Doc: A Memoir (25 page)

Inside the dorm, there was no privacy at all. The common bathroom had half a dozen toilets without stalls. Bottom bunks were trophies for guys who had proven themselves. Like everyone, I started on top. Eventually, I made my way to one of the coveted lower bunks in the center of the room. Even in prison real estate, it’s location, location, location.

Gainesville’s rehab program was more about building social skills
than teaching people to stay off of drugs and alcohol. There was an older counselor, Mr. Sellers, who’d really lay into prisoners.

He’d say “you fuckin’ loser” to inmates the way fans liked to call me “Doc.” It was a full-fledged nickname. Even he would try to be helpful to people who sought his advice, though I don’t remember too many people seeking his counsel on their social skills.

I hated being locked up. But I tried to make good use of my time. Once the guards saw I didn’t expect special treatment and wouldn’t make extra demands, most of them treated me with respect and decency. “We’ve seen pro ballplayers before,” one of them said to me. “Your teammate Strawberry was here. He was a diva. He treated us like the help.” I laughed and said, “He was like that in the locker room.”

A lot of the other inmates were extremely down on their luck. Some guys never seemed to get any visitors or mail from the outside world. It was like they’d been totally forgotten. Despite all I’d dragged them through, my family and friends never forgot me. Monique and my daughters were great about writing to me, as were hundreds of baseball fans. Hearing from people on the outside was a hugely important connection that kept me from going insane. I couldn’t imagine being one of those forgotten souls. I hoped I never would be.

One night a couple of months into my sentence, a younger guy strolled up to my bunk just before lights out. He looked like a true thug. Tattoos, a scowl, a practiced swagger. But one-on-one, I could tell he was hurting. He spoke to me in a whisper, not wanting anyone to overhear.

“You get so much mail,” he said with a soft smile. “Could I maybe read some of it?”

I didn’t think I’d heard him correctly.

“Oh, nothing private,” he said, laughing. “I don’t want to pry into your life, man. It’s just that, I got nothing, you know.” He held up his empty hands, making his case.

I looked at my stack of letters. I didn’t want to hand over anything from my family. I did have some nice words from fans. That seemed harmless. Still, it was personal stuff.

“It’d give me something to do,” he said. “My kid’s mom won’t send any pictures. I got nobody.”

Cautiously, I handed him a stack of fan letters. “Don’t go passing this stuff around,” I warned him. “This is important to me. Read ’em, then give ’em back.”

My mother came to see me once. But watching her go through the metal detector and get patted down was just too horrible. I told her I appreciated her coming, but I didn’t think she should come back. I’d see her as soon as I got out.

It was the same with Monique and Dylan. They came to visit a couple of times. But I didn’t want to put them through that. Flying from Maryland to Atlanta and then to Gainesville, renting a car and a hotel room, then being allowed a two-hour visit—I missed them terribly, but that was more than I could ask. And more than I could shoulder. The extra guilt was a heavy part of my sentence.

Before I left Gainesville, I was supposed to speak to my small therapy group and tell the personal story of my own addiction and what I’d done to fight it. But there was a violent storm that day, and we couldn’t leave the dorm. Someone decided it might be a good idea for the celebrity-athlete inmate addict to address a much larger group, the whole dorm. Now I was really nervous. The whole dorm? But when I shared the story—my first cocaine experience at my cousin’s house, my missed parade, the ways I’d hurt my family and my own career—I think everyone realized I was just another guy who had messed up a lot of things he cared about, who didn’t have all the answers but was trying to do the best he could. I wasn’t Dwight Gooden, star pitcher. I was just another struggling person who wanted his life back.

High Low

T
HE CALL CAME AS A
total surprise. It was January 2010. Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer, whose family owned the team, had some big news for me. Four new people, Jeff said, were going to be inducted that August into the Mets Hall of Fame, the first time anyone had been added since Tommie Agee eight years earlier.

