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...

I keep reaching for my ID card. I’ve been out of work for about three weeks now, but I’m so used to clipping my company ID card to my belt each morning that it feels weird leaving home without it. The photo of me is atrocious and that little piece of plastic makes me feel like an animal that’s been sedated, tagged, and released back into the wild, but now I must admit that it’s a little scary not having one. My sister-in-law is into astrology and I asked her to do a chart for me—yes, I’m that loopy—and she tells me that September will be marked by not one, but two eclipses, which in the zodiac world are signs of great change. What kind of change, whether good or bad, is not specified and we don’t have any say in the matter anyway. It’s just that I’ve had a big change already in seeing my magazine shutdown and the eclipses ain’t even here yet. My sister-in-law tells me that these events are important for the mutable signs, like Gemini, which covers yours truly. The people in ...

I need to see an exorcist. I finally got my computer back, but I paid a heavy price in the form of time, money and what’s left of my sanity. On Friday morning I want to the repair place on Seventh Street expecting to pick up my machine two weeks after it croaked on me, and then zip on back home to write, blog, screw around on YouTube, and look for work. Well, that all went merrily straight to Hell in a hatbox as I had to wait nearly an hour before I got the goddamn thing, only to bring it home—via car service—to find that there was some kind of glitch with the email. So I called the repair place. Their solution? Bring the computer back to downtown Brooklyn—via car service again. I couldn’t believe my ears. I finally had the machine back home and now I had to do an about-face? So back downtown I go, and the techies fiddled with it while I burned for a total of five minutes before clearing up the problem—which they somehow couldn’t do over the phone. And then I had to call c...

I'll keep this short and sour. My computer is still on the fritz and I'm hunting and pecking this post on my I-phone. But wait there's more. I am also out of work, unemployed, and about to go back on the dole. The job I accepted just four short months ago has gone belly-up. It seems the publication I hired on to had been losing money for a while and could not be salvaged. I learned this appalling news on Tuesday during a conference call from the Chicago office. I actually thought it was a joke and I was ready to say "knock it off; it ain't funny." Only it was no joke. And it still ain't funny. I have to be honest: the shock has not worn off yet. So now it's back to searching the want ads, applying for openings, going out on interviews and hoping from hell to breakfast that I find something pretty damn quick. I go back to my dad's motto: scared money never won. I know he was right but it's hard not be scared at a time like this. B...