Doc: A Memoir (18 page)

“Dad—” I tried to say.

“Son,” he cut me off. “You’ve had a great career. If and when you get back to it, great. Think of your family first. Do this for them.”

I think it was the first time I’d ever heard my dad shift his priorities away from baseball. As far back as Little League, he’d always said, “If you want to be a pro, you gotta put baseball ahead of everything else. It has to be number one in your life.” The sad part is that, for a long time, we’d both known what my top priority was. It wasn’t family, and it wasn’t baseball.

Dad’s words meant a lot to me but not enough. The commissioner’s office had suspended me but not ordered me into treatment. Faced with nothing but shame and embarrassment and with a lot of free time on my hands, I went back to drinking and drugging almost immediately. I could have reached out to my parents for support. It wouldn’t have been hard to find them. They lived a few doors down from Monica, the kids, and me in a house I had bought for them on our St. Petersburg
cul-de-sac. Instead, a few beers led me over the W. Howard Frankland Bridge into Tampa and back to cocaine. I was still being tested regularly, but I didn’t care. I was tempting Major League Baseball to suspend me even longer. After a few high-pressure phone calls from the Mets and from my agent—and with my dad’s heartfelt words stuck my head—I agreed to go back into rehab.

At the end of July, out of shape and looking like a phantom, I flew out to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, where I stayed for twenty-three days. Betty Ford was a great facility. It was staffed by people who tried to focus and challenge me. I was polite, but I never really cooperated with them. This may sound like an old cliché. But you have to be in treatment for the right reasons, not because someone is forcing you to. Even the greatest treatment facility just gives you the tools. There is no magic. There is no instant cure. You have to accept your powerlessness and work every day at recovery.

I wasn’t even close to there.

I saw what I’d done as a minor slip-up. I was only going through the motions of recovery. I knew I had to navigate my way, going through the motions, back to baseball. But never did I think I needed to change myself fundamentally. The best way to help myself and my family, I thought, wasn’t to dive into recovery. It was to put all this behind me and get back on a baseball field.

I left the Betty Ford Center feeling like I’d just had my ticket punched. I had done what I’d been asked to, now let me get back to work. I secretly knew I was probably not done drinking. I told myself I would do my best to stay away from cocaine. I also left the Betty Ford Center without a job. Baseball players had gone on strike two days earlier.

I didn’t fly back to Florida immediately. I had to stop in New York to check in with the Mets brass. I also had to see Drs. Solomon and Millman and Lou Melendez. I spent a few days in meetings, trying to convince everyone how well I’d done at Betty Ford. “When the strike
and my suspension are over,” I told everyone, “I’ll be ready to join the team again and contribute to Major League Baseball.”

“You’re looking good, Dwight,” Dr. Solomon said.

“I’m feeling good,” I said. “You know, it was honestly just the one mistake. I think it was just the depression caused by my injury that triggered it. I’ve dealt with a lot the past few years. But I’ve got a new perspective now.”

The people at the team and league did their best to appear hopeful. But they also had a backup plan. The biggest piece of advice I took from our meetings was: “For God’s sake, if you’re tempted to do anything, just drink. Just do not, under any circumstances, do cocaine.”

That flew in the face of what I’d heard at Betty Ford. I say “heard”—not “learned”—because my mind wasn’t open enough for learning. I probably should have realized what a bad idea “just drink” was for me.

I got on my flight to Tampa International Airport. As soon as we hit cruising altitude, I downed five Absolut miniatures. When the plane landed, my defenses were already lowered and I was thoroughly drunk. I didn’t think twice about calling my dealer from the terminal. “Who needs a taxi?” I thought. He picked me up and I didn’t go home for three days.

There was no doubt I’d get caught and pay dearly. But the immediate gratification of the booze and the coke was too strong to resist. Barely forty-eight hours out of rehab, I was way, way out on thin ice. I had no plan to test clean, or even call Monica and let her know my New York meetings were done. I’d figure all that out once I came down.

Normally, once I got back to Tampa–St. Pete after the season, I’d call the commissioner’s office in New York to say I was back home. Someone in New York would set up a place for me to go for testing, usually at a walk-in clinic in a strip mall. This time, it took me a week to call in. I said a sick relative had taken me out of town. Really, I was my own sick relative, giving my system time to pee out the cocaine. I
passed one or two tests before I went on the bender that would cement my place in the annals of self-destruction.

