A league of their own

In a stunning debut, punk rock drummer and ex-junkie John Albert finds redemption through a baseball team full of L.A. burnouts.

By Ben Cosgrove

Aug 17, 2005 | In sports, as in so much of life, timing often carries the day.

The point guard's no-look feed to the power forward in the paint; the QB's last-second option pass to the tailback: surprise and execution -- in most every game, the point is to keep the opponent guessing.

And while most writers wring their hands and swear that their gig is not a competitive venture, timing's just as important on the printed page -- and especially important when bringing those pages to market -- as it is on the hardwood, the gridiron or, of course, the diamond. In John Albert's exceptional debut, "Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates," the eminently unpredictable sport of baseball serves as an ideal device for illustrating how lives once lost to drugs, despair and a rather tiresome quest for oblivion can occasionally, with effort and luck, be reclaimed. Albert's story -- one that, it seems, could only happen amid California's golden smog -- recounts how the author and a motley, damaged, rehabbing band of brothers gradually coalesced into an occasionally formidable, frequently haphazard and, it turns out, endearing baseball team fledged in 1998 in a municipal league run by L.A.'s Parks and Rec department.

Improbable? Of course. Happily, though -- for the reader and, one comes to realize, for Albert and his crew -- the book is the right nonfiction stuff; it feels, as one delves deeper into it, more and more genuine, even as its preposterous, infuriating scenes of willful self-destruction unfold again, and again, and again. Heroin and curveballs; punk rock and double plays; nihilism (both real and playacted) and batting practice: For the first time in a long while, here's a book about baseball that actually feels like it's also about life -- or rather, life as it's been lived by so many of us born after, say, 1960.

"You never know what's going to save you," the book begins. "Most of the time, salvation comes from the usual suspects -- god, pharmaceuticals, romance -- but occasionally, as in this case, it arrives entirely from left field."

Cornball punning aside, Albert's story lives up to the vague, compelling promise suggested in those two sentences. This is, indeed, a story of salvation, and like all such tales, the pilgrims whose progress the book recounts are about as deeply flawed as one could possibly expect (or hope). But as "Wrecking Crew" takes place entirely in Los Angeles, and Albert himself is a former member of some of L.A.'s most original punk acts (the "semilegendary cross-dressing band Christian Death," as his bio has it, as well as the still-touring Bad Religion), the pilgrims' flaws, while Chaucerian in variety, are heavily SoCal in specifics. Junkies, parolees, former glam-rock deities, pretty, vacant call girls, aging skate punks, Internet porn addicts, cross-dressers (of course) and one sodden neighbor whose big toe explodes, or "goes off," one night on account of alcohol poisoning, or gout, or something.

So, it's not quite a Rockwell vision of these United States, but in its own way, it is just as genuinely and recognizably American as anything old Norman painted. Baseball, apple pie and speedballs: This is the Right Fielder's Tale, and Albert tells it like the veteran that, in many ways, he is. Like not a few ex-punk musicians -- Richard Hell, Henry Rollins and others spring aggressively to mind -- Albert eventually transferred at least some of his creative talents from music to writing, and has not looked back. Now a freelance writer ("Wrecking Crew" first saw light as an award-winning article in the L.A. Weekly in 2000), Albert also pens screenplays -- without much luck. "Why the industry never embraced my gothic ghost story about a washed-up masked wrestler ... always baffled me," he admits.

"It was a scorching weekday in February," he writes early on in the book, setting the stage for the craziness to come, "when I answered the door to find my illustrious screenwriting partner, Teo, standing there, clutching what appeared to be an antique portable typewriter. Teo was in his early fifties and weighed somewhere around three hundred pounds. No matter the weather, he always wore a slightly frayed, blue blazer that looked like someone had hurled a combination pizza across the front ... Teo and I existed on the fringes of the film industry like a world-weary screenwriting Abbot and Costello, barely scraping by and always believing we were just one phone call away from success and eternal happiness."

The typewriter, it seems, is (or might well be) one of Hemingway's. The Hemingway's. Teo's socialite expatriate parents apparently knew Papa; Albert has seen pictures of them arm-in-arm with the man, back in the day. This very early scene, then -- the struggling screenwriters; a tenuous connection to greatness; fame and riches always just around the next corner, or perhaps the next -- sets the tone for one of the book's central themes, adroitly maintained from beginning to end: that Los Angeles is still, more so than anywhere else, a sunny, sordid, intoxicating place where dreams are the one genuine currency. This is the L.A. of Nathanael West and Bret Easton Ellis, Billy Wilder and David Fincher and punk and glam bands like X, Faster Pussycat and a million other legendary and long-forgotten edge-of-the-continent seekers.

Next Page: Our hero chooses Mexican heroin over "dog-piling nubile young groupies"

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