AMORALMAN: A True Story and Other Lies

Orson Welles didn’t want to be a magician. He wanted to be a MAGICIAN.

And just as we’ve seen others hide something from us, we have felt the surge of fear and adrenaline when we scramble to hide what others aren’t meant to see. These are the toxic effects of secrecy.

Mr. Forte wasn’t a magician. He was a game protection specialist who worked with the casino industry, helping with theft prevention. And his video series had nothing to do with magic; they were educational tapes from the 1980s, produced to help educate people on the techniques used by gambling cheats.

I had convinced myself to make the pilgrimage by giving myself outs along the way:

You can learn a lot about yourself when you pretend to be someone else. Being Cody allowed me to participate in the world and yet still remain separate from it. I could hide behind his eyes and have interactions that weren’t distorted by my own knowledge, my own insecurities, my own fears. In many ways, Cody’s interactions were more honest and auth

He wanted to be remembered as a real magician, someone who revealed more than he concealed, someone who bridged the gap between our collective consciousness and the divine.

Cody was an uncomfortable mask I couldn’t wait to take off. Away from the table, I avoided talking to both the players and the staff, out of fear of being exposed. I hid in the corners of the house reading books on my breaks; I avoided eye contact and small talk. Of course, that’s exactly what I did when I wasn’t Cody. I had been hiding in corners

It’s difficult to isolate any single event that conveys the enormity of his douchebaggedness.

Karl Germain, the celebrated conjuror, known to the masses as Germain the Wizard, famously said, “Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and then he does.”