Busking - 8-21-08

I spent spring 1976 on a coast to coast busking tour with my friend Johnny Fox. Busking is thought of as a fancy word for street performing, but by definition, it also includes indoor hat passing. We traveled in Fox’s vintage auto, which was in constant need of repair. Today Johnny drives fine late model vehicles, but he is still working the street… in a protected environment. He is a successful sword swallower on Ye Olde Renaissance Faire circuit. In 1976 he wasn’t hanging with craft vendors, wearing Friar Tuck costumes, speaking like Shakespeare, or swallowing swords.

Fox was, however, a talented sleight-of-hander specializing in coin tricks, who liked performing outdoors in the daytime. I specialized in sleight-of-hand with playing cards and preferred performing indoors in the evening. When Johnny was performing on busy street corners… I was available to keep a lookout for the cops, or the juggler who seemed to think the corner belonged to him. At night, when I performed in bars, Fox was available to drink cocktails.

San Antonio, Austin, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta, Key West, these were cities where we found success. But we worked everywhere in between. We did our magic commando style… which meant we kinda assaulted people with our tricks, or at least I did. I walked into a crowded bar, often connected to a restaurant with a long dinner wait, or a tavern full of construction workers, or a disco… went right up to a table, or the bar, interrupted conversation with a fan of cards, “reach in and grab one.”

f someone grabbed a card I was on my way… “show everyone your card, I won’t look, I’ve seen the trick before...” The selected card disappeared, floated, changed to another card or… at the time I was a walking encyclopedia of card tricks. Sometimes they just kept the card, or tore it up, but I wasn’t deterred, I just went somewhere else.

Commando style… no introduction, no permission, just right into the routine. If I was able to complete that first trick and got a decent response, I continued for five or ten minutes... then held out my hat and said, “help me get a room tonight.” A few bucks richer and onto the next table. Of course, as I’ve said, there were those… that did not respond well to this approach. Some nights it took four or five bars to find a lucrative spot. Other evenings I was successful going back and forth between two establishments all night. The manager or bartender kicked me out at times… It didn’t matter, we never spent more than a day or two in any town.

In those days, most people were extraordinarily generous. Almost everywhere we stopped to do a show someone offered us a place to stay, food, drinks, money... they knew we didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t because they thought we were poor that they were so kind… it was because they enjoyed our tricks, liked talking to free spirits, and above all, because they wanted to offer tokens of friendship to traveling strangers. Here’s one of a million examples… a manager in Atlanta came up to the table, watched my tricks, “don’t show your face around here again,” and kicked me out. The six people I was amusing left with us and took Johnny and I out to dinner.

The flip side of the coin… I had to talk loud to be heard over the disco beat, but the guys and gals in Nashville seemed to be enjoying my show. I held out my hat and … suddenly lit cigarette butts were flicked at me from an adjacent table. Orange embers everywhere… my hat smoldered as the big fellows next door were laughing at their handiwork.

The boys I’d entertained didn’t take kindly to this. To make a long story short, words were traded, the situation escalated to a fist fight… the club’s bouncers got involved, followed by a full scale riot. Lostsa guys threw punches, threw furniture, broken glass. Fox and I were able to slide out unscathed, just as the police arrived. We never found out if this was really a dispute between rival gangs or just a bunch of guys who worked at the serious business of committing felonies. I’ve seen some bad card tricks in my time… but I can definitely say that, in the last thirty years, I’ve never seen or heard of any card tricks that have provoked that kinda reaction.

At a Phoenix coffee shop we spotted Fernando, he ripped a page from his sketch pad and walked the paper over to a table where an elderly woman was seated. Hardly a word passed between the two, the woman took the paper, smiled, and handed him five dollars. Fernando returned to his table and started drawing in his sketch pad… five minutes later, he walked up to Fox and handed him a piece of paper, on it was a perfectly rendered pencil sketch of Fox. Our Latin brother was one of us… a clever busker, he didn’t spend a lot of energy gathering a crowd, doing a show, and passing the hat. He leisurely drew pictures and let his talent do the talking. Fernando was a Mexican citizen who felt his talent also made him a US citizen. America felt differently.

We hit it off with Fernando and he joined our tour, temporarily. Between Arizona and Texas we were stopped at an immigration check point. Officers asked for our identification, Fox and I complied, Fernando did not. They detained him and informed us he would soon be deported. We were fingerprinted, photographed, and accused of smuggling an illegal alien, a felony… ignorance of the law and ignorance of Fernando’s legal status on American soil was no defense. Defenseless, but innocent, they let us off with a warning. “If we catch you harboring a fugitive again, we’ll toss you in jail and throw away the key.”It took a while for Fox to locate a good spot in San Antonio. He started working his magic at the edge of a park, at the bottom of a hill, near a busy intersection. Today, when Johnny does his sword swallowing act he can entertain hundreds at a time. In 1976, Fox was a coin man who was a master at entertaining an up close group of ten people. While Johnny was in the park making silver dollars appear and disappear at his finger tips,

I was scouting out The Riverwalk, looking for bars to return to that evening. Bars where people might appreciate sophisticated properly performed card tricks. I picked my spots, and went to meet up with Fox. As I walked down the hill toward the park, I saw a huge crowd, maybe a hundred people. As I got closer, I saw Fox making four silver dollars appear, then, one at a time, the coins became invisible. I couldn’t believe the size of the crowd he’d drawn. Johnny had finally done it, the hat was gonna be huge on this one.

As I got even closer, I saw that about ten people were engaged in Fox’s routine. The other ninety people were looking behind Fox, across the street, at the man standing on the roof of a ten story building. It looked like he was gonna jump. Was he really gonna do it? Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, and it was dead quiet, as we watched the figure high above, dive, head first, straight down. Spectators blocked my view of the landing… but I can tell you the accelerated speed of his departure from the roof to his meeting with the surface of the sidewalk… produced a loud, sickening thud. I half heard it, half felt the impact come through the earth… and I was across the street… a haunting memory. The jumper drew a huge crowd, but he didn’t pass the hat.

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