House of Nails

by Lenny Dykstra

  Mark introduced him as Eric, and we exchanged greetings. There was minimal conversation, both in the car and at dinner. One thing that struck me was that Eric didn’t ask me anything about baseball, probably because he didn’t know who the hell I was and didn’t care. Eric is definitely not a star-fucker.

  After we finished dinner, Eric dropped us off at Mark’s house and left. As I was getting ready to leave Mark’s, I realized I was missing one of my two cell phones. I always carry two phones: one for business and one for nonbusiness. The second is called the “Bat Phone.” I figured out that I left it in the backseat of Eric’s car, so I asked Mark for his number.

  I called Eric. “Hey, bro. It’s Lenny. I think I left my phone in your car.”

  He checked, and sure enough, it was there. I asked if I could come pick it up, and he said, “Sure.” I asked him for his address, put it in my GPS, and the next thing I knew, I was parked in front of this big-ass fucking mansion in the best area of Beverly Hills. I remember thinking that I obviously wrote down the wrong address, so I called Eric again.

  “Hey, bro. I’m at the address you gave me, but I think I may have written it down wrong, because I’m sitting in front of some big-ass mansion.”

  “You’re at the right place,” he replied, as he proceeded to walk out and hand me my phone. We began to talk, and it became quite evident after about fifteen minutes that everything isn’t always what it appears to be. One of my gifts has always been my ability to get a read on people very swiftly.

  We started to hang out more frequently, as I loved his rap and I got the feeling that he appreciated the fact that I knew what he meant when he would tell me something. The reality of the situation is that Eric and I were more alike and had more in common than either of us would have believed initially.

  A short time after I met Eric, I was forced to leave Terri’s house, where I was living, because her landlord told her if I didn’t leave, he wouldn’t rent the house to her anymore. When Eric found out, he said, “You can stay in my guesthouse if you need a place to stay.”

  I took him up on his generous offer, and I’ve been here ever since.

  Another thing Eric and I have in common is the fact that we both came from nothing. That doesn’t mean we don’t have solid parents, because we both do. There is something to be said about a person who worked his ass off to get to the top of his profession, which is exactly what Eric and I both did. The only difference was that I made approximately $60 million playing baseball and doing business. Eric, on the other hand, made about $100 million grinding his way to the top of his profession.

  He understands my situation, and I will be forever grateful to him for what he and Kelly, his wife, did to help me navigate an extremely difficult time in my life. What they have provided me, and continue to provide for me, has had a major impact on my life. Without them, I cannot conceive that I would have had the necessary time to complete this book.

  Eric knows how I’m wired; he knows how I value loyalty. Eric knows that I would take a bullet for him and Kelly. He gets it, and I’m incredibly fortunate that he came into my life. I can’t imagine where I might be had I reacted in my usual fashion to being Pearl Harbored by Mark Slotkin.

  Luck, or a lesson learned? Probably a combination of both.

  23

  RICHARDS & REHAB

  I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

  —JOHNNY CARSON

  After baseball, I was living in Philly and indulging in one of my greatest weaknesses: women, or pussy, the most powerful thing in the world. Obviously, greater men than me—leaders of fucking nations—have been brought down by that shit. I’m just being honest. I have been honest throughout this entire book, and there is no reason to sugarcoat anything now.

  But the thing is, when you’re married you can only say you’re going to a psychiatrist once a week, which I was doing, before your wife starts to get wise to what you’re really up to. At that time, I was seeing Dr. Richard Kogan, and you had to be a celebrity to get an appointment with him. His office was on the Upper East Side right by the Carlyle Hotel, and all he wanted to do was hear my stories about pussy. And for that I gave him 750 bucks an hour—for only fifty minutes. When that clock hit ten till, if I had said, “I’m going to kill myself,” his answer would have been “Hold that thought. We will pick up on this next week.”

  Ordinarily, going to a shrink located in a city separate from your own buys you one night of partying away from home. But I was a jet-setter. Literally. I was ready to go wheels up at a moment’s notice.

