Car is getting unbearably hot.
I’m sitting in my car in a parking lot in Hollywood… on Sunset, near Thai town. Supposed to meet Mr. George for an interview.
Not for a job. To become a student.
Of magic.
He’d already called me to tell me he’s running late. I’ve been waiting 40 minutes…
Mr. George is a master cardician. A student of one of the legendary masters of card magic.
I’ve been a fan of magic since I was a little kid… and the first “real life” magic trick I ever saw was when I was about four or five years old. Living in a high-rise in Aoyama (Tokyo). Our neighbor, a couple of doors down showed me a trick where they pushed a “real coin” into a coke bottle.
I didn’t say a word. Just looked at the bottle with the coin inside. I couldn’t believe my eyes…
After that, I would hang out at the magic counter at the various department stores in Tokyo, while my mom would go take care of her errands. The store clerks all knew magic, and they would demonstrate all kinds; from simple card tricks, to ring magic, to stuff with ropes – you know, the trick where they cut the rope then it turns out the entire rope is still intact.
I did eventually find out how the coin in the coke bottle trick was done… and instead of feeling gutted, I was fascinated.
I had no idea there were these “secret” devices…
But the first time I really got my mind blown was when I was about 11. On an island in Sweden while on vacation. I befriended a kid whose grandfather knew coin magic. The grandpa would make the coin disappear and reappear different places. I must have been 11 or so. I could not for the life of me figure out how the heck it was done...
I was trying to rework how he did it for days. Weeks even. I never did figure it out (until much later).
When I was around thirteen, I went back to Japan on vacation…
Where did I spend my time, you ask?
At the magic counter in department stores. That’s where.
I'd spend countless hours there bugging the sales person… I know he was getting tired of this gaijin kid hovering around the counters asking questions without buying a single thing.
I did eventually leave with a handful of magical items… Mostly some lame stage magic props. Like linking rings and a rope I could turn into a handkerchief or something...
I was never good at either.
Not even sure why I bought it.
Probably because the sales person at the department store made it look really cool.
It wasn’t when I did it.
Looking back, it was the learning and knowing the “insider secrets” that attracted me to the martial arts.
My judo sensei throwing larger opponents with ease at the dojo when I was seven. A tiny lady in a park in Japan, who felt like a brick wall when I rushed to push her over.
The seemingly impossible ways I got struck by my instructors… like when my jujutsu teacher would use debilitating strikes to pressure points in my late teens.
Demonstrations of relaxed strength and “ki” (‘chi’) in my 20s… where it felt like I was barely touched, yet lying on the ground writhing in agony as if a hot spear went through my body.
Many inexplicable and magical events that drew me deeper into the mystical side of martial arts.
Which is why I went searching for teachers.
Magic was always the other thing.
The parallel interest, bordering on obsession at times. Not a calling like martial arts… more like a door I kept walking past and occasionally opening. Books, videos, the odd trick learned and forgotten.
Then I heard about Mr. George. That he would occasionally take on private students. So, I found a way to reach out to him through the wonders of internet. Composed a little too formal of an email and sent it off.
A couple of weeks later, he said he was willing to meet with me.
Mr. George eventually showed up. About an hour late. A squat man with a wide face and a broad smile. Took my hand and asked me if 'I’d been waiting long'.
“Not at all,” I said like a dumbass… with sweat pouring down my face.
The AC in the car was busted. And I was sitting in this hot mess of a car for an hour with the windows down, instead of going into the airconditioned café to wait like a civilized person.
The waitress seated us in a dingy looking booth where we ordered some drinks.
Iced tea for me; but he didn’t order a thing… the waitress just showed up with stuff. Turns out he’s a regular.
“Show me a card trick,” he says as he pulls out a brand-new deck of cards.
I wasn’t prepared for this… the whole point was to LEARN magic. Not to show him the crappy tricks I’d learned from books.
He removes the plastic wrapping like some cigarette packet, tears the seal, and pulls the cards out. He quickly shuffles them with a flourish and hands me the deck.
“Thank God, he didn’t ask me to shuffle,” I think as my hands grab the deck carefully. As if they’d break if I’d drop them.
I’m sweaty. I’m nervous.
I stare at them blankly.
“Show me a trick,” he says again…
I can’t think of a single one. I’ve learned several tricks over the years… but that day, they vanished. Like some magic trick.
