Backstory: The Great Magician Jannsen

(I)

Mostly, Jim (my real father) came up with ideas. Some were downright crazy, but others were elegant and pragmatic. My father seemed unable—or unwilling—to distinguish the ludicrous from the useful; rather, he approached the natural and social sciences with a jazzer’s improvisatory mien. He even had an odd way of talking that reflected playful combination: somewhat like Cockney rhyming slang, his speech was peppered with alliteration, substitutions, neologisms, and strange metonymies. Later, when Jannsen sued to take over Jim’s part in the company, he would cite this predilection for outrageous speech as one of the qualifiers for Jim’s mental instability. Since Jim preferred amazing others with his combinatory powers over convincing professional mediators of his sanity, Jim can be said to have given away his share in the business.

Jannsen’s role in the business was primarily to secure patents for my father’s ideas and to wait for others to either use an idea based on this patent (in which case he would sue said party), or to wait until someone asked to use the idea in an invention (in which case he would work out an amicable settlement). When an idea was born with a full-fledged will to market, it was advertised on infomercials with by a host who served as a stand-in for my father. You know this man, of course: Tom Galiel has been coming into your living room for years, selling you all kinds of useful crap that my father either invented or improved upon. Not all of these made the piles of cash you’d expect, but they endeared the buying public to a certain kind of smarmy marketing. Remember the Pocket Pan-Fryer? What about those amazing four-bladed windshield-wipers? I am the rightful heir to the Healthy, Fast, Wok Repast dynasty (“Just stir it…and defer it!” says the infomercial audience).

At first, my mother must have found Jim entertaining. By the time I was ten, though, it was obvious that she viewed him solely as a source of wealth: he spewed out profitable ideas like an always-spouting oil well, and while Jannsen took on the task of refining the natural resources of his partner’s mind into cold, hard cash, my mother worked on the homefront to anchor Jim to the real world enough to subsist on a daily basis. He would fly to Paris to study architecture, he would stand all day in a supermarket to watch people’s wavering movements as they chose this breakfast cereal over another, he would lay on his back and silently watch the stars. General curiosity was Jim’s grand calling.

Jannsen and my mother met often to discuss my father’s well-being. Initially, Sally (my mother) reported to Jannsen on Jim’s dreams, for he often spewed forth ideas in his sleep—intellectual property that could be tapped without cutting their rightful owner in on their fair market value. Over time, Sally and Jannsen’s business relationship didn’t develop into a love relationship, but instead cut out the middle man. Judging that they’d garnered enough wealth from my father, they shut him out of their lives. Jannsen moved into investment banking, and Sally moved in with Jannsen.

(II)

My mother, eager that one of us might extend an olive branch, had left us alone for the afternoon. It appeared that Jannsen had been first to bend.

He looked down at me, smiled for the first time since I’d met him, and asked me, “would you like to see a magic trick?”

Jannsen had only recently replaced my father as head of the household, and I had been wary of him to this point. His manner had seemed cold (as much an individual personality trait as a Scandinavian thing, I would later find out), as if he viewed me only as a formal addendum to acquiring a new wife and a new household. At this moment, the possibility that my father might be replaced by a magician went a long way toward smoothing the transition.

“Bring me those dollar bills I hear you’ve been saving, and I will make them multiply magically!”
I ran to my room and grabbed the money, ecstatic. Even at ten years of age, I knew that magic was sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Already I understood his Tooth Fairy magic-logic; he was going to somehow pull more money from a sleeve or such in an attempt to buy my love. At this point, my love was for sale. I had been saving my father’s sporadic allowances for a year now. I was up to four hundred and thirty-five dollars, nearly three-quarters of the money I’d need to buy a pint-sized version of the Italian racing bicycles I’d seen in the movie, “Breaking Away.” Money in hand, I ran back to the kitchen table and sat across from him.

“We have a hefty pile of cash, don’t we?” I found myself already liking the way he talked about my money, saying “have” as “haff” and “hefty” as “hafety.” I thought I might even ape some of his pronunciation.

He took the bills, straightening and placing them in his left hand. Twirling his right hand over the stack, he chanted, “voolah, zoolah, moolah!” I braced for the transformation. Would the money come from the sleeve? Would my eyes be directed away at the last possible moment? I watched his hands intently as he grabbed the bills between his thumbs and forefingers. “Zoot!” he cried, and ripped the bills in two. He proceeded to rip the bills—mostly twenties but with a couple hundreds—into quarters and then, with some difficulty, into eighths.

“This part is very important,” he said, winking at me. “Go and get the scissors from…wherever you keep the scissors.” I leapt up and sprinted to the kitchen. I assumed that I would find a wad of bills, but when I opened the junk drawer, I found only discarded insurance notices, rubber bands, a package of sheet rock screws, and the requested scissors. My curiosity at this trick now very much piqued, I rushed back. “No running with the scissors,” he lightly scolded, and I blushed a little. “This is not a trick that need be rushed,” he added. He took up the scissors, said, “zam. Zalla. Zee!”, and carefully cut the bills into sixteenths, then thirty-seconds. He scooped up the shredded pieces from the table and threw them into the air above me.

“Hee hee!” I giggled as pieces of twenties and hundreds sprinkled on and around me.

He extended his arms out, palms opened toward me: “ta-dah!”

I waited for a second. Brushed money out of my hair. Five seconds. My eyes widened. Twenty seconds. Still, nothing happened. Forty seconds. A minute and a half. He sat silently, an expectant smirk on his face. Finally, after two minutes, I asked, “when will it happen?”

He hammed up his supposed ignorance: “When will what happen?”

“The magic,” I said, still hopeful. “When will my money multiply?”

His countenance returned to the impassive state I had observed in the preceeding weeks. “Oh, yes. That,” he said, suddenly dismissive. “It won’t.”

