Page 44 - Unlikely Stories 4

The Magic Clown

She nodded, relieved at the absence of reticence and any vestiges of
jealously-guarded secrecy. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Riga—may I call
you Tony?”
“Sure, why not? I’m like every other guy in late middle age: hate to
be called ‘Mister’ by young people in some situations, hate to be
addressed informally by them in others. But we have been
introduced—by whom I can’t recall—so ‘Tony’ it is. Your name again,
please.”
“Ann.”
“Got it. Now, you want to know the story of The Magic Clown. I
am prepared to tell you the whole thing.”
She smiled, hoping his acquiescence owed something to her powers
of persuasion in a series of letters and phone calls. Undocumented
retired stage magicians with any level of renown were few and far
between. Now You See It had contacted Tony Riga several times over
the past few years, and he had refused to talk to anyone until her
recent entreaties. But her self-congratulation was short-lived.
“You see,” he said, scratching at the stubble on his cheek, “I’ve
been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Pretty soon I
won’t be able to tell anybody anything about myself. More to the
point, it means I won’t give a damn about any reaction to what I shall
tell you—things I have never revealed to a living soul.”
Ann sat back, stunned not by his theatrics, which she had
encountered often with his contemporaries, but the realization that
her subject was leaving a testament in her hands. The man sitting
across from her was in his late sixties, an age many performers in his
field just began to consider retirement. She opened her pad to the
notes she had made about Tony Riga’s career.
“Then let us begin. We have your date and place of birth. How did
you get involved with magic in the first place?”
“I was in my early twenties, a college dropout, getting by on part-
time jobs. In those days you could just about survive that way. I had
no ambition, what they call a ‘slacker’ now. It is difficult to reconstruct
my ego—what did I think my future would be, how did I justify my
miserable existence to myself. When you’re just coasting, you make up
all sorts of excuses. My point is that I had no particular desire to be a
magician or anything else.”

43