News from The Opposite Field

On Wednesday I received the “Mayor’s Award of Excellence” from Monterey Park’s mayor, Mitchell Ing, and his colleagues on the Monterey Park city council. I was actually one of three honorees that night: I was summoned to the dais after Tony Ngo, owner of the Chinese vegetarian restaurant Happy Family, and before Master Shi Yan Liang, who put on a kung fu demonstration in the Shao Lin tradition.

I would venture to say that nobody on the council was all too familiar with the contents of The Opposite Field, although my plaque was gracious enough to describe the book as “beautifully written” and full of “character-building lessons.” Far be it for me to dispute that. I presented each member of the council with a signed poster—and even though there must be some ordinance against conducting commerce within the confines of city hall, I managed to sell five books while I was at it. 

The best part of the evening was getting the chance to share it with Carlos Zuñiga, who in the photo is standing between me and Max. I had the privilege of coaching Carlos for several seasons at La Loma Park, and his first hit—”something glorious and irrevocable”—was for me one of the most pleasurable passages of The Opposite Field to write. As much as La Loma was an oasis for Max, a refuge from some of the tribulations in the rest of our lives, so it was, too, for Carlitos, who I believe is twenty-two now, one of those rare and sacred places where he could just be himself.

Nearly everyone who has commented about the cover of my book has wondered about the boy, that face split in half, that eye peeking out—searching, glaring, beckoning. Was that me as a kid? Is it Max? A child from our league?

Now, I might pretend to be Latino from time to time, but as I have written in The Opposite Field, I am at best a ”reverse coconut”: white on the outside, brown underneath. I am pretty sure I do not look Latino. My son, a beautiful, undefinable synthesis of Nicaraguan and Eastern European Jew, does bear some similarities to the image in question. The darkness, the almondness, the lushness of the lashes—it could be him. But it is not, and of course, there is no reason for it to be. A book cover is not a literal documentation of the contents; it is an interpretation, an invitation. An advertisement for the ideas and emotions within.

That said, I have found myself wondering just who that boy might be, an ordinary and anonymous if strikingly handsome kid whose half a face is now a fixture of bookstores across America and replicated a gazillion times over on the Web.

On the inside flap, the photo is identified simply as “boy” and credited to Getty Images. As an experiment, I visited www.gettyimages.com, which specializes in stock photography—a repository of generic shots that can be bought and then reproduced for any purpose—and in the search engine, I typed ”Hispanic boy.” (I generally avoid that term…”Latino” would be my preference…but I was not sure how enlightened the techies at Getty could be expected to be.) My search returned 16,645 results. I began flipping through them, sixty to a page, and on the twenty-sixth page, which is to say, 1,516 images later, there he was, that penetrating gaze, that red cockeyed cap, that mysterious commingling of innocence and wisdom. Actually, he looks a little harder in full visage, and with full regalia, which includes a silver chain and what appears to be a crucifix. But there was no doubt about who I was looking at. It was him. 

In the results, he is listed more formally as “Boy with Baseball Cap.” He has been assigned a serial number, #84011100.  The photo is stamped with a watermark from The Image Bank, an archive acquired by Getty, and it is said to have originated with 4eyesphotography, a studio in Manhattan. I sent an e-mail to Kellie Walsh, who has been shooting stock at 4eyes for fifteen years, and while she said the photo was lovely, she insisted that it did not come from her. I suppose I could try Getty again. Kellie offered to do a little more digging. But the more I think of it, maybe it is better not to know, to just let him be what he is, international, universal, a chameleon. My boy.