Doc: A Memoir (32 page)

I stared straight ahead as I waited for my name to be called. My lawyer, Neal Frank, was sitting to the right of me. Ron was on my left. State Superior Court Judge Donald Venezia was coming onto the bench. The clerk called out, “State versus Gooden.” My lawyer and I walked
to the front. Bergen County Assistant Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph was already there.

It’s funny what can pop into your head at times of huge pressure. What I noticed, as my whole future hung in the air, was that both lawyers had last names that sounded like first names. This would be a legal battle between Mr. Frank and Mr. Ralph.

Before anything got started, the judge made me raise my right hand and swear to tell the truth. He asked “was I under the influence of any narcotics, prescription medicine, or alcohol at this time?”

“No, sir,” I said.

Given what I was charged with, I could understand why he might want to ask.

It had been more than a year since I’d climbed behind the wheel of that black SUV, groggy from Ambien with traces of cocaine in my blood, five-year-old Dylan in the back. I thanked God for the favor I didn’t deserve, that no one was hurt that morning as I careened off the road near our house. Now, before Judge Venezia would decide my sentence, the prosecutor and the defense lawyers would both get a chance to be heard. My lawyer went first.

He began by telling the judge I had been doing great in treatment. I had successfully completed an inpatient program at the Pasadena Recovery Center in California. In the three weeks I’d been back in New Jersey, he said, I’d been attending the Evergreen Substance Abuse and Addiction Treatment Program at Bergen Regional Medical Center, where I’d been drug tested several times a week. He told the judge I’d passed every one.

That all sounded good, I thought.

Instead of giving me prison time, Frank argued, Judge Venezia should sentence me to special probation under the state’s drug-dependency law. That meant probation with extra conditions attached, one of which was that I continue with my treatment.

As my lawyer got rolling, I wondered how he would deal with my
long list of past screwups. He addressed that directly. I’d been in rehab before and blown it, he told the judge. But this time would be different, he said. Never before had I been so motivated—for my own sake and for the sake of my family.

“It’s the first time that Mr. Gooden has really had this level of commitment and the opportunities that he’s had,” Frank said, saying I knew how much was at stake here. “He comes up with one dirty test, he violates probation. He comes before Your Honor. The plea agreement goes out the window.”

I was not a perfect risk, Frank admitted. But I was a risk worth taking, he said. “I don’t see that anybody loses by the court taking that chance,” he argued. “Sure, you’re going out on a limb. But I ask the court to do that because I also suggest that Mr. Gooden has gone out on a limb in his life to do what he’s never ever really done before.”

I believed that. But would the judge?

“To some degree, he’s a changed man,” my lawyer concluded. “He’s forty-six. He’s been fortunate thus far. I hope that the court will go along with the request that I’m making because I think it’s well-founded in the evidence.”

Judge Venezia seemed to listen carefully. But damned if I could figure out what he was really thinking as my lawyer talked. I had no idea.

The judge asked if I had anything I wanted to say before the prosecutor spoke. I didn’t want to say much. I thought my lawyer had covered most of it. It was a little strange, my sitting in the courtroom and hearing him discussing my life. But with so much at stake, I did want Judge Venezia to hear in my voice how serious I was about my future.

“Your Honor,” I said, “I’ve been really trying hard this time around. As my attorney mentioned, I’ve been in treatment before. But this is the first time I’ve really dedicated myself to it. I really did some soul-searching on the things I need as far as opening up and sharing stuff with the counselors, things that happened in my life and the reason
why I kept going back out using drugs and alcohol. I’m trying to correct that problem going forward.”

And it won’t stop with this case. “Even when I’m done here,” I told the judge, “I’ll continue the rest of my life. I have a lifetime commitment that I continue to be involved with aftercare, even though it’s a day-to-day process.”

“About time, right?” the judge said when I finished.

“Yes, sir.”

It certainly was.

I couldn’t tell if my words had touched the judge at all. But I know I said what I was thinking, and I was glad I did.

