I hadn’t been at my delivery job with Industrial Finishes very long, so when Gary the Plant Manager for Silverado Trailers called me back to the office to inventory the order of automotive paint supplies I’d brought, I thought I’d done something wrong. It turned out that he just made up an excuse to try a new card trick out on someone. It was called The Jesse James Gang, and it seemed like real magic, so I immediately began cajoling him to show me how he’d done it. But like any good magician, he wouldn’t budge.
Gary and I got along like gangbusters right away, despite the twenty-year disparity in our ages. He knew a few more card tricks, but was a boundless repository of jokes and the most god-awful puns. What sound does a piano falling down a mine-shaft make? A-flat miner. See what I mean? Once a week I’d make an identical delivery of thirty-six spraycans of metal primer for the welds they made on the trailer frames, he’d call me back to the office away from the shop floor to “inventory” the order, and we’d spend ten to fifteen minutes shooting the breeze, and exchanging all these awful puns and jokes. What’s blue and smells just like red paint? Blue paint. Badump-kssh!
I didn’t ask him to teach me The Jesse James every time, although I always wanted to. Though it was mysterious on the face of it, it seemed frustratingly simple. It only had three moving parts, and there was no shuffling involved. How hard could it be? The set-up requires collecting all four Jacks and assembling them side-by-side and top-to-bottom, displayed together in one hand. This is the Jesse James Gang, and the deck is the bank that they’re going to rob. Three of the Jacks go into the “bank,” randomly inserted anywhere in the deck, while Jesse stays up on the roof—the top of the deck—to keep lookout. He gives the signal to let the gang know that the Sheriff’s posse is coming and to get up to the roof for their escape. At which point the magician taps the top of the deck and all four Jacks are suddenly back on top, which they demonstrate by flipping them over. Three Jacks down in the deck, tap it once, and where only one Jack should be, suddenly all four are back on top. Abracadabra.
Gary was a man of considerable stature, tall and portly, hair already silvering like our President, Bill Clinton, at age 46. An affable guy in his niche, not overly burdened by ambition or regret, an MBA running a shop full of nachos & NASCAR types. I’m guessing that’s why he took a shine to me and my polysyllabic ways, as someone to volley with in an otherwise prosaic world of machined surfaces and utility.
As time wore on, between jokes he would sometimes tender a bit of wisdom to a young man too cocky to think he needed any. Some of it seemed comedic and silly to me, although I think he meant it. “Don’t marry a beautiful woman. They’re nothing but trouble.” Some of it didn’t seem to apply. “Learn how to drink Scotch.” I’ve learned. And a lot of it was generic stuff that I’d heard a million times from parents, uncles, youth pastors, and other mentors of more standing than Gary. “You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
One thing he said to me has stayed with me over all these years, probably because it was unique to him. No one ever said it to me before him, nor have I heard it since. Gary asked me one day how old I was. I told him I was twenty five and he replied that he was actually twenty-five himself. “Or at least that’s how old I feel on the inside. That’s the thing they never tell you, how you stop aging on the the inside, but the outside goes right on. At some point you notice that your neck doesn't turn all the way to the left anymore, and you never really get that back. Every day I look in the mirror and wonder, 'When the hell did that happen? And why does my back hurt?' You don’t ever feel old, you just get old.” He looked at my twenty-five year old face and saw my blank incomprehension and said, “Ok, I can see you don’t believe me. But don’t throw it away, file it away.”
So I did. And as the years advanced, careers changed, relationships came and went, friends moved into other more distant orbits, responsibilities piled on, money came and went, tragedies ensued, I realized that Gary was right. I felt like a stone in the rapids, somehow stationary and unchanging as events and time flowed around me. But then I’d look at my hands and see the advance of time written in callouses and scar tissue; I’d see the back of my neck in the barber’s mirror and realize the deep lines and wrinkles baked in by years working under the sun had been tirelessly advancing; a picture from the wrong angle highlighted an incipient bald-spot. And the first time I ever said aloud, “When the hell did that happen?” I thought of Gary.
The day inevitably came when I couldn’t keep driving a truck for a living just because it was fun and I loved my coworkers. As I was moving on the the next phase, I paid my last fifteen minute slice-of-life visit to Gary. We made all the usual awkward talk about how great it had been over the last three years and how we’d stay in touch, and hovered between manly handshake and uncomfortable man-hug for what seemed like an eternity. Before I left, I took one more pass at getting him to reveal the trick to the Jesse James.
“Do you really need me to do that?” he asked. “You’re a bright guy. Isn’t there really only one way it could possibly work? After all, it's not as if it's actually magic.”
I said that I didn’t, although I still did. I left without ever learning the secret, and of course never saw him again.
Now that I’m the same age Gary was then, I can’t believe how many times I’ve repeated his insight to all the guys I’ve mentored in my life and career over the years. I don’t even take credit. I tell them the story of Gary, and simply endorse his wisdom with my own experience. And then they look at me the same way I looked at him, and I just say, “Don’t throw it way, file it away.”
Since Gary was right about that—even when I was too dumb to know it—I’ve decided to similarly believe all of those other people who say from their deathbeds that their number one regret is losing touch with their friends. I must be past the halfway point, because all I really want anymore is time with few good friends and somewhere to be where we can look each other in the eye and actually hear what each other is saying. I mean, I may feel twenty-five, but the second I’m with people in their twenties, I realize I’m for sure in my forties, and I don’t need all the noise or flash in my life anymore. And then I wonder when the hell that happened. And why does my back hurt?
The other thing Gary was right about was me not needing help to solve The Jesse James. Eventually, I figured it out on my own. I mean there’s really only one way it could have worked. The Jacks are a mask for the disposable cards hidden behind them, and they themselves never really go down into the deck at all. Once I saw how the trick was done, I wondered how I’d ever fallen for it. Like every magic trick, it’s really about distraction, while the switch is made right under your nose. Just like the rest of life.
After all, it's not as if it's actually magic, right? Abracadabra.
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