The Luna Park Gazette

I have this childhood memory of walking with my father through a crowded, smoke-filled room. I was very young and apparently the only child in the place. While my subconscious keeps telling me it was a bar, I find it hard to believe my dad would ever bring me into a saloon at that tender age. Wherever it was, we got separated and all of a sudden I was alone in a sea of towering adults. I was so small I couldn’t see any faces, just bodies. Frightened, I grabbed at the nearest sleeve, looked up and said “Daddy!” Only it wasn’t Daddy. It was a total stranger looking down at me. He laughed and it seemed like everyone in the room joined him. And I was more frightened than ever. My father found me seconds later and we walked out together. I’m wondering now who that man was and what he must have thought when some strange kid grabbed his sleeve. Of course the irony here is as I got older, life got harder and my relationship with my father became strained. I stopped looking for Dad...

It’s starting again. I’m sitting at my computer and, as I reach for the keyboard, I can feel a wave of numbness spreading across my left shoulder. This has been going on for the last 10 days or so and the episodes range from mildly annoying to full-on Vulcan nerve pinch. It’s like I have an internal stun gun zapping me every time I move the wrong way. I just wish someone would tell me what the right way is. I tried ignoring it for the first few days, basically giving my bad shoulder the cold shoulder. But this strategy failed, as it usually does, and I shifted straight into panic gear, convinced that my arm was going to dry up and fall out of its socket. Fresh out of denial, I went to my chiropractor who told me that my neck and upper back were out of alignment. Apparently the top portion of my body decided that my lower back has gotten too much attention lately and pulled a little job action of it own. How exactly this happened remains a mystery. It’s all highly illogic...

I was standing outside the Linda Gross Theater with my sister one recent Sunday afternoon when I spotted a potential customer. We had come to this renovated church on W.20th Street to see the Atlantic Theater Co.’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive . Our beloved auntie was supposed to join us, but she had come down with a horrendous cold and now we were looking to unload her ticket before the matinee started. The theater has a no return policy so we had to take our act outside and try to bag a random patron of the arts. I figured this would be a cinch. The show had received rave reviews, McPherson is very popular in New York and who could possibly pass up a chance to sit next to me? Well, a lot of people, apparently. We were striking out to beat the band. And that’s when I stopped this one fellow and asked him if wanted to buy a ticket to the show. “Do I want a ticket?” he repeated in a fine Irish brogue. “No, I’m in it.” That’s right, I had just tried to sel...

In my mind I’m going to Colorado, but reality is a little different. My family’s second attempt in 7 months to visit my brother in the Centennial State was stymied this week when super freak voodoo storm Hercules flexed his snowy muscles all over the northeast and dropkicked airline schedules straight into the Underworld. We were supposed to fly out of JFK on Thursday night just as Hercules came blasting into town. Our first plane was rescheduled twice and by the time it was ready to go—at midnight —the roads had gotten so awful that we didn’t want to risk getting into a car, let alone a plane. Every time I looked out the window on Thursday night and saw the raging snow I thanked God and all the saints in Heaven that we weren’t flying through that grief. My sister did a herculean job of trying to get us another plane, but that flight was cancelled and getting yet another flight proved to be such a challenge that we agreed to scratch our trip and try again in warmer weather. ...

And so it’s 2014. The holidays have come and gone and "the rolling year" as Jacob Marley called it in "A Christmas Carol" has swept right by us. Now we begin again. Christmas at my house was a quite affair with catered food and the lovely company of my sister and auntie. Unlike Thanksgiving , where I kept a lid on my emotions, Christmas saw me tearing up at every conceivable--and inconceivable--opportunity. “What’s wrong?” my sister asked during one of my many spectacles. “I don’t know!” I blubbered. “It’s Christmas,” my auntie observed. It’s hard not to get emotional when you remember the people you love who are no longer with you during the holidays. New Year’s Day has been quiet. I got up late, fired up the DVR, and watched a couple of episodes of “ The Twilight Zone ” I recorded from the Syfy Channel’s marathon showing of Rod Serling’s classic TV program. One in particular, entitled “ The Four of Us Are Dying ,” stuck in my mind. It tells the ...

If there’s a patron saint of klutzes, I could sure use his help. I’ve been on what feels like a nonstop doofus run for the last week or so, as I break or lose just about anything I put my hands on. It started when I misplaced one of my crappy old gloves. I can’t even guess how these things are—I think they once belonged to my father--so it’s not like I lost some valuable piece of attire. But it’s just so goddamn annoying. There are few things as worthless as a single glove-- unless it belongs to Captain Hook. And what really bugged me was the fact that just the day before I remarked on how I hadn’t lost a glove in years. So I got a fistful of karma for mouthing off. In desperation, I hiked all over Bay Ridge, retracing my steps like some cut-rate Kojack in search of my missing mitten. But I came up empty. Luckily the glove turned up at my gym the following day and I thought, okay, life will now return to normal. Then disaster struck. I have a statue of St. Martin de Po...

I put it off for three whole days, but today I finally gave in. I shaved. I hadn’t touched my face for most of the week after deciding that I'd go to a barbershop on 74th Street and let Garry, the man with the razor, work his tonsorial magic. And be advised that I didn’t go for some run-of-the-mill whisker wipe. Oh, heavens no. I ordered up the royal shave for both my magnificent mug and my beautiful hairless head. It was decadent, selfish, a ridiculous waste of money—and I loved every second of it. Hell, I haven’t gotten a shave from a barber since the Reagan Administration. That was back when I went to Leo, a little old Italian man who had a small shop on 68th Street. Leo used to wave to me every morning as I walked to the subway station-even before I became a customer—and one of the first articles I ever did as a reporter was about Leo for a now defunct publication called Bay Ridge Life . Then Leo closed his store and for some reason I stopped getting shaves. I’m n...