s top-right corner, a foot away from Ramsay’s face.

  “. . . watch,” I said, slowly opening my right hand, which held the torn piece. I went from pinky to index, slowly lifting each finger one by one. But when my hand was completely open, there was nothing there. The piece had disappeared.

  “Check your back pocket,” I said after a pause.

  “No!” Ramsay shouted. He smiled, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the ripped corner. “Ah, man,” he said, laughing.

  “Check it,” I told him. “Make sure it fits—that it’s from the same card.” He brought the two pieces together. The torn edges lined up perfectly.

  “That was really good, man,” he said. “You got me. I’m impressed.”

  “But here’s the thing,” I said, holding out my hand. “Let me see the piece.” He placed it into my hand, faceup, the two and the club symbol, the card’s index, visible to us. “This is a special card.” I paused and looked up at him. His brow crinkled, unsure of what I was getting at.

  “Because this is me now,” I said. “I’m the Two of Clubs. I’m in.”

  I

  Welcome to the Underground

  I love magicians because they are honest men.

  —ELBERT HUBBARD

  The strongest magic does not lie. It invites the audience to lie to themselves.

  —DANIEL MADISON

  1

  A Way of Life

  I was homeless.

  I wasn’t living on the street or under a bridge, but I had $188 in my bank account and couldn’t pay the rent for my apartment in Brooklyn. I was running out of options. My old friend Nick worked on the second floor of an office building in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and told me that the room across the hall from him had been vacant for a while. It didn’t seem like anyone was going to rent it, he said, so if I kept a low profile, I could crash for the summer. We called it an adventure, but technically—and legally—I was squatting. It was June 2015, I had just turned twenty-eight years old, and I had started freelancing full-time as a journalist earlier that year. And I was dead broke. I accepted his offer, found a subletter for my room in Brooklyn, packed my bags, and headed north.

  The space turned out better than I had expected. It had a big window that faced the town’s north bay, a sturdy desk, and a little bathroom (with a shower!) just down the hall. Plus, Nick, whom I’ve known since childhood, was there, trying to get his video production company off the ground. I kept my expenses minimal. I bought an air mattress at Walmart, nabbed a three-piece wicker furniture set for twenty-five dollars at a nearby thrift store, ate cheap turkey sandwiches for lunch and dinner, and did my laundry at Nick’s apartment. With all the basics squared away, I kept my output high. I scoured for compelling story ideas and voraciously pitched them. The great thing about being a freelance journalist is that personal circumstances—squatting in an office building, for example—are irrelevant to an editor. All they care about is your idea and how it could blossom into a captivating article. So I unloaded my pitches into editors’ inboxes with abandon. I had nothing to lose. I was a young writer with only a handful of clips to my name, but I knew I could convince magazines that my ideas were better than anyone else’s and that I was talented enough to execute them. They didn’t have to know that I was in dire straits.

  I landed a few great stories from my illegal apartment, including a profile of Shaquille O’Neal for Vice, for which I tagged along while he performed at an electronic music festival in Georgia; another feature for Vice about a basketball team in Nebraska composed exclusively of Sudanese refugees; and one for Wired detailing the technology behind a highway interchange in Dubai. I wrote them all in that nondescript offic
e building, secretly scraping by, subsiding on deli-meat sandwiches and off-brand yogurt, hiding in plain sight.

  One day, just after lunch, I was sprawled out on the lawn outside of the office building, reading, when my phone rang. It was my mother.

  “Mom—what’s up?” I said.

  “Hey, honey. How are you? What are you up to?”

  “I’m good,” I said, clapping my book closed. “Just taking a break—reading a bit, enjoying the sun. It’s beautiful up here.”

  “Haven’t gotten caught yet, have you?” she asked, followed by a light chuckle. I had told her about my circumstances—broke, squatting, struggling. She was sympathetic and said she would’ve offered me money if she had any. Money hadn’t been the same since my father died fifteen years ago and, plus, I didn’t want to burden her. I could take care of myself. I could deal with a little adventure. She, after all, managed to take care of me after my dad died, and I was scrappy like her. My father was the breadwinner, and we had to get creative after he passed away. There was life insurance money, sure, but they had just built their dream home in the woods of central Massachusetts, just under two hours from where I was in New Hampshire, accompanied by a hefty mortgage. She didn’t have a job, so she started playing poker—for groceries, gas money, to keep the phone bill paid and the lights on. We ended up losing the big dream house after the housing crash, but she found another place to live—and kept playing cards. Which, I could tell by the lilt in her voice, was why she was calling me.

  “I was thinking I would come visit you this weekend,” she said.

  “You’re going to come all the way here, just to see my homeless-guy setup?” I asked suspiciously.

  She laughed. “Well . . .”

  “Mom, c’mon, what do you have planned? Are you coming up here for a poker game?”

  “There’s a great tournament twenty minutes away! I thought I could come see you, and then we could play.”

  “Well, Mom, hate to break it to you, but I’m broke. The office building. Squatting. Can’t pay my rent. Remember?”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. I’ll bankroll you. It’s only a hundred dollars per person. Nothing huge. I just want to see you. If you send me the address to where you’re staying, I can be there on Saturday—by 11 A.M.? The tournament starts at one.”

