There's no such thing as a brief conversation with Lenny Dykstra. Wendy, the waitress in the restaurant of The Ritz-Carlton is learning this firsthand as she tries to take his dinner order. Before giving his order, he wants to know where she's from. When she tells him she's from China, Dykstra—a former entrepreneur, former proprietor of a car wash chain, and self-appointed stock market adviser—is excited to drop a bit of knowledge he's picked up about the region.
"China, there's a lot of action there," Dykstra says. "A lot of money there. Did you know there's more millionaires in China than there are people in this country? This is not factual, 'cause I haven't checked, but I believe that there's more millionaires in China than there are people in this country. There's a tall statement, are you with me?"
According tothe 2015 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, China actually has a population of 1.3 million millionaires. The population of the U.S. is just over 323 million. So, sure, Dykstra is right in his statement not being factual, but China is sixth in the world in terms of the number of millionaires in its population, so one can see his point about there being "a lot of action."
Wendy politely lets him know that she's not really interested in politics before finally taking his order for French onion soup. Wendy is infinitely patient and a good sport. You kind of have to be when talking to Lenny "Nails" Dykstra. He's the first to admit that he has a tendency to mumble. When he's speaking, his narrative thread isn't always linear. It's as if his brain and his mouth are working at two different speeds, with his mouth constantly struggling to catch up. Sitting and listening to Nails talk is labor intensive and requires one hundred percent of one's attention, but holy Christ, is it entertaining.
In fairness, Nails isn't here to discuss the Chinese economy. The retired major league center fielder, hero to both Mets and Phillies fans alike, is here to discuss his gripping memoir, House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge. Plus, he's in a good mood since he just got off the three years probation he served after being locked up for two years for, among other charges, bankruptcy fraud.
"I wrote this book because this is the story that the American people deserve to be told," Nails says. "At the end of the day, why do we get up every day, what do you work so hard to achieve? You want to have fun, to get some kind of entertainment, so my book will help people get away from their miserable life."
And what exactly does that miserable life entail? Well, Nails lays out a mundane Moebius strip of an average man who "sits in his car, goes to his job, takes orders, [gets] back in his car, [goes] back to his miserable wife, eats his shitty food, they don't fuck, and then he gets up and they do it again. And again, and again, and again."
If anything, Nails lives in mortal fear of being average. That fear just might be his fatal flaw.
"You fail, or you succeed. There's no middle," the 53-year-old says of going up to bat in the major leagues. "That's why I fucking love baseball. My whole life is about getting away from the middle. I make that clear in that book."
Getting "away from the middle" has brought Nails to two separate World Series. It's made him a multimillionaire and a hero to sports fans in both New York City and Philadelphia. It's allowed him to do blow with Robert De Niro, party for five days straight in a limo parked outside of the Promises rehab center with Mickey Rourke, and rub elbows with Jack Nicholson. It's also resulted in bankruptcy, convictions for fraud, grand theft auto, and sexual misconduct towards housekeepers he solicited on Craigslist. Nails is determined to live a life of extremes. Sometimes those extremes consist of room service and private jets. Other times they involve getting his teeth knocked out by deputies in Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail and regularly pissing in a cup in front of a probation officer.
Nails flips through his book and points out photos of his bloodied and busted grill taken while he was hospitalized from the jailhouse beating. The damage was so severe that all of his teeth were eventually removed, hence why he's eating soup tonight. These days, he hides the fact that he's missing his teeth behind a grey mustache.
"These photos were their evidence," Nails says. "They misplaced the videotape." You can practically hear the scare quotes around "misplaced."
In his memoir, Nails writes that he corroborated the deputies' version of events because they allegedly threatened to kill him if he didn't.
"Nonetheless, I had to serve the remainder of my time there, saying nothing about the incident, or risk death if I did," wrote Nails. "Needless to say, I lived in constant fear that they would come back and finish me off."
The fact that he was in constant danger was ironic given that Dykstra was put away in protective custody designed to keep high-profile prisoners from being attacked by other inmates. According to Nails, another such high-profile prisoner who was locked up in the same wing "for a little while" was Dr. Conrad Murray, the physician who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Michael Jackson's death from prescription drug overdose.
"But he didn't do it, just ask him, he told me what happened," Nails says. "It makes sense."
Oh?
