Once in a while a sort of mad idea comes to everyone, and this especially is so with that order of humans called magicians. With that sentence as an excuse for what is to follow I offer something in the way of a routine. None of the tricks therein are new, but, to some extent, they are not what one might call “well known”. Credit cannot be given to several for they have “kicked” around for many years. I hope that will be a “face saver” for credit not being given any — it doesn’t seem right somehow to differentiate — but if we are wrong we’ll be only too glad to make amends. The fact that never before have the separate items been assembled into a routine makes for novelty, even if some brethren (are you there, Mr. Craggs ?) accuse us in print of purveying refurbished secrets.
All of this is party stuff — you have to have your audience within “throwing” distance. And you have to have also a nice little 2 x 4 foot oriental looking “prayer” rug. See how the effects sounds and we’ll tell you the rest of the requisites.
Explaining that a study of the east, and a thorough training in the methods used by those adepts to transcend all mundane happenings, have enabled you to emulate the fakirs who infest the curbstones of Bombay, you reverently place your “prayer” rug at an advantageous spot before the assembled guests and in front of it put an array of “tools of trade” to be described hereafter.
On your knees, on the rug, of course, you say that a true belief in the teachings of they who accepted you as a believer has made you immune to pain at will. After all, you make clear, pain is but a sensation controlled entirely by the mind, exactly the same as pleasant feelings are told you by the sources that send out signals from the brain.
You mutter to yourself between these statements and get into a mood that would make any psychiatric expert fawn upon you as a perfect “case”. You repeat, “No pain — no pain — no pain.” Even to the uninitiated it is evident that you are hypnotizing yourself into a state of insensibility — to pain.
You call for a lighted cigarette. A puff or two to make a brightly glowing end — and you openly and deliberately rub it to the extinguished point on your outstuck tongue. Then throw the butt away with a sneer (an oriental sneer ? Ed.) into some far corner of your host’s room. Now repeat, “No pain – no pain.”
Pick up the nice big sewing needle and the pair of pliers or pincers. Clamp the needle at the eye end in the pliers and proceed to push the point of the steel through the flesh of your left arm. It goes in and comes out an inch away. Mutter, “No pain.” And you can recite any German, Spanish of French you know, too. Leave the needle there for the time being.
Reach out and pick up the pepper shaker you have borrowed from the kitchen. There’s nothing faked about it. Shake out plenty of the stuff onto your left palm — you can’t get too much. Then with another muttered, “No pain,” you put out your tongue and actually lick up every grain possible, smack your lips, and swallow it all.
Look down at your arm. The needle still goes in and comes out. You jiggle it a bit and say, “No pain — and I mean no pain !” And at that moment you let your right hand drop and go directly into an open and set muskrat trap which responds beautifully with a terrific snap and takes you to task. That’s your climax. You arise and cry “No pain,” just once more, and stalk out of the room without further ado.
Now we can get down to a Calcutta curb and talk about the “inside”. There is nothing faked except you. As you have read, the apparatus needed consists of : a “prayer” rug, a needle, pliers, shaker of pepper (red or black), and a muskrat (or often called “skunk trap”) meanie. Just before you make your entrance you do a nice job of taking a mouthful of olive oil or any of the substitutes (Mazola, in the States, but we don’t know its equivalent in foreign countries). Any of the heavy salad oils will do, though. You swash around that stuff in your mouth and let go of the rest. The coating is all you need.
The cigarette bit will work on your tongue just as it is when you read this — it takes only that first bit of nerve to try. Cigarettes, we say, not cigars. For some reason or other you can wipe the burning cigarette across your tongue, even when wiped dry, and extinguish it without any detrimental results.
Now the needle. Hold it in the pliers in your right hand. Turn your left arm upward to show the white and soft part. Have someone pull up and hold between their thumbs and fingers of both hands a bit of that flesh that’s loose and responsive to such an action. It’s through this you push the needle. Hurt ? For the first time you do it, perhaps. You’ll always get a prick on the first push but it means nothing from then on. The needle goes through, the man lets go, and everybody (including you) sees the needle coming out an inch away from where it enters. It’s just the way the skin spreads out. And when you pull out the needle afterwards there won’t be any blood. The skin just closes up because it has been stretched at the start.
The pepper ? You remember the olive oil coating ? You’ve only been muttering to keep from washing that coating away. Go ahead and lap up the pepper, red or black. The oil neutralizes it and you don’t know but you are are eating awfully small pieces of caviar.
The trap ? That’s another laugh. Just put your hand into it. They are made without teeth. You stick your closed fingers directly into the jaws of that thing exactly at the center of where they’ll come together at the top. You get a sharp knuckle rap, naturally, and you’d better keep any ring off that hand, but that is all it amounts to. What isn’t known to many except trappers is that such traps are made to catch and hold — not catch and break. It’s too easy for an animal to tear away if a trap breaks bones. And it won’t break yours. Now you can be a Hindu fakir ! Selah !
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