Beyond Belief (14 page)
“I made the decision to use,” I said. “Not my parents.”
He kept going, and my anger built. I was not a patient man at this time, but I tried to calm myself by ignoring his words.
This too will pass.
I told myself. Or something like that.
It didn’t work. He kept going, as if taunting me. I was the big baseball player with the wasted talent, and he took it upon himself to teach me a lesson. He was going to let me know what I gave up for drugs, as if I didn’t already know. I wanted to walk across the circle and tear into him, to beat him till he had no choice but to shut his mouth.
Fortunately, I didn’t do that. Instead, I stood up. “I’m done with this,” I said. I turned and left the room. I walked to my room and sat on the edge of the bed.
I was furious, and I didn’t know what to do with my fury. I wanted to hurt somebody. No, that’s not right — I wanted to hurt the guy who had pissed me off. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I couldn’t handle the emotions that were raging through my system.
I lit a cigarette, took a couple of puffs, and then put it on the top of my left hand, with the burning end on the fleshy part between my thumb and index finger. Then I took another cigarette, lit it from the first one, and put it next to it. Then I took another one and did the same. Then another. By the time I was finished I had the burning ends of four cigarettes lined up in a semicircle on the hand that once held the baseball that held my future.
I sat there and looked at it, feeling the heat expand and grow. The flesh began to redden, then sear, my world reduced to this hemisphere of pain. Teeth clenched, I watched. The pain reached a peak and held steady. I could feel it burning through layers, the skin peeling back and curling like newspaper in a fireplace. The smell of my own burning flesh reached my nostrils. I sat transfixed.
The burn grew to about the size of a half-dollar. I took the cigarettes off my hand, one by one, and stubbed them out in an ashtray on the dresser.
I let my body fall backward onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I took a deep breath. I felt better, so much better.
The drug tests came three times a week, as stipulated in the players’ agreement, and in September ’03 I blew one off. Failing to take the test is the same as failing the test, so another suspension was in order. Sixty games now. Sixty more games on top of the thirty I’d already missed. Sixty and counting. The next failed test would cost me a full year.
I was lost. Emotionally lost, physically lost, mentally lost. I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. Part of my problem, although I didn’t know it yet, was denial. I couldn’t believe I was using, so I felt I had no choice but to pretend I wasn’t.
A positive drug test? I could explain that away. It was a false positive, it was something I ate, it wasn’t my pee. I couldn’t believe I was using — that wasn’t me, not Josh Hamilton, not the All-American boy — and so I denied I was.
It got to the point where I could convince myself I wasn’t using. I operated under a simple principle: If you think it’s the truth, then how can it be a lie?
Somehow, I knew enough to know I needed help. I didn’t know where to turn, but I knew I had hurt my parents enough to make any meaningful conversation with them impossible at this point.
So I made a decision I still don’t know how to explain. I took a drive that ended at the house of Michael Dean Chadwick, the father of my ex-girlfriend Katie. I guess I was looking for advice, or seeking someone who might be able to relate. I remembered how open he was about his bad years, using and selling on the streets of Baltimore. I also remembered how he found sobriety through faith.
It had been close to a year since I’d seen Katie’s dad, a man everyone called Big Daddy. I was casting about, and I thought he might be a good place to start.
Big Daddy has a big, beautiful house, and when he answered the door — I arrived unannounced — he greeted me like he had been expecting me all along. Later he told me he had a strange feeling when he opened the door and looked at me. It was eerie, he said, because he opened the door and stared directly into a vision of himself from twenty-five years earlier.
I wasn’t real smooth, but I said, “Big Daddy, I was wondering if you had a minute to talk?”
“Of course, Josh,” he said. “Come on in. Let’s go out back.”
We sat on the back patio and talked for at least an hour. I told him I didn’t understand what was happening to me, and I wondered if he remembered what it felt like to feel your life slipping away and being powerless to stop it.
