He would wind up his arm, execute a vigorous throwing motion — and the ball would vanish into thin air. I would leap into the river and paddle in frantic circles for five minutes searching for it, which he called good exercise and I called breach of contract.
I soon took my cues from my mother, Queenie. She would sit on the sandbar, yawning, knowing full well the ball was tucked into his armpit, waiting for the real thing.
Later I discovered the deceptive magic of the car. You hop in expecting a weekend at camp; you get out and there’s a thermometer where no gentleman wants one. You can’t trust transport.
The Boss, however, has always loved it — from the clumsy card tricks his grandfather showed him, to seeing Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas (two years before one of the white tigers decided to peer-review the act, bringing the season to a close).
This week he’s obsessed with Houdini, who died a century ago on October 31. Houdini I respect. He escaped from regulation handcuffs, padlocked milk cans, and a German courtroom. When a newspaper alleged he concealed a key, he did the escape again in front of detectives, stark naked. I, too, have performed every great escape of my career entirely unclothed: the yard, the leash, the wash bath.
Magicians today face an existential crisis, The Boss says. Young blokes on the internet keep giving the tricks away. One fellow earns millions a year sawing his toddler in half and immediately posting a tutorial on how the mirrors work. Exposure is the cardinal sin.
Their other problem is attention. A modern illusionist complains that crowds won’t sit through three and a half minutes of misdirection any more — TikTok has made them impatient. Amateurs. I have watched a raw sausage on the kitchen bench for 40 minutes without blinking.
Then there’s technology. Microchips are now hidden inside playing cards, so the performer knows what you’ve selected. I have had a microchip embedded between my shoulder blades since I could barely walk, and it has never earned me a single thing except a lecture on council registration.
Trying a more transparent Houdini trick in 1999, magician David Blaine buried himself alive in a clear coffin for a week. Seventy-five thousand people came to look. Twenty-odd years later YouTuber Mr Beast copied the stunt, filmed it and attracted 285 million views.
That’s the algorithms for you, but burying things is a dog’s art. I have buried a bone for a week, and nobody came to look. There is always someone who digs up your work and passes it off as his own. In our patch it’s the kelpie by the railway line. In magic, it’s now the internet.
Live illusion, apparently, is fighting back. There is a private club in Los Angeles that bans phones entirely; to open the hidden door, you must whisper a password to a carved owl.
I recite my own secret words at the back door six times a day. A low, rhythmic whine, rising to a sharp percussive bark. Sometimes it successfully conjures a human with an open door; sometimes it conjures my reflection. But that’s the trouble with amateur conjuring — you can never quite trust the apparatus. Woof!
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