Wrecking Crew: The Saving Grace of Baseball

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By Jess Hopsicker

Magazines paint a vicious yet glamorous picture of stardom. The glossy pages are saturated with style-stealing squabbling celebrity couples with cheesy nicknames playing pass the boyfriend or wife. Some A-listers are famous for, well, just being famous. It also seems that siblings to stardom also get a record deal. Once cast into the scrutinizing limelight, privacy becomes outdated. If any of them are caught pumping their own gas, buying groceries, or getting a manicure, the picture caption labels them as being “so down to earth.” They live in an entirely different stratosphere of multi-million dollar diamonds, exclusive vacation getaways, and celebrity-endorsed religions. Sadly, as suddenly as it arrives, the shiny veneer can diminish, for reasons as simple as a little weight gain.  Sometimes they’ll go to almost any length to recapture the attention.
        But what happens to those who fail, do they simply cease to exist? Do they rot away, mumbling in an L.A. gutter on the same streets they once strode as rock gods?  John Albert’s endearingly dark debut memoir The Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates chronicles the national pastime as it is played by the forgotten and almost famous. The saving grace of baseball exists as a back drop and a vehicle that propels his fast-pitch hard luck team of has-beens, hopefuls, former junkies, a cross dresser, and even a convicted murderer through to the championship. Though they may not have been the best team, they pulled together, overcame obstacles, it even leads some of them into full-blown adulthood.