  That’s when my master plan hit me. Inspired by the free pass that my therapist visits gave me, I told my wife, “Terri, I want to get sober and clean up. I’ve heard there’s a rehab in London that’s really awesome.”

  She was all for it. Even though I was off the pills, I couldn’t break the drinking habit, and Terri was probably desperate for me to get clean. As far as she knew, I was set to enter rehab for thirty days, where I would not be permitted to talk to anyone from outside, not even my wife. In fact, no one can find out if you’re even really there.

  Instead of entering the clinic, after I landed in London, I had thirty days to jet-set all over Europe. A perfect fucking plan.

  Over the years, I played that card six different times and hit six different countries. I spread them out. Six different rehabs, but I never set foot in a single one of them. I paid for them, so if you checked, you’d think I was there. I hit Barcelona, London, Italy, and Geneva (that place has one beautiful lake).

  One time I flew to Moscow in the dead of winter. I wanted to see what it was like, but I discovered that life over there was a sea of misery. No wonder they all drink vodka. They put the m in misery. And worse than that, everyone looked like they wanted to cut your fucking throat—without even thinking twice.

  Another one of my stops was Monaco, without a doubt my favorite stop on the circuit. That fucking place seemed almost fake. I’m serious. Like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

  Before you get too excited, let me clue you in on something: if you are on a budget, or worried about what things cost, then you need to make an adjustment to your itinerary. Trust me on this. If you want to tee it up on the French Riviera and play the role with the top 1 percent, just know going in that they are going to bend you over, so ask them to slide it in gently, because you will experience pain, believe that! It’s almost like they just make up their own prices, like there is no concept of what the true value of money is.

  I was in my early thirties, put together like a Greek god, and could have millions of dollars sent wherever and whenever I wanted simply by making a phone call. My ego was just as big as my bank account. Which leads to this weird infatuation I had with wanting to add some royalty to the list. Basically, I was on a mission to fuck Princess Stephanie, not because she was necessarily that pretty, more because I just wanted to put a “royal notch” in my belt.

  When I traveled, I always had to take at least two of my people with me, fake friends who were basically just along for the ride. I was okay with it—after all, I had to have somebody to listen to me spin my yarn and agree with me. Since no one by themselves could keep up, I’d bring two, so they would take shifts.

  When we got to Monaco, my assistant, Croz, broke the news about the princess: “Bad news, bro, she’s not here.”

  So I scanned the room, and over my shoulder to the right I saw two blond Swedish girls who looked like they’d stepped right out of a TV tourism commercial.

  “Go get the 411 on that right now,” I told him.

  “They’re with their fiancés,” he said.

  “Listen closely, Croz. Look me in the eyes like a man. I will have their suitcases on the fucking sidewalk tonight!”

  The next morning I rented a yacht as long as a football field. It was a yacht with a capital Y. It was ten in the morning and Croz and I were sitting on the bow, or whatever you call
the front (I don’t know shit about boats). We had Coronas in our hands, cruising down the French Riviera heading to Portofino, and there, on the deck of my yacht, were the two blond Swedes sunbathing nude.

  “Croz,” I said, grinning, “whatever heaven’s like, if there is a heaven, this is as close as it’s going to get, because it can’t get any better than this.”

  On another of my thirty-day jaunts—when I was supposed to be in yet another rehab—I ended up in St. Barts. There were two presidential suites in the hotel. My entourage and I had one, and next door was another group that had a big fucking yacht parked out in the bay. I’m talking about a serious fucking yacht.

  The word was out that De Niro was there, and one afternoon when I came back from the restaurant, I was on my porch, drinking a banana daiquiri, and there was the Raging Bull himself, sitting at the next table.

  “What are you drinking?” he asked.

  “A banana daiquiri,” I said.

  One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew we were in the bathroom of his suite and it was powder fucking city. This guy was a pro, dipping his finger in the coke and numbing his gums. I don’t think he even knew who the hell I was. I could tell he wasn’t a sports guy, but he sure liked hitting the slopes with me.

