The Luna Park Gazette

I’ll be packing extra tissues today. It’s Christmas and I’m off to my sister’s house for great food, fabulous company and lots of weeping and wailing as we enjoy our favorite holiday movies. The two biggies are Scrooge , the very best adaption of the Charles Dickens classic and The Mousehole Cat , a beautiful animated story that puts me around the bend no matter how many times I’ve seen it. I've watched these movies many times over the years—particulary Scrooge - and it’s impossible not to think of my parents and, thus, it’s impossible not to cry. In addition, I’ll be having plenty of wine, pretty much guaranteeing that the tears will flow like the mighty Mississippi. During last year’s movie event I got a little lubricated, nodded off, and woke up just in time to start crying at some tender scene in Scrooge . “Go back to sleep!” my sister said and promptly threw a tissue at me. Ah, family, that’s what the holidays are all about. I keep telling myself that it doesn’t...

I met them back in the summer and I still don’t know who they are. Sometime in August I did a walk around the Central Park Reservoir with a Meet-up group I had just joined a few days earlier. It was a nice summer day, the people were cool, and the walk was excellent. By the end of the second—or was it the third?—revolution, I was ready for rest, food, beverage. We walked over to a bar on the West Side and sat down for what I thought would be good food and stimulating conversation. Well, the food was passable, but the conversation quickly went south when some people within the group started chattering among themselves and left me and a few other stragglers lingering in social limbo. I’m not sure how this happened and I guess I have to shoulder some of the blame for slipping into the void—it’s happened before--but it seemed like the stream of talk that came so easily during the reservoir walk dried up as soon as our butts hit the chairs. Whatever the reason, I decided it was t...

In 1843, the parish priest in the French town of Roquemaure asked a local a wine merchant and poet named Placide Cappeau to write a Christmas poem to celebrate the renovation of the church organ. Cappeau was seemingly an odd choice for this task, as he had never shown any interest in religion. But he obliged and wrote the poem “Minuit Chrétien" during a stagecoach ride to Paris. A short time later the composer Adolphe Adam set the poem to music and the song became “O Holy Night,” one of my very favorite Christmas carols. When done properly this song can bring tears to my eyes. And that’s exactly what happened last week when my sister and I took the train out to Long Island to meet up with our cousin Chris and her husband Art at the Milleridge Inn in Jericho. In the past we’ve had our Thanksgiving dinner with them at this historic spot, but we decided to take it easy this year and meet up the following week. It was nice sitting down for a meal at this place when it wasn...

I looked anxiously out the cab window as I rode with a friend through the streets of Paris on our way to catch a train. This was during my European vacation in the summer of 1982. The sun was coming up and there seemed to be no one around this most wonderful city. I was so tired and stressed about making the train that I don’t think I fully appreciated that beautiful morning. (And we did catch the train.) Sunrise will be at 8:25AM in Paris tomorrow morning. I only know this because my smart phone offered to share this bit of information with me when I hit a button and didn’t make my original request fast enough. This was one of a series of queries or tasks that my phone suggested, which included the score of the Giants game (I don’t follow football) and sending an email to Brian, whoever he is. Smart phones didn’t exist back in 1982, so I wasn’t carpal-tunneling my thumbs into numbness on Twitter or photographing the back of the driver’s head or shooting a video of the passing...

I did my best to keep it together, but I finally had to reach for the tissues. I’m a world famous weeper and I make no attempt to hold back the waterworks when I’m in the privacy of my home, where I can wail to the rafters and nobody’s the wiser. However, on this particular occasion I was at the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan taking in a performance of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold…and the Boys. But I couldn’t keep from crying, despite the crowd, as this is simply one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful plays I’ve ever seen. The language is fabulous and the emotions so raw that I never had a chance. I don’t know what the man sitting next to me was thinking when I start sobbing and after a few seconds I didn’t care. This was the third time I’ve seen Master Harold since 1982 when my oldest brother and I saw it with James Earl Jones and a young Danny Glover. I saw it again in 2006 with my sister and our late father and this time Danny Glover was playing the o...

I think I’m getting better at this. I had two book signings this week for my novel Born Speaking Lies and I’m starting to get this whole author thing down. On Wednesday I had a book launch party at the Mysterious Book Shop on Warren Street in Manhattan, where I’ve attended many readings. Now it was my turn. For years I’ve dreamed of standing in front of a group of people and reading from my work, but when I first arrived I saw nothing but empty seats. The list of attendees wasn’t that long to begin with and I had four cancellations before I even walked through the door. “It might be just the three of us,” I told my dear auntie and sister when they arrived. I was trying to chalk it up to experience; this was my first book, people have busy lives, and the old standby, shit happens. But none of that took away from the numbing sadness that had gathered around my heart. This was going to suck. When a UPS driver showed up to make a delivery I half-jokingly suggested we make ...

Thank God for the theater. My sister, auntie, and I saw Finian’s Rainbow at the Irish Repertory Theater today and we enjoyed a wonderful show filled with beautiful songs, fine acting and no Donald Trump. It was the closet thing to a remedy from Tuesday’s nightmare scenario that has one of the country’s largest KKK groups planning a parade next month to celebrate Trump’s election. Racist attacks have skyrocketed around America since Trump's victory so we shouldn’t be surprised that the boys in the white sheets have decided to come out of the closet. Trump claimed that he wasn’t aware of the incidents (was he in a fucking missile silo?), said there was only a small amount and told people to “stop it.” It seems fitting that there’s a character in Finian’s Rainbow who is an avowed racist--until he’s magically turned into an African-American. He learns pretty quickly what oppression is really like and amends his bigoted ways. Where’s a leprechaun when you need one? Trum...

My Halloween costume this year was painfully appropriate. I had made a last minute decision to buy an old time prisoner outfit, complete with striped shirt, pants, and cap. I didn’t think much of it, at first; it was just a standard issue costume intended to get me through the holiday. But it got a lot of positive responses, especially from total strangers. “I know you,” one young man said to me as my sister and I rode the F train. “We did time together in Alcatraz.” We were going to our friends’ apartment in lower Manhattan and we had a wonderful time, starting with the doorman who threatened to call the cops the moment he saw me. Our outfits were a big hit (my sister was a nun), we met some great people, and ate too damn much. When we left our friends’ apartment, I started running for a bus, prompting a man walking his dog to point at me and say to my sister, “he’s getting away!” Everything was fine, at first, but then the evening suddenly morphed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. ...

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...

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...

Well, at least I cleaned out the closet. That’s about the only good thing I can say about Friday, a two-ton, four-alarm fiasco of a day--except of course, for the fact that I got through it alive and managed to stay out of the loony bin. Yes, it really was that bad. It started early in the morning when my faithful Apple computer up and croaked on me after years of dedicated service. I pressed the On button, heard the familiar baritone beat, and looked at a shockingly blank screen. I hit a few buttons, did the on and off routine, and nothing happened. I felt panic surging through me, but I tried my best to keep my nutsy behavior in check. Check it tonight after work, I told myself, and if it’s still on the fritz bring it to the repair shop. And then I asked, please God, let this be the worst thing to happen me today. It didn’t quite work out that way. Absolutely everything I put my hand to promptly went belly-up. I was making stupid mistakes at work. I just could not get a...