The Luna Park Gazette

I got rubbed the right way on Saturday and it didn’t cost me a dime. For the last several months I have been treating myself to near-weekly massages at Heavenly Body Works on 73rd Street in Bay Ridge. Last weekend I hit the magic number of 10, meaning I was entitled to a free massage. And I made sure to collect. I started doing this after reading an article on how massages are actually good for the immune system, which puts them one notch above the shameless indulgence of the barbershop shave . The hour-long treatments are a little pricy, but they’re relaxing as hell and if they’re going to prevent me from coming down with a case of the heebie-jeebies, then I think it’s money well spent on a bloody good cause. A number of Chinese massage places have opened up in my neighborhood recently and a dozen of them were promptly shut down last year after the cops found out that the rubdowns were straying south of the border, if you know what I mean. Picking the right place was impo...

I paused in the lobby of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge and waited for a few seconds before pressing the buzzer. This was in the Eighties, back when I was reporter for a local weekly newspaper, and on this particular day I was covering the suicide of a young woman who had thrown herself in front of a subway train. I had gone to the dead woman’s building in hopes of talking to someone who knew her. I decided to start with the landlady so I rang her bell and waited. She didn't buzz me into the building, choosing instead to talk to me over the intercom. It felt so strange leaning over to ask my questions into the speaker. I got a few static-filled responses, but the upshot was that the landlady knew virtually nothing about the dead woman. As soon as she rang off, two teenage boys came into the lobby and when I told them that a woman from their building had killed herself, one of the exclaimed “Fresh!” This was the Eighties after all. Then a woman in her ...

I’m never one to turn down good advice--even if comes from spam email. Take my friend Nicole, who wrote to me--and about 10,000 other guys—the other day. Aloha, my friend, she writes. Tell me what are you looking for, may be you are looking for me? Nothing personal, Nicole, but I’m looking for a pile of cash five stories high, a good deli, and an escape from this horrendous winter. I am cheerful, open, sociable, family-oriented, light-hearted, well-balanced, active, liberal, honest and responsible. That’s quite a resume. All Nicole needs is to be thrifty, clean and reverent and she can join the Boy Scouts. Nicole also is “fond of sport,” which is good, seeing as she’s so well-balanced. I wonder what she’s responsible for—or do I want to know? Besides “sport,” Nicole also enjoys “cooking, growing flowers, playing bowling and listening to music.” Playing bowling. Nicole just doesn’t bowl; no, she plays it. I wonder if she cooks, grows flowers, and bowls at the same time....

A man jumped to his death on Friday from a building two blocks from my office. I initially dismissed the police cars and fire engines parked on Broadway as just another day in the big city. But when I saw the news trucks pulling up to the scene I knew something was going on. A cameraman from the Spanish language station told me someone had jumped from the 12th floor and then he trained his lens on the building and began shooting footage. The body had been removed by this time, but when I walked by the building I saw a pool of blood on the pavement and nearly puked. If I were still a police reporter I would’ve covered this terrible incident, but I’m a business writer now so I have to find out the story behind the tragedy the way everybody else does. I checked the news sites throughout the day until I got the story. The victim was a 45-year-old man who recently separated from his wife and had lost both of his parents. The day wore on, I gradually stopped thinking about the man...

It usually goes off without a hitch. My sister and I live in the same neighborhood so whenever we meet up to go to Manhattan I head over to the Bay Ridge Avenue R station, stand at the front end of the platform, and wait for the train to roll in. When the R shows up at the appointed hour, my sister steps out of the train, waves to me, and I jump on board. It’s a simple plan and it never misses. Until Saturday. We were going on yet another theater adventure with our auntie to see a performance of John Patrick Shanley’s comedy “ Outside Mullingar .” While we prefer matinees, this time out we were taking in the evening performance and planned to have an early dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Trattoria Dopo Teatro on West 44th Street. That was the plan. But a mix-up at the subway station injected some heavy drama into our day. Okay, so I was on the platform when the train pulled in. I didn’t see my sister in either one of the first two cars, which was odd, since I w...

Who is this guy? He looks like me. He sounds like me, lives in the same place and works at the same office as I do. But he sure is one furious son-of-a-bitch. Too bad he won’t go away. I’m finally recovering from yet another nasty virus that has been hanging around my neck for three tortuous weeks. Between the horrendous weather and my poor physical condition the second month of 2014 has been so bad I've renamed it "Fuck-You-Already." It’s the usual scenario: my body temperature drops, my stomach rumbles like a dormant volcano coming to life and my energy sinks into the negative numbers. This is part of the chronic fatigue problem that I’ve been having for many years now and I thought I was getting better at controlling my emotions, but apparently not. I started off fairly calmly, taking a few days off from work to rest and watch a lot of bad TV. I was feeling better by Week Two and told myself that I was over the worst of it. But I went into Week Three st...

I ran into an old friend last week and it was so nice to see him. He was an older gentleman who used to hang around a candy story in my neighborhood and he came walking out of the wilderness of my memory after an absence of nearly 35 years. I never knew his name, where he lived, or what he did for a living. And I don’t know whatever happened to him, though I’m pretty sure that after all this time he’s probably gone to his reward. All I know is that I was his buddy and that when he was around I was the most important guy in town. I can picture him very easily, even after all this time, a stocky man with a ruddy complexion, gray hair, and a smile you could see from two blocks away. And I can still hear his voice. “Hey, buddy,” he’d say whenever I ran into him. “How’s it going?” I was in my early 20s when I first met him, just out of school with a head full of dreams about all the great things I was going to accomplish with my life and absolutely no idea how I was going to do i...