The Luna Park Gazette

I switched the TV on to the Christmas carol channel to get the holiday spirit going last night and came away with some valuable information. The cable people like to run little Yuletide factoids along the bottom of the screen while the music plays. So I learned that in Hungary, food cannot be eaten on Christmas Eve until a twinkling star is seen in the sky. No food, I thought, that’s ridiculous. What happens if it’s overcast and you don’t see any stars? You go Hungary! (Ouch! I'll be getting a lump of coal for that one...) But as I thought about it, I started to like this tradition. A star is a sign of hope and given the current state of the world we could all use a little hope right this very minute. It seemed like a good idea to hold up the party until you get that sign from above. I just got done watching “ Scrooge ,” the best film version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” and it got pretty emotional. I grew up watching this movie with my family and now here I was sitting by ...

In the movie “ The Next Voice You Hear ,” God skips the burning bush and uses the radio to speak to humanity. I recently saw this 1950 film, starring James Whitmore and future First Lady Nancy Davis, and found it to be a bit clunky and contrived. But it made an impression on me because it showed how good, decent people can forget that they’re good and decent as they rush around trying to find a place in the world. Upon hearing the voice of the Almighty, everyone starts taking life slower and being more respectful to one another. I thought that was important and it seemed to tie in so nicely with my Day One project, where I vowed I would improve my outlook on life. And then I decided to go the movies on Friday night and everything went to hell. I rarely go to the movies, preferring to watch films at home. Most movies are overrated and overpriced and most theater audiences are comprised of inconsiderate morons who talk, act stupid with their smart phones, and do just about anything els...

Every night when I come home the first thing I see is Ben’s heart. It’s just a heart-shaped piece of green glittery paper that I have taped to my front door, but it means so much to me. Up until recently, Ben was my four-year-old next-door neighbor. I knew I’d miss him after I moved, but I didn’t realize how much. He gave me that green heart back in the summer as my sister and I were cleaning out our family’s house. Every weekend we’d look forward to seeing Ben poke his head in from outside and shout “Wob-ert!” He would talk with us, look around the empty house, and then suddenly say, “I have to go now.” And off he’d go. Ben is such a sweet kid, always willing to share things, which I find amazing for a child that age. I don’t think I was anywhere as near as generous when I was four years old, so Ben has taught me an important lesson. We told him not to give us anything, but nevertheless Ben stopped by the house one time and gave my sister and me some balloons he had. Then he promptly ...

Over the summer, DC Comics took the incredible step of resetting all 52 of its continuing series and starting them all over again with issue No. 1. Superman and Batman may have been around since the 1930s, but DC is scrubbing everything that’s happened in their comic universe over the decades and beginning anew. I don’t know how comic book fans are reacting to this plan, but it sounds like a great idea to me. I have gone through so much upheaval over the last few months that I’ve decided it’s time for me to start my life all over again at Day One. And I’m doing this right now. I can’t afford to wait until New Year’s Day to make any resolutions—my life needs a radical reboot ASA-freaking-P. I’m in a new place, we finally sold the family home, and I’m back at the gym five torturous months after my back went out and took my right leg with it. There was a time when I thought I would never heal, that the incredible pain in my shin would be with me forever. The agony started one Friday night...

There was a time many years ago when I was struggling to find my way. I had trouble holding on to a job, my physical health was bad and my mental condition was even worse. I was so upset that I went to my mother looking for some kind of guidance. “What’s going to happen to me?” I asked her in desperation. She paused for a moment, clearly upset at my state of mind. “Well, you know,” she said, “when I die, you’ll get money for this house.” My mother meant well, of course—she always did--and I know she was trying to comfort me. But those words really shook me up. Did my mother have to die before I could make something out of myself? If I were making a list of the lowest points in my life that conversation would certainly be in the top five. My mother and father are both gone now, I’ve found something like a career, and today we finally sold our parents’ house. After all the work, all the cleaning, all the worry and aggravation, everything came down to a few hours at a local bank. We si...

I feel like I’m living in an American Express commercial. The massive financial services outfit used to run ads featuring various celebrities who asked the musical question “do you know me?” I was more partial to the Traveler’s Cheques spots where Karl Malden sternly declared, “don’t leave home without them.” He said it with such intensity that I was afraid to leave my house--and I wasn't traveling anywhere. I could’ve used Karl Malden’s help last week when I ran into a series of people whom I vaguely recognized but couldn’t initially identify. You look at them for a few seconds, they look at you, and you search your mind to find a name to go with the kisser—like Karl and Michael Douglas chasing down a perp in “The Streets of San Francisco." It started one night when I was coming from work and I followed this older gentleman into my local grocery store. I know that guy, I thought, I’ve seen him someplace before… It wasn’t until I was paying off the cashier—and this old timer...

