The Bullet Catch: Murder by Misadventure

Blog Posting #3.....David writes about his love of magic

I have always had terrible eyesight. My baby pictures invariably show a chubby face with curly red hair (now gone) and Coke-bottle glasses (still have) staring off ponderously toward something no doubt very blurry. Perhaps as a side-effect of my poor vision, I am slow to react to things. (My wife takes advantage of this with delight and no mercy. She is constantly sneaking up on me but claims she was there the whole time. I know the truth.) And, I think, maybe as a side-effect of that side-effect, I became an early admirer of magic. Most people are always one step behind the magician. I was a 100-meter dash in the dust. But that changed when I was about ten.

That was when Penn & Teller came to our regional theater. My parents got tickets for the family. Aside from being just about the most exciting thing to come through Kingston, NY since the British burned it down in the Revolutionary War, the show was phenomenal. It was funny and exciting and I loved every second of it. And best of all, the grand finale was a slow-eyed kid’s dream. They broke one of the biggest rules in magic. They showed the audience how their trick was done. Granted, it was one of the oldest ones in the book – some variation of the zigzag lady. In Act 1, Teller’s live body parts waved and smiled from black boxes located at opposite sides of the stage as Penn calmly ranged back and forth. Act 2 was the nearly same trick, now performed with frantic music and Penn’s excited narration. Except this time, Teller’s body could be seen scrambling through Lucite passageways. A-ha! Now I was up to speed. Best of all, at the end of the show they waited in the lobby and signed my Playbill by smacking it with their bloody hands.

I was hooked then. I remember having similar experiences at other live shows and televised specials. This was the early 90s – you could hardly turn on the TV without seeing David Copperfield make something enormous disappear, or Siegfried & Roy parading their animals. I checked out all the books about Houdini I could find from the library. I taped his TV biography and watched it on loop. I devised my own daring escapes from laundry baskets – an improvement, I thought, on his Metamorphosis Box – and wrapped long-sleeved t-shirts around myself and pretended to escape from a straightjacket. Sadly, my magic skills remained mostly imagined.

As I grew up my interest in magic waned, but never completely went away. I had such a thrill revisiting those key moments of my childhood while writing “The Bullet Catch”. Re-learning all the facts about old magicians and their illusions was like finding a favorite old toy. At first you remember it as an object. (Oh yeah! That thing…) Then you hit some button – incredible that the batteries still work – and it buzzes to life. There are a few illusions described in “The Bullet Catch”, and I had a lot of fun drawing out the schematics and clumsily practicing my legerdemain. Before I knew it, I was remembering whole afternoons that I didn’t know were lost playing with magic, which had suddenly become important to me again.

And that’s how I feel about magic now. One of the best nights of my life came in October 2013. We had finished the first draft of the book earlier that day. To celebrate, me and my wife walked over to the west side piers in Manhattan. David Blaine was in the middle of his “Electrified” performance. While I wouldn’t call the feat magic exactly, I couldn’t help but feel a little like our character in “The Bullet Catch”, Leo, as he watched Houdini dangle upside down in Times Square ninety-six years earlier.