Incandescent. Brilliant. Electric.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Conover, enjoy this excerpt from Volume 1.

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It was in the mid-1990s. We were in the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower in New York City. The occasion was a cocktail party for the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Tim and I had been hired to entertain the large group for a couple of hours. Well, I was there to entertain; Tim was there to dominate, prevail and take no prisoners. As we were setting up in a side room, Tim looked at me as I stuffed sponge balls in my pocket.

“Please tell me you’re not doing sponge balls for this group!”

“What?” I said. “They’ll love it.”

He chuckled and shook his head as he continued preparing for battle.

The typical investment bankers in the 1990s in New York enjoyed a lavish lifestyle with their high salaries and bonuses and were driven by ambition and competition. These Type A individuals were highly sophisticated and highly confident and assertive people. They could not afford the social cost of being made to look foolish or gullible. That made them a particularly difficult audience for magic.

I set off into the crowd and began performing for small groups, attempting to amuse them with some fun magic and card tricks accompanied by snarky quips and silly banter.

It was brutal.

After a while, I began to hear shouts and roaring cheers from across the expansive room. I made my way through the crowd to see Tim, arms raised above his head, hands clenched in fists, eyes closed, with a large group of people standing and sitting in a semicircle around him watching a dinner fork that was balanced on top of a wine glass on a nearby table. The people were rapt. Their attention fixed on the fork that Tim was attempting to move with the power of his mind. “Move!” he shouted with the intensity and conviction of a revival tent preacher. “Move!” We all gazed at the fork. Several of the bankers side-eyed each other with condescending smirks.

The fork wasn’t moving.

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When I first met Tim in the 1980s, what struck me was his clean-cut, unremarkable appearance. He didn’t look like a magician. He looked like an insurance salesman with his shined shoes, neat haircut and winning smile.

But when he began to work, his talent and brilliance shone through. That’s when I realized that he was extraordinary. Tim seemed to be an amalgamation of the best of the old-school sleight-of-hand men that I admired; he had the grace and skill of Albert Goshman, the timing and misdirection of Slydini, and the charm, intensity, and irrepressible energy of Del Ray. He exuded confidence in himself and competence in his craft.

He was drawn to the close-up classics: Vernon’s “Cups and Balls,” Ramsay’s “Cylinder and Coins,” Goshman’s “Salt and Pepper Shakers,” Scotty York’s “Goldfinger.” Difficult routines to execute well, but he put his own twist on each routine, and he performed them to perfection.

It was hard-hitting material, chosen for maximum impact, and Tim committed to the premise of each moment and sold it with energy and conviction. His high voice rising, his exclamations of “Yes! It’s working!” Or his little jumps of joy as he shouted, “Tremendous idea!” or “Fantastic!” raising the anticipation of the crowd and amplifying the thrill of each amazing effect. He was giving his audience an elevated experience of thrilling visual magic and mind-bending mysteries without a wink or nod to his own cleverness. It was a very workmanlike attitude. His job was to blow people’s minds and give them an experience they would never forget. So he did just that.

Every trick that Tim performed was examined thoroughly, and each addition or twist was thoughtfully considered and judiciously applied to create the most streamlined yet devastatingly deceptive version possible. He wasn’t interested in cleverness for its own sake or ego strokes from his magic buddies. Tim was laser focused on dismantling people’s minds. It was his obsession.

Whenever I had the good fortune to work with Tim, invariably I would end the evening by standing at the back of one of his enormous crowds watching in awe.

Over time, I began to see external signs of the inner workings of Tim’s incredible, obsessive mind. During the O. J. Simpson trials, he had a thick folio of the typed transcripts of the ongoing trial. In the margins of every page, there were Tim’s handwritten notes and references.

He bought a boat at one point and showed me a recent purchase of a tome on the rules and regulations of nautical navigation. It appeared to be the authoritative text for boaters. Again, all throughout the book’s margins were scribbled notes and arrows. Not just a few notes on a few pages, but the book was filled from cover to cover with Tim’s handwriting.

The same for a copy of the pop-psychology bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

Once during a corporate gig in Hawaii, Mike Caveney and I noticed Tim near the resort’s beach crouched down, working on something. “What’cha doing, Tim?”

“I’m trying to start a fire with just sticks and friction.”

“Oh, we were going to canoe out to that island. Want to join us?”

“No, I want to do this.”

Our journey and exploration of the island took several hours. Upon returning, we found Tim, frustrated and exhausted, still furiously rubbing sticks together. Who does that? Tim did that. His obsession was a mirror to his soul, a relentless pursuit of deciphering the world around him.

Everything that Tim turned his attention to was a system to be dismantled, a puzzle to be solved. Among his friends, we had a running joke that we expected Tim to show up one day and exclaim, “Guys, I figured it out! I got the alphabet down to six letters! You only need one vowel!”

Of course, I didn’t recognize it at the time, but these were glimpses into the darker side of a brilliant but troubled mind that would ultimately overwhelm and consume him.

But that is not the memory I care to hold of Tim.

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No one moved. No one dared breathe. The clean-cut man with the spit-shined shoes and the million-dollar smile was on his tiptoes, shouting at a fork, commanding it to move. Eyes shining, his body vibrating with excitement, his voice rising, “It’s moving!” Now, jumping up and down with glee, “Look!”

Is it moving? Or is the tower swaying? Or is it the power of suggestion at work? Has this modern-day huckster in his Brooks Brothers suit convinced us that something is happening when it’s not?

No, look, the fork slowly turns on top of the wineglass… “We did it! We did it!” he shouts.

The fork slowly revolves and finally falls to the table top with a loud “clunk” that seems to echo through the hushed room. The crowd erupts into an explosive ovation in approval. The air itself seems charged with electricity as the cheers reverberate, the crowd united in their astonishment. Tim won them over, turning jaded skeptics into fawning fans.

Those days are gone. The towers are gone. Tim is gone.

But this is how I choose to remember him: during a decade of rising optimism, high above the twinkling lights of Manhattan, standing triumphant in the center of that jubilant, adoring crowd.

Incandescent. Brilliant. Electric.

— David Williamson