The Luna Park Gazette

They don't get lightning storms in L.A. That's what my Uncle Joe told me the other night when he called me from L.A....during a lightning storm. He had called to see how we were doing and while I love talking with the guy I was wincing every time another lightning bolt cracked through the sky. We've been having a streak of thunder storms in the northeast lately, big, massive affairs that sound and feel like artillery attacks going on in the clouds. The kind of storms where it's not a good idea to talk on the phone. "We don't get storms like that out here," he said, as I held the phone three feet from my head. "I miss them." I found it hard to believe that L.A., the land of extremes, didn't have thunderstorms, not with the brushfires, mudslides, endless rainstorms, and Charles Manson. But then we don't get earthquakes in Brooklyn, so I guess it all evens out. There was a guy on our block who got hit by lightning as he spoke on the telephon...

Well, it's been a hell of day. My father is in the hospital right now, having suffered what the doctors fear is a stroke. When my sister and I left him, he was being difficult and annoying, which is pretty much par for the course with my father. But he needs to be watched and tested over the next few days. It started yesterday when I got a call from the nurse at the senior center where my father goes twice a week. He had fallen down and while the nurse couldn't find any sign of injury, she was concerned and wanted to speak with my dad's doctor. It got worse when my dad's aid, Mary, called me at work to say my father was home and insisting she call his old company in Albany, NY. Even though he's long since retired and the company went out of business about 30 years ago. I had noticed some unusual behavior the other night, when my father got up at around midnight to tell me something about "two guys breaking out of jail." I told him to go back to bed. At Mar...

"I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead..." --Mickey Spillane My watch stopped the other day. I’m getting strange phone calls. The whole world is going to hell faster than a greased pig on a water slide and now I find out Mickey Spillane is dead. My gut tells me there's more to this than meets the eye. Tuesday started off like any typical day. I got up and went to work. At lunchtime, I had...lunch. And when I got to my office that's when I saw it. The LCD readout on my watch had disappeared. I tried to recall when was the last time I actually looked at my watch, what time was it when I last checked the time? I had gotten this watch on Canal Street years ago for about 10 bucks and I used to call it the watch that wouldn't die because no matter what I did, the thing kept on ticking away, so to speak. And yet now here was, dead as Kelsey's nuts, as my father used to say. I don't...

I broke a promise to myself the other day when I bought some used books from this guy on 73rd Street. He's a big, husky black man and he sets his table outside the Chase bank branch on Broadway, a block or so away from my shrink's office. I always tell myself, no more books, you have piles of them you still haven't read yet. But then I'll see a novel I've been looking for, or I'll read the jacket copy, and, think, gee, it sounds pretty good, and it's only a couple of bucks... So that's what happened again on Thursday, when I picked up a copy of House of Sand and Fog and some English novel that won the Booker Prize in 1988. As I handed over my money, the proprietor of the sidewalk business nodded to me. "Thank you for the goodness," he said. It's a good line and it comes to mind today, the fourth anniversary of my mother's death. Her mass card says she "Entered in Eternal Life" today and I surely do like the sound of that. I us...

Four strangers get on an elevator in a downtown building: the Asian woman, the tall man with glasses, the beefy middle-aged office guy, and me. We each press the buttons for our respective floors: 9, 11, 12, 15, and then fall silent staring straight ahead. It is eerie, no office chatter, no discussions of weekend plans, just four strangers in an elevator, 9, 11, 12, 15. We look at the mini-TV screen in our elevator, which reels off news headlines, weather reports, and of course, advertisements. God forbid we spend the few seconds on an elevator not watching television, not being hit with more commercials. The company that makes the elevator TV's is called Captivate, which is scarily appropriate. The only way you can avoid looking at the thing is to turn and face the wall. I actually applied for a job there, back when I was a "consultant" at Goldman Sachs. "Consultant" was corporate speak for "temp" and while it looks great on a resume, the truth was al...

Poor old Uncle B.J. I never met him; I didn't know he existed until last week, but I'm sure going to miss him. I learned about B.J. from an e-mail I received recently that read "Private and Urgent Message to You: Rob Lenihan" in the subject line. It was from the desk of Barrister Ambi Peters, Esq., in Togo, telling me that his client, one B.J. Lenihan, "a national of your country," died on Oct. 31, 2003 along with his wife and two children "in a ghastly Motor accident." Mr. Peters said that after trying to track down B.J.'s family through several embassies, he took his search to the Internet and came up empty. And that's where I come in. "I have contacted you to assist me in repatriating the money left behind by my client before they get confiscated by the Bank where this huge deposits were lodged," the barrister wrote. It seems Uncle B.J. has $10.5 million in the bank and Mr. Peters wants to present me as the next of kin so the p...

Flash Gordon could always whip Ming the Merciless, but around my house he was no match for LBJ. I was a kid in grade school when President Lyndon Baines Johnson came to Bay Ridge. We don't get too many U.S. presidents around this way, so it was a pretty big deal, I suppose, but back then all I wanted to do was watch Flash Gordon on the afternoon kid's show. Flash Gordon was an old movie serial, made in the 30's, so they were ancient even back when I was a kid. My parents watched Flash in the theater when they were kids. I guess the local TV stations got the rights to these creaky old chestnuts for a song and threw them on the air for adventure hungry kids like me to enjoy. Station Identification Looking back, I realize Flash Gordon had pathetic scripts, abysmal acting, and the crappiest special effects on this or any other planet. But back then none of that matter to me. I loved every minute of those silly things. So this one day I came home from school, sat down in fron...

Okay, I have a right to ask. What's going on here? I got stood up the other week, which sucks all on its own, but it seems to be happening to me a lot lately. And that really blows. I met them all through interracial dating sites that brings black women and white men together. I can give all sort of reasons as to why I got onto this site, but I'll get right to the point: I like black women. Maybe it's from growing up in a white bread neighborhood like Bay Ridge (or the way it used to be), but I do have a thing for the sisters. I wrote about the first one back in April, when I was ill and this young lady scrubbed the date at the last second. I had to go out on a rainy night with a heavy cold and I didn't get the call until I reached downtown Brooklyn, but that was just fine with me. I did an about-face and went the hell home. The second one was Shirley, which is not her real name, of course, but I'm not giving her any publicity. Also, she's a lawyer and might sue...