He listened to me, and he related segments of his story that were more detailed than anything he’d told me before. His tone was different, and I realized it was a tone that came from experience, from someone who had been in my shoes and knew that BS and lies weren’t going to cut it. He was straightforward and unemotional. There was nothing between us, no animosity or disappointment. I hadn’t let him down (yet) or hurt his daughter (yet), and he — like many recovering addicts and men of faith — felt it was his responsibility to try to help me through my problems.
Near the end of our conversation, Big Daddy looked at me and shook his head.
“Josh,” he said. “There’s no magic answer to any of this. I wish there was. But I’ll tell you how it works. This will end either one of two ways: You’re either going to get better, or you’re going to die.”
He told me the only way I could get better — truly get better — was through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
His words hung in the air between us. I’d heard variations on the theme since I started using — dead or in jail, that kind of thing — but nobody had put it so bluntly, or delivered the message so dispassionately. Even through my altered vision, the matter-of- fact look in his eyes made an impression on me. He shrugged and gave me a whattaya-gonna-do look.
I appreciated his approach, even if it didn’t give me the answers I wanted. I don’t even know what answer I wanted. Most people thought they had answers, or knew the right way to scare me back to the right path.
My daddy had a friend who was a sheriff in Wake County, and once the two of them conspired to scare me straight. They came and picked me up in a squad car and drove me to the jail. They were serious, all business, taking me through the corridor of one of the cell blocks. My daddy’s friend had his keys jangling from his belt loop, and he walked up to an empty cell, reached down for his keys, and opened the cell. He ushered me into it. I walked in, kind of amused by the whole process, and then walked out a few minutes later after they realized this exercise wasn’t having the desired effect.
They couldn’t reach me. Nobody could. I couldn’t reach myself, so I had no interest in letting anyone else in. I acted like I had all the answers, even though I had none.
But Big Daddy’s words cut through me. Here was someone who’d been through similar times telling me I was going to have to find my way myself.
And where that way took me was entirely up to me.
Before I left he had offered me a job on one of his home-building projects. It was strictly entry-level manual labor, but he thought it would be good for me to feel productive again.
I took the job and spent several weeks digging trenches and doing whatever menial tasks needed to be done. I dealt with Big Daddy standing beside a ditch, looking down at me and saying, “Look at the $4 million man now.”
I showed up for work every day, but I was still using and drifting further from where I needed to be. I was still hanging out with Wayne and doing the wrong things. When I told Big Daddy I was going to leave the job, I told him I needed to get out of Raleigh and try to get my mind straight. I had decided to give rehab another shot, this time at Pavillon in the North Carolina hills.
Resigned, I boarded a plane and hoped for the best.
How many times had I sat in the television room of a treatment center with my eyes glazed over, ESPN on the screen, my mind somewhere else? More times than anybody could count, probably, and I was doing it again on March 19, 2004, when the news crawl at the bottom of the screen caught my eye: “Devil Rays OF Josh Hamilton suspended for one year for violating MLB drug policy.” Those words rolling across the screen informed me that I wouldn’t be playing baseball for a while.
Another long while.
This suspension was the big one: number five, one full year. I was the second ballplayer to be punished so severely for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy. The first was Darryl Strawberry. Now he was not alone.
Hazelden in Minnesota was my sixth treatment center. I did well, completing the program and graduating to a halfway house in Tampa run by Turning Point. People who don’t understand addiction would see any stay in a program that doesn’t result in long-term sobriety as a failure, but I had to look at it differently. I was acquiring tools to deal with the world, a little at a time.
One of the requirements for living in the halfway house was to get a job, and I went down to a big batting cage/baseball school facility and asked for a job. I had to humble myself, by walking in cold off the street to seek employment. The owner was there, and I told him, “I’m living in a halfway house right now, trying to get clean, and I need to get a job as a condition of my living arrangement. I’ve got a baseball background and I think I can help out around here if you give me a chance.”
