I started coughing up black stuff, tar-black crack soot, out of my lungs. I would cough and cough, then spit out chunks of black sputum that must have been caked to my lungs. It was like I’d worked in a coal mine all my life.
I spoke to the devil. He came at me with cravings, tempting me to yield to his evil power. I convinced myself the cravings were nothing more than thoughts — thoughts created by the devil — and out loud I told him, “These are just thoughts. I am not going to act on them.” The physical act of voicing their existence and then dismissing them emboldened me. I spoke to the devil. It gave me a measure of control.
Through it all, Granny stood beside me. She was my confidante, pushing positive thoughts on me the way Murd pushed crack. She cooked me good ol’ country dishes — steak and mashed potatoes with gravy, pork chops and biscuits with squash. She cooked me breakfast every morning. Most mornings, the first thing that hit me after Granny woke me up was the smell of bacon making its way into the back room.
“How you feeling today, Josh?” she asked most mornings.
“Not too bad, Granny,” I’d answer.
“You ready for your bacon and eggs?”
I’d been sober for less than a week when I had my first bad dream. When I was using, I never dreamed. If I slept, it was the deep, dreamless sleep of a stalled brain. It was the sleep of the dead.
This dream caused me to wake in a panic, covered in sweat. It was 3:00 a.m., and it took me a few seconds to take inventory of my situation. I had slept in so many places and awakened in so many different stages of disorientation that I needed to run down a checklist.
In my grandma’s house.
Check.
Safe.
Check.
Sober.
Check.
Grandma’s house is rural, not quite country, but the nights carry the kind of dead silence that fills a room. I was suddenly aware of the silence, and the vivid scenes from my dream were a physical presence.
In the dream, I was fighting the devil. He wasn’t the classic red, horned beast, though. He was a man, a large unsmiling man who was terrifying in his intensity. It was the same vision I had seen in the clouds above the stadium in West Virginia six years before. In the dream I was holding a stick, or maybe a baseball bat, and I kept hitting him and he kept getting back up. I would swing my hardest and knock down the devil, but over and over he got back up. My best shot couldn’t wipe him out.
Eventually, I became exhausted. My swings got slower and less powerful, and just as it appeared the devil would overpower my wrung-out body, I woke up.
The dream hung with me. I couldn’t dismiss the vision of the devil as a gross distortion of an ordinary man. I tried to get back to sleep, to ignore the dream lingering in my head and the silence bearing down on me from all four walls. I had never felt more alone.
I had been alone for so long. All the time I was using, I was alone with the fears and the sadness and the emotions I worked so hard to kill with the drugs. But now I was truly alone, fighting the urge to use but afraid of what reality might bring. I had no idea how hard this might get, and no idea what might come next.
I got up and sat on the edge of the bed.
Humble yourself before God
. I looked around the room and tried to calm myself. It was no use. The loneliness scared me. I got up and opened the door and walked out of the bedroom and through my grandma’s television room.
I stood at the closed door of Granny’s bedroom. I was a twenty-four-year-old man, a former professional athlete, the number-one pick, the $4 million man.
I knocked gently, opened the door, and walked in.
“Slide over, Granny,” I said. “I’m scared.”
My weight rose from 180 to 205 within weeks. My ribs were filling in. My shoulders and legs were gaining strength, even though I wasn’t doing anything but eating and avoiding drugs. The black soot in my lungs turned gray, then disappeared altogether. The dream stayed away.
I brought a scale into the bedroom and weighed myself every morning. Granny kept waking me up to get food into me. I had been sober only a short time, but this time felt different. When I surrendered to God, He took care of the rest. I had a peacefulness inside me, a calm that I hadn’t felt since I started using. I took a quick inventory every morning. Sober? Yes. Safe? Yes. That was all I needed. From there I set out to make that day as positive as I could. There were so many mornings I woke up disoriented, not even knowing where I was. I can’t begin to explain the simple pleasure that came with going to bed at a decent hour and waking up at a decent hour knowing I hadn’t hurt myself or anybody else the night before.
