QUEENS, NY–Area man Larry Minacozzi received quite a shock on Sunday when he stepped on a syringe at Rockaway Beach and found that within minutes his chronic skin disease had been cured.
Minacozzi was following a seagull that had taken his sandwich along the crowded Queens shoreline when a sharp pain in his foot caused him to fall to the ground.
“I thought I’d stepped on broken glass or a switchblade,” the forty seven year-old plumber told reporters, citing that such waste is common in the area.
In his scramble to get back on his feet, Minacozzi found a dirty syringe filled with “thick yellow ooze” in the sand. Shocked, he walked the syringe back to his beach towel a few yards away where his wife, Renee, noticed that her husband’s skin rash, which had covered virtually every inch of his body, was completely gone.
“I didn’t even recognize him,” she said. “He looked like a new man. Like someone who didn’t make me want to rip my own eyes out every time I saw his unclothed body.”
Four people on Staten Island and two at Rockaway Beach have also been pricked this summer, but none have experienced the same miraculous healing as Minacozzi.
“I’ve wasted thousands of dollars at the dermatologist over the years,” Minacozzi told reporters as he stared into a hand-held mirror. “Who knew I only needed to get pricked with a dirty needle on a New York beach to cure a lifetime of excruciating eczema? Am I the luckiest guy in New York or what?”
The Parks Department reports that it cleans beaches daily but that budget constraints allow for only so much sand maintenance. “We figured that most people would just stay in the water anyway,” said Site Manager Jerry Salingas.
No plans are being made to increase beach cleanings; however, Minacozzi vows to patrol the NYC beach on his own time in search of other needles, hoping that they may somehow cure his high blood pressure, chronic hiccups and man boobs.
After several tests conducted by the EPA the chemical contents of the syringe remain unknown.
