Tag Archive for: Langley Powell

Here’s the first chapter of Humorist Books’ latest release, Langley Powell and the Society for the Defense of the Mundane by Jeff Giles. It’s out now, for after you read this and want to consume the next 270-odd pages.

“Death”

Death, thought Langley Powell, might be the most mundane thing on Earth.

To most people, “mundane” might seem like something of an insult, particularly in this context. After all, what kind of person could possibly contemplate the end of life and call it ordinary? Unless you’re a complete wacko, death is something to be feared and avoided, or at least staved off as long as possible. Deeming it mundane would seem to indicate a lack of respect for the sanctity of life.

Needless to say, Langley Powell was not like most people.

Not that he meant “mundane” in a negative way. Not at all — in fact, as any of the millions of people who’d attended his seminars, purchased his books, or watched his television appearances could tell you, for Langley Powell, mundanity should be held in the highest regard. When questioned, he was fond of reaching into his satchel and removing a pocket edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, letting it fall open to a page that had been consulted so many times it no longer even needed a bookmark. “Here,” he’d say, pointing to the word. “Mundane. Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one.”

Of course, as the other person involved in these conversations invariably pointed out — and as you yourself might be noticing if you’ve opened your own New Oxford American Dictionary to see the definition of “mundane” for yourself — Langley Powell’s preferred meaning of the word is listed second after the first and most commonly accepted, which is “lacking interest or excitement; dull.” To anyone unfamiliar with Langley’s finely honed stage patter, this always sounded like a solid retort, but they quickly discovered that the whole thing was really just a carefully constructed opening for him to step through, explaining to an invariably enraptured audience that “earthly” and “dull” had only grown connected in the human imagination after centuries of slander by charlatans and scoundrels.

“To twist a phrase I loaned the great singer-songwriter Paul Simon, Earth is a place of miracles and wonder,” Langley would say at his seminars, pausing for a moment to soak in the applause that always greeted the photo of the two onstage during their joint appearance on Saturday Night Live. “What could be more wonderful than a resplendent sunrise to greet the day? What could be more majestic than one of our planet’s many natural monuments? What could be more soothing than the sound of the ocean? I could go on, but I’m sure you see my point: ‘Mundane’ is the furthest thing from dull. Our earthly surroundings are awe-inspiring — and they deserve to be defended from those who seek to distract us and enrich themselves with ideas of fantastical phenomena and unseen spiritual planes. The next time you see a person who claims to be able to tell fortunes, contact the dead, move objects with his mind, or anything else that flies in the face of established science, I implore you: think of the mundane. Remember, it’s all we have… and it’s so much more than enough.”

After delivering that last line to thunderous applause, Langley would bow with a carefully practiced flourish and leave the stage, often heading directly to the airport to catch a flight to his next speaking engagement — and always thousands of dollars richer, an irony that seemed more or less completely lost to the attendees who’d paid handsome sums to hear Langley urging them not to give psychics and seers their money.

Not that Langley’s intentions were anything less than pure. The truth was that despite the fact that he delivered essentially the same performance every time he took the stage, and had rehearsed every moment of it so thoroughly that he could have gotten through a show without giving it much conscious thought at all, he really believed everything he told his audiences. Langley was genuinely convinced that people all over the world had long been lulled into a false belief that not only were there aspects of human existence beyond our understanding, but that they were often somehow preferable to observable reality itself. He saw himself as a general on the battlefield in the war against logic, and although he’d developed a keen sense of showmanship over the years, he took his self-appointed responsibility seriously.

To those who knew and frequently rolled their eyes at Langley, taking things seriously was something he excelled at to an exhausting degree. An only child, Langley had perplexed his parents in a variety of ways, none more so than the near-total lack of a sense of humor he’d grown into during his late childhood. His mother was a teacher and his father worked as a lineman for the telephone company — both solid, largely unexceptional careers that many would view as the less flattering variety of mundane, but well-paying enough to afford the Powells a comfortable suburban existence. A yard, a dog, a television in the living room — young Langley had all the perks of middle-class living in postwar America, and as a small child, he’d seemed to enjoy them all, adding to the robust soundtrack of the Powell household with all the cacophonous laughter, imaginary battle sounds, and slamming of screen doors that have gone along with young boys for generations.

In other words, by virtually any definition, young Langley Powell’s life was good, and the stage was set for him to grow into a man every bit as lighthearted and gregarious as his parents. He might very well have become that man, too — if not for the thrilling exploits and humiliating fall of Neville Pemberton.