Word spread to the family first, then beyond.
Granny says Josh hasn’t used for two weeks now. I saw Josh the other day and he looks pretty good. I saw Granny at the store and she says she can’t buy enough food to feed that boy.
I couldn’t do this on my own. I prayed that Jesus would lead me to the right path, and I believed in the power of being positive. Granny told me every day how good I looked, and as the scale inched up I even started to believe her. It seemed the only two people who believed I could be salvaged were in this house.
I had been sober about three weeks when Granny looked at me shoveling food into my mouth and said, “You know what, Josh?”
“What, Granny?”
“You’re doing this, Josh. You’re really doing it.”
Between forkfuls, I said, “No, you’re wrong, Granny.
We’re
doing it.”
She got up from her chair and turned to the sink, pretending to be interested in the dishes.
“It’s all you, Josh,” she said quietly, wiping away a tear.
About this time, Granny started talking about baseball as if it were a foregone conclusion. She’d just mention it in passing, something like, “When you get back to playing ball . . .” Or sometimes she’d say, “You can still play ball, Josh. You’re a young man, and once this is all behind you, you’ll get back to it.”
I listened, but I didn’t really believe. I desperately wanted to play again, and I desperately missed it, but I felt so defeated that I couldn’t bear any more disappointment. I remembered my daddy telling me how I deprived everybody of seeing my talent, and I remembered Katie telling me how God spoke to her and said I’d be back playing baseball for a cause bigger than the game.
But it didn’t compute. Not yet, anyway. I was off the hamster wheel, and for now that was enough. I was still figuring out how to get better, and it was a monumental task. I was doing this for me, not for baseball, and I needed to keep it that way. It was overwhelming to think about dealing with my addiction while getting ready to play baseball again. That felt like scaling Everest and seeing Kilimanjaro sitting on top of it.
Who would take a chance on me? How would I be received if someone did? As soon as those questions popped into my head, I had to get them out. Too much, too soon.
It was easier to just give up on baseball, or at least put it aside. Priorities — life first, baseball second.
Then one day Granny was doing the dishes and I was sitting at the table eating — it seemed like I was always eating. “Granny,” I said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to play baseball again.”
GRANNY KNEW. As soon as I told her I didn’t see myself playing baseball again, she turned back to her dishes and smiled to herself. Why was she smiling? I wasn’t telling her something she wanted to hear, and yet she responded as if I had relayed good news. What was she thinking behind that smile?
Along with being headstrong, Granny is observant, and she smiled because it was the first time I brought up baseball on my own. “This meant you were
thinking
about ball,” she told me later. “And that’s when I knew you’d get back to
playing
ball.” She’d been waiting for that moment.
When it came to baseball, she was persistent. She worked me, filling me with positive thoughts, but she never pushed me so far that I’d push back. Every once in a while she’d tell me again that it wasn’t too late, and as the clean days rolled from one into the next she picked up the pace, sometimes finishing sentences about the future with “. . . but that’ll be when you’re playing ball again.” She was subtle, and she was smart.
I know she missed watching me play, and being around her day and night like this made me realize how much hurt I’d caused and how much promise I’d wasted.
And the truth was, I thought about baseball all the time, even if I didn’t talk about it. Since the suspensions started, the game had become something of a millstone around my neck. It was always around when someone wanted to remind me of who I’d once been. From the moment I surrendered and asked God for guidance, I began seeing myself in the clearest possible terms: I was a guy with a serious problem, who needed to solve that problem to save his life, not his baseball career.
I needed to get clean for me, not for baseball. I needed to trust God and see my way out of addiction, not tease myself into believing baseball would ever be an option again.
Think about it: I’d made a solid effort to destroy my body for nearly four years straight, and I had no idea what kind of damage I’d done. The only running I’d done was out of desperation. I hadn’t picked up a ball in months. I hadn’t swung at anything but a windshield in just as long. Since I found crack, my body had deteriorated to the point of being unrecognizable.
