MAGIC (9 page)

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 blow 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.”

Corky went back to Merlin’s place. A nap would
have helped but too risky, what if he overslept, beat himself that way.

In the end he just sat there for two hours. Then he cleaned up, changed—he’d long ago decided not to wear anything fancy. Of course, he didn’t
own
anything fancy which made the decision a lot easier. Gray slacks and a white shirt and gray cardigan sweater. Casual. No mumbo jumbo crap. A pack of bicycles in each pocket and scoot.

He didn’t start getting unpleasantly nervous until he reached the Stardust. He was there at 8:30 on the money, but in order to make that work he’d had to take a twenty-minute stroll around the area. Still, he wasn’t the first. The performers bunched outside in the bar area. In the middle was the desk with the entrance to the club. The manager waited there, escorting people to their tables. It was going to be jammed, one of the girl performers said.

Good or bad, Corky wondered, then decided, didn’t matter, nothing like that mattered.

Do it right.

Do it right.

What’s your act? another girl asked a curly headed boy. Nostalgia, I imitate Mort Sahl was the reply.

I wonder if he’s good, Corky thought. If he is, I wonder if he’s before me. And if he’s good and if he’s before me, is that good?

It doesn’t goddammit matter
. What
you
do matters. That’s it. It’s on
your
shoulders. No excuses. You’ve spent the time, you know the moves.

—quit making me nervous—

The show started promptly which was a surprise. The first performer never showed. Panic. Neither did the third. Same. The second sang the “Age of Aquarius” and the fourth did comedy birdcalls.

Christ I wish that guy was just ahead of me, Corky thought. After this is over I’m gonna hire that birdcall guy and have him come on before me all over the country.

The black girl that was five was funny.

So was the white guy that was sixth.

The seventh person carried a box on stage and for one minute of blind horror Corky thought he was another magician, but that was just nerves, imagination, the guy was a singer and the box held his tape recorder.

Number eight. Now nine. The acts were beginning to blend on him.

Ten didn’t show.

Nor eleven.

“Say hello to Corky Withers,” the MC read.

Corky walked through the room toward the stage. All he heard were couples ordering drinks from waiters but that was imagination. Maybe one guy ordering one Scotch, rocks, no big deal. He stepped onto the stage. People were all around him, very close.

He blinked from the lights. He hadn’t expected the lights. No. He knew they were there, just not so bright. He hadn’t expected the heat. They’ll think it’s nerves, he realized, and it’s not, I’m fine, I was a fool to wear the sweater.