“Huh?”

“Your money’s gone child. Don’t you know that money’s no good when you cut it into twenty pieces? Don’t you know that magic is no more real than those silly Gods in the stars or in bibles?
I was silent. I felt a lump rising in my stomach, a kind of roller-coaster preamble that couldn’t decide whether to introduce dread or excitement. Was this part of the trick? “I don’t understand,” I mumbled.

“It’s simple, little one. Or, must I draw a map for you, tear it up, and throw the pieces on your head?”

I started to cry. Just a little at first, a whimper really, but when I saw that no response was forthcoming, I started heaving out my grief in great blubbery heaps.

“Yes, yes. I get your point,” he said. “The shattered illusions of youth and all that apparatus. Listen to me: when you choose to stop crying, I’d like you to go to your room and write this down:

“I have been duped by the great magician Jannsen. I will be a cleverer boy in the future.”


(III)

Twenty years later, in the old man’s last months, Jannsen and I truly bonded as father and son. I had seen very little of my real father over the past decade, and had completely lost contact with him after he moved from his dingy, cluttered hovel to a tidy, antiseptic sanitarium. I had recently overcome my own bout with agoraphobia, and was now contending with Ruthie’s upwardly mobile arc of mental illness (why does insanity seem to swarm around my family?) Now, I was to serve as a part-time nurse to my stepfather and one-time employer, a man who had spent no more of his fortune than absolutely necessary on his loyal stepson. I had gone to a public high school, had paid my way through a public University, and now held an unassuming job in marketing. Jannsen, too, had a son, a effete fop of a man four years my elder from a previous marriage. This man, Sven by name, had been educated—at Jannsen’s expense—in the finest European academies, and had taken as his life’s work the expenditure of his birth father’s capital. Every month or so, I would track him to a suite in Paris or a villa in Tuscany, forcing him to talk briefly to his father over the phone. Sven was usually too busy spending his father’s money to talk for more than a couple of minutes, but these few minutes were enough to greatly please Jannsen. Jannsen wouldn’t come out and tell me he was proud of his son’s lifestyle, or even of his son’s disregard for him; rather, he registered his approval of his son by redoubling the day’s efforts at humiliating me.

Although he had not deigned to help me with even a word of recommendation at any point in my career, Jannsen was quick to point out my failures in the business world at our every meeting. He said I lived above my means. He said I’d married horribly. He said I’d never amount to anything. Whenever he went off on one of these tangents, I smiled the smile of the duped. He had always shown only enough concern for me to apprise me of his unconcern, yet now I, duped again, smiled while emptying his bedpan, while taking his temperature, while turning his cancer-ravaged body so as not to invite bedsores. The nurse came only twice per week, and I was expected to do the job of a hospice worker in addition to my normal job. Since most of my business was already conducted via computer at that time, I set up shop in an empty bedroom of Jannsen’s house, foregoing much daily contact with my wife at a crucial time for her mental illness.

I said that we bonded as father and son. This is true. No less than three times per day, he would ring the little dinner bell I’d given him, croaking, “son! Son!” I would come into his room, lean close to him, and hear him say, “son, don’t even think about touching the Monterey properties. I’ve already signed them over to Sven.” Or, “son, tell Sven that I’ve given him my collection of cars,” or, “Son, you thought you’d live in this mansion with my ghost? The realtor already has a bidding war on his hands, and every penny will go to Sven.” He called me son. I treated him as a son should. And every day his derision worsened. Every day, I kept the same tenuous hold on my sympathy. Even in his utmost cruelty, he was met only with my now-stoic, now-stupid smile: ha! You got me again, old man. I smiled, I cleaned up his bloody vomit, I waited.

I stopped waiting in his final weeks. He hadn’t the strength to even grab the bell anymore, and I would now have to lean very close to hear his whispered mockery. One morning, I waited until he was at his most cognizant, and removed a folded piece of paper from my pants pocket. I unfolded it and held it before his face. I then read it aloud to make sure he understood. The contents of this note, written twenty years ago in a child’s hand, were as follows:

“I have been duped by the great magician Jannsen Jason. I will be cleverer in the future.”

I had stricken his name and added my own on the same day I wrote the lesson. Below this, in a more mature hand, was a number. By his widening eyes, I guessed that he recognized the number to one of his offshore bank accounts, an account that could be said to represent his grandest achievements of siphoning, embezzling, and general fiscal backstabbery. There were actually many such accounts, but this account in particular held a special place in my heart. This was the account in which he had first deposited funds stolen from my father, even while Jim was still married to my mother. By extension, Jannsen had stolen from the very woman he would marry and later drive to an early, ugly death. And now, its contents were mine.

Jannsen started to say something, so I leaned in close. “Quite a bit more…” he wheezed, “than 435 dollars…I was beginning to wonder…if you would ever learn that lesson…Son.” He paused, gathering the breath to pursue another sentence. “I hope you enjoy…tearing Sven to pieces.” Then, he made a halfhearted attempt to bite my ear.

I said, “goodbye, dad,” and left it at that, walking out of his room, his mansion, his life. He was afterward attended by a Certified Nursing Assistant I’d specifically chosen for her ineptness. After having drained the accounts, I nobly ceded to Sven on matters of Jannsen’s materiel. One might think that Sven would be gracious about this division of wealth, but he seemed to think that he had gotten the short end of the stick—of course, he had received the short end, but one can only blame his father for having more hidden wealth than legitimate. In the end, I think that Sven’s repeated death threats stemmed more from the necessity of his leaving Europe than from the actual distribution of assets. Nor am I so cold as to discount Sven’s grief over his father’s death.

Hopefully, now that I have disappeared from the scene, my step-brother can finally begin the process of healing.