He’s barely a cultural footnote to the audiences of today, but when Langley was a boy, Neville Pemberton was a major star of stage and screen — and whether he was wowing crowds at Radio City Music Hall or reducing Johnny Carson to astonished guffaws, there seemed to be no act of wonder too great for him to perform. Could he read minds? Absolutely. Bend spoons and move objects with the power of his mind? Just watch him. Card tricks and other acts of prestidigitation beyond compare? Child’s play. For decades, he was the world’s premier paranormalist, and despite the efforts of countless would-be debunkers, no one had ever managed to find a rational explanation for Pemberton’s amazing abilities.

For the kids of young Langley’s generation, there wasn’t anything quite as exciting as a Neville Pemberton appearance. His guest spots on talk shows were not to be missed, his television specials were always cafeteria conversation fodder the following day, and if you were lucky enough to have parents who were willing or able to score the family tickets for a live show, well, you were a legend of the playground. The youth of America were enraptured by Pemberton, and Langley Powell was no exception: From the posable Pemberton action figure to the lunchbox and thermos set emblazoned with his name, face, and colorful logo, from the Pemberton magic set to a lifetime membership in Pemberton’s Association of the Inexplicable, he had it all.

So ardent was Langley’s hero worship that when Pemberton was challenged to a test of his powers on live television, it scarcely even occurred to him that the outcome would be anything but yet another humiliating defeat for the latest non-believer. So certain was Langley in his idol’s abilities that he agreed to wager every penny he’d stored up in his piggy bank against Orson Mead, a third-grade classmate whose scornful dismissal of Pemberton’s might had been a source of irritation all school year. And when, on the fateful night Neville Pemberton confidently strolled out before a live studio audience and faced his challenger, only to stutter in red-faced astonishment as he failed test after test, Langley resolutely believed it would all be explained as a terrible mistake of some sort, or the result of underhanded behind-the-scenes trickery. Standing lone and defiant before his peers, he insisted the mighty Pemberton had been framed.

It was not to be. The following day, Pemberton faced a throng of reporters at a press conference and admitted that the jig was up — all of his amazing feats had been carefully orchestrated tricks, and while he would never reveal how he’d done it, his career as a full-time source of wonder was officially over. As Neville Pemberton stepped away from the podium and out of the public eye, Langley’s shock and horror quickly curdled into a deep-seated disillusionment that would permanently alter the course of his life. He handed his money over to the hated Orson, mutely accepting the mockery that would become his birthright for the rest of his youth and adolescence. Never again simply Langley, he would always be greeted with snorts of “hey, Merlin” or “well, if it isn’t the wizard.” He stopped wearing hats after being asked for the hundredth time if he had a rabbit hidden in them. He couldn’t so much as pick up a pencil without some idiot screaming “alakazam!” and triggering uproarious laughter from the rest of the class. In high school, other boys joked that they needed to keep their girlfriends away from Langley lest he attempt to saw them in half.

The great irony here, not that any of his doltish classmates ever bothered to notice, was that after Neville Pemberton’s disgrace, Langley lost all interest in magic and the supernatural. In fact, the more he was taunted, the more he hated anything to do with any of it — and by the time he collected his high school diploma, he’d long since vowed to leave town, reinvent himself at a college several states away, and never lay eyes on one of his youthful tormentors ever again. In a critical thinking class the following fall, Langley’s heart was struck like a bell by the professor’s opening lecture; listening to the man’s impassioned defense of reason, he knew immediately which path he was destined to follow. He nearly wept.

Like so many college freshmen, Langley quickly learned firsthand how satisfying it can be to find yourself in a different place among different people, and in many ways, he flourished — freed from the burden of his misguided faith in a laughingstock, he made friends, joined clubs, and quickly rose to the top of his class. He even started wearing hats again. But whenever he returned home for a holiday or school break, it was as if he’d never left — Orson Mead, by now a college dropout who worked nights at the local bottling plant and lived in a one-room apartment over a laundromat, still hurled the same old insults at Langley whenever they crossed paths. Eventually, much to his parents’ confusion and chagrin, he more or less stopped coming home at all.

