News from The Opposite Field

My dad is 78 and, by some measures, slowing down. He has a bad hip and a bad heel, a surgically repaired shoulder and balky eyesight, and despite kicking a lifelong Marlboro addiction, lungs that rumble and groan. I worry about him behind the wheel (he locked himself out of the car, with the engine running, not long ago) and wherever the digital world demands compliance (he refuses to use an ATM card or a cellphone or anything else that requires a password or charger). He favorite expression: “Save me from the twenty-first century.”

Dad may be a dinosaur, but the older he gets—the closer extinction looms—the more I have come to recognize that creakiness is not the same as stagnation. His work requires him to be inquisitive and inventive, audacious even, qualities that a son can only hope to emulate.

Although he is retired from the art department at Portland State University, Mel Katz is still an artist, a job that comes with no expiration date. Next month he is having a show of new sculptures, his 120th or so exhibition. He scored the first one, at the Brooklyn Museum Biennial, six years before I was born. The stuff he makes has never been confused for decoration, nothing prettified or representational. These are contemporary pieces, abstract, industrial, provocative, cumbersome, the kind that invite criticism, that tempt rejection. At an age when other dads might be content to putter around the golf course, mine is taking monumental chances. Given the choice, he will die in his studio—and on Father’s Day, that is the first place I will try to reach him.

It was a great thrill to see confirmed in the Pasadena Star-News’ prep sports blog what Max had been advised of informally: He has been named to the All-Almont League second team for the 2010 baseball season. Making the cut is especially difficult for players on a weak squad. Max and graduating senior Andrew Fraire, a first team honoree, were the only two boys from Mark Keppel High to be selected to an All-League roster. (By contrast, league champ Alhambra had its entire starting nine in the mix.) At our team banquet last week, Max added to his honors, receiving the Offensive Player of the Year Award and the coach’s Aztec Award, for the player demonstrating the highest levels of commitment and desire. Although his final stats were never entered on MaxPreps, he finished the season in sixth place on the Almont League leader board, with a .407 average and 22 hits, including 4 doubles and 2 triples. The best part is I got to witness it all, the silverest lining of being an self-/un-/semi-employed dad.

Back from a marvelous trip to Mexico, catching up with newspapers and the mail, trying to figure out if I missed anything while I was gone. Can you say “V energy”? Yes, I leave for a few days, and holy crap, the greatest Dodger story of the year erupts in my absence: From 2004 to 2008, owners Frank and Jamie McCourt paid a Russian emigre named Vladimir Shpunt—a physicist and a healer—to send positive energy to the team, usually while watching TV coverage of the games from the confines of his suburban Boston home. Cheers to Bill Shaikin of the L.A. Times for dredging up this gem, “Dodgers Tap into ‘V Energy,’” from the McCourts’ mess of a divorce. Among the heroics Vlad claims to have influenced was Steve Finley’s walk-off grand slam on the final day of the 2004 season, a stupendous blast that clinched the Dodgers’ first playoff spot in eight years. “The miracle finish…was the result of V energy,” wrote Shpunt’s frontman, executive leadership consultant Barry Cohen, in an email to the McCourts. Funny, I had always thought it was Max and I, cheering from the blue Reserved Level, who had helped guide that ball over the outfield fence.

Photo: Spencer Weiner

Although Max’s list of colleges and potential careers fluctuates as wildly as the Dodgers’ pitching staff these days, he has been expressing quite a bit of interest in architecture—a merging of the creative and the physical that he finds appealing—and so we have begun regular father-son expeditions to some of L.A.’s historic landmarks. This past weekend the destination was the Watts Towers, a trip partly inspired by a Los Angeles Times column last month, “Watts Towers—World’s Treasure, L.A.’s Secret,” by my friend and former colleague Hector Tobar. I had visited the Watts Towers on several occasions, and yet I had never been inside, under and within the structures, always settling for the view just beyond the perimeter fence. As Hector points out, short-sighted bureaucrats have ensured that many visitors will experience it that way: Monday through Thursday the grounds are shuttered.

A donation of $7 each entitled us to a tour with a pith-helmeted James Janisse, formerly a jazz DJ at KKJZ and probably the coolest (and frankest) guide anywhere in the city. As a kid in the neighborhood half a century ago, he used to climb the spires, ascending the maze of  hoops and pipes and curlicues as if it were his secret tree fort, and now he gets to play guardian, educating and inspiring a new generation of converts. Being shepherded through the interior made me feel like a rube: All these years in L.A., and what I thought I knew about the Watts Towers proved to be only the most superficial of impressions. The level of detail—the craftsmanship, the madness—was staggering, a mosaic of bottles and cups and plates and mirrors and shells that turns out, on closer inspection, to be intended to replicate a ship. 

