I first came across him at 46th and Broadway. He stood on a plastic soapbox, making red silk handkerchiefs disappear. Zip, gone: like a silent film of flare bursts played in reverse. There were so many people crowding close, I thought he was an accident or, at the very least, a first-rate epileptic fit. Around Times Square only someone else’s pain will draw that well.
Right off you knew he was a good magician. But it went beyond that. Robert Levy has no age: he could be 12, he could be some forty-year-old with an impacted pituitary. The two front teeth upstage his mouth—bossy, new, second-growth incisors—yet they are not all his own, it’s just another illusion. (“This little kid ran into me, my real teeth are implanted in his head somewhere.”) “Shock of hair” is a cliché, and I think Robert’s hair was its provenance: wild, listening to the siren call of some private static electricity, with light roots that might be grey roots. Robert is heavy and not tall. When he walks, the shoulders are assertive, as if he were pulling himself along in a rickshaw. And the line of patter, his own, is eerie: adulthood lip-synced on a child’s unreluctant mouth.
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