Doc: A Memoir (11 page)

I had tried smoking weed before. It only made me hungry and sleepy. But I thought I might give marijuana another chance. Maybe this time, it would ease the restlessness I was feeling, or at least mellow me out. So I drove to my cousin Bo’s house. I knew that he would have some.

He was a cousin from my mom’s side of the family. He traded in pot, cocaine, and women. It was a little strange, my relative being a pimp and drug dealer. But that’s what Bo was. When I got to his house, he said he was totally out of weed—but, no problem, he’d be right back.

“Yeah, great,” I told him half distractedly.

Looking past Bo’s shoulder, I could see two of his ladies fooling around with each other on the bed.

From what I could tell, they were probably ten years older than me, and they looked like they could be the backup dancers at a Prince concert. The taller one was dark-skinned, trim, and small-breasted. The other one was lighter and shorter, all tits and butt. Bo caught me staring into the bedroom.

“Don’t pay any attention to them, Doc,” he cautioned me. “You don’t want to get tangled up in that. Sit down on the couch. Watch some TV. I’ll be back before you know it.”

I grabbed a beer and sat. I left the TV off.

In a minute, I could hear the ladies giggling in the bedroom. I looked up, and I could see them making out. The shorter one, I could see, had on purple-colored underpants, white boots, and nothing else. Through the door, I could see one of the women grab a handheld mirror and tap some white powder out of a little baggie. The tall girl used an ID card to push the powder into lines. I was mesmerized by their attention to detail—almost as much as I was mesmerized by them.

I’d heard people mention cocaine in Tampa. It sounded like a scary drug to me. I had the sense, without really knowing, that people sold it in the projects. No one on the team had ever offered me any, and the topic only came up a few times. When outfielder Jerry Martin joined the team from Kansas City my rookie season, everyone knew he’d been arrested the previous October for buying cocaine. Along with Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, and Willie Aikens, he’d served ninety days in a minimum-security prison. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Jerry for a year but then turned around and reduced his suspension. None of the other Mets seemed concerned about any of it.

It wasn’t like drug use in sports was a shocking idea. In 1985, six Pittsburgh Pirates—Dave Parker, Lee Lacy, Dale Berra, Lee Mazzilli, John Milner, and Rod Scurry had been called before a Pittsburgh grand jury and questioned about drug use in professional baseball. Their testimony led to drug trials, which made headlines. UPI called baseball’s drug problem the “number one sports story of 1985.”

The team owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association began negotiating a drug policy, but those talks went nowhere. “These guys must think they’re dealing with the sugar plum fairy,” complained Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was pushing for mandatory drug tests. “We have players that need help and the union is trying to pretend that no one is using drugs.” Union president Donald Fehr said the players felt insulted by the owners’ “guilty until proven innocent” approach.

In December, while I was hanging around Tampa, the union did
take one step: publishing a children’s coloring book called
The Pros Say It’s O.K. to Say No to Drugs.
It had messages from forty players—including me.

Given where I was heading, is that ironic—or what? The Dwight Gooden page said: “If anyone tries to give you drugs, say NO! and tell your mom or dad.”

If only I’d followed my own advice!

But if I’d been scared of coke, all of a sudden the potent white powder seemed like something sexy women did. And these two seemed to have the mechanics down cold. Chopping up the powder. Lining it up just so. Taking long sniffs, first one nostril, then the other. Then they busted me.

“Come on in,” Miss Negligee said with a laugh.

She had just finished snorting a line of powder. She looked up from the mirror and pushed one of her nostrils closed and gave an extra sniff. She smiled and offered me her straw.

She asked if I wanted to party.

“No thanks,” I said.

I was still nervous about messing with cocaine. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to use the drug. “I’m all right,” I said.

There were two beautiful, half-naked women on a bed in front of me, and you couldn’t call them inhospitable. I was shy, but I was also a guy. I was just hoping they’d transition away from the drugs toward something I knew a little more about.

“You’re in the major leagues, right?” the shorter, lighter-skinned woman asked, smiling at me.

“Yeah,” I said, taking another sip of my beer. “I pitch for the Mets.”

