The Luna Park Gazette

There’s a scene in Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol , one my favorite holiday movies, where Magoo, portraying Ebenezer Scrooge, sings as he greedily counts his coins. “Ringle, Ringle, coins when they jingle,” he goes, while Bob Crachit freezes his tuchas off in the next room, “make such a lovely sound.” I’ve recently embarked on a mission to clean up all loose change in my house and I have to say that the sound of all that jingling hasn’t been lovely at all. There are pennies all over the place. They’re in plastic soup containers, glass jars, any kind of canister that can possibly hold pennies…holds pennies. Part of the problem stems from the dark days of coinage, when banks refused to take your change unless you put it all in those awful paper wrappers. Nobody wanted to sit down for hours at a time, counting the pennies, then losing count and having to start all over again. So the pennies piled higher and deeper. I think that’s why pirates buried their treasure. I can't see Long John ...

It’s seems sadly fitting that I learned on the same day that Editor & Publisher was folding and Tom Flannery had died. Tom was a reporter at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa., my first daily newspaper job. E&P is—soon to be “was”—the trade magazine for the newspaper industry, which at the time was being printed at a plant in nearby East Stroudsburg. I subscribed to E&P for years and I even worked there briefly in the late 90s before going to work for CNNfn.com. Like a lot reporters, I always went straight to the want ads when the latest issue of E&P arrived because, like a lot of reporters, I hated my current job with a passion and I had to get the hell out before I went berserk. I did get around to reading the articles, but the job listings always came first. E&P was my lifeline to the outside world and each issue offered some hope that maybe this week I’d find my dream job. You had to read the ads carefully, though, because sometimes you’d spot a great job, ...

I ran into Anthony, my mother’s former hairdresser, on Thanksgiving Eve and greeted him with the old standby “how’s business?” And he told me. “I sold the building,” he said. “I’m retiring.” I couldn’t believe it. Another familiar place disappearing? Anthony has been running the beauty salon on Fifth Avenue for as long as I can remember. He can’t just close up shop. Anthony said he’s not leaving Brooklyn. I thought he might head off to someplace like Florida, but he dismissed that idea. “Maybe I’ll go to Key West for a couple of weeks,” he said, “but I don’t want to boil down there—especially in the summer.” Anthony was one of the few people who actually loved his job. “I couldn’t wait to get to work,” he said. “It was never really work for me.” Not too many people in this world can make that claim. One of my earliest memories of Anthony was coming home with my brother from grocery shopping when we were kids. We had gotten caught in a terrible downpour that soaked...

We pulled into the funeral home parking lot just after 8 pm, found a spot, and waited for the cops to show up. It was June 1988. I had just started working as a reporter for the Pocono Record , moving to Pennsylvania from Brooklyn a month earlier, and on this night I was handling the police beat. Frances Cox, one of our photographers, was sitting next to me in the passenger seat and we were waiting to get a picture of a man named Jerry Burgos, a New York transplant like myself, who was inside the attending his wife’s viewing. Nilsa Burgos had been discovered in the couple’s burning home a few days earlier. Her death had been ruled a homicide after an autopsy found no trace of smoke in lungs, meaning she was dead before the fire started. She was seven months pregnant. The paper had been running stories about the killing for days and then one of the reporters had gotten a tip that the state police would pick up Burgos at the funeral home and charge him with his wife’s murder. Fr...

A decade ago, while working as a reporter in Connecticut, I was driving through some small town on my way to some forgettable assignment and listening to the news on the radio. The Yankees had won the World Series and New York was going to give them a ticker tape parade that very afternoon. I’m not much of a sports fan, and I usually root for the Mets when it comes to baseball, but it just killed me to be sputtering around the back roads of East Deer Tick when my hometown was throwing such a huge bash. "What am I doing here?" I whined within my old Toyota. "I should be back there ." Well, today, I got a second chance to see the Yankees parade down the Canyon of Heroes. And it was certainly worth the wait. My office is on Broadway, overlooking the parade route and, after a little hustling, I got to see a good portion of the show without facing the cold or the crowd. And the crowd was unbelievable. I know it’s New York, the Big Apple, and, yes, Toto, I know I’m not in...