I finally got around to visiting the Great Wall Supermarket on Fort Hamilton Parkway this week. The place opened up about six years ago, but I haven't had any reason to come down this way in ages. I had actually been here many times in the past; I practically lived in the building when I was a teenager—only back then it wasn’t a supermarket; it was the Fortway Theater. God alone knows how many movies I saw there, but the titles include Batman, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Excalibur, Deliverance, The Omega Man, The Lone Ranger , and, of course, The Exorcist , when I had to pretty much carry my poor traumatized mother up the aisle after the movie ended. The Fortway was one of four theaters in my neighborhood when I was growing up. There was the Harbor (now a health club); the Dyker (now a Modell’s) and the Alpine, the sole survivor--if you call being subdivided into eight broom closets with paper-thin walls “surviving.” The Fortway was the cheap place, charging $1 to see second run movie...

They come out on Sunday nights, just as the sun is setting. “There they are,” my sister said the other week, “the metal people.” We were outside our parents’ house and I could see a few people at the end of the block going through garbage cans. They’d have a lot of competition as the evening wore on. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing people collecting soda cans and bottles so they can get the deposit money. They tend to be elderly Asian women lugging overstuffed trash bags on their shoulders. There was one lady in particular who used to come around every Sunday night. This was back during my chronic Diet Coke addiction, when I was drinking the vile stuff for breakfast, so she made a small fortune every time she stopped by my house. I don’t know anything about her, since we didn’t speak each other’s language, but she had a nice smile and she’d always clasp her hands together and bow slightly whenever I gave her some bottles. She had an eye for the recyclables, that’s for sure. I handed h...

My sister and I stood on a corner in Brooklyn this morning and watched the world go by. The New York Marathon made its yearly pass through Bay Ridge on Sunday and you can see people from just about every country on earth competing in the 26-mile race to Central Park. The marathon is such a fabulous event. It’s like a moving version of the UN General Assembly. We saw competitors from France, Italy, New Zealand, Chile, Denmark, Argentina and Japan, to name a few. I’ve been going to see the marathon for years and I never get tired of it. There’s nothing quite like watching a seemingly endless stream of humanity stampeding down Fourth Avenue like a herd of Texas longhorns. It’s looks as if the residents of an entire city have dropped whatever they were doing, strapped on their running shoes, and hit the road. There's so much going on. Helicopters crisscross the sky; photographs snap pictures, local bands set up and jam right on the sidewalk, and people like me and my sister stand alo...

It’s Halloween, the perfect time to chase some old ghosts out of my life. I finally moved all of my stuff out of the family home and now the house where I was raised is scary empty. You can actually hear an echo when you speak or walk around on the wooden floors. The weather was hideous on Saturday, which seemed strangely appropriate seeing as how we had a monsoon a few months back when I moved to my new place. Apparently the weather gods don't like to see me changing addresses. Now I’m sitting in my home office surround by more boxes than a FedEx driver and I keep telling myself that I’m going to get this stuff in order and the place will look fabulous when I’m done. I think if I say it enough times I might even start believing it. One package that did not make the trip was a box filled with my old diaries. I had been putting off deciding what to do with them for the last few weeks, but now that the clock is winding down to the closing deadline, I had to do something about this s...

I got a non-contact palm reading the other night and high-fived the hand of fate. I had gone to Pret a Manger on Friday in hopes of getting some of their fabulous turkey chili. The place is a block away from my office, but it took a while to get there because I walked out into the lobby of my building just as a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street came marching down Broadway. “ We are the 99 percent! ” they chanted. “ We are the 99 percent! ” I was going to wait until they went by but then I realized that I’m the 99 percent, too, and thus should be out there walking with them, if only for half-a-block. I marched, but to be honest I’m not much of a chanter. Pret wasn’t serving turkey chili, so I settled for soup and a sandwich and grabbed a table in the back of the room. There were a number of people around me who appeared to be part of OWS. An older gentleman with a full gray beard stopped as he walked by my table and looked down at me. “Press?” “Is it that obvious?” I aske...

