Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [109]
His interest in magic, he told me, stemmed from a time when he was nine years old and had seen a magician perform a few feats at a Portland school assembly—standard stuff, like pulling rabbits from a hat, producing doves from a silk handkerchief, drawing half-dollar coins from an unsuspecting schoolboy’s mouth. Frank Jr. went back home and told our parents what he had seen. It was all he talked about for a week or two. When Frank Sr. saw that his son was interested in magic, he told him he knew a thing or two about the craft himself. Said he had been around it a lot during his circus career and in the years with Fay, and had learned how to perform many of the stock tricks when he worked as a clown with Barnum & Bailey. My father offered to introduce Frank to some local magicians and to supply him with some texts about the secrets of magic.
Frank Jr. started learning a few tricks, and he would take them to my father and practice them for him. My brother had a trick where he would break an egg in a pan and then make a little chick appear. My father showed him ways to improve on the effect. “I never showed Dad a trick that fooled him,” Frank Jr. told me. “He never watched one on television that he couldn’t tell me how it was done. I don’t care if they were sawing a lady in half, making her float, making somebody disappear, he would tell me how it was done. Dad knew all about it. He was way ahead of me.”
When he was about fourteen, Frank Jr. was preparing for a show at the Portland Magicians’ Society. “It was my initiation show,” Frank said, “and I was real nervous about it.” Frank proceeded to rehearse his routine in front of our family, but at one point, when he faltered a little in a particular trick, my father stepped in and finished the effect for him, showing him how a polished magician would present it. Frank Jr. was astonished at how good Frank Sr. was. “He was totally confident and smooth,” he said. “In fact, I had never seen anything at the Magic Society to match it. He was good, Mikal, very good. But he also embarrassed me that day. He said, ‘What you have, Frank, is a love for magic. You don’t really have the talent.’ He told me that. It’s pretty obvious he was right. I do have a love for it. I did a lot of it at one time. I actually did it for months and months. But I was never as good as I wanted to be. Certainly not. I was never as good as Dad, to be honest with you.”
I was discussing this episode with a friend one day—a woman whose heart and mind have taught me much—and she commented: “What a dirty, rotten trick. To intimidate a fourteen-year-old kid like that, and to make him feel shitty about the one positive thing in his life.” She was right, of course. My father’s criticisms of Frank’s vulnerable pride effectively ended my brother’s magic career, just as he was starting it. He went on to give his show at the Magicians’ Society, and it went well. But in his heart, Frank Jr. believed he could never match his father’s talents in this area. My friend said: “It’s as if your father took any accomplishment on his sons’ parts as a diminishment of himself. In fact, he made damn sure that they didn’t dare do anything he could do. I feel so sorry for fourteen-year-old Frank. And he just accepts this as fact—‘I’m not as talented as my father.’ Poor guy. He was just a kid.”
FRANK NEVER HAD THE appetite for trouble that Gary developed, though when the two of them were young they shared a flair for mischief. Kid stuff, like squirting strangers with squirt guns, tossing eggs and water balloons at passing cars, getting in slug-outs with neighborhood kids.
One night recently, Frank and I were having dinner at a wonderful low-end Chinese restaurant in Portland, memorably named Hung Far Low—a place we had been eating in since we were kids with our family. Over a bowl of soupy Chinese noodles, I asked Frank if he had ever been tempted to try his hand at criminal acts, as Gary had. Frank laughed hard enough