I begin slowly… I don’t talk. Trying hard to remember how the trick goes.
My hands have a death grip on the deck of cards. The cards are sticking to my hands… and my hands are shaking.
Violently.
Not the first impression I was looking for.
But I manage to stumble through a trick I’d learned in the book “The Royal Road to Card Magic”.
He looks at me for a minute… probably thinking, “what the hell was that??”
He pulls out another deck of cards from his pocket, then without commenting on my botched trick says, “this is how you hold a deck. It’s called a mechanics grip.”
“And you shuffle the cards like this,” as he deftly shuffles the cards in a continuous motion.
“You try.”
I nod. Put the cards in the grip.
“No. Put your thumb there, place your pinky here,” he says as he adjusts my grip.
I begin to shuffle and he nods.
He takes me through different ways to control a given card. How to do some other simple card magic secrets… then teaches me a trick.
A version of a basic card trick called the “Triumph”.
An hour goes by… and he finally nods and says: “Good. Now go show it to some people over there,” as he points to some strangers sitting at some tables on the other side of the café enjoying their meal…
“Shit.”
It’s 2007, and my American Kenpo Karate training had stagnated. I’d moved a couple of times… teachers moved, closed shop… and in one case, passed away. And the last one… he just didn’t move the way I wanted to move. I couldn't quite articulate what was missing. I just knew it wasn't there... It was more stilted… more karate. Not the flowing Kenpo I’d learned years prior. Granted he was from an offshoot branch of American Kenpo, so I’ll give him that.
I’d also been searching for that unseen quality… which I had never seen in Kenpo. Sure, I had seen people hit hard. And guys that were fast. That’s a Kenpo ‘thing’ after all.
But it still made me go out searching for ‘it’. Dabbling in Chinese martial arts, Russian martial arts, Japanese, Filipino, Indonesian… you name it, I’ve probably tried it. As the saying goes, “jack of all trades master of none” would apply to me, one hundred percent.
But now, I was back in the Kenpo frame of mind - an art that I always came back to.
Just about every night, I’d sit in front of my computer… going through forums. KenpoNet, e-Budo, KungFuMagazine Forum, Aikiweb… For new teachers. New ideas. Some clue that I’d maybe missed.
Then I went on YouTube.
It’s early days. Not a lot of martial arts content had made its way there yet, let alone about Kenpo.
I typed in “Kenpo Karate” and waited. Up came the usual results.
Except for one.
I pushed play.
Dynamic, explosive movements.
“Wow,” I said out loud to no one but myself. Mesmerized by his demonstration.
Flowing from one strike to another. That power... you could literally feel it through the screen. And so fast, there’s no way you’d know where the next strike would be coming from. Not that you’d even be conscious after hits like that… had he actually struck his partner with full intent.
Then he said, “you need your presence to come out.”
He explained the use of pressure point strikes and I thought.. “that’s cool.” I knew it was in the art already… but it’s what came up next in the video that made me stop in my tracks.
He rocks his legs and throws a back knuckle to his partner’s abdomen… the guy folds and falls to the ground.
“The energy goes right through this guy.”
I must have watched it a dozen times. Stopping, going back watching his action… stopping, studying it again.
Then I let it play… I hadn’t even gotten to the good part yet.
In the next clip, he shows a similar strike. Except, this time there’s no rocking of feet. Just dropping his hand… “you don’t need all the dramatics behind it,” he says as his partner is sitting on the ground recovering from the strike.
He continues to demonstrate… talking about vibrations, surging of energy…
And then, as if I wasn’t already convinced.
He does an even lighter ‘touch’ strike.
"Mr. Parker always did it..." he says, then touches his ‘uke’ with a light back knuckle and the guy drops...
I was pretty sure I knew what that felt like. Something akin to what my Chinese martial arts teacher had shown me years before.
I was amazed... Shocked even, that I'd been searching for it everywhere else. Except in Kenpo.
Here, this man was showing that it was already a part of Kenpo Karate all along.
I looked in the description of the video.
The teacher’s name was… Mr. Paul Mills.
I’ve watched this video hundreds of times since then…
Few months later, I reconnected with Mr. Kongaika.
