Beyond Belief (10 page)

I stared at it. I was weak. I couldn’t imagine letting these guys down. They had become the most important people in my world.

Or maybe I just didn’t care.

Whatever the case, I was in. I leaned over and inhaled a line. I didn’t know what to expect, but by the time I’d lifted my head up I knew I liked it. The fog in my brain lifted. I had energy and life. I was a new man.

They looked at me expectantly. I didn’t tell them all this was new to me, but they must have known. When they saw the smile on my face, they laughed. They were right — I loved it.

Immediately, the cloud from the alcohol was gone. I was alert and alive and funny and smart. Nothing hurt.

Kevin and Bill were the coolest guys for introducing me to this feeling. We were even better friends now.

It was the worst decision of my life. I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I knew I should never do it again.

Inside, though, I knew I would. I knew deep down this was the start of something. It was exciting and exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time.

I’ve tried to take my mind back to that moment, to unspool history back to the time I was sitting in that chair, to imagine what would have happened if I had said no when they asked me to go out with them. Or even to go back to the moment when the mirror appeared, to say no to that. I’ve tried to imagine my life if I had simply said I had something else to do. Would it have happened anyway? Would my moment of weakness have come somewhere else, with someone else?

That one decision triggered a series of events that nobody could ever have imagined. So many lives changed in the wake of that decision.

I considered myself a Christian at this stage of my life. I had always been a Christian, but I had given it more thought since the night in Princeton, West Virginia, when I saw the face of the devil and the face of Jesus on the same night.

Those visions prompted me to seek a greater understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and a month after my first professional season ended I went to my uncle Joe and aunt Mary’s house to have a serious discussion about Jesus’s role in my life. My aunt and uncle were always the strongest religious presences in my life; when we went to church on Sundays, they were the ones who provided the push.

So it was natural for me to seek them out as I sought answers. Sitting in their living room, discussing what it means to accept the Lord, I felt His presence in the room. Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary felt it, too, and asked me, “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

“I do,” I said.

And I did. I was saved that night, and what I felt in that room was real. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t have the tools or the motivation to follow through. I wasn’t doing the things I needed to do to be a good Christian, and I left myself open to temptation. The devil comes at you a thousand times harder when you’re a child of God, and he came at me with his best stuff.

From the moment I tried cocaine, I became a different person. I wasn’t playing baseball, but this — this was the surge of adrenaline I got from hitting a ball 450 feet with the game on the line. With this, I was smart and strong and invincible. I was someone else. Gone was the guy who lived for baseball and family. Gone was the guy who didn’t go to the prom in high school because he was afraid of being around people who might put him in a compromising position and jeopardize his career. Gone was the guy who went with his brother and his daddy and his momma to take batting practice just hours after being picked as the number-one player in the draft.

Maybe that guy was drifting away from me anyway, and this was simply my logical destination after a series of wrong turns. Maybe it started with the accident, or the independence, or the tattoos. Who would ever know?

I’ve always been able to get along with all different types of people. I always wanted everyone to be happy, and I always tried to see the good in everybody. I could hang with Ashley Pittman or Carl Crawford or, as I now knew, Kevin and Bill. This was the way I was raised — to see the good in people — and it was no different when my crowd changed from baseball players to drug users. That had always been a positive aspect of my personality, but now it seemed more like naïveté than acceptance.

Regardless, the tattoo guys were my circle of friends now, and I worked to make sure they liked me. They weren’t bad people; they just did bad things. I brought them a couple of my signed Devil Rays jerseys, even though they weren’t baseball fans. We were tight.

Whether the choice to use was an impulsive, random decision or the culmination of a series of poor choices, the result was the same. From the moment I tried cocaine, I became the coke-sniffing baseball player. I was a guy who was in violation of my contract, a guy who was willing to take a huge chance with his talent and his career, a guy who was willing to trade everything he’d achieved for temporary acceptance from a bunch of guys he didn’t really know.

On that one night, with that one moment of weakness, I made a decision that will stay with me the rest of my life.

I believe the seeds of addiction were planted that night, and my fate was preordained from the moment I decided to leave the tattoo shop with Kevin and Bill. With that one decision, I embarked on a journey that took me to a place I never could have imagined, where nothing else in life mattered as much as that drug.

Because I didn’t stop drinking and doing cocaine. The buzz of that drug lingered. I did not go out the next day and use, and I didn’t allow it to rule my life until much later. But it did stay with me. Two days later I used, and using became a recreational thing from that point forward. Every other night, maybe two nights in a row — hey, I had money and time and opportunity. Why not? There was no one around to stop me.

The events of that first adventure with the guys from the tattoo shop led to more. Being around these guys made it easier to forget about baseball and easier to keep from doing the things I needed to do to get my head and body right to get back to playing the game.

I drifted further and further from being the person I needed to be. I became a case study of my theory of people, places, and things. Now that I can see my own gradual deterioration with a clear eye, I speak to groups about this: If you hang out with a group of people in a certain place, you’re bound to end up doing the things they do.

I can’t count the number of times someone said, either in the media or to someone in my family, “If it could happen to Josh Hamilton, it could happen to anybody.”

That doesn’t make it better, and it certainly isn’t an excuse. Nobody pushed me or forced me. I walked out of the tattoo shop with Kevin and Bill. I walked into the strip club. I leaned over the mirror and inhaled the cocaine into my system.

But I believe if it could happen to me it could happen to anybody. I believe I am a good person who made bad choices. I believe I am living testimony to the power of addiction.

I’m the cautionary tale. I accept that.

CHAPTER SIX

ONE OF THE LAST TATTOOS I got is on my right calf. I chose this one myself, but I don’t know why. There was no rhyme or reason behind the choice, any more than any of the others.