Ever since the Mets had moved to Citi Field in April 2009, the sportswriters and the fans had been expressing a nagging complaint. They said the team was failing to celebrate its own amazing past. At the new ballpark, the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers seemed to get more attention than the history of the New York Mets. The exterior design of the stadium resembled Ebbets Field. The rotunda at the main entrance was named for Dodger great Jackie Robinson and featured a quote of his: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” No dis on Jackie. Mets fans revered him. But soon enough,
a new Mets Hall of Fame was installed right off the rotunda. The Hall of Fame Committee, which hadn’t met in years, had now decided the time was right for a new class to go in.

“We’re revving it up again” was how Jeff described the plans to me.

All four of the new guys, he said, were closely connected to the 1986 World Series Mets: Darryl Strawberry, Davey Johnson, Frank Cashen. “And the fourth person being inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame,” Jeff said, “is you.”

This wasn’t Cooperstown. This wasn’t the Hall of Fame people once expected me to be part of. Ever since my rookie season in 1984, I’d been hearing talk about the Baseball Hall of Fame. How likely I was to get there. How long I’d have to wait. Then how I’d tragically blown my opportunity. Once in a while, some friend or fan or baseball numbers geek would pull me aside—this still happens—and talk Hall of Fame statistics with me. “You really should be in Cooperstown,” these people would say. “Your numbers are better than a lot of the guys who are there.” The running theory from my boosters seemed to be that I had created such gigantic expectations in my early playing days that my failure to meet them—not my actual performance—was being held against me. That might or might not be true. I don’t know. I’ll let other people argue about that.

All that said, no one was more surprised or more pleased than I was to get Jeff’s call. My eyes welled up with tears even before I had hung up the phone.

We’d had such a wild ride together, the Mets and me. Now the team that I had started with, the team I cared most about, wanted me in their Hall of Fame. I was just so honored.

In 2006, I’d been invited, along with the entire ’86 championship team, to the twentieth-year reunion of the 1986 Mets at Shea Stadium. The media had been making a big deal about how Darryl and I and the rest of the guys were finally being forgiven for the partying that some people thought cost the Mets a four- or five-year dynasty. Unfortunately,
“the still-partying Doc,” as one of the stories described me, couldn’t be there for the anniversary celebration. I was four months into my one-year prison term. But two years later, another invitation had come. The Mets asked me to the closing of Shea Stadium, the Shea Goodbye, in September 2008. That was the first time I’d actually appeared at the stadium in eight years—the only exception being for the 2000 World Series when I’d been wearing a Yankees uniform. For the Shea Goodbye, the team didn’t even announce in advance that I was coming. Until I got there, team officials weren’t convinced I was actually showing up. I could hear the relief in their voices when I arrived: “Oh, good. You’re here.” I certainly didn’t know how the fans would receive me that day, but I went. And the ovation I got was overwhelming. I smile just thinking about it.

I had so much fun at the last Shea game, I went to Opening Day 2009 at the new Citi Field, watching my nephew Gary in his first game as a Met. It was unreal, seeing that little kid from the backyard on New Orleans Avenue now a grown-up man in a Mets uniform. The fans seemed to understand the full circle that represented, and they couldn’t have been friendlier to me.

I went up to the Ebbets Club, one of the restaurants in the new stadium and another cap tip to the Dodgers. “Will you sign the wall?” the general manager asked me. “And write in a couple of stats?”

“No problem,” I told him as he handed me a Sharpie.

DOC GOODEN
, I wrote.
84 R.O.Y., 85 CY YOUNG, 86 W.S. CHAMPS

The next day I got a call from Jay Horwitz. “Doc,” he told me, “you can’t just be signing your name on the wall. The Wilpons are upset with you.”

I explained to Jay that I wasn’t just writing graffiti. The general manager of the restaurant had asked me to sign. “It wasn’t like I was walking around with a Sharpie in my pocket,” I told him. But when word leaked that the Mets were going to remove that section of wall and that
the manager might be fired, the story blew up in the papers and sports-talk radio. Suddenly, the Mets front office had a change of plans. They didn’t want to get rid of my signature anymore.

“We’ve listened to our fans on this,” Jay told the reporters. “The last thing we want is for them or Doc to be upset. We just didn’t want everyone to think it was okay to start writing on walls all over the stadium.”

