Real Man Adventures (25 page)

But that’s not all. We also take in a show. Not just any show. A magic show: David Copperfield (née Kotkin, of the Metuchen, New Jersey, Kotkins). My father, his sister, my wife and I, and our two girls get all dressed up and hop into two cabs that take us to the MGM Grand Hotel, the third largest in the world. We wind through the noisy, smoky casino and pick up our tickets. Which turn out to be great, two adjacent tables in the middle of the theater. (My mother goes out with her brother and my cousins instead; we find out later that she scored a couple thousand dollars playing craps.)

Shortly after we settle at the seats, order some popcorn and Shirley Temples for the kids, their faces glowing red in the preshow lighting, eyes giant saucers, legs kicking madly under the table in anticipation of they have no clue what is coming… a lady in all
black and outfitted with an important-looking hi-tech headset approaches us.

“Good evening. How are you all doing tonight?”

“Fine, thank you,” my father says, but she is not talking to him.

“I work for David,” she says, now more obviously to my wife and me, “and he’d like you to be a part of the show tonight.”

“Do we have to go onstage?” my wife asks. She does not like to make a spectacle of herself.

“Yes,” the lady replies.

“No,” my wife says directly.

And then she looks over at our kids, who are giving
Are you kidding me? Pleeeeeze?
looks.

“Well, just hear me out,” the lady continues, more to me. “And you two can decide afterward whether you’d like to be a part of it or not.”

I nod. She continues: “Well, we are looking for a husband and wife to come up and help demonstrate to the audience that a plate of steel that David will be passing through during the first illusion is completely solid.”

The kids are speechless. Even more speechless, though, is probably my father, who is studying the lady talking to us as though we are all about to be involved in a train wreck that he is powerless to avert.

“You’re married, right?” the lady asks.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, but don’t add, “Right down the boulevard, in fact, by Elvis,” because nobody else at the table knows that but me and my wife.

“Well, okay then,” the lady says. “We’ll be taking you through each step, you will always have somebody beside you, and it’ll be
very clear what you’re to do at all times. You don’t have any health problems that would preclude you from walking up stairs or going onstage?”

“Nope,” I say.

“No,” my wife echoes.

“Okay, then…” I say to my wife.

Her neck is flushed the way it gets sometimes. She looks so pretty.

“Okay,” my wife agrees, and the lady seems pleased she has done her job, barking something into her headset. The kids are beside themselves, considering whether we’d somehow planned this all along solely for their benefit. And my father has still not spoken a word. (I don’t think my aunt knew what was going on, because she was at the end of the table, and the din of the settling crowd was significant.)

About five minutes into the show, in the dark, the lady returns to collect us, leading us up and around the audience, and then down alongside the stage. There are handlers/assistants everywhere, all black-clad. David Copperfield is in the midst of a rambling joke. “Don’t hold hands while you’re walking up the steps,” the lady reminds us, quietly. Then we are standing alone at the bottom of the stage stairs.

“I’m going to trip,” my wife whispers from behind me. “And I’m going to be laughed off the stage. Thanks for choosing to go with four-inch heels tonight,”

I whisper back. “What are we doing?” my wife asks.

What we are doing is trying not to laugh, and there is a giant, at least one-and-a-half-inch-thick steel plate being suspended in the air
above and in front of us, and soon David motions us onstage, and I feel an assistant’s grip on my shoulder, guiding me toward the illusionist.

“Hello, sir. How do you do?” David greets me in his customary sleepy-sarcastic cadence. I shake his hand and think,
Damn, he looks good for fifty-five. Are those hair plugs?
“Your job is to examine the steel. Right this way.”

And then it all becomes a bit of a blur, and I don’t know where my wife has gone, cannot see her standing off to the side behind me. I look at the steel in front, the audience side, and it seems very solid indeed, and I am standing there trying to come up with a way to demonstrate to the audience that I found the plate to be solid, but soon David hands me a hammer.

“Now, hit it over and over—hard—making sure it’s solid,” he instructs.

I wind up, two hands on the hammer, and whack the center of the steel plate, which sounds like a gong. I whack it again, then turn to look at David. An assistant appears to relieve me of the hammer, as another brings over my wife.

“Okay, hello, ma’am, thank you for helping out,” he says to her. We are both beside David, and the plate has been hoisted and spun around in the air above us. “Now I’m going to have you examine the backside.”

My wife looks at the back of the plate. “You too, sir,” David says to me, at which point I go over and grab my wife’s ass while she is examining the steel.

“Not
her
backside!” David mugs.

