8 million stories: He's a Magic Man

LAST WEEK, MANY people were fraught with grief and disillusionment when they learned that real fake non-magic—the magic of real things happening in a fake-seeming way (read on to understand more)—sometimes fails to be real.The magician David Blaine was supposed to hang upside-down over Central Park for 60 consecutive hours. Instead, he took several standing-up breaks so he could drink water, urinate and swallow back down his own heart.This disappointed everyone, but my faith in Blaine was especially shaken. I’d become inspired by him, by his grandiose language and his dazed peacefulness. Indeed, during my meeting with him in late September, we had bonded.

On that day, I found myself sitting on a face-up deck of cards, which I’d thoroughly shuffled, as Blaine guessed the color of each card I pulled from the top of the deck. He claimed he could see through the table, as well as my lap. Red, he said, then black, then black again. He was correct 23 times in a row.At that point, I felt there was something I had to do. Blaine had already blown my mind with other card tricks. He transmuted a card, as I held it between my fingers, from a six of hearts to a four of spades. Before that, he showed me a video of himself taking a blow to the belly from street-fighting terror Kimbo Slice, and then grinning at him unfazed. He detailed his plans to undertake what was essentially selftorture and extend it for 60 hours straight. He was so sure of his power, of my amazement, of the color of the next card that I’d turn up. “Red,” he said, and I pulled a black queen from the bottom of the deck. Both his dark eyebrows slanted to the left as he studied the card. “Well,” he muttered, without breaking his calm, “that one has a lot of red in it.” I’d been sent to interview Blaine about “Dive of Death,” and the overwhelming impression I’d gotten so far was of serenity. I asked his publicist if he was always so slow, steady and measured, or if it was just because he’d been fasting for a week to prepare for his hanging. He sounds almost drowsy, I said. “It’s not the fast,” I was told. “He’s always that way. He’s really into yoga and things like that.” He also comes off kind of weird.

Perhaps that’s because I expected a superstar, when meeting with a young reporter on his first assignment in the city, to be aloof, glossy or at best cheerfully condescending. Blaine was none of these things, not by a long shot. His Zenlike curiosity was engaged equally by his own grand schemes as by the contents of my pockets.

When I first arrived at Blaine’s office—my instructions were to turn down an alley in Chinatown, walk 100 yards and then wait outside the black gate—the swarthy magician was in a glass-walled chamber with his inversion mechanism.

He took off his upside-down boots and handed them to me, asked me to empty my pockets so I could hang from his contraption.

As I did so, he collected and examined my provisions.“That’s really funny that you have dirty tissues in your pockets,” he said. I hooked up and let my head drop. I immediately felt a painful tingling, a pressure on my eyeballs and a clogging of my sinuses.

My face felt like it was plugging a dam. Blaine took a couple pictures with me, and then I got down, sweating like warm wax. Upstairs, in a room lined with historical posters of great illusionists, I asked Blaine to elaborate on something he’d been quoted saying. “I don’t want magic that looks real,” he told a New Yorker writer in the spring. “I want real things that feel like magic.” How does this latest stunt feel like magic? I asked.

“Didn’t it feel magical when you were dangling?” he prompted. “I don’t know if that’s the adjective I’d use.” “Well it will when you get up to 40 hours,” he said.“It’s magical when you can control your body in ways that you never thought you could.”

I asked him how he was going to deal with the pain, with the physical and psychological panic that surely began to creep during a stunt like this. Did he use meditation, astral projection? The answer was far simpler. As with any of his previous projects—burying himself alive, for example—Blaine planned to pass the entire time by counting. He did some calculations on his iPhone and determined that the 60 hours of “Dive of Death” would amount to 216,000 counting seconds or 3,600 minutes.

Subtract, of course, about 600 minutes for the water breaks that he didn’t mention at all. “Three-hundred-sixty is a good number as well,” Blaine said dreamily. “Three-sixty is degrees, so that’s a good number.”

On his regular runs around the Central Park loop, Blaine told me, he counts 4,400 right-foot touches to complete the circuit. But that’s a jog. Just staying awake for 60 hours (sleep could mean death during this stunt) would be psychological torment. I reminded Blaine that he’d said this would be his most difficult stunt so far. “What you just went through, I felt that for five hours, and I know it’s going to be a nightmare,” he said. “A poetic nightmare.”

“Why poetic?” I asked. “‘Cos it’ll be fun.” As I ran out of questions, Blaine started asking about my origins, trying to open a conversation about the financial crisis. I was confused because his assistant had told me he’d only have 15 or 20 minutes.Then he started with the card tricks, and he went on for 25 minutes after we’d finished talking. His publicist was making subtle suggestions that we should wrap things up. “Are you an avid reader?” Blaine asked me suddenly. He got up and opened a door to a very dark, very narrow storage area. I followed him in; there was no light. Gingerly but efficiently, he opened one box among many identical boxes, and I saw that it was packed with books, hundreds of copies of the same book. “I own a thousand copies of all my favorite books,” he said, “so I can give them out to people.”

The book he gave me was a collection of stories by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. He also had a thousand copies of A Confederacy of Dunces and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s hard to tell whether David Blaine is universally chummy and kind, has become a pro at buttering up journalists or had taken a genuine liking to me. (“You look like those two kids from Superbad,” he said.) Besides the book, he gave me a deck of cards and the first signed poster for “Dive of Death.” He showed me the Kimbo Slice video on his phone. It wasn’t on the Internet yet—his assistant hadn’t even seen it. In it, he pulls up his shirt and stands still so Kimbo Slice can punch him in the stomach. He reels for a few steps, then regains face and shakes the fighter’s hand. Kimbo looks at the camera with disbelief in his face. “How did you train for that?” I asked.

“Non-stop crunches and sit-ups?” He scoffed. “Naw, man, that’s not how you train for gettin’ punched. I had people punching me full throttle, and then I had people throwing 35-pound balls on my stomach as hard as they could, like whippin’ ’em.” Between this and the card tricks, I found his efforts to impress strangely flattering.

The fun was coming to an end, though, and Blaine was informed that he needed to be at the airport soon. As I said good-bye, his people were surrounding him. It seemed he was running late—or at least facing a tight deadline. But he didn’t seem to care.