I didn’t know if my eyes still worked or if my legs still worked or if I could even swing a bat. Honestly, I was afraid to find out. I was coughing crack soot out of my lungs and fighting off persistent cravings that had my palms sweating like they’d sprung a leak. I was supposed to think about running around the bases and tracking down a bullet hit to the alley in right-center?
To come back to be a good husband, father, and man of God, I needed to be clean and I needed to be responsible. I had shown signs of being able to regain that part of myself. But baseball was an entirely different animal. To come back and play baseball I would need to do more than be able to build up my weight and stay civil to the people around me and give all the glory to God. Playing baseball meant building my body back to the point where I could be a professional athlete, and that was just too much to think about at this stage of the game.
I was a crack addict, in the early, early stages of recovery. That’s all I was, and all I could pretend to be. Reality first. In this condition, baseball had to remain a rumor. Professional baseball? Way past the horizon. And major-league baseball? That exceeded the limits of imagination.
But good things were happening. Small, good things. By the end of October, my coughing slowed and the black stuff disappeared. The dark rings under my eyes were less noticeable. My face started filling out, and I no longer looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin. The dead look in my blue eyes was replaced by something resembling the person I used to be.
I was broken, but I was healing. Piece by piece, I was healing.
Every morning Granny would tell me how well I was doing, and how good I looked. I had surrendered to God, but I never asked for Him to heal me. But there was no denying something was happening inside me, both physically and spiritually. My faith in Jesus grew, and my faith in myself grew along with it.
October became November, and every day got easier. I could feel the pounds and the strength gradually return to my body. I was eating grits and grilled cheese sandwiches and pizza. I was drinking sweet tea the way I’d always liked it — a little tea with my sugar, thank you — and enjoying the freedom that came with staring down my demons by taking a deep breath and saying a prayer till the craving went away.
Piece by piece.
And it wasn’t just physical. Granny decided to trust me with her credit card, a move that would have led her directly to financial ruin a mere six weeks before. Since I showed up at her door, though, I had earned back bits of her trust. Six weeks previously, I was a guy whose wife was moving and hiding money like someone running a three-card monte game on a Manhattan street corner. Now I was being trusted with a credit card. It was intended only for me to buy pizza over the phone, but still.
Piece by piece.
There were days I would eat three meals and then mix in a pizza late in the evening. I would order it to be delivered, and I always left the receipt on the kitchen table so Granny could see what I’d bought with her money. She didn’t require a receipt, but it made me feel good to be someone who could be trusted again, and to prove I could be responsible in return.
Piece by piece.
I started walking around a little bit, just across the property and over to the cemetery and around to the old places I’d traveled to a million times as a kid. It felt good to breathe deeply without coughing, and for the first time in several years I felt the beginning of the crisp fall air and believed it was the start of something good.
I enjoyed the solitude. It gave me time to think about priorities and to organize my thoughts. I started to miss Katie and Julia and wonder about my baby girl, Sierra. Mostly, the solitude gave me the chance to slow down and let my body and mind catch up after the years of aimless running.
Piece by piece.
I caught myself laughing and smiling spontaneously. I could react to things around me without suspicion or paranoia. I stopped thinking everybody was out to get me and started to see people for what they were. Ever since I had seen the look of hurt in Granny’s eyes, I told God I didn’t want to cause any more pain. I had caused enough, and I was ready to move forward.
To do that, I couldn’t allow myself to be consumed by guilt. I took responsibility for what I’d done, but it wasn’t healthy to live in guilt and regret. I wouldn’t blame anyone but me, but I would no longer beat myself up over what I’d done and who I’d hurt.
Piece by piece.
Christmas neared. I went out and bought small gifts for Katie, Julia, and Sierra. I called Katie and asked her if she and the girls would be willing to meet with me so I could give them their gifts. She wasn’t ready to have me visit the house, so we agreed to meet in the parking lot of a Food Barn, where I held Sierra and hugged Katie and wished them merry Christmas and drove away with tears running down my cheeks.