  “Well, if you’re paying, I’m in. Did you win recently? Where is this extra money coming from?”

  “I played a cash game last week—sat down with two hundred dollars and walked away with a thousand.”

  “Holy shit. A good night’s work.”

  “It’s all those macho dudes, thinking they can push me around,” she said. “There was this one guy—a real piece of work. He just wouldn’t fold against me, Ian. He looks at me and sees someone who is weak; he sees this little old woman and thinks, There’s no way she can beat me. So, I trapped him. I just let him keep betting, and I stuck with him until the end. You should’ve seen his face when I turned my cards over. I took almost four hundred dollars on that one pot.”

  “Damn! Works every time,” I said.

  She chuckled. “Of course. You have to be able to know how to play the game—any game—to your advantage.” I laughed along with her and glanced up to my room on the second floor of the office building. It didn’t feel like I was cheating. The crime was victimless given that I had no clue who owned the place. I didn’t feel bad, and neither did my mother; deception has been in our blood for a long time.

  My mother is stout, barely five feet tall, with white hair and a piercingly innocent smile. She is largely taken for granted at the poker table and, to some extent, the same has been true in every aspect of her life. She grew up the eldest of eight children in Fitchburg, Massachusetts—a small city next door to where I grew up—where her outgoing and mischievous personality won her popularity as a teenager. Her catlike eyes and petite figure meant she earned numerous yearbook superlatives during senior year of high school, but she spent much of her free time in local bars, drinking beer and playing pool. After graduation, she drove across the United States in an RV, lived in Portland, Oregon, for a year, returned home, saved some money by working nights at a nursing home, and ventured off again down the East Coast with her friend Joyce, hoping to eventually make it to Texas. “I was looking for an adventure,” she told me once. “Being home, I felt stuck. It was a dead end, so I left, hoping I’d find something better.” But they ran out of money in Fort Myers, Florida, and had to live in a tent at a campground for a while, where they cleaned up trash for money. They hung around in local bars, and my mother hustled men at pool.

  They eventually made their way to New Orleans and then Houston, where my mother worked nights at Joe and Gary’s, a beaten-down beer-and-wine shack on the side of the road. She made a circle of friends and played a lot of pool, but also began throwing down money in backroom poker games. She had played a lot of poker in high school when she wasn’t hustling pool at the bar, and quickly found herself a natural at the table. She began to play cards constantly in Houston, mainly with friends and friends of friends, and gained a reputation for winning. “The challenge was being able to figure out other people,” she told me. “It was like solving a puzzle.” And then, one day, while at work, my father, who had moved to Houston from Ohio, walked through the door, sat down at the bar, ordered a beer, and, well, the rest is history.

  Eventually, my parents moved back to Massachusetts. I was born, and they needed a more normal, stable life. But we were always a family with a few decks of cards lying around—a piece of my mother before she became my mother. We’d play games of five-card draw with play money, or deal to an invisible series of players to see what hands would come out. She’d teach me about strategy and tells. I first learned to shuffle a deck of cards when I was six years old. There are dozens of photographs of me as a child holding a deck during our annual camping trips, dealing cards under the glow of our lantern. My mother even taught me how to cheat at poker. She showed me how to shuffle the cards in such a way as to keep an ace on top of the deck, or how, if you bend the cards enough while you’re shuffling, you can peek at them, or denote their specific order.

  Aside from knowing how to cheat at poker, my childhood was standard-issue American middle-class. My father was a blue-collar entrepreneur, a tile man by trade, and we lived frugally during the early years of him being his own boss. We lived in a small, one-story ranch near the center of my hometown while my parents saved money and built their dream house on its outskirts. We all went camping and swimming in the summer, watched football in the fall, went to the movies, hosted cookouts. I started playing sports early, and my father coached my football team. Despite my small stature, I played quarterback and linebacker. I was actually pretty good. Our team always made the playoffs, and my father would give rousing speeches to us before games, vigorously clapping his hands and shouting to get us riled up. When we’d win, I’d drive home with him in his truck, and he’d lovingly grab my shoulder and tell me how well I played. Our life was as simple as a small-town existence could get.

  Until it wasn’t.

  After my father died, everything changed. He was the rock who kept our family grounded. My mother worked with him on his business, and his ambition to build a stable, successful family kept all of us on track. When he met my mother, she was a freewheeling twentysomething—the pool-hustling and cardsharping walkabout. She was on the search for purpose in her young life, and she found a way forward with my father. Together they formed an equilibrium. But after he was gone, she was lost. So, with the pressure of being a single mother mounting, she went back to something on which she knew she could rely: poker.

  Deception at the card table became her primary coping mechanism. It was the closest thing she had to an escape. Sadly, it sometimes wasn’t enough to erase the loss she carried around in her chest. She still came home every night to an empty bed—to an empty heart. I, too, got lost. A father is supposed to show his son how to become a man, and I’ve had to navigate my adolescence and young adulthood alone. And, I’ll admit, squatting in that office building, although adventurous, didn’t make me feel like I was living up to the expectations my father had set out for me—and what I set out for myself.