There is a trick magicians call misdirection, and the secret of it is that you can show someone exactly what is happening, in plain sight, and they will still look at the wrong hand. The eye goes where it’s told. The trick survives not because it’s hidden but because attention has been pointed somewhere else, gently, by a man who understands exactly where you’ll glance next.
Ricky Jay spent his whole life inside that idea, and he learned it, near as anyone can tell, before he understood what it was for.
He was ten years old in a New Jersey bathroom, standing in front of a medicine cabinet, looking at two tubes that sat a foot apart — his father’s toothpaste, his father’s Brylcreem — and he switched them. His father brushed his teeth with hair cream and combed Colgate into his scalp. Jay would tell that story for the rest of his life with the precise comic timing of a man who had told it ten thousand times.
There was a basketball hoop bolted above the garage of that house, and Jay loved to shoot baskets against the aluminum siding his mother begged him not to dent. There were music lessons — accordion lessons — that his parents made him quit, a detail he liked to deliver with a shrug, probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons. There was a guinea pig that urinated on his father’s necktie during a television appearance when Jay was seven, and his father’s only comment, delivered with no apparent affection: Perfect. You get all the glory and I get all the piss.
He said, when pressed, that he could not remember when his family moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs. He could not remember what year he started college, or the year he left, or how many of the five colleges he attended he actually finished. He had, by his own account and the testimony of nearly everyone who loved him, one of the most extraordinary memories in America — a man who could recite a hundred-item list cold, a man who could quote his own carnival barker spiel from a quarter-century earlier without missing a word. None of that machinery held a single fact about his parents in place.
What he did remember, with total clarity, down to the address, was a magic shop on West Thirty-fourth Street. What he remembered was his grandfather.
Max Katz was an accountant, an amateur magician, a man who loved cards and chess and calligraphy and codes, and who believed the way to learn anything was to find the best person doing it and watch their hands. He took young Ricky to see Dai Vernon and called him the Professor and told the boy to study the naturalness of his movements. He introduced him to Slydini, to Francis Carlyle, to a whole demimonde of men in midtown cafeterias who could make a coin disappear with nothing but patience and forty years of practice. When Ricky did his very first trick in front of an audience, at four years old, multiplying paper coffee creamers at a backyard barbecue, it was his grandfather’s friends who were there to see it.
When Ricky’s bar mitzvah came, and his parents asked what kind of celebration he wanted, he didn’t ask for a band or a hall. He asked for a magician named Al Flosso, the man who ran that shop on West Thirty-fourth Street. Jay would say, decades later, that this was the only warm memory he had of his parents.
Max Katz died when Ricky was a teenager, and at the funeral, Flosso did something magicians do for one of their own: he broke a wand, ceremonially, and placed it in the casket. Jay called it the single most frightening thing he ever saw. He also said that his grandfather’s death marked the end of whatever relationship remained with his parents.
He spent the rest of his life being trained by a chain of older men — Vernon at Canter’s Deli until five in the morning, Charlie Miller watching him run the same sleight for hours without blinking, men who would sit across a table from a kid and say do it again, do it slower, do it until it disappears.
He never got the toothpaste joke to land any other way. He didn’t need to. Some hands you watch your whole life and still can’t explain.
Motivated by learning of the passing of Mark Singer whose profile of Ricky Jay in the New Yorker provided my direction to learning more about him.
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