There once was a time when I looked forward to the sign of peace. That’s the part of the mass where you shake hands with everybody around you. It's kind of like a spiritual version of the seventh inning stretch. We started doing the sign of peace in the Catholic Church when I was in grammar school and I remember how one of my classmates once grabbed another kid’s hand during mass and said “hey, how’s the wife and kids?” Fortunately for him, none of the brothers caught him in the act for they would have no doubt sent him to meet his maker right there in church. It’s a much shorter trip. I’ve been attending services at Trinity Church for a few years now and I’ve gotten to enjoy this little hand-to-hand routine. I greet my regular buddies and new arrivals and next to the sermon, it is—or was —my favorite part of the mass. But that was before the H1N1 virus and all its attendant hysteria came to town. Now my church has a hand-sanitizing android stationed in the vestibule ready to spew ...

I finally found peace this week. No, not serenity, calm, stillness or tranquility—don’t be ridiculous. I’m still as neurotic as ever. I’m talking about a novel called Peace by Richard Bausch, a gift from my brother which I thought I had lost somewhere between my house and the New York City subway system. I had just made up my mind to read that particular book after looking through the stacks of paperbacks around here. I brought it to work, kept it in a brown plastic bag to protect the cover, but when I got home that night and looked in my bag, I found that I had been seperated from Peace . I looked all over my house, peeked into the garbage can, I even checked out the re-freaking-frigerator--nothing. I tried the Zen thing of letting go and the book apparently returned the favor because I couldn't find it anywhere. At breakfast the next morning I because convinced— convinced —that I had tossed the book in the trash can. Seconds later I heard the garbage truck pulling up in front of...

I was doing my evening shopping the other night when I heard a familiar song on the radio. I had trouble making out the tune because of the noise around me, but I knew I’d heard this song before. As I put my groceries down in front of the cashier, I listened carefully and tried to figure out the words. It was from the eighties, one of my favorite decades for music. And I could tell it was a woman singing. Then there was a sudden gust of silence around me and I was able to name that tune. It was “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna. Okay, well, if you just ring me up, I'll be on my way. Please, for the love of God, ring me up. As soon I got my change, I bid farewell to the Material Girl and bounced down to the corner drug store for some additional shopping. At first I wasn’t paying too much attention to the piped-in music, but as I roamed the aisles in a futile search for whatever the hell it was that I wanted, I started to listen to the song pouring out of the sound system—and wished I h...

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Matthew 5:44 For the last few days I’ve been trying to remember where I was standing on 9/11 when the planes hit the World Trade Center. I pass by Ground Zero every day on my way to work and as the anniversary drew closer, I'd walk by the Brooks Brothers store on Church Street and see if I could find my exact location on that most hideous day. I had to imagine that the towers were still there and try and recall if I was closer to Church Street or Liberty Street when I watched smoke pour out the North Tower and when the South Tower exploded into flames as the second plane hit the building. I had just come from my gym near City Hall and was on my way to my office, which back then was at Liberty Plaza—right across the street from the Trade Center. That was my father's 80th birthday; my mother was at Lutheran M...

We never go out after dark. Whenever I visit my girlfriend in the Bronx, I always plan on staying in. It's a simple set-up. She cooks a fabulous meal while I hog the remote and HBOverdose on all the movies coming out the TV. We've never formally declared that we won't leave the building until sunrise, but that's how things work out. The neighborhood around Pelham Parkway is not the safest place in town and frankly there's not a hell of a lot to do...except get into trouble. I’ve almost gotten used to the blasting boom boxes, roaring motorcycles, screaming sirens, shouting from the street at all times of the night, and the regular rumble of the No. 2 train clattering on the elevated tracks just two blocks away. I can tolerate the noise, but only from the safety of my girlfriend's apartment, and an incident this past weekend really brought that point home, so to speak. On Saturday we had gone to see “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage’s haunting play that takes place at a brot...

