THE HAND

HOW ITS USE SHAPES THE BRAIN, LANGUAGE, AND HUMAN CULTURE
By Frank R. Wilson; Pantheon Books, 1998

MAGICIAN WITH A GRACED HAND

Mark Mitton and I met in his apartment in New York shortly after he and his wife had moved there. We sat at the table Slydini used for his close-up magic, and which Mark now owns. Mark projects an intense, open friendliness that alerts you to the possibility that he might not be a native New Yorker. He is, in fact, a Canadian by birth, although he has lived in the United States much of his life. Like Robert Albo (whom he knows), Mark was smitten by the magic bug when he was nine years old. That was when he was given a Chex Magic Kit, and the year he saw his first magic show.

By the time Mark was a teenager living in Superior, Wisconsin (near Duluth, Minnesota), he was hosting a children’s talent show on a local television station and performing sleight-of-hand magic. He saw his first tape of Slydini when he was sixteen and says it inspired him to work even harder on sleight-of-hand technique. But he was equally interested in the psychological side of magic, particularly “psychics and con games,” and he suspects this was because he grew up in a very conservative Baptist family. He attended college in the United States, first at American University in Washington, D.C. and then at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. One of his friends at Haverford was a physics major, and the two of them had frequent conversations about the overlap in their interests; they even drew meaningful connections between Max Malini’s Book of Magic and the physics lectures of Richard Feynman.

After graduation, when his college interests in economics and politics failed to produce a job, he lived with his parents for a while. During that time, he studied karate and “took some magic lessons from a con man.” Although he had not anticipated it, karate later turned out to be useful, when he became more serious about magic, because it taught him how to mirror someone else’s movements.

Before long he moved to New York, where he began working with a street magician. He decided it was time to meet Slydini, who by then was eighty-three.

One Saturday I met Jim Sullivan, who worked under the name Cellini and who had been a student of Slydini. We had a long conversation, and all he could talk about was Slydini. He told me what Slydini really knew, not what the magic fraternity thought he knew. He said, “Every day I thank God that I got to study with Slydini,” and he told me what I’d have to say to get Slydini to take me as a student.

So I met Slydini. He was very formal. Always in the lesson he would say, “Do what I do.” I had to replicate his movements, and the mirroring made it easier. Mirroring takes a certain skill, and once you know it, once you’re in rhythm, it’s very fast and it’s beautiful. Slydini had a wild technique, but he understood perception in a way I think no other magician ever has, He approached it scientifically, really broke it down. For example, there is a vanishing paper-ball trick based on a principle he called “the coordination,” and it involves something called an “erasing movement.” When this trick is done by people who didn’t study with Slydini, it’s actually sort of vulgar—you see a guy chucking paper over someone’s head. But in Slydini’s hands it was beautiful, and part of it was his letting you see how the person was being deceived. It wasn’t just a cheap trick, because Slydini was a real illusionist. That’s what he taught his students to be.

You can learn from books or from a teacher, but you have to practice, and you have to perform. And nothing else helps you as much as performing. Doing a watch steal is a great example of what I mean. Part of what we do is sleight-of-hand, and part of what we do is out-and-out deception. If a person takes your watch, you know that a guy’s taken the watch off your wrist—it’s not really a secret.

The reason so few magicians do the watch steal is that to learn it you must be caught doing it. How do you make that acceptable? Either you find someone who knows you’re going to take their watch, or you have a joke to cover you if you do get caught. And that’s only the beginning, because in addition to the technical skill and the deception, you need a presentation. Did you take the watch, or do you make it look like someone else took it? All this has to fit together. Slydini had very, very strong feelings that it was the overall effect that creates what people experience as real magic. He said, “Listen—I teach you the trick, the trick teaches you the principle, and the principle teaches you magic.”

What he meant was this: the only way to teach was through very specific routines. That’s what he did. As a student, only by learning and doing the routines and by performing them could you start to understand the vocabulary. Anyone who studied with him for less than two years would do everything exactly as he did. It wasn’t until later that he would teach you to mold the trick around yourself.

