The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1998. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

Last night I was sleeping in my quiet little bed in my quiet little apartment when all of a sudden in a flash of lightening and a cloud of smoke, God came to me. He stood half a building tall and sparks shot out of his eyes when he sweated and he boomed down in a voice as scary as the day is long, "Jason, I have a plan for you."

Now I of course being the atheist that I am took this ghostly apparition with just a little bit more shock than the rest of humanity would. But I am nothing else if not adaptive so when the good Lord comes a-knocking...I answer the call.

"Jason," he boomed out in a voice that shook the very foundation of my apartment building, "I have a plan for you. You are to be my messenger. You are to be my shining white light in this dark dark planet of ours."

"Yes, my Lord," I replied in the appropriately meek and awed voice that we mortals should. "I am ready to be your messenger. And what vehicle should I use to spread your good word far and wide across this sinning corrupt planet of which we live?"

"Jason," he boomed in a voice that made dogs bark all the way to 129th street, "your path will be a perilous and challenging one. Your path will test the faith in which you place in me. For I want you to become...a professional magician. And I ain't talking one of those namby-pamby cut the rope and look it's grown back together again magicians. And I ain't talking one of those little pussy Cub Scout Blue-And-Gold Banquet pour the milk down the newspaper roll and it magically disappears Kiwani Club magicians. No, Jason, I'm talking Las Vegas magician. I'm talking Siegfried and Roy, doped-up white lion magician. I'm talking marry a supermodel, rumors about your sexuality for the rest of your life magician. I'm talking start your own theatre in Branson Missouri, open for Tony Orlando and Dawn, bit parts in Clive Barker movies magician.

"Jason, this is the path that I have chosen for you. I want you to walk among my green earth spreading the good news far and wide. I want you to wear custom-made early 80s floor-length black leather coats for me. I want you to wander across the wide deserts and climb the rugged mountains, miraculously flinging playing cards from your hands, over and over, as from thin air, grinning good-naturedly as you dazzle and amaze Burmuda-shorts-wearing tourists from New Jersey taking a break from the dollar slots at Caeser's Palace. Jason, you are my chosen one. I want you to reach out into that audience and grab that goofy yet endearing Upper Wisconsin dad, and I want you to drag him up on that stage to the squeals of delight from his prepubescent daughters. I want you to sit him down in that velvet-lined folding chair and gently poke fun at him in that way you can only do when your victim is in front of 5,000 witnesses and cannot punch you in the mouth. I want you to force that bewildered dad to give you a hard-earned twenty out of his wallet and I want you to tear it up and then pretend you've screwed up the trick to the oohs and aahs of that air-conditioned oasis in the desert, just to later produce said twenty out of the dad's underwear, to the unrestrained, orgasmic applause and adulation of your liquored-up audience, wasn't Bob such a good sport, let's give him a hand ladies and gentlemen, you can take your seat now.

"Jason, this is the path I have chosen for you. I want you to spend millions of dollars building the most elaborate and spectacular tricks ever known to man. I'm talking smoke machines and lasers and sharp pointy steel poles, giant rotating saws straight out of turn-of-the-century Westerns, traps with names like The Terminator, The Exterminator, The Roach Hotel, The Giant Fangs of Death, The Watery Grave, The Big Box of Unpleasantness. I want you to think of something that no one has made disappear yet--an elephant, a helicopter, a skyscraper, the Statue of Liberty, hell, maybe your audience itself. I want you to construct a giant curtain and then utter those words that make our hearts leap and our blood thrill while we sit in our suburban homes watching you on Saturday night on the World's Greatest Magicians part 29: "From this point in the trick forward, the camera will never cut away. You will be watching Jason's amazing feat live and unedited just as the studio audience is watching it." Jason, I have a plan for you. I want you to go out there and hire the sleaziest, the trashiest, the most white-trash porn-star dropouts you can find to be your assistants. I want you to tease their hair up to inhuman heights and dress them in outfits straight out of a Don Bruckheimer summer action movie. I want you to hire minimum-wage TV-movie cheesy neo-rave synthesizer studio musicians to compose a subversive-yet-mainstream soundtrack for your television special. And Jason, let me tell you something, Lance Burton died for your sins and what have you done for me lately, Jason, let me tell you something. I have a plan for you. I want you to become a professional magician."

And all was good and right in the world and I bowed my head serenely to the awesome majesty of our grand creator, and if I listened carefully I could hear the sweet angelic harmonies of the holy angels above and I was just about to head to the local Walgreens to get my black hair dye and begin my miraculous transformation, and then, and then, and then, I got to thinking.

I got to thinking and I realized that every single professional magician in the world looks alike, and not in that wonderful and endearing way like the Olson twins, but in a creepy, sort of evil way, like that cult that was making all those web sites and thought a comet was going to kill them, a creepy, sort of evil way, like the crowd at Hi-Tops on a Saturday night about two in the morning after a dozen Miller Genuine Drafts, a creepy, sort of evil way, like that loner in high school who always wore the Led Zeppelin three-quarters-length jerseys and read nothing but the Lord of the Rings over and over and over again, a creepy, sort of evil way. And I suddenly realized, and I pointed to the strange glowing figure outside my window and said, "You're not God. Show me your true face. I demand it right now."

And the figure suddenly transformed, his features gnarling and twisting into a hideous monstrous form, and his body turned red and his skin started boiling and soon enough I was face to face with the Dark Lord, the master of hell, St. Lucifer himself. And I said, "It was you, Beezulbub, all this time. It was you that created this insidious circle of Merry-Go-Round-wearing demons to spread your dark word" and he cackled maniacally and said, "Yes, it was me" and I said "And it was you that duped us into thinking the Masked Magician was really David Copperfield when all along it was just some unknown dork gunning for his own television special," and he flipped his snake-like hair from his forehead and said "Yes, it was me" and I said "And it was you who forged a contract with NBC to keep producing all those horrible horrible specials with that cheesy guy with the beard who pretends to do magic tricks where you touch the television screen but are really stupid little math problems we already learned in fourth grade" and Satan's eyes glowed all afire and he yelled "Yes, yes, it was me all along! And you are all the hapless victims of my best-laid plans!"

And I said, "You are pure evil incarnate, and I cast you out. I send you back to the icy bottomless pit from whence you came." And I pulled him up in my hands and I flung him, I flung him as hard and as high as I could, and he came crashing down on a bamboo prison on the fourth level of hell, and who should be in the prison but Doug Henning himself, imprisoned there since the fall of 1978, and Doug was released and he and I roamed the earth for decades in matching rainbow suspenders, slaying the black-clad slick-haired imps of the Apocalypse one by one and instructing today's youth during high-school assemblies about the magic of illusion and the illusion of magic and to say no to drugs and to stay in school and to wear a condom. And freedom and light reigned across the land and flowers grew in the cracks of our nation's highways and dogs and cats no longer fought each other and all war across the world suddenly ended. And even to this day when I'm feeling sad and blue I will walk up to a stranger on the Chicago sidewalk and I will pull a quarter out of their ear and it will remind me that sometimes magic still exists, sometimes the exceptional is commonplace, and I will silently thank my Lord for dribble cups and squirting flowers and x-ray specs and sea monkeys, forever and ever, in his name I pray, Amen.