It’s a picture of Jesus’s face superimposed over a cross. He’s on the same leg with the demon with no eyes.

When I look at myself now, I see what I couldn’t see then. This was spiritual warfare, taking place subconsciously on my body.

The soulless demon.

The face of Jesus.

The battle had begun.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TWO WEEKS to the day after I used cocaine for the first time, a member of the Devil Rays’ Employee Assistance Program told me the team wanted me to see a sports psychologist.

“Okay,” I said. “Why?”

“The team’s concerned about your injuries, and we’d like you to talk to someone about them,” he said. “Everyone just wants to make sure you’re okay. This’ll be good, just someone to talk to.”

Two years of injuries had taken their toll on me. The back problem that started with the accident, the quad, now the back again . . . yeah, I was frustrated. The team was frustrated, too. I assume there was a meeting among the top brass and the familiar subjects were discussed: whether I was really hurt, whether I really wanted to play, whether the problem was in my head and not my back.

The first step to a solution, according to them, was a psychologist.

The psychologist was employed by the team. I was a little hesitant to go see him, but once I started talking to him I found I liked him. We spoke about my injuries, and what it felt like to know you can play at a higher level than your body will allow. We talked about expectations — my own as well as the team’s — and he caught on pretty quickly to the idea that I’m my own worst critic.

He listened and I talked. It was pleasant enough, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to make my back feel better to talk to him about it. As the conversation started to die down, we both sat there awkwardly until he finally asked, “Well, is there anything else bothering you? Anything else you want to talk about?”

I could have said no, shook his hand and left the office. It would have been that easy. Instead, I sat and thought about it for a minute. I ran it through my mind at warp speed, over and over: Should I? Should I trust him, or should I leave?

I stayed in the chair.

What if I had gotten up and left? How different would my life have been?

“There is something,” I said.

“Yes . . .”

“The last couple of weeks . . . well . . . I’ve kind of been experimenting with drugs.”

No shock registered on his face. He retained his professional detachment and asked the normal questions — which drugs, how often, with whom. I had used cocaine with the tattoo guys seven or eight times — roughly every other day — to this point. I continued to like it, and I saw no real reason to stop. Since I wasn’t playing, I wasn’t concerned that it might hurt my ability to play. I liked it, and I liked how it let me enter a different world and forget my problems.

He nodded politely to keep me talking. He didn’t act judgmental. We talked about the set of circumstances — frustration with injury, boredom, loneliness — that led me to make such a flawed decision.

I don’t know where I expected this discussion to lead. I knew he worked for the team, but I believed it was a confidential doctor-patient conversation.

My decision to bring up the issue showed how conflicted I was. As I was making my confession, it didn’t seem real to me. It felt as if I was talking about someone else, describing someone else’s life. Experimenting with drugs? This couldn’t be me.

The focus of drugs in baseball had shifted from the cocaine era of the 1980s to the performance-enhancing era of the past decade. In 2001, MLB unilaterally implemented its first random drug-testing program for minor-leaguers. All players outside the forty-man roster were subject to testing for “ steroid-based, performance-enhancing drugs, plus drugs of abuse (marijuana, cocaine).”

Steroids never interested me. I would wonder at times how much better I could be if I did them — mostly when I saw someone less talented tearing it up with the extra help — but I was never tempted to do them. Strange as it sounds coming from me, I thought taking performance- enhancing drugs would cheat the game. I had always been taught to respect the game, and whenever the topic of steroids came up, my daddy would say, “If you can hit the ball five hundred feet and the fences are four hundred feet away, why do you need to hit it any farther? And if you can throw the ball from the outfield fence to home plate, why do you need to throw it any farther?”

The strength of the Major League Players Association made the minor leagues the first battleground in the drug war. The first positive test carried a fifteen-game suspension, the second thirty, the third sixty, and the fourth a full year. A fifth offense called for a lifetime ban from professional baseball.

The morning after I met with the psychologist I received a call from the same EAP employee who had arranged the appointment.

“Josh, we’re sending you to the Betty Ford Center for rehab,” he said.

His words took my breath away. Rehab? You mean drug rehab? The doctor turned me in? He went right back to the Devil Rays and told them what I confided. I couldn’t speak, but my mind raced.

I couldn’t keep this secret. People will find out. I’ll have to tell my family. This will follow me wherever I go.

He kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening. Something about leaving tomorrow, a plane, thirty days in treatment, the best thing for me, get my head straight, come back ready to play.

I didn’t really know what to say, but I blurted out something that probably made no sense. I was in shock. I had no idea how that conversation had led to this. I had tried cocaine seven or eight times, and now I was branded an addict? I was going to Betty Ford?

I hadn’t failed a test. I had simply confided in a professional. I hung up the phone and tried to make sense of the past twenty-four hours. Right there in the drug policy are the words, “The EAP director will arrange for an appropriate and confidential medical evaluation of the individual, and will assist in prescribing the appropriate treatment, counseling, and after care.”

I’ve often thought about that episode — how it happened, whether it was right, if I should have questioned the confidentiality aspect of my conversation. I always come back to the same answer: It needed to happen that way. The script was being written somewhere else, and even though the sequence made no sense to me or anyone around me, it made sense to someone somewhere.

That night, I made the toughest call of my life. I punched in my parents’ number back in Garner, took a deep breath, and prepared myself for the worst. I closed my eyes as it rang, wanting to hang up but knowing I couldn’t. My daddy answered. We made small talk for a few seconds, but there was no hiding my mood. Daddy knew there was something going on, so I stopped trying to pretend otherwise.

“I’m going away for a while tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay. What for? Your back?”