And me.
Maybe there was no shame in entertaining a room of spiffed-up thirteen-year-olds, but whenever I did a show for kids, even when it paid well, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was no different from anyone who’d ever floundered through a dozen off-the-shelf tricks for some six-year-old’s birthday party, maybe twisting balloons into poodles for good measure.
Still, tonight’s gig paid just over five percent of my settlement. And because kids always want what the other has, I knew I could count on a few referrals over the next year.
Money, right? It made the world go around. Unless you were Incan.
For real. The Incas didn’t use currency. They were a unique empire, full of master architects and sophisticated farmers, constructing pyramids and irrigation systems, but never needing dollars or pesos or gold coins.
My mother told me this when I was fifteen. By then my father was vast and ruined, and my mother was explaining to me that she and Chip Dawkins were in love and wanted to get married, which meant finally filing for divorce.
I’d known about Chip for a while. My mother still dropped me off periodically at Jack’s magic store, but she and Chip had gotten bolder, and my mother would go out at night with the flimsiest of excuses. My father said nothing. At least nothing I overheard.
I don’t want to hurt him, she would say to me. You know that. I suppose I did. But I also knew she hadn’t forgiven him for losing all that money and never would. The money wasn’t the only thing, but it was the biggest thing. And now we were broke, and Chip Dawkins wasn’t, and she must have decided that her life, and mine, would improve if she were to hitch her star to his.
She didn’t say it like that. What she said, sitting at the foot of my bed one night, was, We aren’t Incas, you and I. And I said something like, Huh? And she explained how the Incas didn’t need money but we did. There were tremendous medical debts, still, and legal bills for dealing with the medical bills, plus all the ordinary expenses of being alive in America. But Chip had been selling her on his aircraft parts business and what it could do for them. I’d met Chip a few times by then. He had a smoker’s cough and a voice like wet sand and, as far as I could tell, a personality to match his voice. He wanted to move to Nevada, where the air was dry and where he could build a manufacturing plant and warehouse. The opportunity was incredible, the way he explained it to my mother and my mother explained it to me. And there would be opportunities for her, too. She could get her real estate license. Housing prices out West were rising, rising, and you had to jump on an opportunity like that while it was red hot. The houses practically sold themselves to all those Californians wanting to retire inland where their dollar went further.
Had we gone then, when I was fifteen, maybe we’d all be rich right now. But my father’s reaction to receiving the divorce papers was to get himself killed in a bar fight, and my mother was so guilt-ridden that she dropped Chip cold turkey for a year. Then she picked him up again, but they delayed their move West for another year so I could finish high school. They put off staking their claim, and by the time they finally went to Reno they were too late. They bought a home at the peak of the market, and then the recession blew in, and Chip never did open his factory, but he did open his wallet and become a frequent patron of the Grand Sierra casino and the Gold Dust West casino and the Peppermill Resort Spa casino.
That’s what my mother did. She married gamblers. My father had gambled once and lost everything; Chip spent more than two years going broke. In Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, he and my mother became poor and stayed poor. But they stayed together.
I sometimes fantasized about sending my mother a big fat check, totally out of the blue. At my current savings rate I could do that in about ten thousand years.
I missed my father. I missed my mother. I missed the days when I never would have imagined that I could miss them.
The bar mitzvah kids were as attentive as one could expect for thirteen-year-olds hopped up on Shirley Temples and a chocolate fountain. When my show was over I packed my gear and collected my check. Then I nursed a glass of house Cab in the mostly empty hotel bar. I’d worn the top hat tonight—not the tall kind, more like a bowler—and the bartender complimented me on it. I caught him smiling at me a few times. He was tall, with floppy hair and a nice chin, and I kind of hoped he’d ask for my number but he never did.
When my drink was gone, I left a large tip and carried my gear outside and across the dark Talmadge Inn parking lot to my car. Loaded everything into the backseat and started the engine. Before pulling away, I checked email on my phone. And there it was: a new message from Brad Corzo.
Subject: WOM Schedule of Events
Dear participants:
The conference schedule is now posted on the WOM website (link below). Please be sure to make it to your venue at least 15 minutes ahead of time. Stage magicians requiring longer setup should contact me individually.
If you have not yet registered for the conference or uploaded your bio and photo, please do
