The Luna Park Gazette

I took a couple of photos on Christmas Day and I’ve decided they’ll serve as a nice theme for the New Year. While on walking along Shore Road to my sister’s home, I spotted two old steamer trunks in front of an apartment building waiting to be carted off by the Sanitation Department. Somebody was getting rid of their baggage. Perhaps that’s twisting the metaphor a bit too far, but I don’t care. I just want to dump the junk I’ve been hauling around in my head for far too many years. I’m not making any grand pronouncements for 2019 because we all know that most New Year’s resolutions hit the canvas in less time than it takes to make them. I just want to check in with the progress—or lack of it—I’ve had in reaching my goals. There are writing projects, career objectives, and personal undertakings that I’ve let slip away from me. I can do this any time of the year, of course, but New Year’s Day seems like a good jumping off point. Now 2018 was a bit of challenge, as I was recu...

At last my diet soda addiction finally paid off. Every year around this time I vow to rid myself of these vile sugarless soft drinks that have been polluting my body since the Jimmy Carter Administration. This year will be no exception, of course, but on Saturday, my weakness for caramel-colored chemicals actually had an upside for once. I was at a local supermarket picking up some diet ice tea, which unfortunately for me, was on sale for a ridiculously low price. The place wasn’t particularly crowded, but I sensed that it was all aglow with holiday excitement. Or maybe that was the caffeine withdrawal talking. Anyway, I was online all set to checkout when I realized I hadn’t picked up an extra bottle of Diet Coke. I loathe counter shoppers—these losers who dump their goods in front of the cashier and continue their buying spree- (I tell ya, there oughta a law! )—so I abandoned my spot on the line, dashed over to the soda aisle and bounced back with my prize hoping to reclai...

I turned on to the short street one block down from Third Avenue on Friday morning and braced myself. This was the one-year anniversary of my double-knee surgery, after I had fallen in the snow in front of a house on this street. That was the start of a hellishly long hospital stay and a lengthy rehab. As I walked, I had a powerful urge to bare my buttocks at the house where I had hit the deck and scream, “ I’m still here, you sons-of-bitches! ” at the top of my voice. But I resisted. This isn’t a time for anger; it’s a time for gratitude. There’s a lot of turmoil going on in my life right now, but at least I’m here to deal with it. Yes, it’s already been a year. The event seems both distant and recent—and somewhat surreal. “ How you much you like them pants? ” That was what the EMT said to me after I had been loaded in an ambulance last year. “Well,” I said, “I just got them…and they’re very warm. Why do you ask?” “We may have to cut you out of them.” It turns the...

I wish I had a camera. You don’t hear that line much anymore in this age of smart phones that take photos, give directions, translate other languages, send text messages, give mambo lessons, and, oh, yeah, make calls. But I remember the days when you’d see something cool or exciting or beautiful and you’d stand there just awestruck by whatever the hell you were looking at for a few seconds until you realized you have no way of sharing this moment with others—except by telling them about it. I’m not knocking story-telling by any means, but sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand clichés. This mini-rant is brought to you by a stray memory that came sliding into my mind yesterday and refused to leave. It was back in the Seventies, somewhere in the vicinity of a little town called Peru, Vermont, where my family and I were staying for a few weeks. One night we were coming of a local restaurant and heading back to our car when something caught my eye. It was two dogs sittin...

There’s nothing like watching children at play to help you forget your problems. I take a boxing class near City Hall twice a week and, on the way to the gym, I walk by the Oculus, the transit hub-shopping center-9/11 Memorial, but I rarely have the time to go inside. I arrive before sunrise and when class is over, I don’t have much time for sightseeing. Now, to be honest, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Oculus when I first saw it. I found the $4 billion-dollar structure’s design to be a bit weird and off-putting. And what’s with that name? The fact that all these shops and stores were located so close to the site of the 9/11 attacks didn’t help much either. I know that life has to go on, of course, but the memory of the horrible day will always be on my mind when I walk around that area. Last week I had some business to take care of in and around lower Manhattan so I took the opportunity to walk around the Oculus for a little while. I had a good feeling when I we...

There’s no better way of celebrating the holidays than watching an old-time horror movie—at least that’s what my family did this year. I got together with my sister and auntie on Thanksgiving Day for the usual blast of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and apple pie. And wine. Oh, yeah, plenty of wine. The food was fabulous and I ate like it was my last meal. I know people always say that on Thanksgiving, but this time I really broke the record. Even my loose pants couldn’t handle the strain of my bulging waistline. It was bitter cold in my part of the world on Thursday, so I was extremely thankful to be indoors spending time with the people I love. And the wine. Really thankful for the wine. After dinner we waddled over to the living room to watch some tube and relax. This is the start of the Christmas insanity and there are plenty of holiday movies and specials to watch, but it just so happened that my sister had recorded Carnival of Souls , a horror movie cult classic that never...

