Beyond Belief (13 page)
This time, I felt like I was seeing it in the past tense.
I said nothing. I tried swallowing back the burning at the back of my throat, determined not to let it escalate. I couldn’t do it. The burning became shudders I couldn’t stifle, and then tears I couldn’t stop.
Nothing made sense. It didn’t make sense that I would knowingly sabotage my career and then sit there and cry about it. I was so deep into this I couldn’t find myself. Henderson looked at me. I could feel his eyes on me, and without taking my eyes off the pitcher, I took a deep breath and said, “I think this might be the last time I ever do this.”
He didn’t ask me why. I assumed he knew. He just told me forever is a long time, that maybe I just need some time to get my head and my priorities straight. I nodded, but I didn’t know if I believed him.
After the game I stood at my locker taking off my uniform. The shirt, the pants, the socks — I lingered over every single scrap of clothing, thinking I’d never wear a baseball uniform again.
I hadn’t played a game since July 10, 2002, ten months ago.
I might not play another one for a long, long time.
The next day, May 15, 2003, the team announced I was suspended for violating the substance-abuse policy. Untethered, with no job and no responsibilities, I left Florida and went back home.
PETE LIVED IN a run-down two-story duplex. Wayne found Pete, and he became our dealer and, I guess, our friend. I didn’t really have friends; they were more like humans who served as means to an end. That end, increasingly, was cocaine.
I would go down to Pete’s house just about every day to buy. I preferred to buy in small amounts, which meant I had to buy more often, which meant I was leaving myself open to being seen more often. And at the same time, I became intensely paranoid about being caught.
My actions didn’t make much sense. That came with the territory. I drove a Jaguar XKG with JOSH 22 license plates. I didn’t really have a pattern. I didn’t have a job or a daily routine or anything resembling a structured life. There were times I would show up at Pete’s house and spend hours doing blow and playing video games in the small upstairs loft. There were other times when I would show up at the door, pay my money, get the drugs, and be back in the Jag in less than a minute.
I could fool myself into thinking this was freedom. In reality, I was trapped. The addiction was growing, and the paranoia grew with it. I was addicted not only to the feeling the drug produced, but also to the pursuit and the secrecy involved in getting it.
My frequent trips to Pete’s house worried me, so I began altering my driving route to avoid detection. Like a CIA operative dropping a tail, I would drive miles out of the way to get to his house, all in the name of avoiding some unseen — and nonexistent — follower. The location of the house reduced the number of ways I could approach it. But I did my best to vary the routes I took to get there.
The other option was to send someone else. This worked for me, too. I had some friends — or people I thought were friends — who would come over and get the money and bring me drugs in return. I paid these guys something for their time, either in money or product.
Which brings me to another habit I developed: I began to overpay for drugs. In my twisted mind, this was a good business decision. Maybe this was my last hope of retaining my status as the guy who signed for $4 million out of high school. I had been reduced to this: I wanted to be liked, and what better way to be liked than to let Pete keep an extra twenty bucks for his services? You can trace this mentality back to the tattoo shop, where I made bad decisions in the interest of making or keeping what I mistakenly thought were friends.
The overpayments were also down payments on future bad times. The addict’s mind is always thinking ahead, perhaps understanding things will always get worse. If I overpaid now, I figured they’d cut me some slack if the time came when I needed to use but didn’t have enough money to support the habit.
Whatever the case, I had money when I was dealing with Pete, and he was always happy to see me. No wonder.
It’s funny that I cared enough about what a drug dealer thought of me that I overpaid for drugs, because I didn’t care a whole lot for the people in my life who truly loved me and cared for me. And I certainly didn’t have enough regard for myself to step back and see how people in the community saw me.
I was buying and using drugs on a regular basis not more than a mile from the high school baseball fields where so many people had watched me play. Fathers would bring their sons to watch me play ball there. Scouts and media people from all over the country came to shake their heads in wonder at my abilities on that field. My senior year I signed autographs between classes while walking down those halls.
And now? Now those memories were starting to fade and I was becoming known as a big waste of talent, a guy who had so much potential but somehow lost his way. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was still a baseball player, but that was receding with every passing day. After the latest suspension, I went six months without picking up a bat or a ball. I didn’t feel anything when I drove past the high school field. The focus of my life had shifted, and now I was a guy who overpaid a dealer for drugs so he could stay on his good side and maybe call in some chips when things got worse down the line.
The paranoia extended to everything I did. I was never much of a social user, but as I fell deeper and deeper into addiction I became more solitary. I never went to clubs for fear of being seen and arrested. I spent most of my time in my room in the big house in Garner, avoiding my parents and using.
This retreat into my own world understandably bothered my parents. They didn’t know what to do. They’d hear people in the community discussing me, and many of those people insisted on blaming them for my problems. It was the same old story:
They were overprotective parents. They didn’t let me breathe. They should have stayed home when I went to the minors.
Meanwhile, back at the big gated house on twenty-two acres in Garner, they wondered what to do with me. They went through every emotion — anger, heartbreak, sadness, fear, disgust. They tried to be tough with me, they tried to put their arms around me, they tried everything in between. I was unreachable.
My momma used to say, “We have to live with this every minute of every day, Josh. You have an escape. You get high and forget the problems. We never get a break from it.”
My bedroom in the Garner house gave me enough privacy to hide my habit, or at least try. There was a separate entrance and an outdoor storage closet on the patio outside the door.
I kept the paraphernalia for my drug use hidden in my clothes closet. I’d slide the mirror and the razors between a pile of sweatshirts stacked on a shelf so nobody could see them. It was a good hiding spot, and it provided easy access.
