Abracadabra!

Every morning before leaving the house for school, I watched Skipper Chuck’s Popeye Playhouse on the local CBS affiliate. I never got to be in the live studio audience. I’m still mad at my parents about that.

A frequent guest on the Skipper Chuck show was Paul Diamond, a local magician. I loved his heavy New York accent and his amazing tricks, even if his stage presence could use some work.

Paul Diamond’s Magic and Fun Shoppe was at Searstown in Fort Lauderdale. I desperately wanted to go there, but my parents thought it was a foolish way to spend my allowance. How can learning to saw a woman in half, or turn her into a tiger, be foolish?

Finally, one day Dad took me and my brother Joe to Sears for back-to-school clothes. When the sales clerk assisted us — something they did in those days — she took out her cloth tape measure and wrapped it around my waist.

“Oh, you’re a Husky,” she said, referring to the children’s version of big and tall.

“And you smell funny,” I said.

It was bad enough being teased by my classmates. Adults should know better, or at least be more tactful.

After Joe and I had our new jeans and shirts, Dad said we could go to the magic shop next door. We spent half an hour there. Paul himself was manning the counter.

I studied every item for sale, from the ninety-nine-cent snapping chewing gum and itching powder, to the twenty-five-dollar linking rings, all the way up to the thousand-dollar disappearing cabinets.

In the end, I bought a whoopie cushion for a couple of bucks and a pack of magic cards. Joe bought a tin of sneezing powder.

Joe and I sat in the back seat of Dad’s Buick while he loaded our Sears purchases into the trunk. I tore open the card deck and began studying the instructions while Joe opened the sneezing powder and said to hell with the instructions.

If he had read them, he would have known to sprinkle a tiny amount into his palm and blow it into the face of his victim. Instead, he leaned over as if to smell the powder and snorted it like it was a line of cocaine.

It was spectacular.

He did more wheezing than sneezing for a few seconds. Then a string of snot escaped both nostrils.

I mean a STRING.

When Dad got into the driver’s seat, Joe was pulling at two nine-inch strands of mucus dangling below his chin, trying to extract them from his head. The world’s best mozzarella sticks never had a cheese pull like Joe’s snot pull.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

This was far better than making a woman levitate.

He managed to extricate the strand from his left nostril, but the right side just kept getting longer and longer, reminding me of the never-ending stream of scarves Paul pulled from his fist.

Joe was crying, I was laughing, and Dad was cursing.

“Stop it!” he yelled at Joe. “Just pull it out!”

“I’m trying!” Joe wailed.

“Goddammit!” Dad said, climbing back out of the car.

He opened the back door, grabbed Joe by the snot-free hand, and pulled him toward Sears.

“You, too!” he barked at me. “And stop laughing, dammit!”

“I’m trying!” I echoed Joe, though I wasn’t.

Inside the store, Dad led Joe to the water fountain by the elevator. He had Joe place his head in the basin, facing the ceiling, and used the ice-cold stream to flush out his nose, accidentally waterboarding him.

This only made me laugh harder. So hard, in fact, that I wet myself, eliciting another “Goddammit!” from Dad and even more laughter from me.

When Joe’s nasal discharge had been reduced to a reasonable level, Dad marched us back to the car. Before he’d let me in, he made me change into some of the clothes we’d just bought, right there in the parking lot. We hadn’t bought underwear, so I had to go commando.

He made me throw away my pants and briefs in the outside garbage can before allowing me ingress to the back seat.

Joe pinched his nose closed and wept quietly on the ride home. Every time another laugh threatened to escape me, Dad barked, “You better not piss yourself again or I’ll give you something to piss about.”

The whoopie cushion failed to elicit the guffaws I’d hoped for, but all I had to do was picture Joe pulling the magic mucus out of his nose and I was off on another laughing fit.