The story of the artist, an illiterate Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, was somewhat familiar to me, the 33 years he spent assembling his monument on East 107th Street, designing by eye and working by hand, a lonesome obsession. We were invited afterward to watch a short documentary, made in the 1950s, the closest thing to an official account of Rodia’s life, and the most extraordinary part was hearing his name mispronounced, over and over. Apparently the producers were given the spelling by a neighbor of Latino descent, who conveyed it, phonetically, as Rodilla—the Spanish word for knee—and so all throughout the film, the narrator keeps saying Ro-DILL-a. It was heartbreaking, and perfect.    

Photo: Forest Casey

In the June issue of Los Angeles magazine, in a piece titled ”Reflections of a Valley Boy,” I profile my old college classmate Bret Easton Ellis. The occasion is the 25th anniversary of his debut, Less Than Zero, and the publication next month of a sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, but the interview also became a chance for Bret and I to reminisce and reflect and relive an oddly captivating evening from 1984 when, while on break from Bennington, he introduced me to the Polo Lounge.

“This is craaazy,” he says. “What are we doing?”

A link is here, a PDF here.

Usually when I extract a story from the vault, I am prepared to cringe a little—at the datedness or journalese or naivete of the young reporter. Dusting off this 1991 Los Angeles Times column one, ”Propaganda, Truth Duel in Crowd Counts,” I was pleasantly surprised by the continued relevance of its premise. Not that I was exactly blowing the lid off the great crowd guesstimate racket. Shocking: The tallies for most protests or parades tend to be wildly imprecise, often reflecting the agenda of the talliers. That said, 19 years later, crowd counting is still more gamesmanship than science, and if you substitute gay marriage for gay rights, Tea Partiers for antiabortion crusaders, Iraq and Afghanistan for the Gulf War, the stakes are just as high.

My friend and neighbor and youth sports ally Chris Contreras, who makes his first appearance in The Opposite Field on page 82, has been in the transportation business all his life. The son of a milkman, Chris grew up rambling through East L.A. in his dad’s refrigerated Divco. Later, he became a car customizer, cruising Whittier Boulevard in a lowrider Karmann Ghia, and as an adult, he launched his own limo service, Total Transportation. Because Chris has a gift for gab and ingenuity, decorum and wit, he also sometimes lands a coveted Hollywood gig—and that includes driving for American Idol king maker/dream crusher Simon Cowell.

The assignment lasted the duration of AI’s ninth season—Chris spent months shuttling between the MPK and the 90210—and although he needed to be discreet about what he was up to, the job ended with last week’s finale and Simon’s farewell. There was one last run to make, a wee-hours getaway from SkyBar, at the Mondrian, and parting the sea of paparazzi, from behind the wheel of the Bentley, was my buddy, the Monterey Park Sports Club’s basketball commissioner.

In the May issue of Los Angeles magazine I profile Bryan Cranston, the two-time Emmy-winning star of AMC’s Breaking Bad, though better known, perhaps, still as Hal, the hapless dad on Malcolm in the Middle. The premise of the piece, “Heavy Hitter,” was to involve motorcyles. Cranston owns a 2006 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, and I was supposed to hop on the back with him and, um, go for a ride. As it happens, the forecast that Sunday was calling for rain, and in the interest of prudence, his people granted me a reprieve.

We still needed to come up with some other activity—that is the rule of an L.A. Mag celebrity “Encounter,” no poking at shrimp cocktails at the Four Seasons—and it was Cranston’s idea for us to meet at the BatCade in Burbank and take some hacks. I am pretty sure he had no idea I was a baseball guy, but he is; Cranston used to coach his daughter’s Little League team, and at 54 he remains a fit athlete.

I found him in the 60 m.p.h. cage already swinging. He looked good: balanced, compact, explosive. I got in some cuts too, of course, but I thought it wise to keep the focus on him—and not just for journalistic reasons. The author was having a hard time seeing the ball.

It was a day I had been looking forward to and a day I had been dreading, the last of the 22 games on Keppel’s 2010 calendar, the finale of Max’s junior season, the beginning of what will soon enough be the end of his high school baseball years. The Aztecs arrived at San Gabriel with a dreadful 2-19 record, exceeded on the misery index only by the Matadors’ 1-18. We had each won a game against the other, and Keppel needed another win to stay out of the Almont League cellar.

Max led things off with a single, and then scored the first run of the game, staking the Aztecs to a 1-0 edge. They gave the run back in the third inning, and let two more slip by in the fourth inning, putting themselves at a 3-1 disadvantage. For a good while, it looked as though that might just be the way the game would end; Max popped up in his second at-bat, and then popped up again in the one after that. In the sixth, though, the Aztecs rallied, evening the score at 3-3, and when Max came up in the final inning with a runner on second, he was itching for redemption.

In the video you can see him fouling off the first pitch. The second one is high. He fouls off another. The next pitch he drills up the middle, driving in the go-ahead (and soon-to-be winning) run. Mark Keppel 4, San Gabriel 3.

As it turns out a reporter from the West Valley Journal, a Monterey Park freebie, was on hand to witness the spectacle, and as soon as it was over, he pulled Max aside—my son’s first postgame interview. Max seemed amused by the attention, even more so by the reporter’s note-taking technique. I will have to wait for Volume 10, Number 9 to be published to see what he said.