I used so much the cocaine tore through my sinuses. I would sit in that room with a T-shirt in my hands, blowing six- to eight-inch-long strings of tissue out of my nose and into the shirt. I could feel them hanging loose behind the bridge of my nose, and I would blow and blow until they came out. The T-shirts were covered in blood and the meaty flesh of my sinuses. I sat there looking at it, happy to have the passage cleared out. I’d take the T-shirt and hide it at the bottom of the closet, or go outside and toss it in the storage closet.
With the evidence hidden and the passages cleared, I’d be good to go. Loose strings of tissue weren’t enough to stop me. Blood wasn’t enough to stop me. I was unstoppable. With the shirt and the flesh out of the way, I’d get the gear out, open the baggie, and get high. I was adaptable.
The doorbell rang in Garner. My parents called me to the front door. When the door opened, there were two DEA agents standing there, flashing their tin. My parents didn’t seem surprised.
They came in and sat down. One guy did all the talking.
“Josh, we’ve been watching you,” he said. “We know what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been hanging out.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. That seemed to be the only smart choice.
“If we have reason to believe there are drugs in this house, we can come in here and take everything you own,” he said. “But we’re not interested in you. If we were, we could have gotten you last year.”
He then ran down where they had seen me the year before, and what I’d been doing. Four days after I left for spring training in ’03, they raided a drug house where I’d spent a lot of time. He was right — they had been watching me.
“We could have had you a bunch of times.”
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not watching you.
They were here now because they were after a dealer in a second-story apartment in Fuquay-Varina. This was an upscale apartment complex near a nice shopping center. The people who lived below the dealer got scared one night when they overheard a conversation through the heating vents. Two people were arguing about getting shorted and getting some stuff that wasn’t cocaine. The guy who got shorted started talking about coming back and killing the dealer, so the neighbors called the police and started the process that led to these two men sitting in my living room.
The more they talked, the clearer their motives became. Part of me was relieved that I wasn’t going to be leaving the house in handcuffs, but another part of me didn’t want to hear what I knew was coming.
“We’d like you to help us,” one of them said.
I listened to their proposal. They were trying to get Pete, in order to get someone above him. It was just like in the movies — you help us and we’ll agree to leave you alone. They also suggested, with some force, that I change my habits as soon as I finished this operation.
It didn’t sound like there was much of a choice to make. I could either cooperate or be arrested. I told them I’d do what I could as long as it didn’t threaten my safety.
They didn’t need me to change my routine much. I had to keep doing what I was doing, keep going to Pete’s house to get drugs, but they wanted me to do it while wearing a wire.
So I did. Twice.
This didn’t have the intended effect on me. It should have been a sign that I was so deeply buried in the drug underworld that I was being used by both sides. This development did not cause me to pause and reflect on the wayward course my life had taken. I’m sure many people around me, my parents primarily, allowed a flicker of hope to enter their minds when the DEA agents came to me with their deal.
This would have to provide the wake-up call, right? The scared-straight moment? If he’s facing the possibility of arrest and jail time, he’s got to seek treatment and make a concerted effort to get better, right?
Wrong. This was no different from every other red flag raised since I began taking drugs. Since I didn’t know how to stop, this simply became another no big deal. I could shrug this off, too. Watch me.
The treatment centers run together in my mind. I have to think hard to remember the dates and the places and the particulars. There were eight of them, all of the best places in the country — Betty Ford in California, Hazelden in Minnesota, Sierra Tucson, Turning Point in Florida (twice). Expensive, exclusive, and for me, pretty much worthless.
There’s a term addicts use for these centers:
spin-dry
clinics
. You show up, dry up, and then work to transfer the principles of the twelve-step program to your daily life back in the real world. It works for a lot of people. I wasn’t one of them.
The real torment inside me couldn’t be addressed in a group setting. I respect the work they do in the clinics, and I have applied many of the teachings to my own so- briety. After all, a reliance on a higher power is the second of the twelve steps, and without Jesus, I would have been dead long ago.
But I got the impression the professionals felt my case was open and shut. Everywhere I went, it was the same: my parents, my parents, my parents. From the first trip to Betty Ford, the story was the same: alone for the first time, free of their shackles, and I lashed out in the worst way possible. They left my side, I left the tracks. Why couldn’t I see it?
Well, because I didn’t believe it. My parents didn’t suffocate me. They didn’t keep me from growing up. The professionals kept saying it, but repetition didn’t make it fact.
Nearly every counselor carried an expectation that I would agree to blame my parents, and I believe this assumption kept me from dealing with the deeper issues of addiction. They were stubborn, I was stubborn, and the combination took me nowhere.
But think about it from my parents’ perspective: They relived every moment that led to my getting involved in drugs. You think they didn’t feel responsible? Of course they did. They blamed themselves and wondered what they could have done differently.
I can’t count the number of conversations with my mom that started with her saying, “Josh, what did we do wrong to make you want to do this?”
Over and over, I gave her the same response I gave the therapists. “Nothing. You did nothing wrong. I did this myself.”
And who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t picked up their lives and taken care of me? Maybe it would have happened sooner, or not at all, or exactly the same way. Who knows? Nobody, and that’s why it doesn’t do anybody any good to assign blame anywhere but with me. It was my life, and my decisions, and I pray every day that I continue to make good ones.
During my first stay at Turning Point, I sat in a group session where everyone discussed their problems and the group chimed in with opinions. One guy, a middle-aged drug dealer/addict who thought he had all the answers, decided to educate me on my problems. He followed the company line and started in on what my parents had done and how it led me to where I was at this moment, sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair listening to him lecture me.
“Your parents were overprotective,” he said. “You needed to learn to live on your own.”
I started to get angry, and my anger grew the more he spoke. I spoke up for myself, calmly, in an attempt to get him to stop.