Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
“I don’t know what he hopes to attain out of all of this,” Mom said as we arrived at the pier. “He’s impossible to figure out. Worse than the wind. Always coming and going, coming and going. You’d think it’d kill him to spend one Saturday night at home with his family.”
The Santa Monica air was pinched with an overwhelming stench of fried dough. Shimmering carnival games blared at the boardwalk’s heart — frenetic bells and whistles, plastic rings clinking off glass, the pop pop pop of balloons.
Weaving through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, we found Dad in the middle of it all, dressed in a suede suit the color of blood, calling out to unsuspecting passersby in an embarrassingly hammy accent, “Over here, gather ‘round.” He waved his arms in giant scoops. We called out to him as people began falling into his orbit, but he ignored us, like usual.
Mom caressed the sharp point of my shoulder and handed me a cinnamon churro. “Come on, Jess. Let him be a clown.” She began to walk away, but my feet stayed in place, heavy, as if they were stuck in a pool of tar.
“You go,” I said. “I’ll find you.”
The magic came in rapid succession. A drinking straw punched through a beer cap. Two playing cards smashed and fused together like a pair of neutron stars forming a single ace of spades. Banal tricks. The kind anyone can do with a couple of hours and a few YouTube tutorials. But the crowd was impressed, gaping at every reveal, completely spellbound by Dad’s dexterity and showmanship. I rolled my eyes as he swiftly plucked a golden ember out from behind a woman’s ear. Fake fingertips, I wanted to scream.
It was the first time I had ever been to one of his shows, and what struck me was how comfortable and natural he seemed engaging with the crowd. Where was the shy Dad I grew up with? The introverted ex-accountant who spent more hours alone in the garage — his sanctuary, his Shaolin Temple — than in the living room with his daughter. Who was this assertive, charismatic doppelganger that had seemingly taken his place?
I only went because he begged me. For months he’d gone on and on about a new trick. I only went so that he’d finally shut up about it.
“You’ll remember this trick for years,” he’d said upon breaking the news to me, his tone buzzed with delight. “I’m talking eyes-popping-out-of-your-sockets, Blue Velvet-levels of crazy.”
And I simply nodded at his obliviousness and pretended that I cared.
A couple of years ago, he began acting strange. Every weekend he’d disappear after dinner, oftentimes returning past midnight cloaked in a distinct aroma of cinder and gasoline. If I was still awake, he’d check in on me. “What’s up, buttercup?” Every time. Buttercup, buttercup. Staring at me with these ravenous, junkie eyes. I wonder if he knew that buttercups were poisonous garden weeds.
One night — around this time last year, the exact date escapes me, though, I remember a plundered charcuterie board resting precariously at the edge of one of our bunching tables, so we must have been hosting some type of get-together — I glared at him awkwardly from the couch, fed up with his disappearing acts. Venom at the tip of my tongue. A new episode of Nightline had just started, signaling to me that it was past twelve.
“Where do you go?” I asked.
I’d hoped that my catty fuck-you tone would elicit some kind of emotional response from him, but instead he’d looked at me, mouth agape, with this enduring gaze, one that I’ll never forget — melancholic and helpless, but, at the same time, accepting. As if I had told him that the universe was ending at a quarter till.
“Nowhere,” he eventually said before tacking on one of his regurgitated excuses: “Just sitting outside and watching the stars. Letting the night pass.”
His birthday. We’d been celebrating his birthday.
#
I confronted him in the kitchen the night after he’d quit his job at the accounting firm. This was six months ago. He’d stumbled in from the garage, bleary-eyed, his jacket heavy with the scent of Newport 100s.
“You were doing your little magic show again weren’t you?”
He’d been practicing his act in the garage and down at the pier intermittently for two years. He’d admitted this to us in one tearful confession a few weeks before quitting the firm. The look of guilt on his face after he’d apologized for his absenteeism. I’d almost felt sorry for him.
“What?” I noticed the spike in intonation. “You know I stopped that, Jess. It’s done. Over. Canceled. Finito.”
The most remarkable aspect of these conversations was how unconvincing he was. Father, a street magician, whose credibility hinged on whether or not he could make a childish parlor trick seem believable, could never produce a clean lie. Always attached was a thin smirk, a shift in intonation, some nervous tic — two nose swipes here, or an abrupt shoulder shrug there — that ultimately revealed his true essence. He was a charlatan, an amateur. A once admirable man turned disappointment.
“You know Mom can’t afford to pay for the house by herself, right?” Never mind my college, I thought. “She needs you.”
“Look, I have a plan of attack. I already have a couple of real, paying gigs booked. I promise you that it’ll be—”
“You’re a child! Can you please come back to earth? What happened to finding a real job?”
“Jess.”
“I hope you snap out of this phase. Maybe one day you’ll realize what you’ve done to us.”
Dad’s eyes fell to the floor.
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “What is it with this magic obsession?”
At this, Dad gave me a resigned look and, with a great deal of exhaustion, said, “I do it to feel like one of the seagulls.”