Jay came up with a brilliant plan. He said the section of wall with my name on it would be moved to a spot off the outfield where fans could easily see it. Other popular ex-players would be asked to sign the wall too. Honestly, I didn’t care what happened to the autograph. I just didn’t want the hard-working restaurant manager to end up losing his job. But this showed how popular the ’86 Mets still were. Oh, and the following year, the team even picked a new name for the restaurant, the Champions Club.

Ya gotta believe!

Whatever the hard feelings of the past, the new good feelings seemed to continue. That spring, the Mets even asked me to go down to Florida and speak with the minor-league players about the pressures of life on and off the field. I definitely appreciated the offer, although with Monique being pregnant, I had to say no thanks.

I wasn’t in great shape, mentally or physically, when I got that call from Jeff Wilpon. I was living in New Jersey. I had put on weight. I was sitting around a lot and not exercising at all. Even worse, I was gradually slipping back into my addiction. By early 2010, I was drinking. I was hanging out in strip clubs. So of course, I found my way back to cocaine. Alcohol, strip clubs, cocaine: the pattern was as predictable as “three strikes and you’re out.” I could clean up enough to handle an autograph signing or a basic public appearance, but that was about all.

Grabbing a moment of clarity at that foggy time, I realized that being inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame was a really, really big
deal for me. A Major League Baseball team was recognizing my achievements in the most public way imaginable. And not just any team. It was my team. The New York Mets. I felt like the franchise had forgiven me for my many sins in the 1980s and 1990s. Or at the very least, the front office was saying to me, “For better or worse, you are one of us. Forever.”

I had missed the parade after our World Series season, too wasted to attend. I’d missed the twentieth-year reunion of that championship team, serving my one-year prison term at the time. I wasn’t about to miss the Hall of Fame.

I was only sorry my father couldn’t be there too.

Jay Horwitz organized a conference call with the sportswriters. It was magical, like an instant time machine back to earlier days. Darryl said he regretted leaving the team in 1990 for the Los Angeles Dodgers. We complimented Davey for his ability to control the ’86 wild men. We gave Frank props for putting together such an amazing squad. Davey and Frank said what great players Darryl and I had been. “I’m very honored and humbled, and you guys know it’s not easy to humble me,” Davey joked.

I was totally open about how I felt.

“In ’94, when I left because of my own personal issues, I was crushed, heartbroken,” I admitted. “I understood the Mets wanted to go separate ways. Not that I felt betrayed, but I had let them down and never got the opportunity to correct the situation.”

I made a point of being gracious to Darryl, even though we’d had our difficulties.

I didn’t mean to be too serious, but I wanted people to know how I felt about this honor, the Mets especially. “For me, being inducted, it’s like a homecoming,” I said. “Everything has come full circle for myself. I’m just honored and overwhelmed for this day to come.”

That was as plain as I could say it.

“Deep inside I was always a Met and I always will be a Met,” I said. “I’m just blessed to be in this situation.”

Drugs hadn’t taken over my life again. Not yet. But I was definitely heading down a dangerous path. I wasn’t using every day. But I was using often enough. I was going out at night. I was fighting with Monique. I was spending long hours alone in my room. And when I got high, I noticed I wasn’t bouncing back as quickly as I used to.

I told my doctor I needed something to help me sleep. I didn’t mention the coke, of course. “What can you prescribe that will help me sleep and relieve some of the stress I’m feeling?” I asked him.

He gave me a prescription for Ambien.

Ambien is one of the most popular anti-insomnia drugs on the market. I wouldn’t call it a magic drug. But it did help to calm me down and lull me off to sleep. I’ve heard people say Ambien can be addictive if you use for a while. I didn’t take it long enough to say. I just know the pink-colored oblong tablets helped with both the stress and the lack of sleep, and they did absolutely nothing to make me face the underlying problems in my life.

March 22, 2010, was a Monday. I got high that night. Not a lot. Not a little. Just a normal amount for me. I used until almost midnight. At about one a.m., I took four Ambiens, the five-milligram size, about what I usually took, and I got ready for bed. That was my new pattern. The cocaine had me going. The Ambien settled me down. I had done it many times before.