When you’re trying to remember something, the worst thing you can do is to try to remember it. I find that when I forget things like movie titles or actors' names—and this is happening more and more as I grow older—the missing information will often pop into my head when I’m busy doing something else. Like true love or an audit by the IRS, these things always hit you when you’re not looking. I’ve been breaking this little rule lately as I try to recall an exchange I once had with my mother and predictably I'm getting nowhere fast. I don’t remember the time or the occasion, but I know I was trying to get a rise out of my dear mother and I succeeded admirably. I remember how angry she got, but I can’t recall what I said. Her reaction was vivid as she put her hands on her hips like so many Italian ladies do when they’re furious, and snarled—I swear to God—“You worm !” Yes, you read that right. My mom compared me to a slimy crawling thing that lives in the mud and manure. And I ha...

That didn’t take long. I’ve been in my new apartment for about two months and I just had my first decorating catastrophe. I’ve been trying to change. For years I’ve never really bothered to put a personal mark on any of my apartments--mostly because I was living in towns I didn’t like, working at jobs I had grown to hate. It didn’t seem worth the trouble to make my place homey when I was always dying to find another gig and skip town like an escaped convict busting out of death row. I’m going to do things differently with the new place. Not only am I only going to keep it neat, but I’m going to put up posters, photographs, and knickknacks to make it look like someone actually lives here. And I’ve got plenty of stuff to choose from since we’ve been cleaning out my family’s house. One of my favorite items was a wall-clock sized thermometer from Hatfield Quality Meats that had been hanging in our home for several presidential administrations. This thing is a kitsch classic, emblazoned wit...

It’s been eight years since New York’s anti-smoking laws drove cigars, cigarettes and Tiparillos out of the bars and restaurants and sent smokers out into the streets. You won't hear me complaining. I don’t miss the smoke stench that would take root in your clothing after a night out on the town, or that smoker’s cough you’d get, even though you didn’t smoke, you didn't chew and you didn't go with girls who do (or did). I grew up when smoking was still acceptable, when cigarette commercials ran on TV, and movie stars didn’t hesitate to light up. Some of the stranger, more personal, artifacts from that distant era have been turning up in my family’s house in the form of ceramic ashtrays that we made as children. I had forgotten how my fellow Cub Scouts and I used to make these things for our arts and crafts projects. Now let’s think about that for a moment: children making ashtrays. Kids were actually aiding a deadly and disgusting addiction by making one of its ...

It’s officially autumn in this part of the world and while I loathe the coming cold weather, I’m not sorry to close the door on the Summer of ‘11. My life took a bad hop back in July, when I had to drop out of my beloved boxing class due to extenuating—and excruciating—circumstances in the form of a bulging disc. An MRI revealed that I have a mild case of arthritis in my back. It was a bit of a shock. I mean, arthritis…me? C’mon, old peopl e have arthritis; I’m strong, fit, in the prime of life…sort of…I can’t get arthritis. Except that I can. My doctor said this is a degenerative condition, that he can treat the symptoms, but not the disease, and promptly packed me off to a sports medicine facility for physical therapy. The head trainer seems positive about my recovery. I’ve gone to two sessions so far and I’m following the home exercise program the trainers have given me. At least it’s some kind of workout, even if it’s mostly stretching. I also get to see people who are in much wors...

I complain about the subways a lot, but some nights you can feel like you're inside a rolling concert hall. There are mariachi bands, rappers, gospel singers, and nostalgia acts and many of these people are quite talented. And all it costs is the subway fare and whatever you feel like giving a particular performer. You get the occasional clunker, like the guy I saw at the W.72nd Street C station one night who did such a horrific job with “Unchained Melody” that he should have been hauled off in irons. A tourist actually took this loser’s picture, though there’s no way you could capture that hideous noise in a photo. And if you could, you’d be clawing your eyes out as soon as you saw it. One night I heard the sound of no less than five different drummers as I rode uptown and then home to Brooklyn. First a couple of guys got on board the northbound No. 2 train with large African drums and proceeded to rock the house. I was annoyed at first, since I was tired after a long day at work...

In the weeks before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, WNYC and WQXR, the local public radio stations, asked listeners what they wanted to hear as they thought about the attacks and the events that followed. I meant to contact them and make my own suggestion. I kept telling myself to do it, seriously, dude, don’t forget to do this or you’ll be very sorry. However, like a lot of others things in my life, I never got around to doing it. I find this especially irritating given that one of the many important lessons that came out of 9/11 was that we should do things now and not put them off until later—because there may not be a later . But I ignored that lesson and so on Sunday I listened to other people’s musical choices, while my own played only in my mind. For the record, the song I wanted to hear was the old folk tune “ 500 Miles .” Credited to Hedy West and copyrighted in 1961, the song is a mournful ballad about a traveler who is broke, far from home, and ashamed to go back. I always as...