News from The Opposite Field

“For generations they have come, seeking fortune in the golden land. Stargazers, mercenaries, refugees, romantics: some have made it in L.A., some have gambled wrong. Few dreamers, though, have blown into town with as much fanfare as Frank and Jamie McCourt, the Boston husband-wife, developer-lawyer, paper-millionaire duo who in 2004 bought the legendary Los Angeles Dodgers. Fewer still have watched their dream so spectacularly implode.”

– “McCourt v. McCourt,” by Jesse Katz, Town & Country, February 2011

Thanks to the Friends of the Duarte Library for hosting the city’s eighth annual Festival of Authors, a celebration of Southern California literature on the grounds of Westminster Gardens. We braved a rare October sprinkle in the morning, only to have the sun—and the keynote speaker, the ever inspirational (and now bestselling author) Father Gregory Boyle—show up in the afternoon.  A day of good friends, old and new.

Photo: Mary Barrow

Right between the “Hi-Def Abs” and the “Sex Tonight: Instant Action” exhortations, there he is, on the September 2010 cover of Men’s Health, the subject of my latest foray into celebrity journalism (in an Agave shirt and PPD jeans), Jeremy Renner. We had drinks together in Hollywood at a piano bar called Piano Bar, which might not qualify as the healthiest of encounters, but it did induce the Hurt Locker star to open up about swimming with sharks, sleeping under painter’s tarps, and serving as his mother’s Lamaze coach: “Oh my God, this sucks,” Renner, who was 16 at the time, recalled thinking. “Why am I watching videos of these vaginas squirting out all this fluid? It was terrifying.” The story is not online, but MTV’s Hollywood Crush provides a swooning recap.

Monterey Park lost a dear friend—community volunteer, elementary school teacher, church devotee, doting parent—last week in Dorothy Zuñiga, the mother of my longtime Little League confederate Carlitos. Her heart, as huge as Carlitos is tiny, had been causing her trouble for some time, and on August 12, at the far too young age of 58, it finally gave out. Max and I went to the funeral Saturday, as did a good number of Monterey Park Sports Club loyalists, at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. It was one of those rare celebrations of a life that required no embellishment or tidying. Everything about Dorothy was legit, from her generosity to her faith to her unconditional love for a son who needed every bit of what she had to give.

In The Opposite Field, I wrote about Carlitos being slipped onto my team in our early days at La Loma—a mysterious thirteenth player—and the unexpected triumphs we would come to share. But there would be no story without Dorothy, without her optimism and her stubbornness, without her willingness to expose Carlitos to failure, without her sureness that every bump and bruise and strikeout was taking him one step closer to victory. Dorothy, who earned her B.A. and M.A. in education at Cal State L.A., was a living reminder not just that baseball was about more than the score, and not just that baseball was supposed to be about having fun, but that baseball was about confronting limits—staring them down, disputing them, shattering them, transcending them—a testament to not knowing until you try.

As hard as it was to absorb her loss, it was just as hurtful to learn that Carlos’s health has also been deteriorating, and that he was not well enough to attend his mother’s funeral. He is 23—that is him in the photo, between Max and me, getting honored last fall at Monterey Park City Hall—and I can only imagine the void right now at the center of his world. When I was running things at La Loma, and running myself into the ground, Dorothy once pulled me aside and assured me I could count on her for anything. “If you need help, ask for it,” she told me, an offer I jotted down and later wove into the book, on page 236. “I don’t want to hear that you got sick and didn’t call.”

That was Dorothy, always pledging, even when her needs were great. I can only hope myself capable of making to Carlitos—and his tenacious sister Victoria—a fraction of the contribution Dorothy made to us all.

Things have probably seemed a little quiet around The Opposite Field of late, which is, in fact, just the opposite. Although there is a new paperback to celebrate—with a new cover, a new price, and new study questions—I have found myself consumed by other transitions: among them, the end of Max’s summer school and sports schedule, and the beginning of his first great solo trip abroad. The boy is in Peru at the moment—Cusco, to be precise—11,000 feet up in the Andes, staying with a host family, and volunteering at an after-school center for at-risk kids through a program called United Planet.

Not having him around the house, not shuttling him to two baseball games and five basketball games a week, is a strange new sensation for me, one that I will have to get accustomed to much sooner than I would like to admit. From his distant frontiers, though, Max is doing what for a modern teenager comes naturally: he is blogging, providing regular dispatches from the Incan Empire at maxandperu.blogspot.com.  The best thing about his blog, which bears the identifier “From Privileged to Primitive,” is not the writing, which I think, from my biased perch, is pretty darn good, but the sense of wonderment and adventure that permeates every sentence. There is no complaining, nothing about what distresses or inconveniences him, and instead lots of observation and appreciation and humor, including an account of a cockfight his first day in town.  He has given me no shortage of reasons over the years to be proud, but watching him from afar, on his own, in an uncertain place, and yet absolutely present, is proving to be among the sweetest excuses ever to cheer him on.  

Photo: Max Katz

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.