Scotch and Soda
The first time I saw Scotch and Soda performed I thought, for the
first time, that magic was something real. It seemed entirely
believable to me that a small group of skilled magicians could secret
it away through all these centuries just to show it to children and
keep the magic alive. I mean, how else, in my own hand, could a Spanish
coin change into a quarter? In my own hand!
So I fell in love with the magician. I fell in love and I believed he
knew more secrets than I could ever know. He was much older than me,
and that only added to his mystique. He wasn’t one of those cheesy,
black paper hat magicians that would pull rabbits and birds out of it.
He was the kind that you’d be walking around a park with, and he’d pick
up a blade of grass, and make it vanish in his hands, no sleeves! He
was the type that would, when you were making breakfast and you
discovered there wasn’t enough eggs, reach into your pocket and pull an
egg out for you. And it was no trick egg, because we’d eat it and it
was delicious.
So it was that I spent many nights with this man, and learned a few
tricks of my own. My normal group of friends seemed obsolete to me.
They didn’t know any tricks. When this magician would appear magically
in my life, maybe once a week or less, I’d drop everything (which was
nothing) and follow him around, transfixed. He’d pull a handkerchief
out of his empty palm (which I know now is a hollowed thumb) when I had
a runny nose after deep-throating. That was my best trick at the time.
And I blew it.
After a couple of months I fancied myself a magician. I could impress a
bored group of people at my work with a dazzling feat of
slight-of-hand. there was only one thing I couldn’t figure out. Scotch
and Soda. I demanded he tell me how it’s done. If you’ve ever known a
magician, demanding to know a tricks secrets only make it that much
more revered to him. He would just trick me with it, over and over, to
see if I got it. I never did.
He would show me two coins, both relatively the same diameter, then he
would make some quip about how my mind is so powerful it could crush
this Spanish coin, if I thought hard enough about it. And he’d put the
coin in my hand, close my hand around and tell my to feel it shrinking.
I felt it shrink, but after a while, I stopped playing along. I didn’t
concentrate, or try to summon up all of my benign psychic energy. I
just opened my palm, and there was a quarter.
Some trick.
Before I could figure it out he disappeared for good. I waited, week
after week and month after month to see him walk from some behind some
tree skinnier than him. I looked in all the chests at all the magic
stores. After a while I learned Scotch and Soda, for 50$ to a sly old
rat that owned a store on the poor side of town. It was too easy. A
hollowed coin. A hollowed thumb. And now I was empty of all my belief,
all my curiosity. I could pull anything I wanted out of me.
I played my tricks on an unsuspecting public. I had many a boy follow
me around, trying to learn them, and I would never tell them. Believe
it while you can, and then I would pull the best trick I learned from
him and disappear. Easy trick.
Five years would pass this way, and I found myself drunk at an old bar
on that poor side of town, betting another drunk that I could make
foreign currency convert into local currency while it was in his hand.
I got a lot of free drinks this way.
“What is the trick called?” the bartender asked, overhearing my tirade.
Then a man at the end of the bar called over, “Scotch and Soda.” That’s
how he reappeared into my life, hiding all this time behind the years.
Weaving through memories. I left the drunkard curious and walked over
to him, hugged him and hoped against hope that he wouldn’t vanish into
smoke, and leave me hugging his black overcoat.
“So you’ve figured it out finally?”
“Yeah, and I’ve learned some new tricks.” So we spent the night
impressing each other. I pulled myself out of him and he appeared from
the bathroom moments later, ready for his new trick, shrinking while
inside of me. Magic. I couldn’t ask him where he’d been, who he’d be
impressing for all these years, because if you know magicians,
demanding an answer will only get you tricked.
He said he would appear in my life again, and I said I’d love that. We
each had something the other would like to know. But this time, I
thought, I would be the one to vanish before my secrets were told.
Down at the same bar, we would meet. I ordered two Scotch and Sodas,
and right before his eyes, vanished into the first one. I re-appeared
some time later, crying on a street corner and trying to make myself
believe I pulled it of
--J.C.