I’d met him many years earlier, around 1991. Both orange belts at the time. And then again in the late 90s when he was the head instructor at Mr. Parker’s Pasadena school. I’d tried to train there, but the LA traffic killed that idea.
Years go by, and I find out he’s teaching 20 minutes from my house.
“Come on by and just train,” he says. Friendly and welcoming as always.
I took him up on it.
The address he gave was to some community swimming pool… I was confused. But I walked around the ‘club house’, and there he was laying down the mats inside the building.
“Steve!” he says. “Glad you could make it!”
I changed into my uniform, strapped on a white belt.
“You can just wear your rank, bratha” he said.
I shook my head. I wanted a clean start.
After class one Saturday morning, some months after I started, one of the brown belts tell me: “dude, you’ve got to have Mr. K. hit you with ‘one of those strikes’.”
“He barely touched me and I doubled over.”
“Bro, it hurts,” said another brown belt.
“One of those strikes?” I mutter to myself.
I didn’t ask him that day… since it felt awkward to walk up and say, “Mr. K. Can you please hit me with ‘one of those strikes’ they’ve been telling me about?”
Months go by.
Then, this thing happened about a year after I’d started training with him.
We’re wrapping up for the day, pulling the large puzzle mats off the floor as we always did after classes.
We were just talking about some random Kenpo stuff, when the topic of controlling our strikes and how it doesn’t take much to hurt people.
‘This is my chance’, I thought.
“Yeah, David said you should hit me with this strike… you know what he’s talking about?”
He nods.
“I don’t do it real well,” he says. “But my teacher, he could do it really well.”
“Can you try to hit me?” I said with a smirk on my face… thinking about how ridiculous that would sound to people not training in Kenpo.
“Sure.”
He walks over… and lays what seems like a pretty relaxed hit to my stomach.
There it was.
That searing pain… that goes through your body.
And I could feel myself double over.
“THAT WAS AWESOME!”
I was at a loss of words after that.
We finished up.
Then I left.
Thinking about what I’d felt. Comparing it to what I’d felt in the past.
Some weeks later during class, we’re casually talking about making sacrifices to learn and train with people. I shared a couple of my own stories… how I’d moved to LA to train with Mr. Parker… or how I’d travel down to San Diego every week to train with a teacher of a completely different kind of art.
“I used to travel up to Wyoming every month or so to train with my teacher,” he said off handedly.
“Wyoming?”
“I thought you’d trained in Pasadena.”
“Up to green belt,” he says. “Then I went to Wyoming to train with Mr. Mills.”
“Got my Black Belt from him.”
I was like "What?!?"
I had no idea.
It had come back full circle.
Then he begins to tell me stories of his teacher.
How he would barely touch them and they’d be crawling on the floor. Or how he would, “hit here… then it would travel across the body to here…” while pointing first at his chest, and tracing his finger across his body.
“That’s insane!” I said.
While in my head I’m thinking, “that’s like… magic!”
I'd spent years chasing these “secrets” in both martial arts and magic. Books, videos, teachers, forums, that café on Sunset Boulevard... It almost got to the point where I was more interested in the secrets than the training or practice at times.
With magic I could always find the answer eventually. Look it up. Buy the right book. Find the right teacher. The secret was always logical once revealed. It just required some patient practice.
But that feeling in my stomach when Mr. K hit me? Or the times when my Chinese Martial Arts teacher would hit me.
Nobody could articulate this kind of skill well. Let alone write it down.
Mr. Mills perhaps could? I don’t know.
There are so many layers of skill and knowledge to achieve these kinds of things that I’m guessing he could probably do it better than he could explain it.
This kind of knowledge has to travel through someone's hands into your body before you can even begin to understand it.
One type of “secret” lived on the page. In books… videos…
The other lived somewhere else entirely. Viscerally. In the hands… in the body.
In 2020, Covid happened. And the 'lockdown'.
I sat at home a lot of the time, just bored out of my mind.
Because of all the down time, I decided to brush up on my Japanese. Spent hours with tutors conversing in Japanese on Skype.
But that didn’t satisfy my curiosity of training… and the pursuit of the secrets.
So, I began practicing some magic again. Recalling some of those tricks, magicians call them ‘effects’, that I’d learned from George - and from subsequent books and videos I’d collected since the days of meeting him in that café in Hollywood.
There is this vast number of magic tutorials being sold out there. And while they’re great… I prefer to learn and get feedback from teachers.