Then, it was time for the prosecutor to talk. The difference was night and day. Bergen County Assistant Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph stood up with a stack of papers and a sad expression. He didn’t seem to be buying anything my lawyer or I had said. He certainly wasn’t in favor of probation. Given my history, he said, “the court has to have some pause.”

His office, he said, was recommending three years in prison.

“Mr. Gooden has been through treatment before,” he reminded Judge Venezia. “Mr. Gooden has been in treatment over a period of more than twenty years.” Then the prosecutor started ticking off the painful particulars. Smithers, Betty Ford, Health Care Connection—it was like a whole resume of my failures. “So it can’t be said that Mr. Gooden has never had a chance. He has had a chance. And in this instance, he’s found himself in a situation where his conduct, his abuse of drugs, put other people at risk. Fortunately, he didn’t cause harm. He put his own child at risk. He put other motorists on the street at risk. And it’s time to be held accountable for what he’s done.”

Right there, I could feel my hopeful future slipping away. It made me sound awful. And the worst part was, I couldn’t really claim any of his facts were wrong.

“The Pasadena Recovery, by all intents and purposes, is a legitimate treatment center,” he said. “But it’s also the setting for a reality TV show called
Celebrity Rehab,
and that’s what Mr. Gooden went to do. So he somehow turned around this tragic and disastrous situation to something he could exploit for his benefit by continuing to promote his celebrity.”

Now he was making me sound like Amy Fisher, Bai Ling, and Sean Young.

“I saw Mr. Gooden basically using this case to promote himself and apparently make money going on a
Celebrity Rehab
TV show,” the prosecutor said. Whatever the ultimate sentence, I think the court should consider a fine so that there’s not a benefit from the involvement in the criminal justice process in this case,” the prosecutor said.

He really wasn’t leaving anything out.

He even scoffed at the credentials of Dr. Sharp, the psychiatrist from Harvard overseeing my followup treatment, making him sound like a lightweight. “Despite the fancy titles that are on those documents, you know, a doctor from Harvard Medical School, Pasadena Recovery Center is a TV show, for what that’s worth,” he said. “Suffice it to say, we stand here, Judge, I think with more questions than answers.”

As prosecutor Ralph finished and sat down, Judge Venezia nodded politely, the same way he’d nodded after my lawyer and I had spoken. He gave absolutely no clue at all about his choice between probation and prison time.

What was he thinking? What would he do?

What he did was to look straight at me and start talking baseball.

“You’re like a pitcher who’s gone through two innings, who’s gotten banged around,” the judge said. “By the third or fourth inning, you’re looking like you’re not going to get into the fifth. Very frankly, that’s where you are, okay? Because if you don’t get your life together now, I don’t think you’re finishing the game. You are, like Mr. Ralph indicated,
on the brink of basically putting yourself either in jail or jeopardizing your own life and the safety of your family. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Where was he going with this? Would he throw me out of the game or call me safe at home? These baseball stories can go either way.

“I generally think you’re a decent guy,” the judge said. “I know who you are. But your celebrity is not the key. You’re not a bad person, but you’ve got an issue that you just keep avoiding. And the problem with it is how long you’re going to take to finally address the issue. And I think now you are at the crossroads.”

Then he turned his attention to the accident.

“It could have been a disaster,” he said. “I think you understand that.”

He was happy I was in treatment. He said, “Hello! That’s exactly what it’s for! Those programs can help you, if God helps those who help themselves. I can almost hear my own mother, giving me the same advice.”

I liked that he mentioned his mother. But he didn’t dwell on her. He continued with the pitcher-in-trouble idea.

“I’m out of the dugout, and I’m the manager,” he said. “I’m looking at you, and I’m about to take the ball from you and say, ‘Into the showers you go, because you’re done.’ Okay?”

I wasn’t about to interrupt this.

“I think you understand,” he went on. “And the fact of the matter is you are finished if you don’t do everything I tell you to do, assuming I do put you on special probation. You’re not going to finish the game of life. You’re going to end up putting yourself in the ground. You’ll die a young man or cause somebody else to get injured or both, or just disgrace yourself like some of your other brethren in other sports have done.”

