The Luna Park Gazette

This all started with a craving for shish kebab. It was Wednesday night, I was coming home from work and I wanted to have something different for dinner. A local grocery store makes a nice shish kebab and I usually buy two of them, cooking one and saving the one for another day. It was a block out of my way, but my taste buds had made their decision and there would be no arguing. So I walked into the store and this heavyset fellow in a baseball cap brushes by me on his way to the back of the store. I picked up my shish kebab and make a loop around the store to see if there was anything else I needed or wanted. And that's when I observed the individual in the baseball cap. He was stuffing a box of bacon under his shirt--a shoplifter. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I looked away. He was much bigger and younger than I, so I wasn't about to grab him by the scruff of the neck, shake the bacon to the floor, and give him a stern lecture on civics. No, I was going to handle this...

I walked by Thriftee tonight for one last look. I've been going to this discount store on Fifth Avenue ever since I could walk, so I wanted to see it one more time before it disappeared. For weeks I've been reading the handwritten sign in the window: " After 62 Years...goodbye! " There's another sign up there tonight, this one in Arabic, reflecting the change in the neighborhood's population. The number 62 appears in this sign as well, so maybe it's a variation on the original farewell message. The windows were shuttered and there was one light on inside. I peered through the glass door and saw the owner, a rotound fellow whose shining bald pate was ringed with white hair, spoke with an earnest young man. The younger man was holding something in his hand. I thought it might have been a tape recorder, perhaps this guy was reporter getting the Thriftee story for future generations. But then again, it might have been a cell phone and this guy could have been ...

I did some time traveling this morning by way of a dream. This wasn't a trip to ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, this was the recent past--my recent past to be exact. I dreamed my father was still alive, still elderly and still in need of care. Seven months after his death, seven months of not having to worry about him anymore, I was back on the job. He was walking around the living room in his boxer shorts looking for his pants. I saw that he was dirty--there were feces stains on his legs, much like real life, I'm afraid. I had to stop him from getting dressed and gently tell him he had to wash. I woke up just as we were going into the bathroom, where normally I would sit him down on his special chair and wash him down. That was always tough because it was hard to clean him and the damn water was either too cold or too hot. It's hard to think about those days now, even though they weren't that long ago. I went back to sleep or maybe I never woke up, but the next thin...

So much happened in history today, August 15, that it's hard to believe it can all be crammed into one day. Yes, this was V-J Day, when Japan surrendered in 1945 and the day the Panama Canal opened to traffic in 1914, and work on the Berlin Wall began in 1961, and the day that Malcolm whacked Macbeth in 1057. But this was also my mother's birthday, and though she's been gone for five years now, that's the most important thing about this day for me. As I look over the list of events for this day, I'm struck by the fact that in 1947, the Ferrari made its racing debut in Pescara, Italy. My mother's maiden name was Ferrari, and no, we're not related to that Ferrari, so please don't ask. People ask that question a lot as a joke, and I laugh along with them. Every now and then, however some bonehead will seriously ask me if I'm related to the famous automotive family and I just stare at them in disbelief. Yeah, schmuck, of course, I'm related to the F...

"Last week I went to Philadephia, but it was closed." --W.C. Fields Maybe I should have gone to Philadelphia. I had been thinking about making a daytrip to the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday to visit a woman I met on a whitewater rafting trip. (I don't know why I wrote "a whitewater rafting trip" as I've done it only once in my life. But, no matter.) However, as the week progressed, I became less enthralled with the idea of spending half of my Saturday on the bus to see someone who said she wasn't looking for a serious relationship. We didn't have firm plans, but I did my ostrich routine and just didn't call her. So on Friday she called me and wanted to know what was going on. She said she thought she had scared me off and I assured that this wasn't the case, which it really wasn't. I'm just lazy and reluctant to shake my routine. I apologized and we talked about a future trip. But...

"You know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at?" --Ronald Reagan The first tree on my block is gone now. I came down my street after work tonight, saw the sky where there used to be green, and knew something was up. The tree had been damaged during the great Bay Ridge tornado, knocked into a street light, and had to be taken down. The street light is still there, though it seems to be leaning a little too much for my taste. I'll make sure to walk around it when I go up and down the block. Of course, now that the tree is gone, I'm trying to remember what it looked like and coming up blank. But I still miss the hell out of it. I went out last night to see the storm damage for myself. It didn't seem right that I, an ex-police reporter, would rely on mainstream media images of a catostrophe right in my own backyard. I left my house at around 11:30 p.m., even though I had to go to work the next day. ...

I'm thinking of a scene in The Thief of Bagdad where Conrad Veidt, as the evil wizard Jaffer, uses his nasty magic to conjure up a monsoon. Radiating pure ugly, he stands up on the deck of a ship and summons the storm like an attack dog to come forth destroy the hero. "Wind," he shouts, waving his arms like a conductor leading an orchestra. " Wind! " I suspect Conrad must have made a stop in Bay Ridge today because we were hit with an honest-to-God tornado. A tornado...in Bay freaking Ridge. News reports are saying this is the first tornado to hit Brooklyn since 1889. Can I get an "Auntie Em"? The neighborhood looks like a war zone. A street lamp on my street is roped off as it is in danger of falling. Trees are down in the park around the corner and on 68th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, and a church on 67th Street had its stain glass window destroyed by the brutal winds. Officials are saying the storm ripped the roofs off 11 homes around h...

I saw another story about Don Imus in the news today, but I just skimmed over it. I never liked that stupid bastard even before he and his crew of bootlickers made those comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. I often referred to him as "Dumb Anus" because of his habit of saying some incredibly stupid things. In fact, the Rutgers thing angered me because, while I'm glad Imus got bounced, there are a lot of rappers who have made a living out of saying a lot worse about women than the broken down radio clown ever did and these pigs aren't out of work. And spare me that crap about the situation being different because the rappers, like the ball players, are black. Filth is still filth, no matter who says it. So, no, I was not sorry to see the plug pulled on that bum. And I wouldn't miss all those right-wing psychos spewing their filth onto the airwaves on a daily basis. If the Anus has to go, then the hemroids should join him. The radio hos...

So now Rupert Murdoch owns my old newspaper. Not The Wall Street Journal , though the right-wing media-mashing mummy owns that, too. I’m talking about the Pocono Record , where I spent five years of my life, from 1988 to 1993. Since Murdoch was allowed to buy Dow Jones—huh?—he gets all of its subsidiaries, including Ottaway Newspapers, which owns the Record. So, in addition to snagging a national newspaper, Murdoch’s oily tentacles are reaching right down to the small and mid-sized markets. Now the man who helped George "Mission Accomplished" Bush sell the lie in Iraq will have an even greater reach, a tighter hold on news outlets. What a country. Upon hearing the news, I fired off an e-mail to a fellow Pocono Record survivor, which was slugged “Headless Corpse Found in Topless Hot Tub.” I wasn’t very happy at the Record, which, in the area of understatements, is like saying the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. I’m no longer associated with the place, so I could say “goo...