The N fell off my sign in Reno in 1998, and I never put it back.
It was a good sign. A sofa-length slab of painted plywood, gold letters on a purple field, with little bulbs around the edge. It said THE GREAT SUGGESTION. Then a stagehand backed a forklift into it during load-out, and the last letter cracked and dropped into a puddle behind the casino.
I was thirty, with a residency, and a new N cost forty dollars I would never miss. Then the residency ended. Then the cruise ships stopped calling. Then it was county fairs, and a dinner theater in Toledo, and a long, quiet stretch of not much.
By the time I was fifty-eight, I had been The Great Suggestio for longer than I had been anything else. People assumed it was Italian. I let them.
My name is Leonard Pask. I am a stage hypnotist, which is a sentence that makes people at parties take one step back.
I have hypnotized roughly eleven thousand people. I believe about four of them were actually hypnotized. The rest were tired, or polite, or showing off for a cousin.
Stage hypnosis is mostly a group agreement to have a good time. I am the guy in the burgundy velvet jacket who makes the agreement official.
The jacket was a 38 Regular. I was no longer a 38 Regular. I wore it anyway, buttoned once, and moved carefully.
I also had a pocket watch on a chain. It had stopped at 4:17 on a Tuesday in 2009. A hypnotist's watch does not need to tell time. It just needs to swing with confidence.
And I had my snap.
Every hypnotist has a release cue. Mine was a snap of the fingers, sharp and bright, like a starter's pistol. "When you hear my snap," I would say, "you will wake up refreshed, and every suggestion will be gone." For twenty-five years, my snap was the best thing about me.
Then, around 2011, my knuckles got opinions. Now when I snapped, my thumb and middle finger slid past each other in total silence. It looked like a snap. It sounded like a man wiping crumbs off his fingers.
So I used a clicker, a little brass cricket from a novelty shop in Sparks. It was not as elegant as a snap. But it was audible, which in my business is the main thing.
My sister is Beverly Pask. She is sixty-one, three years older than me, and she has been my booking agent, stage assistant, driver, and conscience since 1991. She eats sunflower seeds out of a paper bag in every room she enters. She leaves a small trail of shells, like a woman who expects to need to find her way back.
Bev is also my first volunteer. At every show for thirty-five years, she has walked up from the audience before anyone else. It warms the crowd. Strangers think, well, if that lady can do it, so can I.
It has never once worked on her. She tells me this often.
"I have sat in that chair four thousand times," she said, the night she booked the gig. "Four thousand. Not so much as a yawn."
"You're resistant."
"I'm awake, Leonard. It's different." She spat a shell into her palm. "I got you a corporate."
I had not done a corporate since 2015. That one paid me in full to stop after ten minutes.
"Northgate Integrated Partners," Bev said. "Columbus. They're a consulting firm. They integrate things."
"What things?"
"Other things, I think. It's their annual summit, and somebody named Kevin wants entertainment for the closing dinner." She slid a printed email across the kitchen table. "Twelve hundred dollars plus mileage."
I read the email. It was from Kevin Doyle, VP of People and Culture. It was three paragraphs long, and it used the word "synergy" seven times. Once it was in bold.
"What is the summit about?" I asked.
Bev looked at me over her reading glasses.
"Leonard," she said. "Cash the check."
The Northgate Synergy Summit took place in the ballroom of the Harborview Hotel. There was no harbor. There was a parking garage and a very determined fountain.
Kevin Doyle met us at the loading door. He was thirty-one, with gelled hair and a lanyard that held nine separate badges. I never learned what all of them were for. One of them, I believe, was a badge for having the other badges.
"Leonard! The Great Suggestio!" He pumped my hand. "This is going to be so synergistic."
"Wonderful," I said.
"Our whole theme this year is synergy. Cross-team, cross-everything." He spread his arms. "We want this room to feel like one organism."
"I'll do my best," I said. I did not tell him that my best usually involved a dentist from Akron believing he was a famous opera singer.
