House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge

 

House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge – Lenny Dykstra

Lenny Dykstra is possibly the most hated professional athlete of the last century. He’s fine with that fact. In fact, he uses it to his advantage.  The more the fans hated him, he claims, the better he played.  It’s one thing to be hated because of attitude and hard playing. It’s another thing though, to be hated because you cheat, lie, and blackmail your way towards your goals and achievements. Lenny Dykstra is such the individual.  This book is basically a memoir of an unrepentant junkie and a rotten human being who has absolutely no remorse about anything illicit that he ever did.  Had the book been well written or had any sort of focus, such traits might be easy to overlook, but such is not the case here.  You have to wonder if he intentionally wrote a crappy book over a few weekends with the idea of a quick cash grab in order to pay off his massive debts that we (unfortunately) have to read about here.

This is not Dykstra’s first book.  He wrote an account of the 1986 New York Mets championship team (called “Nails” – I’m guessing long out of print) shorty after that season ended.   Like this offering, that book sounded as though it was written by a drunken uneducated teenager with an overactive libido, but at least that book had a point. At least it had a theme; a story to tell.  This one really doesn’t.  This really isn’t even a baseball book. It simply details much of Dykstra’s escapades (many after his ball player career) and is so poorly written, you can’t help but be frustrated. This book needed so much more focus.

Example: We DO read a bit about his years as a Met, but it almost seems as though he’s including these very short chapters out of obligation.  He’ll say something like “Wally Backman should easily be a manager now in the Major Leagues” but Dykstra doesn’t tell us WHY he feels that way. In fact, other than that one sentence, we don’t read anything at all about Backman, nor most of his other teammates.  Now, you COULD argue that Dykstra has already told us the story of the 1986 team in a previous book, but there’s a lot more baseball that we could have read about here that could have been interesting.  What about the 1988 Mets?  The 1989 Mets that fell apart and traded him?  The 1993 Phillies?  Yes, all of that is, in fact, technically here, but in painfully short snippets.

Each chapter in this book is about 4-5 pages long. The pages are extremely thick, and each chapter is broken up by a blank page filled with some large, vapid quote.  So, this “rather thick” book is actually “rather thin”.  Of course, since the book is so poorly written, you’re almost relieved by this fact upon completion.

He also has a rather poor memory.  I never followed his career that closely, but some of his errors are quite obvious.  Most Mets fans can tell you that the infamous team photo fight between Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez happened in Spring Training 1989 – NOT 1986.  (I should also add if you’re wanting to read about insights or details of that altercation, you won’t find any here.)  We also read about Dykstra’s lackadaisical recollection of his steroid use.  He goes into detail about starting to use Steroids in the spring of 1990 as a Phillie, but anyone who has access to YouTube videos can definitely see that Dykstra started with the dangerous substance a year prior while still with the Mets.  It’s such instances such as these that make you question any of the recollections that he puts forward.

So a little about baseball, but very little. And when he does talk about his character, or what drives him, he simply doesn’t provide enough detail. His anecdotes are all very thin.  He talks more about the unpleasantness and dirt than he does about any sort of serious recollection.  Again, though, we must attribute that to his character, or lack of it.  Anyone who ever has watched this man being interviewed knows that he’s a far cry from any sort of Rhodes Scholar.

We also get long chapters on friendships with Charlie Sheen, scenarios where he snorts coke with Robert DeNiro in the bathroom, and uninteresting stories about his many failed business ventures. There were a lot of those.  Such tales aren’t really what one wants to read about when reading about a former baseball player, but the fact that these stories are so abbreviated and poorly told only make the experience worse.

This book was a waste of time. Fortunately for me, I only paid very little for it (50 cents at a rummage sale), but even then, I feel it was still a waste of money.   The whole book is rather sad, but it really is hard to feel too much sorrow for such a rotten human being.