The Luna Park Gazette

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...