It must have been the longest night of my father’s life. My dad was a veteran and I grew up hear his stories about fighting in World War II. These stories were frightening, tragic, and occasionally funny and I never tired of hearing them. There was this one time when he was trapped in a foxhole during a lengthy attack. The shells kept on falling and my father had nowhere to go, so he was forced to take cover in this wet, filthy hole in the ground all night long. I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying that experience must have been, to be trapped in the freezing darkness while the whole world blows up all around you. When the sun finally came up and the explosions ended—for the moment, anyway—both my father’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he couldn’t walk. A pair of medics eventually showed up, loaded him onto a stretcher and began taking him to the nearest field hospital. As they walked the artillery fire started kicking up again. The two medics panicked, dropped ...

It feels like someone broke open the gates of Hell. Wildfires have been ripping through California, killing at least 25 people and burning more than 100,000 acres. California was the site of our latest Second Amendment massacre, which happened in Thousand Oaks, where a deranged gunman shot up a local bar on Friday, killing 12 people, including Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus, who was planning to retire in a year or two. The slaughter was committed by yet another loner psychotic with a gun who also killed himself. There were all the usual elements of a mass shooting: footage of survivors and family members sobbing in each other’s arms; lines of police cars and ambulances streaking up to some blood-soaked location, and, yes, thoughts and prayers for the victims. There’s also the mini-biographies of the victims, most of whom were so young and ready to start their lives. Several of them had actually witnessed last year’s Las Vegas mass shooting and one of them, Telemachu...

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s mob classic Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s uber-paranoid gangster is convinced a helicopter is following him. As the coked-up criminal frantically tries to escape the mysterious chopper, Harry Nilsson’s “ Jump into the Fire ” cranks up on the soundtrack. I always loved that scene, but recently I got a chance to experience what that guy was going through. I had gotten up nice and early one morning for my daily meditation. I’ve been meditating for a few years now and I am slowly seeing the benefits of this daily practice. I set the timer for 20 minutes and do my very best to be mindful and present. And I think it’s helped me a lot. I’m a little better at taming the anger and reining in the depression. It’s been an extremely slow process, but I’m encouraged by my progress and I want to continue improving. Now some sessions are better than others and on this particular morning I was really nailing it—if I do say so myself. I was breathing so ...

I was sitting in the theater yesterday when I had this stray thought about the outside world. While I was thoroughly immersed in The Ferryman , Jez Butterworth’s riveting drama about a rural Irish family that gets caught up in The Troubles of sectarian violence, I briefly wondered what was happening in the so-called real world. The play runs over three hours and I was unable to appease my I-phone addiction and, given the current political climate, I had this strange feeling that something major could be going on. Well, I found out a short time later over dinner that “something major” was yet another mass shooting in America, this time at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where an anti-Semitic psychopath shouting “All Jews must die!” allegedly shot 11 people to death and wounded six others before the cops shot him and took him into custody. I almost wish I hadn’t looked at my phone. I keep saying that it’s pointless to write about these slaughters, that nothing will cha...

It seems like it just a minute ago we were all so young. I met up with some friends from high school earlier this month and I can’t stop doing the math. Was it really that many years ago that we all first met? Are we really that old? And, for the love of God, can we get a recount? The mini-reunion got me thinking about other people I knew back when I was a teenager and I decided to waste some of the time I have left by poking around on Facebook. I noticed that one of my friends had friended a guy I knew in high school who was nicknamed “Pooch.” We weren’t close, but we were friendly enough, at least for a while. At some point, though, things soured somewhat between us and I’m not sure why. I am certainly partially to blame for the rift because back then I was quick to take offense and all too eager to hold to it. This is still a problem, by the way, but at least now I acknowledge it and I’m trying to improve. I never saw Pooch after high school and I didn’t think about...

If I knew I was going on an adventure I would’ve worn a pith helmet. I met up with a friend on Saturday to check out an old building and wound up doing some serious time traveling. We were enjoying the annual Open House New York event, where hundreds of the city’s normally off-limits sites and attractions are open to the public. My aunt suggested checking out the old Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn on DeKalb Avenue, a building I had spotted a few weeks ago while running an errand downtown. At the time I snapped a photo of the outside and wondered what the interior looked like. Here was my chance to find out. So, I contacted my buddy Maria for a little urban exploring. Now I have to confess that I was a little concerned that I was inviting my friend to view a musty old mausoleum. What a great way to spend a Saturday, right? However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The second we walked into the place I knew we had discovered a real gem. Designed by Mowbray & Uffinger a...