One night, nearly years 30 ago, I was out on a date in Times Square. I had taken my then-girlfriend to see a comedy called “Mornings at Seven,” which was quite popular at the time. It was my date’s birthday and we had started off with dinner at a small French restaurant, went to the show, and then walked around Times Square like a couple of tourists from Ohio. It was a warm spring night and even though Times Square--the so-called "Crossroads of the World"--hadn’t been Disney-fied yet, the place still had a magical feel to it. Or maybe I was just in love. As we walked down a street somewhere in the theater district, we noticed that people coming in the opposite direction were stopping in their tracks and staring at man who was walking a few yards in front of us. It was really a cinematic moment as we got closer, anxious to know who he was and why he was getting all this attention. There were several people with him and they were all entering a club. We caught up wi...

So there I was, hanging off the side of an ancient Indian cliff dwelling at New Mexico’s Bandolier National Monument, praying I wouldn’t slip and fall to a hideous death, when my cell phone started ringing. I couldn’t believe my ears. The phone’s obnoxious trill was so unnatural, so out of place in this ancient, spiritual location. It was like playing a kazoo at midnight mass. I hardly use the damn thing and someone’s calling me now —of all times—when I’m inches away from becoming the lead story on the 11 o’clock news? (Assuming it was a slow news day.) “Someday I’ll laugh at this,” I muttered into the rungs of the wooden ladder that were the only thing between me and oblivion. Normally I can’t resist a ringing phone. Even in my most misanthropic moments—and I’ve had quite a few of those—I have a Pavlovian drive to answer a telephone’s siren call. I just have to know who is on the other end of the line. However, on this day, that phone could have rung, whistled, howled, or sung the ove...

There must be something about Union Street. Twice in the last month I’ve been struck on the R train trying to get to or from my office and both times the fertilizer hit the air-conditioning unit right at the Union Street station. They got me coming and going--literally. Is this place haunted or cursed in some way? Did an angry wizard stub his toe on the way down the steps and put a whammy on the whole station? Did some old shaman or witch doctor lose his Metrocard down there and decide to give it the evil eye? It was probably some old ratbag nun who croaked on the platform while religiously pounding the bejesus out of an emotionally-scarred child and who was then condemned to bollix up my commute until the Rapture sucks all the chosen up to Paradise. If that’s the case, I’ll gladly perform a citizen’s exorcism and drive the misbegotten battle ax back to the nether regions of hell from whence she came. Better yet, I’ll send her to the G line. That’s G as in “God, what have I done to des...

I see these two whenever I take out my wallet in search of my Metrocard; and each time I think, “oh, yeah, them …” “Them” is a photograph of a couple; a man with a shaved head, kind of like yours truly, his arm around a lovely dark-skinned woman, who is possibly Hispanic or South Asian. The man is wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and striped red tie. I can’t see what the woman is wearing, but she has a terrific smile. “ I love you! ” is written in fading ink on the back. I have no idea who these people are, but one of them went through the Rector Street train station at least once because that’s where I found this photo. It was face down on the warning track at the platform's edge that tells riders if you step beyond this point you’re going home in a sandwich bag. I don’t know why I picked it up, seeing as how I’m a hyper-hypochondriac and your average subway station floor could double as a germ warfare laboratory. I can just picture my late mother seeing reach me down for the ph...

If the train I was riding on Thursday morning had been a horse, I would have put it out of its misery. But then again, if I had been riding a horse, I probably would have gotten to work a hell of a lot sooner than I did. I work in Lower Manhattan, and normally it’s not such a bad ride from Bay Ridge Avenue to Rector Street. I get in the first car and usually slide right into the double-seat near the motorman’s cab. If I get the seat that’s flush against the wall, my morning is made—which should give you an idea of what my life is like. I get this seat so often I tend to think of it as mine and I get rather peeved when some thoughtless vulgarian decides to plop his or her carcass on my prime spot. I feel like a co-pilot on an airliner when I'm in that seat, ready to take control of the train just in case the motorman rips off all his clothes, puts on a busby, and skips down the track singing “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy” at the top of his lungs. That’s never actually happened, mind y...