Read Crush for Free Online

crawl. Every time he demonstrated the Magnetic Match Trick, he could barely stop from retching. Every time he did the Coin Optical Illusion, he felt himself die a little inside.
    Was this all there was?
    The Amazing Life Disappearing Trick. Abracadabra.
    He considered forming a group, Magicians Anonymous, to help others who shared his affliction. “My name’s Bob,” he would declare to the gathered sufferers, “and I’m a magician.” But he couldn’t get anyone to join. He couldn’t even get anyone to see what a soul-devouring addiction magic was. Everyone he knew was a magician, and they seemed to like, if not love, that life-wasting disease. They told him to take some time off. With a little break, they told him, he’d get back in touch with what he loved about magic.
    That was the last thing Bob wanted.
    So, like an alcoholic whose friends are all drinkers, Bob found himself alone. What’s more, the bitter irony of his situation was that magic was his only vocation. The only trade he knew. And he made if not a goodliving at it, at least a living. It paid the rent. It put food on his table. If he saved up enough, he could even take a girl out once or twice a month. If he ever met one.
    So that was Bob Steinkellner’s dilemma: He’d become the magician who hated magic. He cursed under his breath every time he put on his black tights and got ready to perform the Escape from the Straight Jacket Trick. How could he escape from this?
    That’s when Stanley Trask came into his life.
    Bob’s Aha Moment came, oddly enough, when he read about Trask’s Aha Moment in an old issue of O Magazine , while waiting in a dentists’ office for an appointment he could ill afford. The Aha Moment—the column in which wildly successful, incredibly self-important people talk about the point in their lives wherntheir path diverged from the ordinary (read, your path) and ascended to the extraordinary (read: Oprah’s path). Stanley Trask’s Aha Moment was refreshingly free of humility and self-deprecation. He just related the time he realized that people wanted to be in touch with each other all the time. It was 1986, and Stanley was on the Amtrak from Washington to New York—he was already rich, he confessed, but not superrich. He noticed someone three rows ahead pulling out one of those Motorola brick phones from his briefcase and placing a call—or rather, trying to place a call, since, from the way he was shouting into the mouthpiece, he wasn’t getting much reception. “Can you hear me now?” he was asking. “Can you hear me?” From tinyacorns, mighty oaks grow.
    Now, Trask was not an inventor. Or an idea man. What he did was invest in other people’s new technologies and leverage them in such a way that the potential positive or negative outcomes were enhanced. In other words (and not the words he used in his Aha Moment), Stanley Trask was a thief.
    He got in on the ground floor when the first GSM network opened in Finland and rode the 2G-phone wave as it literally took over the world. Mobile phones went from bulky car phones to sleek handheld devices. Suddenly, they were necessities—people were incomplete without them. Stanley Trask (and a few others) ruled the world.
    Bob Steinkellner wanted in.
    He got all his money, and his mother’s money, and even some of his dad’s money together and opened his very own branch of the Stanley Trask empire in South Pasadena. After much research, consisting (he was to discover afterward) of reading mostly self-serving puff pieces written by Trask’s employees and posted on various websites beholding to Trask, he took the plunge and purchased a franchise outlet, selling the newest of Trask’s contributions to twenty-first-century telecommunications. Just off the 110 on Fair Oaks Avenue, Steinkellner’s store wasn’t much, but it was a start. He was one of the lucky few (he