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Mornings Are Slow at the Bar

I was down at the Thumb Tip Inn having a cold, wet one. I was alone and but for the bartender, had the room to myself. That makes sense at 10:30 in the morning. It didn't make sense that I would be at the Tip that early but things had stopped making sense 18 hours earlier.

"Another one?" Yvonne asked as she set out the menus and condiment racks.

I nodded. I was afraid to speak aloud. My throat had a lump in it about the size of my half-blind uncle's silk fountain load. It had been an emotional day and a half since I learned an important lesson: you can't trust anyone. In fact, don't even trust me when I tell you not to trust anyone.

Yvonne opened the fresh bottle of "Thick Bloody Mary Mix" or as it is commonly called, Ketchup. She diluted the bright red liquid with equal parts of tomato juice, lime juice, and Hi Karate Rum. I removed my slurpy straw from the drink I had been nursing and plunged it into the cold, soft refuge only a gelatinous alcoholic beverage could provide at that point.

"You look like a bee, going from flower to flower," Yvonne said as she washed her hands and tossed away my empty glass.

"How's that?" I asked.

"You look like a bee. I mean you didn't even pull the straw out of your mouth, just went from finishing the one glass and moved it to the new one. Just like a bee, that's all."

I nodded. I had not the slightest clue why she was saying what she was saying. I could have blamed it on my lack of sleep, or the rum that tasted suspiciously like an aftershave that my mother used to wear – or at least smell like when she'd come home after a late night at the office when pop was out of town. …

Mornings Are Slow at the Bar

"Another one?" Yvonne asked as she set out the menus and condiment racks.

"You look like a bee, going from flower to flower," Yvonne said as she washed her hands and tossed away my empty glass.

"How's that?" I asked.

"You look like a bee. I mean you didn't even pull the straw out of your mouth, just went from finishing the one glass and moved it to the new one. Just like a bee, that's all."

"Something bothering you, Tommy?" Yvonne asked.

I looked at her. She seemed sincere, interested, and worthy of my trust. I had no doubt that she too would burn me.

Yvonne had been working the day shift at The Tip since 1999. Not many magic bars open early enough to have a true day shift but when Mystic Hollow Magic Manufacturing announced they needed to go to three shifts a day to meet their distribution requirements, The Tip added a third shift to be there when the members of Magic Manufacturers and Novelty Workers Local 117 got off.

The years had been good to her. She looked the same as when she came to work at The Tip. That was one of the benefits of wearing clown make-up all the time. Your face never changes. I noticed, thankfully, she had finally replaced her red nose. The cold and flu season had not been kind to Yvonne or that latex bulb.

"I really don't want to talk about it," I said.

"What?" she asked.

"If I tell you 'what' then you'll be getting me to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it."

"Is it my body odor?" she asked.

I couldn't tell if she was intentionally saying crazy things to break up the silence or if she was really concerned that I could some how smell anything through her bright orange latex clown suit.

I shook my head.

"Cuz, I know it smells bad. I think the latex looks good but it makes you, I mean me, sweat something fierce."

I shook my head again, took another slurp of the Thick Virgin, and suggested that maybe she smelled something foul because the rubber nose was enclosing her nostrils in latex too.

She nodded knowingly, removed the nose and held it towards me as if she thought I would want to smell it. I demurred the offer to become violently ill. Yvonne set the nose on the bar dishwasher tray and sent it through for a steaming.

"This is better," she said.

I nodded.

I knew I had to tell someone. I couldn't just let it stay inside of me to rot out my innards and render me incapable of trusting again.

"I had a talk with Jerry Hossna last night."

Yvonne picked up the rubber nose as it came out of the dishwasher. She placed the red ball on her nose and immediately shrieked with pain as the boiling water remaining in the nose rushed into her nostrils and along her upper lip.

I didn't mean to laugh.

Yvonne gave the impression she was still listening even as she held her face under the tap to douche her nostrils. "I'm listening," she said as the curing waters rushed over her nose and into her clown wig.

"What did Jerry say?" she asked as she patted her face with a bar towel, trying to not smear the make-up. "Was this about that knock-off deal?"

I nodded. Yvonne was just one of the loyal members of our informal club at The Tip. She took the same unspoken oath as us all to uphold the highest ideals in Magic. Like the Hippocratic Oath we all agreed to first do no harm.

Jerry had broken the oath in a bad way, real bad way.

"If you don't tell me," Yvonne said, "I'll call your ex-wife and tell her where you are."

Yvonne knew I had gone through a very painful divorce – I had been married to my Siamese Twin. Separating from a conjoined lover is hard in so many ways.

"Okay," I mumbled. "You know how Jerry was telling everyone and his brother that he was getting ripped off? He said the last three tricks he brought to the market were ripped-off almost immediately by some jerk out in the Heartland?"