  “How do you like the Richards, man?” I asked.

  “Richards?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the code name for blow, bro,” I told him. It was something I made up for my teammates so we didn’t have to say the word cocaine around management. “I named it after Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He looks like a line of coke.” I cut up another line and we were off and running.

  The next thing I knew, De Niro took half my blow.

  We went back to the restaurant, and he sent over a thousand-dollar bottle of wine. He did this for three nights in a row. On the third night, I walked over and thanked him, and I could see his wife was wondering, Who the fuck is this, and why are you sending him thousand-dollar bottles of wine?

  As I was getting ready to take off, my boy De Niro leaned over. “Do you think you can leave me the rest of that Richards? I’ll pay you for it.” I said, “Come on, bro. Mi casa su casa, you feel me? It’s on me.” If I recall, because I was on a nice little run, I don’t think he had even asked who I was until I was leaving the restaurant. I answered, “Nails, just call me Nails.”

  It was an eight-ball of Richards.

  Not only that, I gave him the keys to the kingdom when I turned him on to my beans, too, Dexedrine. De Niro ended up loving those beans, because you don’t want to do blow all day. You want a slower ride, so you take the Dexedrine to keep you paced out right. De Niro adopted my program for a few days and liked it—a lot. “Better, isn’t it?” I asked him. “You don’t have to worry who mixed it, who cooked it, who skimmed it around, and who knows where that shit came from? This is FDA regulated, bro. You can feel good about taking this, man.”

  When I was leaving St. Barts, De Niro practically ran me down.

  “Do you have any more of those fucking pills?” he wanted to know.

  A couple years later, I ran into De Niro at his restaurant in Tribeca, New York, and went up to him. “Hey, remember me?” I asked.

  He gave me a look like I was an ugly redheaded stepchild.

  There was no wine for me that fucking night, I’ll guarantee you that. Celebrities, man. They are more than happy to take all your blow, then act like you’re the hired help when you see them out in public.

  Eventually, one of the rehabs I agreed to go to was Promises in Los Angeles, the hottest rehab center on the planet. At the time, the cost of going there was about forty grand a month, and I paid it, but I still had no intention of taking it seriously.

  I had been flying back to LA every couple of weeks to check on my car washes, and I always holed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was there so often I literally got my mail there.

  I can’t remember exactly how we met, but the actor Mickey Rourke and I began hanging out together. Mickey’s career was hurting, he was down and out, having a tough time, and we shared a $3,000-a-night bungalow I rented in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Mickey always wore a stupid scarf and he carried that little fucking dog of his with him everywhere.

  Mickey and I went on a ten-day run of partying. Mickey had his crew of Hollywood wannabes, bottom-feeders who clung to him like shit on a shoe, and we were all hitting the Richards nonstop. I was supposed to have checked in at Promises on the first of the month, and I was getting calls from their staff every fucking day.

  “Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there,” I told them.

  We kept hitting the booze and the Richards hard, and finally on the tenth day or so I looked in the mirror and just about shit myself. I was lit up, and in a moment of clarity, it hit me. I could see that I had Mickey’s scarf around my neck, and I was holding that little fucking dog of his, and I thought, Wow, this is fucking bad. I look like the Crypt Keeper from Tales from the Crypt. This is an all-time low.

  “I need to get the fuck out of here,” I told Mickey. “I’m done. Roll it up, man. I gotta go check in to Promises.”

  I checked out of the hotel, and the bill must have been three hundred grand. And it wasn’t just my and Rourke’s bill. We both had our monkeys and group of chicks who drank and ate like there was no tomorrow, and they put it all on my tab. But I didn’t give a flying fuck.

  I grabbed my shit, got in my limousine, a long-ass ride, and took my group of freeloaders with me to Promises. There was some shit left, so I parked my limo in front of Promises, right outside the gate, and I told my driver, “I gotta go in there and dry out. But when I go inside, I’m going in in a ball of fucking flames. Let’s finish this shit up.”