According to Nails, Dr. Murray gave Jackson his "normal amount" of medicine and then his patient "went on his own and got more. It wasn't addiction, he just wanted to check out, quickly."
Probably the most important relationship Nails formed while in the slammer was with Lalo Martinez, the so-called "head of the Mexican mafia who ran the whole fucking jail from his cell." In addition to that impressive resume, Martinez also introduced Nails to the joy of reading by tossing a paperback airport thriller into his cell.
"In prison, you learn how to jerk off with your left hand and then you learn to jerk off with your right hand," Nails says. "You jerk off and you read, what else are you gonna do?"
At a moment when Nails was either jerking off or staring at the walls, Martinez checked in on him.
"You read?" Martinez asked him.
"And I said, 'I never read a book in my life,'" Nails recalls. "He says you better start reading, you're doing hard time."
And with that, Martinez tossed The King of Torts by John Grisham into his cell, and thus ignited a love affair with the literary equivalent of the CBS procedurals your parents watch before falling asleep. We should all be so lucky to have a guardian angel like Martinez in our lives.
Despite the fact that he was beaten until he was unconscious while locked up, he refers to having to fly commercial after no longer being able to afford his private jet as "the hardest thing I ever did."
"I used to always say that pussy..." Nails pauses and corrects himself once he remembers that he's talking to a woman. "Or women, or whatever you want to call it, was the most powerful thing in the world, because it has brought countries down, empires have fallen. Until I bought my plane."
In his more flush days, Nails treated himself to his own personal Gulfstream jet.
"That's not an explainable power to be hanging out with your buddies, in your suite, and be like, let's get the fuck out of here. Where do you want to go? Spin the globe. Rome!" says Nails. He gets noticeably giddy just talking about it. "Get the flight plans, and you can be wheels up in an hour. And get the gasoline and the flight attendants—who I never fucked, by the way."
He says that last part like it's an accomplishment, and maybe it is. Throughout his memoir, he's quite open about the fact that he regularly cheated on Terri, his ex-wife, to whom he was married for 24 years. He even tells an anecdote in the book about how when he wanted to close the deal with a girl, he'd call his buddy Jack Nicholson up and that power move would convince the girl to sleep with him.
"Sleep with," Nails says dismissively, scoffing at the word choice.
He even used to tell his wife that he was checking into rehab for 30 days just so he could jaunt off to Europe and party without having her check in on him.
"I'm not proud of that," Nails offers, before launching into an unrelated anecdote about how he discovered steroids in 1989, placing him "ahead of the curve."
As a ballplayer, like everything else in his life, the scrappy lefthander is a walking contradiction. He's the first to criticize the current crop of major leaguers for not "playing right" and for not walking into the batter's box with a plan for how to deal with the current crop of pitching talent, which he says is much better than the ones he faced back in the day.
"I was a very sophisticated player. I learned about the counts. I learned about all the different situations," Nails says. "You can turn a 0 for 8 into an 0 for 15 real fast. If you have a plan and you know that plan is the best possible plan to succeed and you stick with that plan for every possible at bat, you'll be rewarded."
Sure, Dykstra does make a solid case for sitting on the first pitch and developing a system for each at bat. And by doing so, he led the league in walks in 1993. But how much of his success getting on base was due to the fact that he freely admits that he paid private investigators a grand total of $500,000 to dig up dirt on umpires in order to shrink his strike zone?
"Look, the whole umpire thing," Nails says. "They control your life. I mean, I learned early on who has control of my life—it's the umpires. So, everyone tells you to work the umpires. Most of them worked them different than I did."
He explains that some of the other players worked the umps by "brownnosing them," which doesn't really compare to blackmailing a closeted gay umpire into calling balls that should be strikes.
On the field, Nails' hard-nosed performance often made him a fan favorite.
"It became like a ritual when I played for the Phillies," Nails says, bowing his head as if to pray. "I would go to my locker and I would take two minutes, and I would sit down and say to myself, I would ask myself, if I were a fan, would I have paid money to watch me play? I realized that I was in the business of putting people in the seats. I was in the business of entertaining people. The mouthful of chew, the grabbing my cock—it's all a plan."
Whether he's hitting a game-winning walk off home run of Game Three of the '86 National League Champion Series or telling a story of trying to talk Charlie Sheen into quitting crack, the man knows how to entertain. You gotta give him that.
