The Pot-Smoking Professional Magician who Vanished a Joint in Front of Two NYPD Officers
by Alex Littlefield
They were walking down Ninth Avenue, sharing a spliff, when the cruiser pulled up alongside them.
A sergeant stepped out of the passenger door and came slowly around the hood, sizing them up: Sid the 
Magician in his street clothes and Matthew the Metal Head in a Pantera shirt and frayed jeans. Both were more than their share of stoned, which may have been why Matthew’s first thought went not to the joint, but to the idea that he was the victim of some sort of post-racial profiling. The sergeant’s look said, I’ve got you, you lank-haired goon.
Then Matthew’s synapses crackled back to the joint, the contingency smoldering somewhere below his line of vision. He tried to see whether Sid had palmed it, but could only smell the thing.
The second cop cracked his door and stepped onto the curb, thumbing his belt. The sergeant spoke first. “What you boys got there?” It struck Matthew as a little too casual, given the starchiness of the man’s uniform and his Eisenhower haircut.
“Nothing, sir,” said Sid. The sergeant craned his neck, scoping out the pair’s hands, which they held out palms-up. Even the smell had vanished. After another minute of head-scratching, the cops swung back into the squad car and pulled away from the curb.
Had this been a W.C. Fields movie, Sid would now have coughed up the joint in a geyser of smoke. But instead it reappeared in his fingers as if it had been there all along. He blew on it to revive the waning ember, hit it, and passed it to Matthew, who took the joint without a word. He knew not to ask.
