Crawling from a hole he joyfully dug himself
In his new autobiography, “House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge,” Lenny Dykstra emerges as a figure of enormous braggadocio who moves swiftly from roguish to Trumpian. He can hardly stop admiring his hitting skills, his houses, his private jets, his magazine for wealthy athletes and his epiphany that steroids would help sate his craving to make millions of dollars after the New York Mets traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies.
And, he reminds readers all too often, his little guy’s body resembled the physique of a Greek statue once altered by the juice.
“House of Nails” is a story of exceptional excess that finds our memoirist playing the sensible adult in his friendship with Charlie Sheen; buying Wayne Gretzky’s house for $17.5 million; and paying detectives $500,000 to dig up dirt on umpires so that he could suborn their objectivity by telling them embarrassing things about their private lives while at bat. True or not, the stories fit a distinctive mould: Shock readers with his astonishing hubris and brass you-know-whats.
It is apparently a formula for success. The book, with its cover photograph of Dykstra looking like a jack-o’-lantern with a chaw of tobacco in its right cheek, will rank No. 11 on the July 17 New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
During an appearance last week on “Loud Mouths,” on SNY, the hosts treated him like a returning 1986 World Series hero, no more so than when they asked him about his umpire scheme, which he still believes was a great idea.
“Am I proud of doing that?” said Dykstra, perhaps playing to his admirers. “Yeah.” Jon Hein, one of the hosts, offered his kudos. “He’s the best — Lenny Dykstra,” he said. “The book is ‘House of Nails.’ ”
It is not an eloquent autobiography, like Andre Agassi’s “Open,” and is more in keeping with the spirit of Jose Canseco’s “Juiced.”
It is not explosive, unless his accusation that former Mets manager Davey Johnson drank a lot is big news. It is rather a narcissist’s delight, so relentlessly focused on Dykstra’s ego and antics that you need to rest occasionally from the Lenniness of it all.
In a telephone interview Friday, Dykstra meandered, flitting more to the subjects he preferred to talk about than the ones he was asked to discuss. But that is the normal course that a Dykstra conversation takes. His mumbling, stream-of-consciousness style takes him from twice leading the National League in hits to the bankruptcy fraud case that got him jail time, to the Major League Baseball pension that goes each month to his ex-wife, to being a whale to the casinos in Atlantic City. You hardly ever know where his mind will alight.