Wait, did he say “probation”? I thought he said probation. Probation
sure sounded better than prison time. I’d never heard a judge talk the way this judge was talking. But he sounded like he was going to give me that one last chance.

I glanced over at my lawyer, Frank. He had the tiniest hint of a smile. Ralph, the prosecutor, did not look happy.

The judge went on a bit longer. He covered a lot of ground. He mentioned a football player he’d represented when he was a lawyer. “He was making the news lately,” the judge said. “He used to play for the Giants. I just can’t believe where the guy ended up from where he started out. You know who I’m talking about.” I think he meant linebacker Lawrence Taylor, my longtime friend whose troubles, like mine, included cocaine use and a hit-and-run driving case. “I don’t think he yet learned his lesson,” the judge said.

The judge mentioned Lindsay Lohan. I’m not sure if he realized I’d just spent three weeks with her father in rehab. The judge said he wasn’t going to give me “Fifteen hundred breaks” like Lindsay got. “That’s up to whatever judge she’s before,” he said. “I’m not doing that with you.”

Next, he mentioned my weight. He was hitting on all kinds of topics.

“You lost weight, I see,” he told me. “That’s good, because you weren’t looking so good the first time I saw you in December. I think that’s an indication of what you’re going through. You’re killing yourself. You’ll die of a heart attack. We’ll read in the paper or get some
ESPN
blast that something happened to you. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

The judge said he wasn’t basing his sentence on my celebrity or what I’d done on the field.

“It doesn’t matter if you were Dwight Gooden, former pitcher, or Dwight Gooden, maintenance guy, or Dwight Gooden, manager of the Target store,” he said. He didn’t want me to be “another one of these people you look up under Wikipedia online and see, ‘Dwight Gooden, geez, pitched a no-hitter,’ did this and that, and look where he ended up.”

Judge Venezia was like no judge I’d ever seen before. At times, I had a little trouble following along with him. But I could tell he was a caring person. And definitely a baseball fan. Finally, he got to the legal business or, as he called it, “the legal mumbo-jumbo.” This was the part the lawyers were waiting for. Me too.

“Per the plea agreement,” he announced, going through the required legalese, “I’ll sentence you as a third-degree offender. And I’ve decided, as I indicated before, and I read the criteria in the record, that Mr. Gooden meets the criteria under 12 2C:35–14,” the New Jersey criminal statute that allows special probation for certain drug defendants, “and sentence him under that statute to a five years’ special probation term based upon his drug dependency and his meeting the nine criteria listed under that statute. In addition, Mr. Gooden must also continue to attend and successfully complete an outpatient drug-and-alcohol rehab program. But it’s got to be for at least twelve months’ duration. I don’t want any of this three-or-four-month stuff. It’s got to be for at least twelve months’ duration. It has to be. You need that.”

He suspended my driver’s license for seven months, reminding me that if I get caught driving on the suspended list, “you’ve got mucho problems, you understand?” He ordered regular drug-and-alcohol testing and fined me $1,500.

His special probation had a lot of special conditions. But it sure beat prison, I knew that much.

“Five years is a long time,” Judge Venezia warned me.

“Yes, sir.”

“So I told you,” he said, pounding the baseball theme one last time, “I already made the trip to the mound. I’ll keep you in. But there’s no more trips to the mound. Because that next one, I take the ball. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then the judge reached beneath his bench. I could see he was holding
something in his hand. It was a baseball. Gently, he tossed the ball to me.

“Here,” he said.

I have to admit, even after all I’d heard the past hour, I was a little startled by that. But I reached up my hand, and I caught the ball. Firmly and instinctively. It would have definitely been embarrassing if I’d bobbled it or missed. Only then did I notice something was written on the ball.

It was a note from the judge.

GOOD LUCK
, the note said.
FINISH THE GAME.

Ready Steady

A
S THE MONTHS ROLLED ON
, I stayed with the Evergreen program at Bergen Regional Medical Center, just as Judge Venezia had ordered me to. But I wasn’t going only for him. I was also going for me. The group meetings and the counseling sessions kept me focused on my recovery and kept me connected to other brave addicts who’d also decided they’d had enough.