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 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. Believable or not, the stories fit a distinctive mold: 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 one cheek, will rank No. 11 on the July 17 New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. It has sold 4,956 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen BookScan.
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 the 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 on 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 almost never know where his mind will alight.
Which raises a question: How can someone who can’t stay on point for long write a book that moves at a fairly brisk pace, with plenty of sleaze and surprise? Indeed, he admitted to me two years ago that he’d never read a book cover to cover until around 2011, early in his prison stay, when he raced through “The King of Torts,” by John Grisham.
The veteran collaborator Peter Golenbock worked with Dykstra for seven or eight months, only to be fired by him. Dykstra said he had needed to take control of the book to preserve his singular voice, which is notably profane and blustery and as obsessed with sex as a pubescent boy. Golenbock, who recognizes Dykstra’s Trump-like qualities, said by telephone, “I looked at the book yesterday to see if he used my chapter titles and my work, which of course he did.”
Despite his termination, Golenbock, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., said he had enjoyed a good rapport with Dykstra but chose not to fight him over being fired. “I have a life to live,” he said. “I have softball to play, books to write and the terrible Rays to watch.”
(Golenbock’s decision not to sue Dykstra was not echoed by Noah Scheinmann, who claimed in a breach-of-contract suit filed Friday in Manhattan federal court that Dykstra had refused to pay him for running the book’s social media campaign. He is seeking damages of $91,000 and other unspecified payments.)
Dykstra said he rewrote the book alone, and had help from a husband-and-wife copy editing team and one of his doctors.
“I had to be alone while I was writing,” he said. “I can think better. I wrote one piece of my life at a time. It was a very hard process.”
Indeed, he claimed, he left blood on his keyboard. “Oh, yeah, that’s how I roll,” he said.
In the book, he does not dwell on his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing; lawsuits filed against him; or the legal fight with his brother, Kevin. Too much detail, he said, that he had felt people would not care much to read about. But when Kirk Minihane of WEEI Radio confronted him on those subjects — “You’re Nails, you’re a tough guy, answer the questions” — on his podcast last week, Dykstra exploded.
“Get the facts straight!” he said, shouting. “Ask questions that matter!”
Then he hung up.
Minihane “was just trying to dig up dirt,” Dykstra said Friday.
Dirt is relative. Dykstra paints an unpleasant picture of himself with a fair share of dirt tossed in. But it’s his dirt and he got to choose it.
Email: sandor@nytimes.com
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