It’s quarter past midnight, and I’ve already been waiting fifteen minutes inside the shimmering marble lobby of Manhattan’s Carlyle hotel when Lenny Dykstra calls to say that his private jet just landed in New Jersey and he’s headed my way.

No problem, I tell him. I’ll wait.

I’m here tonight to interview for a job as photo editor at Lenny’s new luxury magazine for pro athletes, The Players Club—a glossy filled with Gulfstream jets, palatial estates, and financial advice for guys who make millions of dollars a year. It’s a dream gig for a newspaperman like me. Lenny wants to meet at 12:30 a.m. on a Monday? I’ll sit here all night if he asks me to.

Twenty minutes later, Lenny shuffles in from the steamy July night, accompanied by two men and two women who may or may not be members of his flight crew. Lenny is a short, thick man, and he walks with a pronounced side-to-side stagger—as if all those collisions with the center-field fence and face plants into the Shea turf have caught up with him. He’s wearing tan chinos and a white button-down pulled tight over the prominent bulge just above his waist; up top he sports a tan baseball cap bearing the logo of Maybach—the German brand that sells the $400,000 sedan, I’ll later learn, that Lenny likes to drive around his gated community just outside L.A. I walk over and introduce myself, and Lenny greets me warmly. “Hey, wait here, bro, and I’ll send someone down to get you in a few minutes,” he says.

That someone is the elevator operator, who after ten more minutes arrives to escort me to Lenny’s multiroom suite—at $2,500 a night, one of the hotel’s finest. There’s a Baldwin baby grand piano in one corner and plush furniture everywhere; on the wall, a flat-screen TV ticks through CNBC’s latest numbers from the Asian markets. Lenny himself is sunk into a sofa, Ethernet cables streaming across the coffee table to two laptops he has running. He’s on the phone with the car service that brought him to the hotel, screaming about a third laptop that’s apparently been misplaced. “I’m missing one of my laptops, and you’re going to pay for it,” he screams, barely acknowledging my presence as I walk into the room.

It’s nearly 1 a.m. when the job interview officially begins. Lenny starts by asking me why I’d want to leave a good job like my current one, sports photo editor at the New York Post. I say I’m looking for a leadership position at a growing publication and that The Players Club seems like the perfect fit. Lenny responds by showing me his watch.

“I don’t wear jewelry, except for this,” he says. “It’s the best in the world—costs sixty-five grand.”

It’s a nice watch—a Patek Philippe—but I have no idea what it has to do with Lenny’s magazine or my qualifications for a job there. I just nod, and he goes on.

“You see, Kevin, The Players Club is not just a magazine. It’s an actual club of players helping players. Do you want to be a part of the Players Club?”

The Player's Circle would be much more than just a print magazine: It would be a comprehensive lifestyle and financial brokerage company aimed at assisting professional athletes with all aspects of their off-the-field lives, from their playing days to retirement.

At this point, I commit my first strategic blunder: Instead of saying yes, I say I’d like to hear a little more about his business before signing on. Lenny hands me a new MacBook Air—“Dude, this will be one of your computers when you take this job”—and I sit down next to him as he pulls up his own PC laptop and we descend into the strange, time-sucking vortex that is working with Lenny Dykstra. For the next two hours, I sit there on the sofa, two feet away from Lenny, as he e-mails me things—Players Club slide shows, YouTube clips, articles about himself—from his laptop. The only magazine business we talk about is a new Players Club logo. Lenny e-mails me a link to it, then calls his flight attendant—an attractive woman in her midtwenties—into the room and gets her opinion, too. The attendant likes the logo.

It’s around then that my wife calls, wondering what the hell I’m doing.

“I’m working with Lenny,” I say. It is now 3 a.m. I tell Lenny that I need to be on the three-ten train back to Long Island.

“Dude, I’ll put you in a car and send you home when we’re done,” he says. This sounds like a sweet deal—the only time I’d been offered a late-night car home on the _Post’_s dime was when the pope died.

At four my wife calls again. I tell her the same thing—that I’m working with Lenny—even though, for the past hour, I’ve mostly been listening to Lenny’s stock tips, watching him eat licorice and guzzle bottles of Coke Classic, and wondering when the hell he’s going to let me leave. It’s bizarre—the interview having degenerated into us just sitting around, him keeping me here for no apparent reason—but who knows, maybe that’s just how Lenny is. For the first time, I begin to wonder what I’m signing up for.