“Ooooh,” the other one said eagerly. “Come on over. We won’t tell anyone.”

Pretty soon, the three of us were all doing vodka shots, as I joined them on the bed. Then the coke came back out. They certainly seemed to be having fun with it. When they asked me again, I was in.

“I’ll try a little bit,” I said with a smile. I was nervous as hell. But I
wasn’t there for the coke. At the time, it felt like nothing more than a way to connect with these two sexy women. I dragged my finger along the credit card, picking up some coke dust, then put it on my tongue. My face got numb. It felt weird but also good. They saw this and smiled.

Then, I snorted some cocaine, and it was love at first sniff.

The shy-and-laid-back Dwight was a different person that night. Confident, relaxed, actually social. Alcohol had been my release from stress and pressure. But compared to cocaine, drinking was nothing. Cocaine was a jet, and beer was a rickety trolley. Coke gave me a feeling I’d always wanted but didn’t know how to find. It convinced me immediately that nothing else mattered at all. No pressure. No worries. No need to stop. I had never heard that cocaine had calming properties. But that night it made me feel calm. The drug hit quickly, and I had no confusion. This is how I wanted to feel.

I fooled around with the girls. It was a lot of fun. We drank and did more coke. They really seemed to like me. I know I liked them. Between the snorting, they took turns making me feel good. Then about an hour after he’d left, my cousin came back. He took one look in the bedroom—I was sweating and talking a mile a minute—and he knew what was up. He started yelling at the girls. Then he looked disgustedly at me.

“I know you didn’t do what I think you did,” he said.

“I only did a little,” I lied.

“Here,” he said furiously, handing me the pot. “I got some weed for you. Take it and get the hell out of here. Get your act together.”

“I don’t need that anymore,” I said to him, grinning now. “I want what they got.”

He glanced at the girls and shook his head at them. “I can’t believe you got him messed up on that stuff,” my cousin said. “What the—?”

“So can you give me what I want?” I interrupted. After the hour I’d just had, weed seemed pointless.

“Can’t do that, cousin. You know better.”

“If you don’t give it to me,” I said, “I’ll go find it myself.”

After more arguing and pleading and a quick good-bye to the girls, I left my cousin’s house empty-handed and met up with one of my friends. Sure enough, he told me where I could score some cocaine.

I don’t think it would be correct to say I got addicted to cocaine after just that one experience. That would come gradually, over time. All I know is I liked what it did for me that night, liked it more than I ever imagined I would. And I wanted more of it.

The next day, I didn’t come down very hard at all. I just felt a little tired. When I saw my dad at home, I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want him knowing what I had done. I didn’t like that feeling. But I didn’t hate it as much as I liked the rush I got from cocaine.

Within a couple of weeks, I was a seasoned user. I didn’t start using every minute or every day. Cocaine didn’t fill my days like a job or a hobby would have. But cocaine was never entirely out of my mind again. It got me through to the second week of February.

When I reported for spring training, I took a look around, and I was pretty sure that a couple of my teammates were doing coke like I was. Maybe I was only wishing, but I don’t think so. When we were out at night, I’d see them disappear at unexpected times and come back just looking different. No one came out and said anything. Not at that point. I figured they didn’t want me to know they were doing it. I sure didn’t want them to know that I was.

I couldn’t always hide it, not if anyone was paying close attention. There were days when I was visibly messed up. Pitcher Ed Lynch, who was eight years older than I was and had been around a little more, stopped by my locker one afternoon. He sized me up and down and just shook his head.

“What?” I asked him.

“You know what, man,” he said.

I didn’t make eye contact with him for the rest of the day. I’d just signed a new contract for over a million dollars. I knew coke could be dangerous. I guess I still had my mother’s voice bouncing around in my head. When I was a kid, every time there was a story in the paper about drugs, she made me read it. “Don’t be messing around with drugs,” she would say. “If I ever catch you, sure as I’m sitting here, I’m gonna let them put you in reform school.”

By this point, there was far too much at stake for me. I’d been doing too well to risk blowing it. Everyone was certainly expecting a lot. The general sentiment around the organization seemed to be: “If Gooden wins twenty-plus games again, and Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez and our other starters can win twelve or thirteen games each, we should be okay.”