So off I went to Google and began searching for “live training in magic”.
Honestly, there weren’t as many options out there as I thought there would be. I knew I wanted to learn sleight of hand type of magic, and I had been trying to learn some coin magic on my own.
So I narrowed the search… ‘online LIVE training in coin magic’.
There were really only a few options that came up. And only two that really interested me.
One was a well-known magician in Hawaii – known for his ‘knuckle busting’ coin magic and sleights. The other, a more obscure teacher, in Italy.
I had seen some videos of this Italian teacher before. He had an unconventional way in handling coins. I went to Youtube and searched his name and found some performances and short tutorials. I was intrigued.
I went to one of the big magic outlets online, and even bought a short tutorial to learn basic handling of coins by him.
I practiced the sequences… and found them to come to me more naturally than other coin magic I’d tried to learn, which typically left me feeling like I had ten thumbs. Not the nimble hands and fingers required for sleight of hand.
So, in the end, I chose Italy.
I shot off an email to the address on his website and got one back almost immediately.
“Yes, I’m taking students. Please answer these questions, and then sign up using the following link.”
Questions were basic.
What was my experience in magic. What about coin magic?
How much time do you have to practice?
What is your intention with magic. Are you trying to become a performer?
I basically told him I was a dabbler, trying to learn something from the ground up and that I don’t have much experience with coin magic at all.
No, I’m not going to become a professional. It’s just a hobby, and that I have plenty of time to practice since I’m cooped up in my house all day, every day.
He sent me an email back a day or so later and we scheduled our first zoom session.
The session was 2 hours…
He asked if I’d seen his magic before. And I explained that I had watched all of his videos on YouTube and even bought a tutorial.
He was pleased.
Then he said, “Show me what you learned from my video.”
“Shit.”
That first session with George came rushing back. I started sweating… I couldn’t hold my coins right…
“Take your time,” he said in his Italian accented English.
I composed myself and did the short little routine he had taught in the tutorial.
“That was very good,” he said.
“I can tell you have put work into it.”
This is how this ‘teacher – student’ relationship began.
I had a weekly class. 2 hours long.
I’d practice what he taught me for hours on end. In front of the mirror. On camera. Do my hands look natural while manipulating the coins? Am I flashing the coins? Do I sound natural while telling a story that goes along with the routine?
I spent way too much time on this. More time than any sane person would on something as obscure as coin magic. But time is all I had.
Every week he’d ask if I’d performed magic to anyone.
“Not really in person,” I’d say. I’d only performed some magic to my Japanese tutors on Skype, which was awkward in and of itself.
And to my kids… who were mostly disinterested.
“How’d they react?” was his next question.
I’d tell him my observations… and then we’d roll into another session. More techniques, more routines.
It went on for weeks. He was happy with my progress.
Then I fractured my finger while training martial arts… and the sessions stopped.
I apologized to him for having to discontinue my training for an unknown length of time. “Until it heals,” I told him by email.
My finger took a long time to heal. And by the time it was healed, I was getting busy with work and I never went back to training with him.
About a year and a half later, the lockdown was gone.
And I received an email from him, which said:
"Every now and then I think of my students, and you are one of them! Definitely you were one of my best students. I would love to see your progress with coin magic and know if my lessons have been helpful to you."
The email ended with, "I am organizing an exclusive, invitation-only close-up congress in Vienna this year. Only invitees will be able to register and book the ticket. So, if you are interested in attending, tell me and I will send you an invitation and be your sponsor!"
I didn't go.
Maybe I should have. But I hadn’t practiced much over that year and a half.
The timing was wrong. Makes me think that maybe some doors you stand in front of for so long that by the time they open, you're not sure you still want to walk through.
Few years have gone by since that email. But the tarnished silver Kennedy half dollar coins I practiced with so obsessively, sit on my desk. Next to my keyboard.
I still pick them up sometimes.
In the dojo, Mr. K and I still work on the subtle striking techniques that Mr. Mills had showed him… and that I’ve been so fascinated by over the years. Especially since that day twenty years ago while searching YouTube.
Still trying to find that thing Mr. Mills had.
Still striving for the feeling – the knowledge – of something that nobody has quite been able to explain.
Some secrets live on the page. Others you spend a lifetime reaching for.