For weeks, it was the 1986 off-season all over again. Only instead of sneaking into my parents’ house in the morning, hoping my mom was already at work, now I had more responsibilities. More baggage. Kids and a wife. I wasn’t a hotshot athlete spiraling out of control, too young and too dumb to understand what was happening. I was a dad and husband dragging everyone down.

I wasn’t looking for running mates like I had back in ’86 or ’87. The few people I spent time with were the ones who assured me what I was doing wasn’t so bad. But most of the time, I just wanted to get my drugs and do them alone. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom with the door locked. I lay alone in bed for hours in the daytime with the curtains drawn. The word “partying” didn’t apply anymore.

When I was at home, I was terrible to my wife, Monica, two months away from giving birth to our son Devin. I sulked around the house. I hated to be disturbed. I considered my own family a bother. Then I’d disappear for days. In early September, she planned a third birthday party for our youngest daughter, Ariel. I was out drugging the night before. I couldn’t even make it to an afternoon party.

I called with another stupid excuse.

“I spent the night with friends in Orlando,” I lied. “Now I’m stuck on the highway with a flat tire.”

I knew Monica wasn’t believing a word of it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a special tire. They can’t get a new one until late this afternoon.”

“So you’re really not coming to your daughter’s birthday party?” Monica said, no longer concealing her disgust. She’d invited friends and relatives, many of them mine. I was cooking up fresh excuses.

“I’m trying to do everything I can,” I told Monica.

“She’ll never have another third birthday,” my wife said. I could hear the hurt in her voice.

“I said I was sorry!”

She hung up the phone.

My disappearing acts had gotten so frequent, all Monica came to expect was the occasional phone call to let her know that I was still alive before I stumbled in at dawn and went to bed. She wasn’t worried I was being unfaithful to her. My only romance was cocaine. And the deeper I got into addiction, it was becoming more of a job than a fling.

When Monica hung up on me the day of Ariel’s party, I wasn’t in Orlando or stuck on the side of a road. I had driven to the edge of our cul-de-sac and saw all the cars parked around our home. I decided I couldn’t face all those people, not in the condition I was in. The party had already started. Everyone was there. Our friends and relatives would take one look at me and know. I was paralyzed by guilt and paranoia. The best I could hope for, I thought, sitting in the car, was that everyone was having so much fun in there, they wouldn’t miss me at all.

Once the guests left, I told myself, I could slip inside and spend some time alone with the birthday girl.

I finally crept in after dark without a present in hand. Ariel met me near the door. She was still awake and happy, surrounded by her birthday toys.

“Daddy was at a meeting with a baseball team,” I said.

She didn’t need to hear the truth, and I didn’t have the courage to tell it.

Major League Baseball was actually fairly lenient with me. They gave me a comfortable cushion after rehab to start turning in clean tests. I just couldn’t do it, no matter how flexible they were. I was in a Tampa hotel room on a $2,000 eighteen-hour binge with some fellow degenerates when a thought somehow cut through the fog of cocaine.

“Oh, shit,” I said out loud. “I have a drug test in the morning.”

Even my zonked-out friends could see this might be a problem.

“I don’t even know what the point is,” I said glumly.

“Relax, Doc,” one of my associates said. “I know just the thing.” He explained that if I took enough diuretic pills, I’d pass the test no matter how much coke I’d taken in. The only problem was that we were in no shape to go to the drugstore. He made some calls and eventually a friend showed up with a bag full of bottled water and a few packs of pills. I popped a handful and began guzzling the water. I peed and peed, and after a while my heart started racing. The diuretics must have had a jolt of caffeine mixed in. I put a wet washcloth on my forehead. I lay on the bed unable to move, feeling like my chest was going to explode. I spent the rest of the night peeing into a plastic garbage can. More than once, I thought about calling 911.

Nothing could stop morning from arriving.

When I felt well enough, I drove to the clinic, gave my sample, and cooled it with the drugs for a while.