But while Langley’s relationship with his parents was strained during his college years, things improved after he entered the professional world and started building a career for himself as a professional debunker. His business grew slowly at first, with his first couple years of clients coming from aggravated relatives of people who’d been fleeced by overpriced psychics or alleged spiritual mediums who’d made off with great chunks of their marks’ savings, but he soon developed a reputation as someone who could quickly and persuasively undermine and expose his targets; before long, he was making talk show appearances of his own, trading barbs with indignant clairvoyants and eclipsing their celebrity, one television spot at a time. By the time he was 30, Langley could afford to fly his parents wherever he wanted to meet them rather than enduring another return visit to his hometown; by the time he was 40, he was able to purchase a Brooklyn brownstone, remodeling it into a duplex he shared with them. He’d grown into a doting son, albeit one who was also definitely something of a party pooper.

By the time Langley’s parents passed away, they’d been able to watch him ascend to full-blown celebrity status, embarking on a series of sold-out seminars while continuing to maintain regular appearances on late-night talk shows. He was the subject of a documentary, Langley Powell and the Defense of the Mundane, that broke box office records when it was picked up by a studio after screening at Sundance; when Langley’s publicist talked him into launching his own website, the members of his robust online forum christened themselves the Society for the Defense of the Mundane. Decades after Neville Pemberton had ceased to be anything more than a faint memory for most of the public, the young boy who’d been humiliated by Pemberton’s debunking had grown up to be the world’s foremost debunker, exposing countless frauds along the way.

All of which is to say that on the last afternoon of Langley Powell’s life, as he was strolling down his street, tossing a grapefruit gently up and down in one hand while listening to his latest podcast appearance on the walk back to his brownstone from the corner bodega, he was in a pretty good mood. It was a beautiful day, he’d just signed a lucrative new book deal, and he was right then having a piano hoisted up to the fifth floor, where he envisioned spending countless hours playing. Perhaps Paul Simon might stop by. And all of that is to explain why Langley, lost in his sunny afternoon reverie, didn’t hear the cries of “Oops!” and “Look out!” until it was too late.

Langley only had the briefest of instants to look up and realize what was about to happen to him — just enough time for the events we’ve just recounted here to flash before his eyes and to finally conclude that yes, death really might be the most mundane thing on Earth. With the exception of his years of torment at the hands of Orson Mead, who now rented shoes at the local bowling alley and worked part-time as an assistant to the high school wrestling coach, Langley had enjoyed a remarkably fortunate life, which is perhaps why he observed his impending demise with a surprising degree of bemused detachment. So this was the end. He’d had a good run. Also, the underside of a piano was surprisingly aesthetically pleasing from this angle. Who could complain?

And then, just as he closed his eyes, braced himself for the moment of impact, and prepared to say goodbye to existence forever, Langley heard the sound and felt the great relief of the largest flatulence he’d ever experienced. He’d never done anything so uncouth in public, but he couldn’t stop himself — the feeling was as blissful as anything he could remember. It seemed to go on forever — so long, in fact, that he wondered how he hadn’t already been crushed by the piano.

Feeling simultaneously lighter and immensely appalled, he opened his eyes to see his new piano shattered to pieces on the sidewalk, with some unfortunate person’s legs poking out from underneath the wreckage. A crowd had gathered, murmuring things like “So tragic” and “Unbelievable” and “What a stupid way to go.” Sirens blared from several blocks away. Looking around in stunned disbelief, Langley tried to piece together what could have happened. Had the person under the piano pushed him out of the way? Had he experienced some sort of strange vertigo and only thought he was in its path? And why was the corpse wearing his shoes?

Langley gingerly stepped closer to the gathering crowd, peering over the shoulder of a man filming the scene with his phone. Yes, those were definitely his shoes. And also his pants. And that was definitely — plop! — his grapefruit rolling into the gutter. “Excuse me,” he said to the man, determined to get closer. “I live here. That was my piano.”

The man didn’t move. Didn’t stop filming. Didn’t acknowledge Langley at all.

“Excuse me!” Langley repeated himself, louder this time. “I live here! That was my piano! Would you kindly step aside?” Once again, the man failed to register Langley’s presence. Outraged, Langley reached out to tap him on the shoulder — and watched in astonishment as his finger, followed by his entire hand up to the wrist, passed straight through the man without making any impact at all. It felt warm and moist, somehow simultaneously comforting and repulsive. Langley instinctively jerked his arm back and stared at it, gawping in horrified amazement.

Langley Powell had dedicated his entire adult life to honoring the observable, the provable, the known. He had urged millions of people to use their good senses to observe the world around them, draw rational conclusions, and reject the rest. By his own standards, there was only one possible deduction he could possibly make: Langley Powell had died and become a ghost.

He was, in a word, annoyed.