The ballroom held about a hundred and forty people at round tables. The banner over the stage read SYNERGY SUMMIT: STRONGER TOGETHER. Someone had placed a bowl of mints on every table, and a small card that said "What does synergy mean to YOU?"
At table one, front and center, sat the leadership team.
The man in the middle was Gordon Pratt, the founder and CEO. He was sixty-four and wore a navy fleece vest with the company logo over a dress shirt and tie. The vest looked like it had been with him through several decades and two divorces. He clapped for everything, including the salad.
On his right sat a woman with a gray bob and reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She had a small solar calculator next to her bread plate. It was the old kind, with the tiny gray panel along the top. It was older than Kevin.
"Who's that?" I asked Kevin, quietly.
His smile flickered. "That's Ingrid Thorne. Our CFO."
"She brought a calculator to dinner."
"Ingrid brings a calculator everywhere." He lowered his voice. "She's never been wrong about a number. Not once in nineteen years."
Ingrid Thorne was forty-nine years old, and she was looking directly at me. She was not hostile. She was simply looking at me the way you look at an expense report from someone who has recently purchased a boat.
The show went the way my shows go.
Bev came up first, sat in the chair, and closed her eyes with the serene expression of a woman waiting for a bus. Six more volunteers followed. A guy from sales, two analysts, a woman from IT, and Gordon Pratt himself. Gordon bounded up the steps in his vest like a golden retriever.
I swung the watch. I did the voice. I counted them down.
Within four minutes, six of the seven were giggling. The guy from sales pretended to fall asleep and then actually fell asleep. Bev ate a sunflower seed with her eyes closed.
The audience laughed anyway. That is the secret. They laugh because they want the evening to be fun, and I give them permission. I thanked the volunteers and sent them back to their seats to applause.
That was when Ingrid Thorne stood up.
"I'll do it," she said.
The room went quiet. Kevin, at the side of the stage, made a noise like a kettle being taken off the heat.
"You're welcome to," I said. "May I ask why?"
"Because I audited a magician once." She sat in the chair and placed her calculator on her knee. "His books were fiction. I'm curious about yours."
The audience loved this.
"So you're volunteering," I said, for the record. I always say it for the record.
"I'm volunteering," she said. "Go ahead. Do your worst."
I had done my worst many times. This time I did my best.
I don't know what was different. Maybe it was how hard she was concentrating on proving me wrong. People who concentrate hard enough sometimes go straight through the wall they're leaning on.
Her shoulders dropped. Her breathing slowed. Her calculator slid gently off her knee, and nobody caught it.
I leaned in. I gave her the classic. Harmless, silly, the oldest bit in the book.
"Ingrid, the audience will pick a word. When you hear that word, you'll cluck like a hen. Just once. Then you'll carry on as if nothing happened."
I turned to the room. "Somebody give me a word."
There was only one person in that ballroom who could answer that fast.
"SYNERGY!" shouted Kevin.
"Synergy it is," I said. I told Ingrid so, gently. Then I said what I always say. "And when you hear my snap, you'll wake up, and every suggestion will be gone."
I reached into my jacket pocket for the brass clicker. My pocket was empty.
I looked toward Bev. Bev was at the side of the stage, patting her purse with a slowly dawning expression.
So I snapped. I snapped the way I used to snap in Reno, with everything I had. My fingers slid past each other with all the noise of a moth landing on felt.
Ingrid opened her eyes. She blinked at me. She picked up her calculator from the floor, stood, and walked back to table one without a word.
"Well," she said to Gordon, loudly enough for the front tables. "That was forty minutes I'm not getting back."
The room laughed. I bowed. Bev found the clicker twenty seconds later and held it up, apologetic. I waved it off, because nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened at all, for exactly six more minutes.
Then Kevin took the microphone for closing remarks.
"Thank you all so much," he said, "for three incredible days of synergy."
And from table one, clear as a church bell, came a full-throated, perfectly pitched, unmistakable cluck.
Up next: Table One
Continue to Part 2 →