You can hardly imagine the environment kids face in a big city hospital. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but a magician doing tricks for the doctor, the nurse, the child, his parents, and sometimes even the janitor can get them all together. That was most of what I did, but I was involved in one incident that was different—we helped a boy who couldn’t walk even though he was supposed to be able to. This boy was there because of a serious kidney condition, and there were a number of factors in play, but still, he was supposed to be able to walk but they couldn’t get him out of his wheelchair. After I had spent some time with him, I started thinking about where I was at age fourteen. That’s not hard: I was a kid and I wanted a job. Carmelo was constantly hustling people for candy, perks, anything he could get—he was basically a hustler. My idea was to find a way to get him to hustle us for money. To me, maneuvering him into trying to get a job out of us was the same thing as lifting a watch.

So one day I did a trick we call a card read. You take a card, look at it, and I look in your eyes and tell you the card. It’s very intimate; it elicits an involuntary eye-movement whenever you see the card you picked. It’s very easy to spot.* I worked out a way for us to do the trick together. I would actually do it, but put myself way in the background—like I was doing nothing, which is a big Slydini thing. In exactly the way you eliminate a movement from a person’s mind, you can also eliminate a person’s presence from someone’s mind. You’re just playing with their perception. So I did the trick and Carmelo got the credit.

One day after we did the trick I congratulated him by saying, “You are an amazing actor!” I meant it, by the way—and he said, “You know something, you’re right. I am an amazing actor.” And he went on and on about how he was a wonderful actor. I told him he was good enough to join us, and if he did we’d pay him. This was just a hustle; it was a straight hustle. It was very much the way you take somebody’s watch. At least that’s how I was thinking about it.

* Mark demonstrated the trick to me. I knew exactly what he was doing and still could not defeat him. It was over in ten seconds.

Fig. 14.3 What would John Napier have called this grip? Mark Mitton, an up-and-coming master of “close-up magic,” demonstrates the technical side of a famous sleight-of-hand illusion. As he masks his own extra-prehensile manipulation of cards, coins, and handkerchiefs, Mark unmasks the shortcomings of conventional descriptions of the movements of the human hand. However, as he tells us both in his discussion of Slydini and in his story of Carmelo, a great deal more than unconventional dexterity is needed to produce real magic. (Photograph copyright © John J. Pavlik.)

That moment came three months later, when he decided he wanted to work with us. Since he’d been so sick, and there was no family, he didn’t have any chance to make his own way and he was excited about the idea of making money. Even being ill and stuck in the hospital, he still had all the impulses of a fourteen-year-old New York kid who liked to hustle people. At least, I was betting on that, and that’s what gave me the chance to pull the little twist.

Three months later, when he was ready, I came in and I said, “I’m really sorry, but it looks like we can’t use you after all. I had everything all ready—the money, everything, but we can’t use you because I wasn’t thinking about your wheelchair. I mean, I didn’t know that you can’t walk.” I told him—truthfully—“We work four floors a day and we use the stairs. If we have to wait for you—wait for these elevators—it’s going to throw off the whole schedule, and we won’t be able to do our job.”

This is another common technique in magic. You take something that’s very straight, that’s true, you take hard information and you twist it. I took real information—the slow elevators, which he certainly knew about—and just said, “I’m sorry.” It was very traumatic, and he was crying, but when I went to the door he stopped me and said, “But, I can walk.” It was just like in the movies. I pretended like I didn’t believe it. It was straight hustling—well, worse than that, it was straight ball-busting.

And it did work. That weekend, his nurse told me he’d made a deal with her: “I tell you what—if you get me a pair of sneakers, really nice tennis shoes, I’ll walk.” He’d hustled them every chance he could up to that point, so that was no surprise. She obliged, got sneakers for him, and he walked. It took us some time, but he got out of that chair. I don’t want to pat myself on the back. To me, it was just a very straightforward endeavor. It was dangerous, potentially, and I never wanted to forget that risk. We had quite a long talk about the reaction of the hospital staff to this event. I think it really led to a closer working relationship between our group and the staff.

All of this, of course, is not an appropriate activity for clowns in hospitals, but as a person with a strong religious background who was raised on the idea that it’s not enough to be good, you’ve got to do good, I decided it was appropriate in this instance. In a way, I think the impulse to do this came from reading Plato’s Republic. The first words, “He went down”—the allegory of the cave—was what I was thinking about with this kid. That’s what Slydini did with me. That’s what my karate instructor did with me. Each of them saw where I was, met me, and then we went somewhere else together. They were able to meet me because they could remember the time in their life when they were where I was. My fears were real to them. And my lack of fear was also real to them. I could see both of those in Carmelo.