Only twenty-plus?
That was a lot of wins, I thought—and a lot of pressure. Could I really do that again?

I felt dominant. My arm felt strong. There was no reason I couldn’t match last year and then some. But going into the season with those expectations did take some of the fun out of baseball in my mind. It certainly added to the pressure. It played to my old insecurities and made the game feel more like work. How come I didn’t feel like that in ’84 and ’85? Maybe I hadn’t set the bar so high yet. The sportswriters sure hadn’t. But now they had.

On opening day of the 1986 season, we played the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. I pitched a complete game, struck out six batters, and we won 4–2. When the game was over, the first question from reporters was: “What happened today? You only had six strikeouts.”

Damn, I thought! Didn’t they notice I won the game?

All I could think of as I left the ballpark that afternoon was: “Man, I could use some cocaine.

Series Season

N
INETEEN EIGHTY-SIX WAS THE
year it all came together for the New York Mets and it all started to unravel for me. Nothing dramatic at first. Just some troubling hints.

The year got off to an awkward start. Frank Cashen, the Mets’ general manager, blew up at me in January when he heard I was walking on crutches in Florida. I’d been tossing a ball with my nephew Gary, and I’d sprained my ankle. I didn’t think anything of it. I iced the ankle and used the crutches as a precaution. But Frank’s comment to the Mets beat reporters—“right away, you start to wonder about the severity”—raised some early questions about what I might be trying to hide.

Nothing. I sprained my ankle throwing with Gary.

In the first week of April, I missed a preseason game. A friend was driving me to the training facility in St. Petersburg when another car ran us off the road. We didn’t crash. We didn’t even make contact. I
wasn’t hurt. The police weren’t called. But especially after the crutches questions, Davey thought I hadn’t given him a proper heads-up. “Doc, you gotta tell me
everything,
” Davey had said, before hitting me with a $500 fine.

Five games into the season, with the team 2–3, the Mets’ front office woke up to my picture on the cover of the New York
Daily News.
“I AM NOT A VIOLENT PERSON,”
the headline said. The story described a loud disagreement at a Hertz rental car counter at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where I’d been returning a car with my sister Betty and my girlfriend, Carlene. I don’t know why I got so angry at the Hertz clerk. But I did call her a stupid bitch when I thought she was giving Betty and Carlene an unnecessarily hard time. That was stupid of me. I lost my cool. Like it or not, I just had to realize I’d be under a whole new level of scrutiny now. At the level I was playing, my private life would never be private again.

The next day in the locker room, the reporters didn’t have any baseball questions for me. I still hadn’t come to grips with the new reality. “Everyone seems like they’re waiting for the first thing you do,” I complained. “Anything—and then,
boom
! It’s a big issue.” You can imagine how well that went over.

I didn’t slide into a deep, dark hole and stay there. And the difficulties I had that year were more than matched by the triumphs my team and I had on the field, successes I still feel proud of. If you look at the statistics from that Series-bound season, you’d have to say that, overall, I pitched quite well, best on the team, among the best in baseball. In 1986, I won seventeen games and lost six. My two hundred strikeouts were fifth in the National League. At various points that season, I had an ERA lower than any other pitcher’s. That summer, I became the youngest pitcher ever to start in an All-Star Game. I was twenty-one years, seven months, and thirty days old. All through the regular season, I was the Mets’ ace, even if I was sometimes an unsteady one.

If it weren’t for 1985, I’m convinced 1986 would have been nothing
but bows and backslaps for me. It’s just that, given where I’d set the bar—and where the fans and sportswriters were now setting it for me—my good that year never felt quite good enough. Not to me. Not to the celebrating Mets fans.

I won five of my first six starts, including a complete-game two-hitter against Houston on May 6. Then something happened I definitely wasn’t used to. I slid into a slump. Not a deep one—but for me, it qualified. I wasn’t used to having any. My next eight games, I went 3–3 with two no-decisions. After the shutout against the Astros, my ERA was 1.04. It crept up quickly to 2.58.