I squinted at him, not expecting this answer.
“I wish you knew,” I said, after my beat of confusion.
“Knew what?”
“What it’s like to feel abandoned.”
“Buttercup.” That gaze I’ll never forget. “I don’t think you know me at all.”
#
The saltwater hiss of the ocean whipped me back to reality.
Dad was stalking the inner ring of onlookers in slow motion, like a jaguar surveying its prey. Silent, focused.
I took him in from a narrow window of pudgy arms and a cloud of B.O. As he tracked towards me, his expression was stiff, desolate, his movement unnaturally smooth, as if he was suspended in some metaphysical expanse, unhindered by the friction of the boardwalk. We made eye contact, and it was as if I was just another face in the crowd: a cagey California blonde, a Parisian bon vivant, a stoned high schooler in search of a good time — anybody but his daughter.
Dad produced a white Bic lighter and what looked like a purple gumball from his shirt pocket.
“For my final trick, I have here your standard, ordinary smoke bomb,” he said, rolling the firework between his thumb and forefinger. “What you’re about to see, I have never attempted before.”
He sparked the bomb and let it fall to his feet, where it fizzled briefly before spitting out a cloud of vibrant eggplant-hued smoke.
“Listen,” Dad had said to me prior to leaving for the pier that night, “I just want to make people happy. That’s all. I want them to know that they’re alive — that they exist. Whether they’re a pretty girl or an ugly old man like me.”
Mom had been taking a nap.
“Is that who you do it for?” I asked. “The pretty girls?”
He’d cringed and swatted at the air like my question was some annoying housefly. “What is it with you? Why do you always twist my words?” And as he sulked to the garage one final time. “I find it tragic, Jess. How much you’ve changed.”
I choked on a lungful of smoke and clenched my eyes shut and I only opened them again when a squeaky-voiced woman cried out.
Dad was levitating, his head hovering just above the purple cloud like a disembodied ghost, bits of grey shining in his hair like streaks of moonlight cut against the night sky.
My mouth hung slack, eyes stinging and watery from the smoke, as I processed the trick.
Those that hadn’t been filming reached for their cell phones. A group of high school boys next to me began spouting theories: “Stilts.” “He’s standing on a platform.” “No, obviously he’s wearing some sort of harness, you planks.”
The bloom of applause. To my surprise — it was practically a reflex — I joined in.
The last time my father looked at me, he was still in the air. He pulled another smoke bomb from his pocket — this one a Hulk gamma green — and ignited it. He waited patiently for the cloud to build and replace the fading purple.
I half-expected a wink, a snicker, a gesture to remain quiet, but all I got was that familiar gaze and him mouthing something inaudible, something inexplicable: Buttercup, I think he said, watch me fly. And I’m certain that was the moment he erased me from his memory.
The smoke reached its apex. I rubbed my eyes clean, wanting to look away, but as I went to turn my head, Dad toppled like a Jenga stack. When the smoke cleared, he was nowhere to be seen.
The emphatic cheers from the crowd quickly mutated into an anxious rumpus.
“Dad?” I said, but it was impossible to hear over the clamor.
I fought my way to the edge of the boardwalk and stuck my head over the guard rail, staring out at the intimidating water and craning my neck to see as far beneath the dock as I could. But there was only a smattering of beachgoers and, farther down, scattered along the shore like little white banshees, a massive flock of seagulls. I watched them for a moment as they hobbled around doing nothing in particular before they lifted off and, raging against the strong Pacific winds, careened toward the grim horizon in search of a better meal.
They never found him.
Maybe, as the disbelieving Santa Monica police officer had put it, failing to stifle his laughter, he ran off and joined the circus. I ignored him. Though it wasn’t an implausible theory. Dad certainly ran; he wasn’t dead. The most likely scenario: he was holed up in a crummy studio apartment somewhere outside of the city — Ojai, Palmdale, maybe Escondido — practicing the same old magic tricks, fantasizing about a big run up to Vegas, acquiring a talent agent and booking a spot on Kimmel or Fallon. Mom was still working out the divorce proceedings. Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, I hope that he fails.
And yet, there is another scenario. One that the kinder, more altruistic side of me hopes to be true. Where Dad abandoned the magic act altogether. Where he found some new calling and eloped with a woman more beautiful than my mother. Where Dad and his newfound bride hightailed it out of Southern California, out of the country, to a remote Mexican beach like Andy at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. Where they purchased a breathtaking coastal villa with wraparound windows and a palatial terrace overlooking the Gulf. Where eventually they had a daughter together who would grow up to respect him for having the courage to pursue the life he’d so longed for. Where his final trick had led him to a satisfying reality. And I remember walking out of the police station, and my stomach beginning to settle, and the taste of cinnamon still lingering on my tongue, and contemplating how impossible this all felt.
Chris Jennings is an editor and fiction writer based out of Los Angeles. He received his B.A. in English from Illinois State University. You can find him on Twitter @cjenngs.