I never told them my name, and I never tried to use my baseball status — if it even existed at that time — to get the job. Besides, at that point in my life, I wasn’t sure whether my name was going to be a help or a hindrance. Eventually, I could see a flicker of recognition in his eyes, and he asked me my name.
“Josh Hamilton,” I said.
He nodded and said, “That’s what I thought. I think we can find something to make this work.”
I started the next day, cleaning the cages and working with some of the kids who were there for lessons. It was pretty low-level stuff, but I was starting to feel better about myself. For the first time in a while, I could see success in my future.
I stayed clean for four or five months. I felt the urges constantly, and I fought them the way I’d fight off a tough two-strike slider. I tried to keep busy with work and the program. I went to meetings and followed the rules.
Then one day, in a scenario repeated millions of times by millions of addicts, I gave in to a moment of weakness. I left the batting cage one night and stopped at a Wing House restaurant on the way back to the halfway house. I had a few drinks and left, and when I walked back into the facility — late — I was forced to admit to the relapse.
I was probably four miles from resisting temptation and getting back to the halfway house. If I had taken a deep breath and driven straight through, the temptation would have passed.
The pattern is familiar to addicts. You stay clean long enough to see the light, to realize drug use is a hopeless dead end, but then you give in to temptation and ruin everything. The relapse was almost worse than never having stopped, because my hopes would rise and my family would start thinking this was it, I’m finally going to stay clean, and then I’d blow it and everyone would be crestfallen again.
I didn’t have baseball. I was on a revolving suspension plan from Major League Baseball. I felt I couldn’t escape, and the feeling of worthlessness stuck to me. The one thing I’d been groomed to do since I was in kindergarten was unavailable to me.
Everywhere I went — “When you gonna get back to playing baseball?”
“Soon, I hope,” I said.
I really never believed it.
While I was living in the halfway house and working at the batting cage, I got a visit from Steve Reed, my business manager, and a writer from
ESPN The Magazine.
During that visit, I took batting practice and fielded some balls at a high school field in Tampa, mostly for the magazine’s photographer but also for myself. I hadn’t been on a field in about eight months, and it felt good. I was shocked by how well I hit the ball and how sharp my reactions were.
No matter what I did to myself, no matter how much I punished my body, the game wouldn’t leave it.
I left Turning Point at about the same time the magazine printed the story, which documented my struggle to stay sober but reported how much better I had been doing recently. I left because of that one night I couldn’t resist stopping at a Wing House and ordering a few drinks just to see if I could have a couple and stop myself.
I couldn’t. The next day I packed up and headed back to Garner. And since I’d already failed, what was the point in staying clean and sober now? In my sick mind, there was none.
THE PATTERN: Stay clean for a few months, start to feel better, then fall off and be back where I started. I needed a reason to stay clean, even temporarily, and after I’d been home for a month after Turning Point I found one: Katie Chadwick.
We got back together in July 2004, and within four months we decided to get married. It was a big step, obviously, but I was feeling good and being responsible for the first time in a while. I fell head over heels for her daughter, Julia, and the two of them made me happy without drugs and alcohol.
While Katie and I were together, I stayed clean. I went to AA meetings nearly every day. My sobriety and my actions led her to believe my days of using were over. I believed it, too. Because of my suspension, baseball remained on the margins of my life, more in thought than in action.
I thought Katie wanted a big church wedding, but every time we agreed on a date someone had a problem with it. Finally, Katie said, “I don’t really care how we do it, I just want to be your wife.” I said, “Great, let’s get married tomorrow.”
So we did. We were married at the Raleigh courthouse on November 10, 2004, before an audience of my parents, Katie’s parents, and a few others. For a honeymoon, we spent a couple nights at a bed-and-breakfast outside Raleigh. I was tied to the AA meetings, so we decided on a short honeymoon that didn’t take us very far away.