  That limo was parked out there for five days. It was me and the driver and a bunch of women, the LA fucking pretenders. After five long nights of nonstop partying, we finished off everything we had.

  Finally, after the last line of coke was snorted, I walked up and pounded on the Promises gate. “Open up, motherfuckers, and let me in.”

  24

  STOCK MARKET GURU

  Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

  —WARREN BUFFETT

  My stockbroker, a Gordon Gekko wannabe who was always dressed in a $5,000 suit, played the role and came across as the real deal, a financial titan who had it all figured out. Just ask him. He always knew what to say, and he always told me what he thought I wanted to hear.

  I will never forget the feeling I had the last time I walked out of his Newport Beach office, located in one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen, with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. The people always looked fake to me, almost like Stepford Wives. Plus, I could tell they really believed that they were born with a better pot to piss in. I called it The Land of the Great Pretenders.

  Of course it was Lindsay Jones, still my financial adviser at that time, who introduced me to my former stockbroker and insisted I needed to diversify.

  So I agreed and invested $2 million in what was explained to me as so-called safe mutual funds and blue-chip stocks. I insisted that if I was going to invest money in the stock market, I wanted to be conservative, especially since I knew nothing about the market at the time. Within two years, the stock market plunged and my $2 million investment was down to $400,000. Eighty percent of my money, a big fucking number, was gone.

  When I was told that the majority of my money had disappeared, the Gordon Gekko wannabe tried to tell me more of what he thought I wanted to hear. But this was the wrong day to feed me that same bullshit. I mean, come on, really? I got hit by a lot of pitches when I played, but not that many. So I snapped him off: “Shut the fuck up! Change the rap!” I was so pissed off. I went on to say, “I want the $400,000 that’s left of the $2 million you fucked off wired back into my personal account first thing tomorrow morning.” That was curtains for G.G.

  Much of my
hard-earned money was gone, and I didn’t have a clue as to why. I will never forget that feeling of hopelessness. It was humiliating, and I remember saying to myself, This will never happen to me again.

  So I decided to make it my mission in life to learn everything humanly possible about the stock market. I immediately subscribed to investment newsletters and websites run by professionals who had the best reputations, as well as all the stock market gurus.

  To gain more insight, I spent hours each day watching shows that dealt with stocks on CNBC and Bloomberg, and I tuned in regularly to Jim Cramer’s then weekly radio show, Real Money.

  I learned about moving averages, cash-flow ratios, short ratios, option calls, and price-to-earnings ratios. From all my research, and the intensity I put into the effort, I got a damn good handle on how the market really worked.

  This was when I learned how powerful options were if used correctly. I discovered a trading strategy known as deep-in-the-money (DITM) calls. This was the key to converting my remaining $400,000 into millions. By developing my strategy around this type of investment, I was able to control large blocks of stock at a relatively low cost, and without all the risk associated with conventional trading.

  For example, say you want to buy a thousand shares of Microsoft Corporation, a stock I have traded many times. Let’s assume it’s trading at $50 a share. You’d have to spend $50,000 to buy a thousand shares of the stock outright (plus commission). This approach would instantly eliminate the majority of investors, as there simply are not many people who can afford to just fire $50K into an individual stock. Other great stocks like Johnson & Johnson, Disney, and 3M all trade closer to the $100 mark. Spending $50,000 to $100,000 for a thousand shares of just one quality stock isn’t an option unless you are incredibly wealthy. Furthermore, this is a recipe for disaster, as there would undeniably be times when the temptation to trade on margin might get the best of you. Trading on margin is like dancing with the devil; if the market turns on you, turn out the lights, the party is over. Anyone who has had a margin call will swear to you that they are being ripped off, as it seems like they make you either bring in more cash or sell some of your other positions to get your account back in line. The bottom line: There is no reason to even fuck with margin, as it will eventually end badly.