LOSER'S POKER

The beautiful thing about Brooklyn is that it shows you the unvarnished reality of life. Here I am sitting in front of Peggy O’Neill’s bar on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, drinking Long Island Iced Teas, right next to Keyspan Park, which is anticipating a minor league baseball game between the Brooklyn Cyclones and the Staten Island Yankees.

Next door, in the stadium parking lot, a company called Zipcar has set up an exhibit of Mini Coopers. The NYPD patrols, who patrol the area in little green dune buggies wearing short pants, have found a reason to waste an hour hanging around the Mini Coopers, making gossip, asking useless questions about the stupid Mini Coopers and making calls on their cell phones. If a police captain would happen to drive by right now and catch them goofing off, they would find themselves assigned to Brownsville or East New York, where there are no equivalent attractions to distract them, only muggers.

Meanwhile, while the cops are having a blast at Keyspan Park, the junkies and crackheads in the Coney Island Houses, a block away are scoring dope and the hookers are having a blast selling $20 blow jobs.

The bar’s band hasn’t started yet because one-half of the duo hasn’t appeared. Instead, the paying customers are being regaled with recorded music of Marvin Gaye, and Frank Sinatra singing “I Get A Kick Out of You.” The girls are walking in with tight jeans and white stiletto heels, just like Paris Hilton, talking on their cell phones. Anybody who believes that Paris Hilton is not a major icon of American popular culture would do well to visit the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, where the girls are imitating all the photos of her published in The New York Post.

The food, served by Mexican servers, is unbelievably huge. Mountains of French fries with gigantic cheeseburgers. For $25.00 you can get unlimited food and alcohol prior to the game. We walk up to the boardwalk just in time to see a huge, 10-storey high cruise ship departing from New York Harbor on a 9-day cruise to Bermuda. The ship is immense, and Magpie’s and my tongue hang out from envy. It will be in Hamilton tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, Latin rap music is blasting out behind us as the Wonder Wheel spins and the Cyclone roller coaster roars. All of this will be torn down next year to make way for an upgraded, $2 billion dollar amusement park.

Magpie and I had a fantastic day in Coney Island. We went swimming in the ocean, drank beer at Cha-Cha’s, drank Long Island Iced Tea and danced the Lindy at Peggy O’Neill’s, shopped for fresh produce at the outdoor stands on Brighton Beach Avenue in the Russian quarter. Get th’ fuck outta here! Not only are we still young, we’re still stoopid, which is a blessing.

I may be stupid, but I’m not as dumb as the guy in Cambodia who injected his penis with hair tonic to make it thicker. Instead, the pain was so intense that he hanged himself. Or what about the guy in Oregon who was smoking reefer, which deranged him so bad that he mistook a snorkler in the ocean for a large water rat and shot him full of holes with a rifle, resulting in a long prison sentence. Where can I score some of that cool shit?

First Prize goes to the guy right here in Coney Island who, just yesterday, walked up to a lifeguard on the beach and, after instructing the lifeguard to call 911, pulled out a revolver and blew his own brains out. Wow! This brings to mind the old joke about the man who discovered his wife in bed with his best friend. He pulled out a gun and put it to his own head. When they started laughing at him he warned them, “Don’t worry – you’re next!”

But the biggest loser in New York is the general public, whose two highest elected state officials, Governor Eliot Spitzer and State Senate Leader Joe Bruno, engaged in an Animal House food fight more closely resembling the war of insults indulged by our two fattest citizens, Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell.

The latest episode in this misbegotten battle of dimwits concerns Spitzer’s keeping tabs on Bruno’s use of state airplanes, helicopters and State Police escorts when engaged in strictly partisan political activities like fundraising, which he is not supposed to do, as opposed to using government transportation when traveling on official state business, which is permitted.

Naturally, a lot of politicians get caught monkeying around using state facilities for private purposes. The list is too long to cite here, but for instance, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi had to cop guilty in court and resign for using state drivers and cars to chauffeur his wife and private friends around. Spitzer figured it would be a fantastic weapon to use on Bruno if he could catch him doing the same thing, so he had the State Police start keeping a log on Bruno’s movements.

The problem is, Bruno’s too cagey to get caught as something as stupid as that, so he would schedule state business and fundraising on the same trip in order to justify the use of a 20-car State Police escort. Bruno accused Spitzer of singling him out for selective prosecution. Why should he be the only one under surveillance in the whole state government for this activity when there are over a hundred sleazy pricks working as state assemblymen and state senators, he demanded to know. He accused Spitzer of “police state tactics.”

Good point. Everybody in America is entitled to benefit from the presumption of innocence, even the leader of such a notoriously seedy club as the New York State Senate. This is an instance of Eliot Spitzer getting run over by his own “fucking steamroller.” The repercussions of this little bit of ham handed stupidity are going to take a long time to play out. Bruno wants to activate senate committees to investigate Spitzer. It probably will blow over in the ling run, but not before Spitzer gets his ass handed to him in a sling, to mix a metaphor.

Spitzer has been having a fine time over the last few years messing with powerful people and often getting concrete results, but sometimes he runs up against people who, while engaged in illegal or unethical activities, are nevertheless smarter than he is. One of them was Maurice Greenberg from the AIG insurance conglomerate, whom Spitzer was never able to get the goods on and who stuck his fingers in Spitzer’s eyes like a Three Stooges cartoon. If Spitzer hopes to survive and carry out the mandate awarded to him by the voters of this state, including myself, who voted for him and who are counting on him to do good, then he better start to play a more professional game against these sharpies. Otherwise the Republicans will regain the advantage and take the state straight to hell, which is where we were going before we elected him.

Meantime, I am sticking to my prediction that Bush is going to get impeached, and that the main impetus for it is going to come from the Republicans, who are going to BEG the Democrats to get rid of him.

The Democrats are half-heartedly trying to push for a withdrawal plan from Iraq, but only half-heartedly. They like what Bush is doing because the way things are going, they will win a landslide in next year’s election. The Republicans, though, are in a panic. The only hope they have is to get rid of Bush and Cheney and install Nancy Pelosi as president so they can run against her instead of Hillary Clinton. If they jettison Bush and install Pelosi, it will derail Clinton’s candidacy and set up the ultra-liberal San Francisco-ite House speaker for them to oppose.

Maybe this sounds unbelievable, but I believe the tectonic plates in American politics have shifted leftwards and we are living in a whole new world.

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Posted on 7/10/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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