Went to the park last weekend to catch up on some reading. One of my little known habits is that I prefer to sit on the bleachers, in view of an empty baseball field. For some reason, I’ve always found baseball fields to be a very calming presence, and good for doing serious thinking. I was sitting there pouring through Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology, when an older man in a tracksuit walked over, glanced up at me, and said, “They got any chinning bars around here?”
I said, “ehh… you mean for chin ups?”
He says, “Yeah, what the hell else is a chinning bar?”
He had a very friendly, yet no-nonsense Irish-New Yorker feel to him. He reminded me of an old boiler-room boss I had when I worked for a financial newspaper. Friendly, but gruff. Perhaps seeing a person reading in front of a baseball field was some sort of sub-conscious New Yorky behavioral code – so he knew he could get an interesting response out of me through approaching.
And so began a conversation in which the stranger and I found out that we were both from New York (he grew up in Long Beach, Long Island), he came from an Irish-German family, and apparently was an actor of some renowned. While he looked vaguely familiar, I didn’t realize on what scale until he mentioned participating in Seabiscuit. In the meantime, we conversationally wandered through Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, religion, psychology, existentialism, Camus, Sartre, and a little bit about stand up comedy.
He remarked that I could find out more through the “IMDBees,” though admitted his ignorance of computers and the internet in general. Upon returning home, I found out that the Eddie Lauter I was speaking to was rated as IMDB’s number one character actor of all time. And he’d been in My Blue Heaven (one of my childhood dark horse comedy favorites). Not to mention the lead prison guard in The Longest Yard, a detective in True Romance, a parent in School Ties, and a role in Star Trek: TNG. I’ve probably seen his face dozens of times, in my 80s TV/Movie meanderings.
In a revelation that he had recently been into Zen philosophy, he quoted the phrase, “You are what you do.”
If that’s true, Eddie is many, many different things all at once, including a very thoughtful individual.
If you’re interested in what Eddie is up to these days, he’s apparently working out the outline of a one-man show, in which he’ll do some storytelling on stage — and I get the sense that he’s got a ton of fascinating stories to tell about the past 40 years of Hollywood.
In any case, it was a welcomed, unusual, and quintessentially Los Angeles day at the park.
