News from The Opposite Field

With devil winds twisting through Los Angeles yesterday evening, the streets a vortex of palm fronds and trash bags, I arrived at Book Soup for the launch of The Opposite Field only to find the store engulfed in darkness. The power was out. It brought to mind the remarks of the great travel writer Paul Theroux:

“The worst trips make the best reading.”

The Los Angeles River—destitute, paved, forsaken—is the cradle of L.A. life. Centuries ago it sustained Native Americans, then lured Spaniards, then finally birthed a metropolis that sprawled and morphed so extravagantly that people forgot where it started from.

The filmmaker Eric Nazarian, in his magnifcent and subtle feature, The Blue Hour, restores the river to its rightful place in the soul of the city. Weaving together four disparate tales along its concrete banks, Eric gives us something Hollywood often seems incapable of conjuring: the authentic L.A., the misperceived L.A., the L.A. of ingenuity and survival and heart, the L.A. of the trenches and margins. Through his lens this forlorn body of water is timeless and universal, our common ground. It is the giver and taker of life, an oasis, a temptation, a canvas, a hideout, the wellspring from which all the city’s dreams and losses flow. With only a few minutes of dialogue on this hour-and-a-half DVD, The Blue Hour is all about what is left unsaid, the truths that collect like silt in our bones.

Despite operating on a shoestring, Eric reels in a surprisingly accomplished cast, extracting performances—including a grieving, and ostensibly Armenian, Alyssa Milano—that defy their popular images. It is easy to see why such proficient actors agreed to put their faith in him. Eric has created something gorgeous and haunting, lush and spare, intimate and epic. The Blue Hour aches in all the right places, and offers comfort, a hand, a caress, just when we need it, too.

I dropped by Vroman’s this week to catch Michael Connelly—his new book, 9 Dragons, debuted on October 13 —and thank him for his generous praise of The Opposite Field, which he described to The Daily Beast as having “that indescribable thing that is in all great storytelling…that glue, the juice, the stuff that captures the human experience.” Although I do not know Michael especially well, we were both cop and crime reporters in the old suburban sections of the L.A. Times, he in the San Fernando Valley, me in the San Gabriel, and from that shared history, and the common trials inherent in it, perhaps I can say that a certain solidarity was born.

The crowd in Pasadena was big enough to necessitate raffle tickets. The staff handed out more than a hundred of them, calling us up in groups of twenty-five to get our books signed. I was in the third wave, which gave me a chance to flip through 9 Dragons and look for the Monterey Park mentions that I had heard might be there. Sure enough, Connelly’s literary franchise, Hieronymus Bosch, is called on to investigate a murder involving a Hong Kong-based triad known as Brave Knife—a case that, on page 86, takes Bosch to America’s most Chinese city, Monterey Park.

“Fifteen minutes from downtown,” Connelly writes, ”it was like a foreign country with impenetrable language and culture.”

The other MPK references I spotted were of a similarly exotic nature: “the neon, the colors, the shops….” All true, except that my experience in Monterey Park is one that encompasses its middle-class aspects as well: a port of entry and a bedroom community, alien, anonymous, international, square. Michael is in his own stratosphere—”the best mystery writer in the world,” as GQ has dubbed him—and far more people will pick up his book, which is #12 on the Amazon bestseller list today, than mine, which (though not available until October 27) is at this very moment #294,992. But I am tickled and honored that we both, purely by coincidence, found a “fish out of water” story in this suburban Chinatown, one fiction, the other memoir, their protagonists a homicide detective and a Little League commissioner—and that without knowing any of that beforehand, Michael took it upon himself to be a champion of The Opposite Field.

How gratifying to discover that someone who has written twenty-two books still remembers what it is like to write that first one.

When your high school is 70 percent Asian, as my son’s is, not to mention an academic powerhouse, ditto, there are a few truisms about sports that you just have to accept:

Contests of brawn and bone-crushing bravura, such as football, are unlikely to be your forte. Games of speed and finesse—say, badminton—might just be your ticket to glory. Mark Keppel High School’s greatest success in athletics, ever, has come with the shuttlecock; beginning in the 1990s, eight California Interscholastic Federation championships. Keppel’s football program (not unlike its baseball program) has been on an almost unthinkable schneid; 40 consecutive losses, dating back to 2005, the longest active losing streak in the CIF.

That is, until last Friday. On a windless fall night, under a flying saucer of a moon, the Aztecs treated Mountain View of El Monte to a 36-0 thumping. It was such a turn of fate, even the hobbled and understaffed Los Angeles Times took note of the celebration.  

The next frontier is to break an even longer schneid against Keppel’s five Almont League opponents, a fruitless stretch that has lasted 56 games. The baseball squad, in a fit of grit and hope and fortune, reversed a years-long Almont League curse of its own earlier this spring. Football gets the chance October 16.

My book arrived yesterday. A single copy. The FedEx lady dropped it off about 10. It was in a padded Manila envelope, a Sealed Air Jiffylite #5 cushioned mailer.  A part of me wanted to rip the pouch open right there in the doorway, greedy and gleeful as a child, to touch and smell and cradle that first precious edition.

Instead I took the package back to my office. I sat myself down. Four years after the idea was sown in the pages of Los Angeles magazine, two years after it started gestating into a memoir, a year after the deadline that I missed by four months, another two months since I last pored over a galley, I could say, finally, the thing was done.

I was shaky as I tugged at the corner, tearing through the bubble wrap. We may live in a digital world—and if that is where the future of journalism lies, I am prepared to embrace it—but, damn, do not tell me that there is not something wondrous and visceral still about printing ideas onto paper, turning what is intimate and ephemeral into a three-dimensional object, tangible, solid, forever. I held it for a long time, then slid it back into the envelope and waited for Max to come home from school.

“Check it out, kiddo,” I said, handing him the package.

He looked at me, cocking an eyebrow.

I nodded. He wiped his palms on his shirt.

“It’s like a child,” he said, reaching in.

“Something like that,” I said.

“We’re witnessing a birth,” he said.

Nothing simple about being the son of a writer.

“And this envelope—,” Max said, pausing, scouring his teenage brain for just the right image, ”—it’s like the golden vagina.”