01.04.13

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, "a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole," was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn't have much to work with.

"Come on," Jillette said. "Steal something from me."

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

"Fuck. You," he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette's pen.

(adam green, "a pickpocket's tale," new yorker 01.07.13)

i returned to a vintage place down on lafayette yesterday afternoon to reacquaint myself with a regally evil black coat i discovered there a week ago. "you're back for the dolce," they noted. i guess i'd gone on at length about how it made me want to lurk in alleys and pick pockets.

12.21.11



my traditional what-eccentric-thing-would-you-do-if-you-were-ludicrously-wealthy-and-had-already-saved-all-of-the-suffering-animals-and-people? response is that i would bronze my underwear, but i hadn't really thought it through very carefully. i don't like looking at underwear all that much, for one thing, and i think i was assuming that i'd be able to wear the underwear once it was bronzed, which just doesn't make sense. what i would actually do if i had a substantial sum of money that i felt comfortable spending in an utterly self-indulgent way is this: i would rent a u-haul, wait until the end of the night on christmas eve, drive out to the neighborhood tree lots, and buy all of their orphans. i would take them home and make a forest in my apartment, tree after tree after tree. i'd bring out some blankets and a lantern, curl up on the floor and tuck into a book, and pretend i'd created a new dimension.

we have only one tree; fortunately it's not an especially tall one, for i don't have a u-haul, it couldn't be delivered, and i had to carry it a mile in the rain. i festooned it with skulls (rounded up from where i'd hidden them around the apartment in october; one was in joe's shoe, i found another in our refrigerator's cheese drawer, and a third was behind the shampoo in our shower), feathers (recycled from the office) and, okay, a few bats (rolled up and coaxed into a few of the extra glass ornaments). welcome home, tree.