CHAPTER ONE: A SLEIGHT CHANGE OF PLANS

I always wanted to be a magician, but my father, a tax lawyer, never
considered magic a "viable career path." My mother, on the other hand,
always told me I could do whatever I wanted with my life, but as I
grew older, I realized that she and my father were playing Good
Cop/Bad Cop and that when she said that I could do whatever I wanted
with my life, she meant I could practice whatever kind of law I
wanted.

My uncle is a lawyer and so are my Michigan cousins, my Chicago
cousins, and my New York cousins. If I had any siblings, they'd be
lawyers too. My father's father, though, was not a lawyer. He
slaughtered cows for a living. Now, I could easily write half-a-dozen
lawyer jokes comparing slaughterhouses and courtrooms, but I'm not
going to do that because I refuse to disrespect the meatpacking
industry.

All my friends and ex-girlfriends are lawyers, law students, or
soon-to-be law students currently denying their inevitable legal
futures. The only exceptions to this rule are 1) my childhood buddy
Steve, who works as his dad's law clerk, and 2) my neighbor Stacy, a
paralegal. I come from an affluent suburb of Detroit where the only
excuse for not practicing law is practicing medicine. But even
medicine, many of my dad's partners feel, is a pretty thin excuse.

My father and his partners saw my interest in magic the way an
evangelical Christian father might view his son's homosexuality. As a
phase.

"He'll grow out of it," they told my dad.

I imagine one of them took my dad aside and said, "I've never told
this to anyone before, but when I was Rick's age, I went through a
magic phase too. My bunkmate showed me my first card trick at summer
camp when I was fourteen…"

In middle school, my dad bought me 8.5" x 14" yellow legal pads on
which to take notes, the way the evangelical father buys his gay son a
baseball glove. But just as the gay son uses the baseball glove as a
prop in his school's Damn Yankees production, I used the legal pads to
sketch blueprints for grand stage illusions. Every time my birthday
rolled around, I asked for marked cards and gimmicked coins and
linking rings—and received dress shirts, neckties, and dictation
recorders. So, I sewed secret pockets into the dress shirts, used the
neckties for escape demonstrations, and recorded psychic predictions
on the dictation recorders (e.g., "Your card was the three of clubs.")

I didn't just perform escapes and psychic demonstrations; I performed
billiard ball manipulations, rope tricks, and dove illusions. My
specialty, however, was performing elaborate, multi-phase card tricks
that most professionals wouldn't dare take on, like those of British
magician Guy Hollingworth. Hollingworth created one of my favorite
card tricks, Restoration, in which a signed playing card is torn into
four and then restored, piece by piece. It sounds simple, but it
isn't; the trick's explanation goes on for thirty-six pages and
contains instructions like this:

"The front edge of the left hand's card should be in contact with the
front of the right's, so that when the cards are directly aligned with
each other, that front edge can slide in between the right fingers and
the other cards, so that the right hand holds it in place; meanwhile
the left thumb is still holding the other side of the folded V-shaped
card, and immediately moves upwards, unfolding the card; at the same
time the left fingers move to the side, so that the card is seen as it
is being opened."

As a teenager, I fantasized about creating illusions so elaborate
they'd make Guy Hollingworth's Restoration look like Dan Harlan's Card
Toon (If you were a magician, you'd be laughing really hard right
now), so you can imagine how betrayed I felt when, at the age of
twenty-four, Hollingworth left the field of magic to study law.

Hollingworth's career change got me thinking: maybe practicing law
isn't all that different from performing magic. The most powerful
weapon in both a lawyer's and a magician's arsenal is misdirection;
just as Slydini misdirected an audience's attention away from the
billiard ball's true location (Slydini's right hand) by looking at his
left hand, Johnnie Cochran misdirected jurors' attention away from the
DNA evidence by focusing on a pair of ill-fitting Isotoners.

The main difference between magicians and lawyers is that lawyers have
no use for sleight of hand. This difference is as personally
disappointing as it is obvious—for every hour my dad spent pacing
around the kitchen, saying things like "bargained-for consideration"
and "promissory estoppel" into his dictation recorder, I'd spent three
in front of the bathroom mirror practicing rope sleights.

"Judges," my father told me, "aren't impressed by lawyers who can tie
four varieties of slipknots; the only knots judges like are the ones
that go around lawyers' necks."
My father wasn't referring to a noose—my father doesn't make lawyer
jokes—he was referring to neckties, and the reason he was referring to
neckties is that I couldn't tie one. I'd always figured that if I
never learned how to tie a necktie, nobody could rationally expect me
to hold down a desk job. Unfortunately, I overestimated society's
rationality, because everybody expected me to hold down a desk job.
Specifically, society expected me to become a lawyer—this much was
made clear to me while sitting shivah for my grandfather:

"Have you thought about law school? I bet that'd make your dad real happy."

You think?

"I'd love to take you out for lunch so we could talk about law
school—your dad told me you're thinking of going."

He did? I am?

"I heard your big news!"

I didn't.

"Law school!"

Law school?

"What a smart decision."

Uh…thanks…

"Your grandfather would be so proud. I didn't want to tell you this
until you made a final decision, but your grandfather always wanted
you to become a lawyer like your father."

No pressure or anything.

Before my grandfather's funeral, my father sat me down at the kitchen
table and said, "It's time for you to learn how to tie a tie." My
father had offered to teach me how to tie a tie before every wedding,
Bar Mitzvah, and funeral, and I'd always declined—that was the ritual.

Only this time, my father wasn't joking around. "It's time for you to
learn. Really."

Maybe my grandfather's death had gotten him thinking
about how he wouldn't always be around to teach me how to do it. But
when I declined again, my father did the same thing he had done my
entire life: he tied my tie on himself, slipped it off his neck, and
placed it around mine.