The Opposite Field: A Memoir
Jesse Katz
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0307407128
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a home.
Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home.
While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a good woman.
Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man.
This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive.
From the Hardcover edition.
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families made in a month, which meant he was missing sign-ups and, in fact, would be ceding a good chunk of his baseball duties to Liz. She did not seem too thrilled about holding down the fort while he got to play figurehead—the pope of La Loma, Gil drolly had begun to call himself—but that was for them to work out. I just wanted back in for another season, a chance to make up for all the years I was forced to put the league before Max. I have no memory of the basketball game that afternoon. I
housed bathrooms, the other side a meeting room, and in the middle was a stainless-steel kitchen. It was ours to use, free, during the season, yet I was told that the snack bar had never turned a profit. That was insane. You could go to Sam’s Club and buy a thirty-two-pack of water for $4.49, then sell each bottle for a buck. Profit: 600 percent. To just throw up your hands and say, Oh, well, too bad, didn’t work, struck me as offensive, not just to the city, which had used tax dollars on our
exposed to a variety of faiths, but in that circus of yelps and jerks and gibberish, I knew she was praying for his lost Hebrew soul. Once, while he was suffering through a pesky bout of diarrhea, Thelma performed something akin to an exorcism, commanding Satan to release his hold on Max’s lower intestine. The poor boy had no choice but to play along, lying still as she rubbed her trembling hands across his abdomen, although I must say that when I asked him about it later, he did concede that his
a freelance gig in the Matamoros bureau of El Heraldo, the Spanish-language edition of the Brownsville Herald. He wore a ponytail and silver earrings and long pointy fingernails on his right hand, in the tradition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As an American on the Mexican side of the river he liked to describe himself as a reverse mojado—he was working there without a permit or visa—and I instantly identified with the dichotomies, the cultural ambiguities, that he extolled. He was ABE-ul, he was
been transported to a furious social laboratory on the haunches of Los Angeles. A new form of white flight was under way, not from a decaying urban core but from an ethnically convulsing suburb: Rather than embrace the new Monterey Park, twenty thousand white folks up and split. At the time, I could never have foreseen that this curious place would one day lure me back, not as a writer but as a father, that I would be returning, against the tide, to make Monterey Park my own. But that was long