News from The Opposite Field

As a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times back in the day, I spent a disproportionate amount of time eating and drinking my way through New Orleans. It was not all frivolity. In this 1996 piece, “Nobody Comes to Galatoire’s Only for the Food,” you can see how lunch becomes theater and ritual and myth—and ultimately dinner.

Photo: Bobak Ha’Eri

Arriving in Portland via Amtrak, after a literary jam session on the outskirts of Seattle, I was thrilled to discover that The Opposite Field had claimed the #4 spot on the 2009 bestseller list at the wonderfully independent neighborhood bookseller, Broadway Books.

I am right behind The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and just ahead of Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Actually, I am nudging out quite a few heavyweights, including Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Greg Mortenson, Sherman Alexie, and the Commander-in-Chief himself. Perhaps nowhere else, but at 1714 NE Broadway I am to be reckoned with:

1. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
4. The Opposite Field, Jesse Katz
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
6. The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch
7. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein
8. The Stubborn Twig, Lauren Kessler
9. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
10. My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
11. The Hearts of Horses, Molly Gloss
12. Pedaling Revolution, Jeff Mapes
13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
14. Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
15. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson with David Oliver Relin
16. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
17. Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
18. Run, Ann Patchett
19. White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
20. Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier
21. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
22. Lavinia, Ursula LeGuin
23. Twilight, Stephenie Meyers
24. The Book Thief, Mark Zusak
25. Dreams from my Father, Barack Obama

My high school pal, Dick Shoemaker, has been playing the sax since we were teenagers, and while I have found it almost impossible to tend to my electric guitar as an adult, Dick has continued blowing that horn. On Wednesday, at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Wash., he and his jazz combo, Azul, opened for me: Miles, Coltrane, Monk, then fatherhood, baseball, redemption.

It was the soundtrack of an artist, of my dad. “He had spent so many years in the studio, bent over sawhorses and manipulating surfaces, elbow pumping, dust swirling, sweat dripping, horns wailing, that he finally wore the cartilage down to the bone.”

I will be adding more stories to my website in the days ahead, beginning with my journey through the world of extras, ”Straight Out of Central Casting.”

Before I wrote the piece, I must confess, I had no idea there was such a thing as Central Casting. I had even used the phrase before in other articles—so and so was “straight out of Central Casting”—but I had always thought it was a mythical notion, an allusion to some bygone Hollywood practice, not an actual casting agency in Burbank.

The climax of the story, which appeared in the February 2006 Los Angeles magazine, was my own debut as an extra. Cast in the first season of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom, The New Adventures of Old Christine, I was to blend into a sea of Rolling Stones fans, a part that called for “very upscale, affluent, good-looking people…a sophisticated crowd…in very hip, very concert-like attire.”

At the time of publication, I had yet to see the episode, but it would later air as “Exile on Lame Street,” on May 15, 2006. My silent yowl and fist pump—about a second of screen time—bespeak a vast, untapped potential.

Could Tom Cruise be Michael Mullen? Could Mullen be Cruise? Or do they both share the DNA of Les Grossman, the cut-throat, foul-mouthed, booty-dancing studio boss in Tropic Thunder?  My son, who has always thought so, felt inspired to prove the point. For the record, Mike, who performs in the improv troupe Lawrence of Arkansas, does not think this is funny. 

After 1 quarter: Keppel 10, Montebello 11

After 2 quarters: Keppel 29, Montebello 31

After 3 quarters: Keppel 42, Montebello 47

After 4 quarters: Keppel 52, Montebello 52

After OT: Keppel 59, Montebello 61

Max: 2 points, 1 rebound

Although we are better known as a baseball family, Max (who is 16 now and not 11, as pictured) has been playing basketball his entire life, beginning in the Pee-Wee division of the Monterey Park Sports Club. These days he is the first guy off the bench for the Mark Keppel High School varsity basketball team—a defensive stopper and a playmaker, as opposed to an above-the-rim human highlight reel, at least so far.