JH: Your book was quite candid; there was a great deal of honesty and realism. Was it hard to get it published without it having to be cleaned up?
JA: Well, I didn’t write it and shop it around. It was sort of a done deal in a weird way because of all the film interest. The idea was sold, so I didn’t have to write it on spec, which was a good thing and a bad thing. It was daunting because I’ve never written a book before. I have written pieces for magazines. I never really thought about it while I was writing it. I thought they would reject it once I turned it in. But I’ve never thought about it in terms of content, and what they would like and what they would not be okay with. I didn’t censor myself in any way. I just thought of it as a lost cause. But I was surprised when they actually liked it and published it.
JH: It was almost as if William Burroughs wrote The Sandlot.
JA: You know, that’s funny because we did these posters around town here, but they were of William Burroughs holding a baseball bat. In terms of content that’s true, but there’s also a cornball sincerity to it that I’m not sure Burroughs would have liked. I love his work, but I don’t know he had that sentimentality that is in this book.  I think that sometimes the most rebellious thing is heart-on-your-sleeve straightforwardness in a time when irony reigns supreme.
JH: Leaving the reader actually hoping for the happy ending?
JA: Well in a way there is a happy ending, I mean it’s not for everybody, though. It’s funny because I’ve actually heard criticism like “We’ll he didn’t have to make the ending like that, they didn’t have to win the championship.” Well, you know what? It’s a true story and that’s what happened. I think it’s good in terms of storytelling, but it is also what happened.
JH: Very cinematic.
JA: That’s what the movie studios seem to think at this point. It has been optioned; I was just on the phone. This is the second time the story has been optioned by the same movie studio, Paramount. They have a script completed, who knows what it’s like. But it’s all moving ahead which is very odd, because it does feel like the Bad News Bears meets Trainspotting. They initially think it’s a good movie, and then they sort of realize it’s filled with sex and drugs and fairly dark stuff. So either they’ll probably not make it, or radically change it.
JH: Is there something intrinsically poisonous about living on the periphery of fame and glory?
JA: I have always sort of lived in that. I lived in Los Angeles, I’ve traveled around, but I have always lived here. The one thing I would always think is that in other places you can live your life, and the expectations aren’t so entirely unrealistic. Here you have to stay young and be incredibly successful or you’re just an utter failure. If you buy into the value system that goes along with part of this town; it’s really sort of cruel and unforgiving. For people like my friends and I at a certain time you just tend to be really judgmental about yourself and feel like you just failed. Other people have completely decent lives where they’re not rich, famous or young and seem pretty happy with it. I have sort of come to grips with it, living here, where it doesn’t matter anymore. But you fall pray to that whole value system, it’s pretty harsh. I’ve never lived anywhere else so I can only assume its easier in other places.
JH: Pretty much, its either that or you’re just a big fish living in a little pond.
JA: Yeah, I’m sure New York is the same way, like New York City. What those two years did after forming the team, was to give us a sense of family and community, as weird as that may seem, so that none of that stuff really mattered.
The point about playing baseball was that you’d be doing something just for the sake of doing it; not worrying about your bleak and tragic past and you bleak and tragic future.
JH: It kind of reminded me of a coming-of-age story. There was one line that struck me like that. “For so long we identified ourselves as the angry young rebels, but the reality was, our time had come and gone.”
JA: It’s sort of that strange thing where, at least in Los Angeles, people live their lives like teenagers well into their thirties. We had to realize that. It is hard to be an adult and to know what that is. I think one of things that happened through all of that was that we became okay with where we were in our lives. I didn’t feel like a kid anymore, but I didn’t know what it was like not to be a nineteen year old.
I work sometimes as a journalist and I interview all these actors who are well into their thirties and pretend that they’re in their early twenties. It’s a strange Peter Pan existence. I sort of like L.A. and I understand everything that is wrong with it and I just sort of except all of that. I guess I always find myself defending it against everyone that states the obvious about what’s wrong with it.
JH: Looking back, how do you feel about the way that things have turned out?
JA: In regards to which part, the book, or life?
JH: How about first life in general, and then the book.
JA: I guess I’d say that I’m pretty happy now. There’s nothing that I could do about the stuff that has gone on. I wish that life didn’t have to be so ugly at times, but if I lived in a way that made me feel regret, I’d be pretty miserable. Things seem to have, at least for me, turned out pretty well. Not in an exaggerated way. I have a nice little life and I’m pretty happy, I’m okay with it. I wish that a lot of my friends haven’t suffered so much, and died, and all of that, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.  I’m glad that I was able to write a book that my friends liked, more than anything. I never intended this to be a magazine piece; I never intended it to be a book. All the way through I was almost more concerned, this sounds idealistic, that the people involved were okay with it.  I never really had any expectations. I never thought that people would care about the initial article, or that there would be a book deal or a movie deal. I didn’t want to abuse their trust.
JH: It’s good they liked it.
JA: Yeah they loved it.  This is sort of an incriminating thing, that the only two people who had minor problems with it, were two of the female characters, one being the prostitute, and for a reason that was sort of unexpected. She thought I portrayed her too sympathetically, and as a victim. In her eyes she does what she does because she wants to. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. She’s okay generally, that was her only regret. Then, there was a character named Stevie, a drug addicted stripper. I think it was just really hard for her to look back at that period of her life. She pulled herself out of it and maybe I didn’t humanize her enough because I was writing about her boyfriend at the time, and not her. I’m guilty of using her as a device. I think she had a hard time reading it. Other than that, everyone seemed strangely proud of their accomplishments. And that it’s actually in a book.
JH: I guess they didn’t think that their parking lot confessions would amount to a book, or a movie for that matter.
JA: I kept reminding them. It’s funny, because now we’re talking about it being a book, and I wonder if they’ll tell me anything in complete confidence again. I think so. Probably, even more so. I think in that particular one, with Chris, the cross dresser, he sort of used the book to deliver a message to the world around him about who he was. There are no secrets anymore, and I think he’s happier for that. I think for a long time he suffered because it was sort of a small part of his life that caused him a lot of pain. Now everyone just accepts him, whatever gender he is at that day.
I hope people like it. It is all true, and in the light of the whole memoir thing, it is one of those instances-at least in this story- where truth is vastly stranger than fiction. I never noticed the strangeness while it was happening. Looking back on it, and writing it, the story did seem really odd. I think when you grow up with people like that it seems normal. Those are my friends.