Bruce Cameron

The Great Hoodwinki

When I was 13 years old, I was a professional escape artist known as “The Great Hoodwinki,” except that no one actually knew me as that and I wasn’t professional.

I thought that people would admire the clever play on words, since “Hoodwink” means “to fool” and “the Great Hoodwinki” would remind the same people of “the Great Houdini,” though who these “people” were supposed to be I had never really defined. Probably the local news anchor, a woman I had such a crush on that when her show came on the television, I couldn’t bear to watch.

News Anchor: You’re the Great Hoodwinki? That reminds me of the Great Houdini, only more clever!

Me: “Hoodwink” means “to fool.”

News Anchor: Will you marry me?

Me: Well, I’m only in eighth grade, but sure.

I would burst in on my father, standing between him and his baseball game. “I,” I would thunder, “am The Great Hoodwinki, Escape Artist to the Stars!”

“I,” my father would reply, “will pay you a quarter to go away.”

In my opinion “going away” and “escaping” were not the same, entertainment-wise, but collecting a quarter did make me a paid professional, so I took the money.

It’s frustrating being an escape artist who has never actually escaped from anything, but I didn’t see that as my fault, but rather as an intimidating attribute: People fear the unknown.

“Put me in a straitjacket. Tie me up in a gunnysack. Suspend me from a crane! I, the Great Hoodwinki, will escape from them all,” I challenged my fourth-grade sister and her friends, feeling fairly confident we didn’t own any of those items.

The girls were unhappy that I was interrupting their game, which involved a teddy bear named Baby Henry getting married to a stuffed rabbit named Pinky Cuddles in a wedding that had been going on since second grade.

They wanted me to leave them alone, but they couldn’t come up with the 25 cents my father had established as the market price for that particular service, so I continued to pester them until they agreed to tie me up with some old rope that I’d come across that no one was using for anything.

(Later, my mother went to hang laundry and announced her intention to prosecute the person who took down her clothesline, giving The Great Hoodwinki something else to escape from.)

Once they got into it, my sister and her friends really enjoyed encircling my arms and legs with the thin grey rope. But I just grinned at them, because I was flexing my muscles Houdini-fashion, and when I relaxed, the resulting slack would make it easy to unravel their pathetic little knots. The only problem was that Houdini had muscles to flex, whereas I had only stringy sinew barely thicker than the ropes binding my limbs.

The girls stuck me in a closet and closed the door, which was fine by me because I didn’t want anyone witnessing my amazing escape techniques that I would employ as soon as I thought of them. When I struggled free of my bonds and burst from the closet, my family would cheer, Baby Henry would call off his wedding, and the news anchor would pick me up in her Channel 4 news van after school so that everyone in eighth grade would know she was my girlfriend.

I had plenty of time to indulge in these and other fantasies, because, as it turned out, little girls are actually pretty good at tying boys up in knots. In fact, I had so much time for contemplation I finally came to the realization that to be an escape artist required something more than the coolest name ever — something like skill, maybe, or practice.

I was pretty disappointed to realize this, as it had deep implications for my life. To join the Beatles, for example, I would have to do more than master the words to “Hey, Jude.” To be a movie star, I probably needed more than a list of people to thank in my Oscar speech.

All that lay in the future, though — for now, I just had to figure out how to escape from the closet.

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