Giant audience response. My wife is looking at me like,
Really, asshole? Here?
She did not know that I had, just seconds before, been
directed by an assistant to grab her ass on cue (though I do admit I am guilty of doing it frequently when not onstage beside David Copperfield, too).

“You two are married, I presume?” he asks. The audience is still chuckling, and I nod yes. “So I guess he’s had ample opportunity to check out the backside
before
the show.”

Even more laughter.

We are escorted by assistants to step up onto the steel plate, now situated horizontally. “Make sure it’s solid, really make sure it’s solid,” David is saying. My wife starts jumping a little. “Now, no need to do Riverdance!” The audience roars, even though it is the same bit he’s been using since the Lord of the Dance single-handedly destroyed any positive memory anybody had of the nineties.

And then there are a few seconds of dead time before the assistants return, and David thanks us and prepares to lie down on a table underneath the steel plate, where he will remain until the instant he seems to
penetrate
that steel plate. He will disappear momentarily, lying there under the plate, a large sheet tossed over all of it, and then he will simply, magically reappear atop the plate. There will be lights and smoke, and the table will be spun around theatrically several times by assistants, and the music will get louder and louder. And then he will gradually start pushing up against the silk sheet, a male, human, David Copperfield–sized form slowly emerging, a nose, a head, two feet poking up, and soon the sheet will be yanked away, and there he will be on top of the plate, arms out, palms up:
ta-da!

And there will have been no fucking way that he could’ve actually done it, even from up close; right there on either side of the
stage, my wife and I will see
no way
that he could possibly have done what he just did. It is a trick the brain cannot figure out when presented with the evidence before it. That he was down there a few seconds ago, and he is up here now—but he did not roll to the side, nor somehow come out from underneath the plate, or go anywhere that anybody could tell in the seconds he was out of sight.
How the fuck did he do that?
every single person who is not wearing all black is wondering.

But before all that—before the illusion begins, and before it wraps up to a chorus of
whoas
and astonished applause—we are back in that sliver of dead air, and my wife is still horrified she’s actually up onstage doing this, and I’m frozen and blinded by lights thinking,
What a fucking midget I must look like right now
. But in that second there is enough time for me to notice how simply lovely my wife looks in her black-and-pink dress standing beside me, her long, dark-red hair up the way I like it, the way it was at our first wedding down the boulevard, come to think of it. And I kind of made an effort that night, too: I’m in a crisp white dress shirt and a red plaid bow tie, the old-timey kind you actually have to tie yourself; sometimes you must tie and untie it several times before getting the ratio of loops to ends just right.

We hold hands in that second before stepping off the steel plate, and then there we are center stage with David Copperfield née Kotkin in Las Vegas, on full display for a full house of 750 average everyday folks including my aunt and my father, my two children. Just an average everyday married couple, nothing particularly magical or special about us at all, just what is required every night to get from one trick to the next. Practically invisible.

Diane Baldwin, Cooper Lee Bombardier, Kate Bornstein, C—’s Dad, Jibz Cameron, Colle Carpenter, Maud Casey, Ian Chase, Fredrica Cooper, Steve Cooper, Sally Ellyson (and Hem), Will 95 Georgantas, Eric Gillyard, Mary Gonzalez, Peggy Hambright, Niko Hansen, Drew Jordan, Stephen Kay, Rocco Kayiatos, Téa Leoni, Evin Luehrs, Adam Mansbach, Scott McCloud, Kenny Mellman (and The Julie Ruin), Scott Miller, Rick Moody, Alex Petrowsky, Ryan Pfluger, Spencer Presler, Chris Pureka, ReDICKulous, RWSG Agency, S—’s Mom, Turner Schofield, Scott Silver, Andrew Singer, Jonnah Speidel, Darin Strauss, Johnny Temple, Dexter Ward, Geo Wyeth.

Douglas Stewart at Sterling Lord Literistic.

Vendela Vida (keenest editor—and advocate—a guy could hope for), Ethan Nosowsky, Alyson Sinclair, Brian McMullen, Adam Krefman, Chelsea Hogue, Chris Ying, and every last being at McSweeney’s and
The Believer
—all class acts.

Mom and Dad Cooper.

And, my hearts: Allison, Doodle, and Till Bill.

T Cooper is the author of three novels, including the bestselling
The Beaufort Diaries
and
Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes
. He also edited an anthology entitled
A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing
. Cooper’s work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Believer
, and
One Story
, among others. He lives in both New York and the South with his wife, children, and two rescue pit bulls.