JUST LIKE MAGIC
One
One a.m. was “Out of the Grave”—Lloyd’s standard. He turned plastic cans into a pile of chirping, miniature zombies. He watched them crawl toward the audience’s shoes hissing the word “brains” and marveled at God’s lack of creative flair.
Two
The Tassle Club show kicked in at half-past two. He pulled the rabbit out of someone’s hat only to find it dead. “Pussy!” he shouted in annoyance. The crowd laughed, burped, fumbled with their zippers. A woman fainted and left a dull thud in the room.
Three
As if things couldn’t get any worse, playing cards came pouring out of his extra large wireless breasts unexpectedly. The trained showman in him turned it into something which seemed entirely planned.
By three a.m., people were easily pleased. “Zombies and fake breasts. What else could a guy want?” thought Lloyd, Star Magician and sometimes One-Man Escort Service, trying to convince himself that he had never applied for a sex change operation. He was happiness incarnate—with large magic breasts, that was true.
Four
One
One a.m. was “Out of the Grave”—Lloyd’s standard. He turned plastic cans into a pile of chirping, miniature zombies. He watched them crawl toward the audience’s shoes hissing the word “brains” and marveled at God’s lack of creative flair.
Two
The Tassle Club show kicked in at half-past two. He pulled the rabbit out of someone’s hat only to find it dead. “Pussy!” he shouted in annoyance. The crowd laughed, burped, fumbled with their zippers. A woman fainted and left a dull thud in the room.
Three
As if things couldn’t get any worse, playing cards came pouring out of his extra large wireless breasts unexpectedly. The trained showman in him turned it into something which seemed entirely planned.
By three a.m., people were easily pleased. “Zombies and fake breasts. What else could a guy want?” thought Lloyd, Star Magician and sometimes One-Man Escort Service, trying to convince himself that he had never applied for a sex change operation. He was happiness incarnate—with large magic breasts, that was true.
Four
His assistant’s lips were huge, the size of lily pads. It was her most attractive feature—and the reason he hired this otherwise plain and rather silent woman. For his meditation, he imagined all sorts of big-lipped creatures panting for air inside a small, windowless room.
His obsession with the assistant’s lips led to Lloyd’s most well-known trick at four a.m., “Floating Ecstasy”, in which he would decapitate his assistant with a chainsaw, but keep her bubble lips in place. They would float over the headless body in swollen perfection before zipping around like a burst balloon.
He and his assistant performed this many times as a crowd pleaser. They were tried twice on charges of public nuisance. Loud and unruly, the assistant’s lips sang irritating songs injected with curses between words.
Five
By five a.m. Lloyd had an epiphany, wire cutters. Nabbing a bronze sculptor from the audience, he used the man’s tools to weld wire cutters to his mouth as lip replacements.
Some called this lethal mouth—a mouth that could cut a bicycle lock—Splendiferous. Others, thought that he had clearly lost it.
Six
Six was a period of loneliness, as it is sometimes the case with the rich and famous. He was neither and somehow that made it worse, especially with a day job like magazine subscription sales.
“Pussy!” Lloyd shouted alone in the street. The word had always helped him.