For a program that is neither stocked with towering urban nor privileged suburban boys, the Aztecs are a legit basketball squad, ranked #129 in California, according to MaxPreps. Under coach Hung Duong (who earns a cameo in The Opposite Field) they went 13-3 in preseason play this winter, and so far in Almont League games are a solid 2-0, including an impressive trouncing of cross-Pomona Freeway rival Schurr, 66-41, in the home opener. A Max Katz layup, which gave the Aztecs an early 26-15 lead, was duly noted by the Pasadena Star-News.

Keppel will be tested in a big way this Tuesday, January 19, when the school hosts Montebello, which brings its 19-1 record to Hellman Avenue. They will face each other once more, on February 5—and if the Aztecs want any piece of the Almont League crown, they will have to at least earn a split.

Shockingly my plans to blog from the road—to craft a living record of my first book tour—vanished somewhere between home and LAX. Before I knew it, November had slipped away, and then December, and now almost half of January, and I am only just barely able to begin making sense of the bedlam, both the ecstatic highs and the aching lows, that ground every other obligation and routine to a halt.

The tally: 25 events in 45 days, from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest to Texas to New York to the Bay Area and back. I did literary landmarks (Powell’s, Book People), cultural bulwarks (Eso Won, Tia Chucha’s), my alma mater, my dad’s gallery, a yoga studio, a law firm, the Monterey Park library, and our local Costco. On my best nights I pulled a hundred people. One frigid night, at an upscale shopping plaza with an ersatz creek wending past a plastic surgery clinic in the exurbs of San Francisco, I drew a zero. Along the way I was treated to uncommon hospitality—rides, meals, beds, hugs, toasts, even my own set of embossed notecards from the events manager at Book Passage in Corte Madera—and unexpected indignities, like waking up in the predawn darkness for a live TV interview in Portland and discovering I had failed to pack any underwear.  

My publisher had tried to rein in my ambition, cautioning me that the author reading/signing was no longer considered a cost-effective tactic. But I was insistent, swayed partly by romantic illusions, partly by pragmatic fear: If hitting the road was out, how the hell else was I supposed to be finding an audience? It is true that in the age of the Kindle and the Tweet traveling great distances to hold court in a retail establishment is at best cumbersome, a brick-and-mortar approach to a viral marketplace. The math is hard to dispute. Fly 1,500 miles to sell, say, 15 books—and you probably could have bought copies for each of those people, mailed them out Priority, and still saved yourself a few hundred bucks.  

Even so, that strikes me as an unfortunate standard to apply, to distill the success of a tour to a P&L.  Sharing your work with potential readers—selling your book face to face, hand to hand—is all about the connections, the communion, the emotional and intellectual bond that sometimes takes root despite all evidence to the contrary. On a desolate Monday night at a lovely bookstore in La Jolla I found myself speaking to an audience of two, one of whom graciously purchased The Opposite Field before I turned around and dragged myself back to L.A., a 200-plus-mile roundtrip that felt like a journey to the ends of the earth. The manager had been embarrassed, I was depressed, and then a few days later I received an email from a fellow named John: He was the fifty percent that had not bought the book, but he wanted to introduce himself and let me know how glad he was to have wandered into my presentation, so much so that he had returned to the store and picked up a copy and was loving it and now needed a second copy to share with his wife. Now that was nice.

I enjoyed plenty of instant gratification along the way, too, enthusiastic home-court crowds in the PDX and the MPK, old teachers, old classmates, old coaches, old girlfriends, my chiropractor, my mechanic, my therapist, the dude from Cook’s Tortas. Many a stop felt like a high school reunion, or my own funeral.  Having been born in New York, raised in Portland, educated in Vermont, and employed in both Houston and L.A., there is no way to keep all those relationships fresh and nourished at once—they are too many, too scattered—but having the excuse to affirm them, to look people up after years and years, decades even, to pause and reminisce and celebrate our shared histories, well, that was quite extraordinary, something I will cherish long after the last hardcover disappears from the shelves.