TOOTHLESS DUMPSTER DIVING
Nails. Down to the nub and below. That hurts. Painful.
But take solace in this and I quote, “Nails never fails!”
So exclaimed one Leonard Kyle Dykstra who spent 9 hours dumpster diving outside a Jersey Mike’s sub shop in Linden, NJ. not long ago. Seems he had forgotten to put his $80K bone-marrow dentures back into his mouth upon finishing a sandwich. “The bread is so hard on those subs,” Dykstra explained to NJ Advance Media a day or two later. “I took my teeth out and put them in a napkin, folded it up and forget [sic] them there.” He left the establishment which is about two miles from his home — the one he is selling, but we’ll get to that — and subsequently realized that his choppers weren’t in his pie-hole. He had forgotten them in his neatly folded napkin.
“When I went back, the workers said they threw all the napkins in the garbage,” Dykstra remarked. In his inimitable fashion, he countered.
“I told them there was no f — — -’ way I was leaving without my f — — -’ teeth.”
Enter Jonathan Grbac, an Uber driver from Rahway who also goes by the name of Sprinkles the Clown. The tweet he sent from his Sprinkles handle at around 11 PM — “you want to come help me and Lenny Dykstra look for his dentures tonight? Or does anyone? This is a serious question…” was seen and caused moderate head-scratching around the world.
Grbac and Dykstra became acquainted that evening when Grbac picked him up. “I actually didn’t know Lenny until that night…I picked up an Uber rider and it was Lenny. I picked him up in the back of a Jersey Mike’s. He had to go home and get a flashlight and some other stuff. Then we picked up another guy and came back. Then we spent some time picking through some garbage and some food…I stayed for about two and a half hours…What happened was it started raining and it was already 2 a.m. so he says ‘Screw it, I’ll come back when it stops raining in the morning.’”
They did and the teeth were found later that Sunday, Father’s Day. “I was there for nine hours,” Dykstra recalled. “I thought the cops were going to arrest me for trespassing. I wasn’t leaving my teeth there in the dumpster. No way I was leaving them.” In his autobiography, “House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge,” Dykstra recounts that he lost his God-given teeth after jail guards in Los Angeles beat him silly in his cell and then again in the hospital. The damage was so severe that any remaining teeth had to be extracted. Although his dentures were made free of charge by a dentist/baseball fan in Minnesota, Dykstra wasn’t quitting until he retrieved them.
Consistent with his nature — no quit — but the man is from another planet.
Just last October the then 55-year-old Dykstra was indicted by a New Jersey grand jury on three third-degree charges: possession of cocaine, possession of methamphetamine and making terroristic threats stemming from an incident he had with another Uber driver — not Sprinkles. It was alleged that Dykstra held a gun to the driver’s head.
According to the AP:
“Dykstra claimed the driver threatened and tried to kidnap him early on the morning of
May 23 [2018] after Dykstra asked to change the trip’s destination. At a news conference
a few weeks after the incident, Dykstra said the driver locked the car’s doors and sped up,
and that he was ‘literally in fear of my life.’ The driver told a different story. He allegedly told
police Dykstra held a gun to his head, though no weapon was found. Police said they found
the drugs among Dykstra’s possessions.”
He could face up to 10 years in the can if convicted. Again. Beginning in 2012 Dykstra served more than a year of jail time after pleading no contest to charges that included grand theft auto.
He is a hot mess.
His rap sheet includes a drunk driving crash, indecent exposure charges, sexual assault allegations, a federal bankruptcy case and an alleged illegal boarding house accusation and complaint to accompany the grand theft auto (and providing a false financial statement) no contest conviction. In 2007 Dykstra was one of dozens of players named in the Mitchell Report, a 21-month investigation by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell into steroid use in Major League Baseball. “You know, I was like a pioneer for that stuff,” he boasted. “The juice, I was like the very first to do that. Me and (Jose) Canseco. I put that in my cereal man. It was in my cereal. C’mon HGH? Nah, we’re talking about the good stuff, y’know? Deca durabolin and testosterone and anadrol. We’re talking about the difference of making $30 million or getting a real job and working and making $60,000. What? Do you want the guy next to you taking them and you’re not going to take them?”
Spoken like a true competitor…not to mention a blithering idiot. An unapologetic, unabashed imbecile.
Like someone who was accused in 2015 of stealing $50,000 in jewelry from porn star Brett Rossi, once engaged to the nefarious Charlie Sheen. Rossi told TMZ Sports that Dykstra offered to help her sell some jewelry but he kept it and fenced it instead. He was kind enough to return a pair of diamond earrings which Rossi claimed were fake.
Or like someone, according to the New York Post who allegedly checked into a Hamptons hotel with a woman in August 2017 for a two-night stay by the end of which he was accused of trashing it, smoking dope and stealing towels, bedsheets and the receptionist’s sunglasses. The manager of the establishment said that when his brother went to check on the Dykstra party he was invited into the room by a woman clad only in her birthday suit. In the report Dykstra’s characteristic eloquence was quoted thusly: “I might have had 10 women in the room, might have had 15, might have had 20. Actually, the only thing I had in that room was my d — — in my hand.”
Well-said Lenny.
Let’s get back to his principal domicile, the house in a quiet New Jersey enclave. Aaah Linden. And Dykstra. “Nailin’ the quality of life.” Courtesy of an illegal boarding house.
According to council members and neighbors he has crammed as many as ten people into his two-story home on a tree-lined street now plagued by oversized piles of trash, transient tenants, physical confrontations and allegations of prostitution and drug use. “It all started when he moved in,” lamented neighbor Linda Graham. “There’s been two overdoses. There’s been a scuffle on the front lawn. There’s been people who are here today, gone tomorrow. We don’t know who these people are and we are afraid.” Dykstra allegedly rents out rooms for $1,000/mo. apiece which violates municipal ordinances according to Linden City Councilwoman Gretchen Hickey, citing his published advertisements on various websites. “There’s been 10 people living there at a time,” she told NJ.com. “He even made the garage into a room.”
He was a three-time All-Star (1990, 1994, 1995) and the runner-up to Barry Bonds as NL MVP in 1993. He was a World Series champion in 1986. Mets and Phillies fans loved him for his hard-nosed play.
Nails.
But always Lenny Dykstra has been — and still is — a magnet for trouble; difficulties hound him like a dog nipping at the cuff. He made his professional bones as a pit-bull of a player but he never has been able to get out of his own way.
His litany of legal difficulties is consuming and all-encompassing. In early April he filed a lawsuit against ex-teammate Ron Darling claiming that Darling lied in his new tome, “108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game,” when he stated unequivocally that Dykstra unleashed a barrage of racial epithets from the on-deck circle aimed at Red Sox hurler Oil Can Boyd during the 1986 World Series. Dykstra denies it ever happened; Darling stands behind it, noting that the invective from Dykstra was horrific and unprintable, “foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff…the worst collection of taunts and insults I’d ever heard. You know how there always seems to be a guy in every organization, in every walk of life, who gets away with murder — murder being a figurative term in this case? That was Lenny.”
His past has been more than troubled and his future is less than bright.
