Paper

Like a goateed Gen-X Zelig, David Blaine started shuffling through downtown's demimonde a few years ago, wowing celebrities and socialites with his unique brand of raw magic. Stars like Madonna (whom he reportedly dated), Robert De Niro, Spike Lee and Mike Tyson embraced Blaine's deft trickery with open arms at hot spots like B Bar and Spy. Blaine soon began tearing up the town with actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Lukas Haas. The press documented the group's after-hours high jinks -- which were compared to a posse of bad boys gone wacko -- with feverish delight. "I don't even want to mention him [DiCaprio] and that whole scene," Blaine says in retrospect, rubbing his shaved head. "I have nothing to do with that anymore. It's all a bunch of nonsense."

David Blaine Magic Man, Blaine's second one-hour television special for ABC, takes the illusionist all over the globe. In Manhattan, he gives supermodel Bridget Hall the heebie jeebies by tugging a piece of string out of his skin. Near Memphis, a shirtless kid is dumbfounded when Blaine manages to have the card he chose (the four of hearts) inked on the boy's chest. Blaine joins a voodoo ceremony in Haiti and infiltrates an isolated tribe of near-naked natives in the South American rain forest. In one scene, he yanks off a chicken's head on Delancey Street, prompting a group of kids to run away screeching bloody murder. It's no surprise that he has to plead to a Haitian man, "I'm an entertainer, not black magic."

Creating illusions is something David Blaine does offstage, too. "I always change stories," he confesses. "It's so boring to hear the same story over and over." He says he's had five different aliases (Blaine is his middle name) and that he never has a telephone land line or permanent address. "A friend of mine, who is a really good private investigator, tried to track down some info on me," he says proudly. "He couldn't find anything -- not even a birth certificate. It was 'file not found.'"

So it's easy to understand why I'm a tad skeptical when I ask him to describe his childhood. "I was born in Brooklyn," he claims. "I moved to New Jersey when I was 11 and then back to New York alone when I was 16. I lived first in Harlem, then in Hell's Kitchen, then the Sherry Netherland, then Gramercy Park." For now, Blaine is shacking up with a friend in a swank duplex off Fifth Avenue in midtown. "Three weeks out of every month I'm traveling. All my stuff is in my suitcase," he says. His infamous coffin bed ("I got it at J&R Casket in Brooklyn"), which he "doesn't really sleep in anymore," lies to the side of a huge-screen TV.

Blaine says he started to practice magic tricks as a shy 4-year-old living with a single mother. "I had a mother who liked me, but she was always working," he says. "I was pretty much independent." Blaine's mother died recently, and he is not in touch with his birth father. He does have a 14-year-old half brother whom he sees as much as possible. "We went to Disney World's Animal Kingdom with DiCaprio before it was open to the public," he mentions, breaking his previous vow. "We got back door entrance on all the rides. But my brother was completely unimpressed."

The script for Trick Monkey, Blaine's autobiographical film, is in its second draft, but the 24-year-old wunderkind says he has "no interest" in playing himself in a movie. He's starting to get recognized more but seems nervous about raising his profile to DiCaprio proportions. "I'll be walking down the street and some big, oversize man will start running toward me screaming, 'Hey David, can you levitate for me?' My first instinct is that I'm going to get my fucking head split open. It's scary." When his breakup with rock star Fiona Apple is brought up, Blaine says that having a relationship in the public eye is near impossible. "I don't think that anybody can do that successfully," he reasons. "No way. It's sad but true." As we stroll down 54th Street late one cold night, Blaine mentions that he's shooting a film with his best friend, Harmful (aka Gummo director Harmony Korine). "We're doing a project right now where Harmony runs around and starts fights with people. He provokes them until they snap and they beat the shit out of him and I film it. It's crazy." I turn around to ask a question, but -- poof! -- Blaine's gone. I look up to see if maybe he's hovering above a lamppost. I check under cars, in doorways. Blaine is nowhere to be found. The pay phone nearby suddenly rings. I pick up. "Hey Peter, it's David," a recorded voice announces. "I'm sorry. Something came up and I had to disappear."