sympathy for the devil

originally posted June 6, 2007

Now that I'm an adult, I've come to realize that my childhood was filled with weirdness. There are so many stories from my early days that I can't possibly tell a person without the aid of a long, rambling prologue to explain, for example, what I was even doing at a polo match, wearing a fur coat, at age five. These are details a person needs before a person can focus their full attention on the story which I am trying to tell them about my run-in with Sylvester Stallone's bodyguard.

A great deal of the hows and whys for many of these stories can be explained by the fact that, for a period of time, my father was "The Balloon Man". You know those giant hot air balloon-esque things that you see from time to time sitting on the roof of an appliance store during a super blowout sale? This was my father's business for a good deal of the eighties. Not only this, but legend has it that he is the "inventor" of this particular means of advertising, but was unable to patent the idea, because it does not count as an invention if you take some things someone else already invented (e.g., a giant fan, the business end of a hot air balloon) and combine them in a novel fashion. This is something anyone can do, but for a period of time, no one was doing it – no one except my father.

My childhood was filled with gigantic rolls of hot air balloon fabric, industrial sewing machines, dangerous fans that I was not to touch, and huge specialty lightbulbs used for illuminating the balloons at night. My father, with the aid of my mother and a few hired others, would design these balloons, cut them, sew them, and inflate them wherever someone needed to say something by way of a 65-foot balloon. Thus, I often found myself in situations not typically encountered by a small child.

I mention this because I wanted to tell you about The Naz. I knew you'd stop me though, and want to know just how someone even makes the acquaintance of a magician on stilts, let alone ends up with an anecdote about living with one. Knowing that my father was The Balloon Man makes it all make a little more sense, doesn't it? You don't even have to ask, do you? It is obvious to you that someone, somewhere, needed a giant balloon, and they also apparently needed a magician on stilts, and thus The Balloon Man met The Naz.

The Naz actually went by the name 'The Naz', and looked like a more devil-y Wayne Newton – all dyed black hair and tiny mustache. One evening my father received a phone call from The Naz, who shared some sort of sad story about how he and his wife were living in a bus station, I think. I guess the business of magic and stilt walking was not a lucrative one at this point in the eighties. During this phone conversation, my mother held up a note that said I feel sorry for them, and so my father invited them to stay with us for a couple of days. Later that evening, while I slept, my father returned home with The Naz, who was stiltless, and his wife. This was a truly bewildering thing to wake up to the next morning. Even as a small child I understood, as Wayne Newton performed magic tricks for me over toast, that we were in for a long visit.

You see, he wasn't a very good magician. This was an impression my parents and I shared, and I was only nine-years-old, which should tell you that he was actually a horrible magician. Nevertheless, The Naz tried to convince us that he was in fact a very good magician over the three weeks they lived with us. He never had much success, though. For example, at one point he requested that we chain him up with the lock and chain from my bicycle, and from these bounds he would escape – TA DA! Of course this was met with utter failure and wrist bruising, which required the application of ice packs. The humiliation was compounded by the fact that The Naz chained up both my father and aging uncle, and they both got out of the chains in seconds. Indeed, he was a very bad magician.

What made the whole experience particularly strange for me was the fact that I'd sustained a head injury just prior to their arrival – one that required a trip to the emergency room in an ambulance. Subsequent to this I became very sick for a couple of weeks, and spent a good deal of time with a fever that caused a number of fever dreams and weird hallucinations. It is at these points that a young person needs the grounding comfort of the familiar and distinctly non-weird. Of course, having The Naz around made me feel like I was hallucinating 100% of the time.

What happened to The Naz? I don't know. About three weeks into their stay, I heard my mother ask my father, in the urgent whisper of a woman who can take only so much magic, Why are they STILL HERE? It was soon after this that my father dropped The Naz and his wife off at a bus station with money to travel to wherever their relatives lived. After this he returned home and hung my mother's note – I feel sorry for them – on our refrigerator door. There it stayed for years, reminding us all never to be kind to magicians.