The Luna Park Gazette

I got the text shortly after 5pm last Sunday night. “ Hello, Sir Rob ,” it said. “ How are you? ” It was a message from the cab driver who would be taking me back to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport two days hence, and I got such a kick out of being called “Sir Rob” that I think I’ll start signing my checks that way. My driver, a Bangladeshi man who has lived in Dallas for 17 years, was a real hustler. I was in the Lone Star State on business so I didn’t get a chance to see the sites, and since my hotel was on a street with virtually nothing but other hotels I can’t tell you much about the third largest city in Texas. I did get to visit the George Bush Presidential Library on my last night in town, and, well, let’s just say that fantasy is best left to the folks at Disney. At least they try to be entertaining when they make shit up. I mean, seriously, people—“Bush,” “Presidential” and “Library”—those are three words that don’t belong together under any circumstances. I also manag...

I stood at the top of the stairs and watched my father emerge from the basement carrying a stack of presents. This was Christmas Eve, God alone knows how many years ago, and I had gotten out of bed to investigate the sounds I heard coming from downstairs. We lived on the second floor of our house back then, and the stairs leading to the cellar had a medieval dungeon look to them, disappearing quickly into a critical shade of blackness that seemed to defy the strongest beams of light. Our cellar was something of an underground junkyard. We put just about everything down there—old clothes, furniture, books--even a couple of refrigerators. Why the hell we didn’t just go ahead and throw this crap out I can’t rightly say. At the bottom stairs was this small storeroom and one of my brother’s had scrawled “Frankenstein Lives Here” across the room’s green wooden door in an attempt to frighten me. I maintained I wasn’t scared at all, but I avoided that room until I was a teenager. I ke...

Now I’ll have to write something else. My author’s website is finally up and running and it looks so funky I can’t believe it’s about me. The site is an online marketing tool for my novel Born Speaking Lies and I'm just crazy about it. The amazing Ed Velandria, the web designer who somehow made sense out of all my gibberish, put together this slick film noir site complete with review copy, a synopsis of the novel, some eerie images, and a mug shot of yours truly. There are also links to Amazon and Fomite Press , my publisher, for easy ordering. (No pressure) Ed handed me the reins to the site on Friday, an evening that came so close to being a fiasco of epic proportions that I’m still shuddering at the memory. We had planned to meet at the Wholefoods in Park Slope at 3rd Third Street and Third Avenue. On Friday afternoon Ed sent me an email requesting a change in time, but I completely misread the message and mistakenly believed we were going to meet on Saturday, th...

I finally entered the 21st Century last week and my metacarpals couldn’t be happier. For the last several months I have been living (suffering) with a hopelessly outdated TV that has been in our family since the 1990s. It was a good set back when Bill Clinton was president and I must say that it did hang in there for a very long time. But recently the picture tube started to go seriously bad. The image would shut down to a single straight line across the screen before snapping back to normal. Then it got worse. That line would be the first thing I saw when I turned the set on and I had to apply some “percussive maintenance” just to get a picture, which is to say that I smacked the living bejesus out of the thing to keep it from turning into a radio. I felt like a character from some kitchen-sink drama or a lifelong trailer park inhabitant. All I needed was a sleeveless t-shirt. Naturally this behavior did wonders for my mental health. I’d finish my morning meditation and qig...

Moses is American Express. He’s not Visa, he’s not Mastercard, and he’s sure as hell ain’t no Discover Card. No, Moses is most definitely American Express. I have no idea what this means, but I have it on good authority from a raving psychotic who accosted me on Broadway far too early one morning last week. I remember when Karl Malden did a series of commercials for the American Express card back in the Seventies that ended with the line “don’t leave home without it,” but he never said anything about Moses. Anyway, this strange little incident happened on one of my gym days in lower Manhattan where I’m up and on the road before the sun has even brushed its teeth. I was walking up Broadway to the New York Sport Club’s City Hall gym for my 7am boxing class. It was cold, dark, and windy, and I had my hood pulled up over my head and my eyes aimed down at the sidewalk. I sensed someone behind me as I walked by St. Paul’s Chapel and then I heard a voice coming from over my shoulde...