The Luna Park Gazette

I took a deep breath and focused on the words tattooed across the trainer's chest: "Death before Dishonor." This was Saturday afternoon and I was standing in the football field at Fort Hamilton High School beneath a merciless sun trying desperately to avoid both as I did mitt work for the first time in months. I did manage to duck the Grim Reaper, at least for the moment, so I guess one out of two ain't bad. Exercise in the age of Covid-19 is a dicey proposition, given the potential for transmission. But after months of shadowboxing alone in my living room, I wanted to hit something solid, and, well, it's been a long time. After a few rounds of this torture I came close to hitting solid ground--face first. "C'mon," my trainer said, "we gotta show these young whippersnappers a thing or two!" Great idea, but at that moment the only thing I could show them was that getting older seriously sucks. I just turned 63 years old, but t...

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.” -- Sophocles I looked around the barren cavern that served as my prison cell and locked eyes with an emaciated woman in a ragged jumpsuit. I had no idea why I had been locked up in this rocky mountain hellhole, but being Catholic I figured I was probably guilty. I had only one question for my fellow inmate. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked. The woman smiled weakly and pointed to a battered stool with a hole in it. And then I woke up. I turned 63 years old today and the very first thing I want to say is “Thank God.” I don’t like being this old, but I really like being here, seeing that we’re in the middle of a pandemic right now and the United States has lost nearly 100,000 people. That dream I had late last week is hardly surprising in light of the self-quarantine and social-distancing measures we're taking in response to the cornhole-a-virus that’s been ravaging our lives since March. Sinc...

"Anthony, please come around, something is lost and it cannot be found.”—prayer to St. Francis While I was freaking, my sister was praying. St. Anthony delivered on his title as the patron saint of lost things last week, after my 5-minute stroll in the park took a sharp turn on to Psycho Street. We finally had decent weather around these parts, with the sun shining and the temperature so pleasant you could almost forget we’re living in the middle of a plague. After work Wednesday, I had to get out of the house for a quick hike around Shore Road Park before coming home to fix dinner. I’ve been working from home since Covid-19 muscled into our lives—and thank God I have a job—and I’ve taken to wearing gym pants at “the office,” since there’s no sense in being all dressed up with nowhere to go. I don’t like to wear the casual duds outside of the house unless I’m doing my power walk because the pants don’t have decent pockets and I tend to cram everything except the Encyclo...

"Life does not come with a manual; it comes with a mother." There was this time in my life, back in the Eighties, when I was having trouble with this woman I was dating. I came home after spending a rather disappointing afternoon with her, feeling depressed and extremely bummed out. All I wanted to do was go crash in my room and hide from the rest of humanity. My mother, however, have different plans. As soon as I walked into the house and mumbled a vague “Hello” to my parents, my mother’s emotional alarm system went into hyperdrive. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Nothing,” I lied and kept walking, hoping that was the end of it. I could not have been more wrong. Upon hearing my pathetic response, my mother rose from her seat on the living room couch and began following me like a bloodhound pursing an escaped convict. “Don’t tell me that,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Nothing,” I said, sticking to my empty guns. “Everything’s okay.” But my mother would n...

When I saw Captain Kirk on Star Trek speaking to people on a video screen, I thought it was cool, but I never thought I’d ever do it myself. We’ll have to add that one to ever-growing list of things I was wrong about because Zoom, the online video service, has been a lifesaver for me during this Covid-19 house arrest. Last week, I used Zoom to reunite with some old writing class buddies I had not seen in years. Obviously, it would have been better to have seen them in the flesh, but I’m extremely grateful to connect with these wonderful people any way I can. And I’ll be using that very same technology this week when I resume (reZoom?) my current writing class. Of course, the tech door swings both ways and there have been a number of video chat disasters. Like the woman who went to the bathroom during an online video conference call, and, well, you figure out the rest for yourself. There was the TV anchor who diligently relayed the news of the day from home, unaware that...

I wonder what made me think of Raymond last week. Every so often a name from my past will slide across my mind for no discernible reason. I’ll start to wonder, “whatever happened to…?” and then it’s off to Google to find out what this particular individual has been up to for the last few decades. The latest search was for a kid named Raymond whom I went to high school with in 1971 and have not seen—or thought about--since. Richard Nixon was president then. A gallon of gas cost 40 cents a gallon, a movie ticket went for a buck-fifty, and the average cost of a new house was $25,250. I was 14 years old, a graduate of Our Lady of Angels Catholic School in Bay Ridge, and starting freshman year of high school. There was no internet, of course, so you couldn’t Google someone’s history, and no smart phones to distract us, so I had to find other ways to avoid studying. And we didn’t have to wear masks and gloves because Covid-19 wouldn’t show up in our lives for another 50 years. ...

At least we have the guns. I ran into a man I know from the neighborhood a few weeks ago just as the quarantine was getting underway. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s a bit of a right winger, which I am not, and, like a lot of right wingers, he likes to inject unsolicited editorial comments into the conversation. So, for example, when he told me he was out of work because his job had been shut down, he felt compelled to proudly inform me that he did not apply for unemployment benefits. Okay, so…what are you saying, exactly? That you’re not going to accept money that is rightfully yours because you don’t want no stinking government handout? Fine, give me your tax refund and then you can really feel good about yourself. And then he told me about the guns. “I moved my guns from my place in summer place,” he says. “I’ve got over 200 guns.” I knew he was a collector who liked to call himself “a gun guy,” but I was appalled at the size of his arsenal. I know he’s a collector, ...