The Luna Park Gazette

My novel, Born Speaking Lies , is going to be published on Saturday. That sounds so strange to me. After all the time, energy, and grief I put into the manuscript it’s a little hard to believe it’s actually going to be a book. I’ve racked up an untold amount of rejections, and I got awfully close to a deal with one publisher a few years ago, but they turned me down because they don't do crime fiction. Finally the lovely people at Fomite Press in Burlington, Vermont agreed to publish my story about a bunch of Brooklyn gangsters who raise a whole lot of hell between here and the Poconos. And so here we go. I started writing this book on a typewriter back when my parents were still alive, my two nieces had yet to be born, and Reagan was president. Now I can’t honestly say I’ve worked on the book for all those years—not even close. I’d put it aside, take up some other project that I was certain would pay off handsomely, only to see that effort come up empty. Take it from...

He lived all alone, within a house, within a room, within himself, a most peculiar man. — Simon & Garfunkel So what was that all about? I recently ran into a former coworker while walking up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which is pretty amazing given the size and population of this city. But what I find even more intriguing was the strange relationship—if that’s even the right word for it—that I had with this man while we working together. Most of the time we’d pass each other in the hall and this guy would cast his eyes to the floor and walk by me as if I were invisible. But every so often this very same man, who took such great pains to avoid eye contact with me most days of the year, would suddenly start a lengthy and enthusiastic conversation with me. He’d talk about movies or something that was happening at work as if we were old friends. And then the very next day this fellow would jump right back into his old routine of refusing to acknowledge my existence. It was...

I climbed up the steps of Liberty Plaza on Thursday morning and looked for the spot where I was standing when the planes hit the World Trade Center 15 years ago. I was a little early this year, making my annual pilgrimage to the place outside the Brooks Brothers store a few days ahead of today’s memorial services. My sister and I are going to the theater this afternoon, so I wanted to make sure I stopped by Ground Zero to say my prayers for those we lost and give thanks that I survived that day. It all looks so different now. The Freedom Tower complex is rising from the location where the Twin Towers once stood before they were destroyed and turned into a mass graveyard by a handful of psychotics in two hijacked jet liners. While I was taking photos a couple of fire engines came flying up the street with their sirens blaring and I almost jumped out of my skin. Sirens provided the soundtrack for 9/11. It’s been 15 years since I stood here in a crowd watching the North Tower bur...

Daniel Fitzpatrick and I had a lot in common. We both went to the same grammar school, which was called Our Lady of Angels in my day, but is now called Holy Angels Catholic Academy. And we were both bullied in the seventh grade. The only difference is that I made it out of grammar school alive while Daniel didn’t. Daniel Fitzpatrick hanged himself last month inside his family’s Staten Island home. His 17-year-old sister found him in the attic with a belt wrapped around his neck. In a letter documenting his abuse, Daniel said that he was bullied by a group of five boys at the school. “They did it constantly,” he wrote. “I ended up fighting (one boy) and got a fractured pinkie…I wanted to get out. I begged and pleaded.” Reading about Daniel’s experiences brought back some ugly memories of my time in Catholic school, which was pretty much a nightmare from beginning to end. My seventh year was particularly rough as there was this one fat bastard in my class who took an instan...