Is there an oddsmaker in the house? I had a chance encounter recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art that I’m still having trouble believing actually happened. If I had to pick a theme song for this particular Friday night in the Meatpacking District it would unquestionably be OMC’s 1995 hit “ How Bizarre ” because that’s the only word that fits the situation. I had gone to the Whitney’s new digs on Gansevoort Street in my half-hearted effort to get the hell away from the DVR and walk amongst human beings. It was pay-what-you-wish night, which caused a massive but relatively-fast moving line to form outside the museum’s front door. Once I was inside I went to the top floor and worked my way down. The new Whitney building is a work of art on its own with observation decks on several floors that offer fabulous views of the city. I thought some of the exhibits were a little strange, but I was trying to keep an open mind. Plus, the Whitney has a number of Edward Hopper p...

We lost such a beautiful voice last week. I’ve been taking this fabulous class “Five for Five” for the last three years and not only have I learned so much about the craft of writing, but I've also had the privilege of meeting some fabulous people. One of those people was Kathleen, a lovely woman and an amazing writer, who died last week from cancer. I’m still having trouble accepting this terrible news. The class is going to start up again in a few weeks and it’s hard to believe that we won’t see Kathleen again, that she won’t be sitting on the couch in our teacher, Rosemary’s, living room, sharing her writing, her thoughts, and her heart. Every week I looked forward to hearing her work, much of which was autobiographical. Kathleen was an Irish Catholic like yours truly so I appreciated her stories about our tribe. She was also so insightful and supportive when commenting on our work. One night I was suffering from a hideous cold and I somehow managed to drag myself to ...

I picked up my home phone’s receiver on Thursday and listened to something I hadn’t heard in months. A dial tone. Ever since my accident in December, I’ve been pretty much living off my cellphone. I preferred the mobile unit to the hospital’s phone and it was more convenient to use the cell when I got home and had to lumber around the house in leg braces for weeks. However, my old landline phone was getting ready to call it a day and I asked my sister to get me a new landline phone for Christmas. The new one is a beauty and comes with a spare receiver that I set up near the TV so I wouldn’t have to dash into my computer room every time someone called me. There was only one problem: I couldn’t get it to work. I read the directions over and over, but I couldn’t make sense out of them. I pressed the various buttons, plugged in all wires and the thing was still as dead as Kelsey’s nuts, as my father used to say. I should mention here that I have no idea who Kelsey was or wha...

I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan, but not this past weekend. In fact, I had a series of fabulous encounters that had me absolutely reeling with joy. It started on Friday when I was bouncing out of the Barnes & Noble at Union Square and spotted a gaggle of smartphones raised high in the air. The store routinely hosts authors of every sort and I reckoned these people were jockeying to get a photo of some cable news blowhard or the latest celebrity chef, whose overpriced cook book would probably end up in the dollar bin by Thanksgiving. Oh, get a load of these star-struck twits , I mentally sneered. They’re so pathetic . I was due to meet a friend for lunch on 28th Street and the only reason I was in the store in the first place was to use the facilities, as the old kidneys ain’t what they used to be. But I figured, what the hell? Let me at least find out which D-lister I’m snubbing. “Say,” I asked a nearby employee. “What’s all the excitement about...

We need to be more like Kelsie. Kelsie is a comfort dog I had the great fortune of meeting today during a 9/11 memorial service at St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Fulton Street. Her handler, a very nice woman from the Tri-State Canine Response Team , told me that she and her canine colleagues respond to all kinds of emergencies, including the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. And they were at Ground Zero today, where they most definitely needed, even after all this time. It’s been 17 years since I stood outside the Brook Brothers store across the street from the World Trade Center and watched smoke pouring out of the North Tower; 17 years since the second plane slammed into the South Tower moments later and we all ran, while the towers and the world as we knew it came crashing to the ground. I think about the people I met on that day, like the elderly lady I helped to her feet after she collapsed in shock when the attack began. I think about the Japanese busines...

“ Shift, shift, shift! ” I went back to boxing class last week for the first time since my accident in December and it was special kind of magic. I was thrilled to see Abby, my instructor and all my friends in the class, whom I haven’t seen in 9 months. But it also felt weird being back in the gym after such a long absence, like I was an imposter or a trespasser. Of course, the original prognosis said I’d be out of commission for 18 months, so I’m certainly grateful for that. And if I had fallen on my head, I wouldn’t be here at all. I had gotten used to sleeping later on Tuesdays and Thursdays, instead of getting up before sunrise and slogging into the city. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to roll out of bed that early or that I’d keel over halfway through the warmup or that I’d reinjure myself and wind up flat on my back again. For the last few months I’d been going for long walks in my neighborhood, lifting weights, hitting the bag at the gym and working out on the Sta...