Yvonne nodded. "I bought only from Jerry, you know."

"No, I know. I mean, that's the point. I did too. But Jerry was always complaining about how other folks were paying cut-rate prices to the guy selling the knock-off."

"This is old news, Tommy. That shouldn't be bothering you still."

Jerry had marketed three tricks in the last year. Each was knocked-off by some web-based retailer in Iowa or some place. His Reverse Professor Cheer's Rope Trick was a great innovation. The performer came out on stage, trailing ropes from his sleeves and pant legs. His polka-dotted underwear was tied to one of the ropes coming from his pants. With a snap, the ropes all recoiled into his clothes and upon pulling down his trousers, the underwear was seen to be in place.

This trick was sold for $40.00. The Heartland, Iowa rip-off artist, Illusionaire, sold it for $19.95 under the name Rope Up Your Drawers. We heard Illusionaire was doing land office business. Where Jerry estimated he sold less than a hundred, he heard Illusionaire sold about a thousand directly through the internet, and about five thousand through its distribution channels.

I phased out of my narrative recollection and engaged Yvonne again. The latex clown suit was causing her psoriasis to kick-in. Each frantic scratch sounded like someone molesting a balloon animal.

"I bought his Dice and Slice," she said as she worked a particularly itchy spot with her nicotine stained fingernails. (I wrote the last three words of her sentence in italics because she was leaning to the right as she said them).

"Right," I said, "me too."

Dice and Slice was a great little trick. You told your audience that you had a special box that could turn any fruit or vegetable into a pair of fuzzy dice. You began by putting carrots in the box and when you opened it, they converted to orange fuzzy dice. When you put an onion in, it came out as a pair of white fuzzy dice with little plastic droplets looking like tears. Finally, you put in tomatoes but acted as if you didn't see that you had accidentally selected an apple instead of one of the tomatoes. When you opened the box, there was one die that was red and mushy and the other was hard like a tomato.

Illusionaire came out with it under the name Fruit Mix-up. Jerry sold his for $75.00 and Illusionaire sold theirs for $25.00. Jerry sold a few, but Illusionaire sold a ton.

Yvonne decided to roll up the latex sleeves that were keeping her from getting to her itchy sores. Once the sleeves were out of the way, she began scraping in earnest.

(Ironically, Scraping in Earnest was the name of my first English-Language novel. It featured the story of a woman married to a blob of jelly named Earnest. She would take him everywhere and eventually resents his inability to share their intimacy and has him tossed into a frozen lake. Years later, her new husband brings her to the Polar Bear exhibit at the zoo and she sees the blob that was her first husband, now solid and frozen, bobbing up and down in the exhibit's water. She risks her life to jump into the icy water to embrace her love and when she kisses Earnest, her lips stick to him and she is unable to escape the fatal attack by the polar bear. The New York Times said it was a breakthrough novel for me and for the genre of protoplasm interacting with selfish humans).

She continued scraping as she asked the name of the last trick Jerry offered.

I had a hard time recalling it. I knew the rip-off version, "Pizza for Pennies."

"It was something about food," Yvonne said.

"Yeah, I can't remember it either," I said.

"Anyway, Jerry was selling that for $125.00 because of all the electronics involved. It took him forever to figure out how to make the pennies assemble in a straight line automatically. The conversion to a pizza was easy, ala the Dove Pan."

I nodded. She was right. All of his research and development costs in the project required him to charge a lot. It was a great trick and worth the price. Illusionaire's price was $65.00. Once again, they sold a ton and Jerry sold very few.

"It was crusty," Yvonne said out of nowhere.

I thought she was talking about her sores.

"It was "Crusty" something or something "Crusty."

"Oh, the trick, yeah. Crusty Presidents. That's it." I felt relieved. Yvonne seemed to have found relief as well as she rolled down her sleeves.

"So what was the problem?" she asked.

"The problem," I said, "is that Jerry was in cahoots with Illusionaire. For every trick he came up with, he had them sell another version at a lower price. He got to cry foul, get publicity on the web, act like a victim and sell them through both his place and Illusionaire's site."

Yvonne was stunned. "He told you that?"

I nodded. "He was proud of it. He thought it was clever marketing."

Yvonne spit towards the sink but her aim was off. The tobacco juice landed squarely in the olive tray. I was glad I never developed the taste for martinis.

"Bastard!" she said with another spit. This one made the sink.

I said nothing.

"We supported him, bought his crappy tricks at full price to make a statement, wrote letters to the magic magazines, I even wrote that piece for Inside Magic. Remember how I called Illusionaire the "cur of the industry?"

I nodded.

"Bastard!" she said. This time, no spit.

I sipped my drink and looked down towards the olive tray. You could hardly tell they had been contaminated. Everything looked normal but I now knew different and could never look at them the same way again.