I didn’t have much faith in the pills. But I was hoping if I could quickly follow the dirty test with a couple of clean ones, maybe I could somehow avoid the trouble that was heading my way.

Sure enough, a week later, Dr. Solomon was on the phone. The league, the players association, and the Mets, he said, had been studying my test results. Everyone was extremely concerned.

“When can you fly to New York?” he asked. “Can you fly to New York? Are you in any condition to do that?”

“Sure,” I bluffed. “I’m doing great.”

I arrived in New York and met with a larger group this time. It was Drs. Millman, Solomon, and Lans, as well as Lou Melendez and Gene Orza, a lawyer for the players association. All of them appeared deeply concerned.

“Looking at your test,” Dr. Solomon said, “we frankly have no idea how you are still alive.”

Gene Orza sighed and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “you’re worse than Steve Howe.” Until that morning, I guess, the hard-throwing
left-handed relief pitcher had set the standard for substance-abusing ball players.

I started tearing up. Once I did, I couldn’t tell anymore if I was really crying or acting. My head was that messed up. Either way, the situation was somewhere far beyond sad. “I tried to overdose,” I said. “I wanted to die.” That was a lie. They were getting ready to throw the book at me. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Dwight,” Dr. Solomon said, “that’s very serious.” He paused and raised his eyebrows in gentle concern. “Maybe you should think about giving rehab another try?”

“I don’t know that it helped,” I said.

I didn’t mention that I hadn’t given it much of a chance.

On September 15, Major League Baseball and the New York Mets, in a joint announcement, said I’d failed my third drug test, an offense that would add additional time to my 1994 suspension. And the clock wouldn’t start running until the strike was through. The idea that I’d be playing at all in 1995 was rapidly slipping away.

Within a few days, Mets manager Dallas Green mentioned to the press that I wasn’t in his plans for the 1995 season anyway. Joe McIlvaine, the man who had drafted me, echoed that to the papers. It felt like a final kick in the teeth. Too bad I had no one else I could possibly blame.

Suicide Squeeze

I
TOOK THE BULLETS
out of the gun. I pointed the weapon against my forehead. I held it there until Monica and the girls got home from Grandma and Grandpa’s house. The gun was a semiautomatic 9-millimeter Glock, more than enough to do the job if I’d had the balls to leave it loaded. But this was suicide theater, not a suicide attempt.

“Dwight!” my wife screamed when she opened the bedroom door. “What’s wrong with you?” She was eight and a half months pregnant.

“Mon—,” I pleaded. “Just leave. It’ll be much easier this way. For everyone.”

“No!” she howled. Her face was a twist of fear and confusion. “Please put the gun down! Please!” She was crying now. “Why are you doing this?”

“I can’t tell you,” I answered. “You don’t want to know.”

“Whatever it is,” she said, forcing a layer of calm into her voice, “we can work it out.”

“I don’t know.”

“Promise me you won’t pull the trigger,” she said. “I’m going to go get your mother. This is crazy!”

I’d been unable to manipulate Major League Baseball and the New York Mets and their stern-faced doctors. But at least I was getting some traction at home. If anything, this sick show was crueler and more selfish than real suicide. It sent terror into the hearts of those who loved me without putting myself at any actual risk. It was a horrible and shameful game. But in the grip of my addiction, I swear, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

My mom marched into the room and came to the side of the bed where I was sitting. Mom never fooled around. She snatched the gun from me. “Gimme that,” she said. I put up no struggle. Then, she and Monica and I huddled together and cried.

This was early November of 1994. A week earlier, I had filed for free agency, one of nineteen players that year to tell their teams “I’m outta here.” When I next pitched in the majors, I’d make them sorry they weren’t nicer to me. In fact, I had no plan for actually pitching any time soon, since it would mean I’d have to get off drugs. But now, as I held that gun to my head, even the far-fetched notion of playing ball again was being pushed back yet more.

I’d gotten a registered letter in the mail that morning. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he was very sorry, but I was being suspended for the entire 1995 season, 168 days on top of the 15 days I already had to make up for 1994. Even my coked-up brain could understand: this meant I would have no job, no salary, and nothing to do all day. I would be failing my father’s most basic test of manhood: Do what you want to. But make sure your family is taken care of.