Beyond Belief (11 page)
“No, the team’s sending me to Betty Ford.”
No response. The silence was thick as he tried to digest the information.
“What? Wait, what are you talking about, Josh?”
I could hear my momma in the background, reacting to his disbelief. He held the phone away from his ear for a second and said, “They’re sending Josh to Betty Ford.”
“Betty
Ford
?” she asked. “The
rehab
place?”
I sat there, in an empty apartment in Florida, listening to this drama play out in the big house in North Carolina. They were shocked, angry, confused, but there had been signs. The tattoos, the injuries, the time away from the game — believing I was a drug user didn’t take the huge leap it would have just two years earlier.
Feeling the need to fill the silence, I said, “They sent me to talk to someone about my injuries and I told him I’ve been experimenting with drugs. They called me back and told me I’m going to Betty Ford.”
They were helpless. They didn’t understand. Nobody did, least of all me. They wanted to come down, but I was leaving the next day. They wanted to go with me, but they knew they couldn’t. They wanted to rewind and start over, figure out how to keep this from happening in the first place, but that was impossible.
They didn’t want to hang up, but there was nothing left to say.
THE DRIVER PICKED ME UP at the airport and drove me through the desert and past the rows of palm trees to the front of the famous Betty Ford Clinic, a sprawling single-story white complex in Rancho Mirage. I walked through the doors that had opened for hundreds, maybe thousands of well-known people seeking to reassemble their lives.
This whole trip was a shock to me. I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t really know why I was there. I was met at the desk by an intake coordinator, who gave me a quick tour of the facility — dining room, meeting rooms, all very nice — before showing me to my room and introducing me to my roommate. I shook his hand but the name filtered in and out without registering. I wasn’t interested.
I walked around in a daze, looking and nodding but not really hearing or seeing. It felt like I was living somebody else’s life.
I didn’t associate myself with addicts, and that was the first issue wrestling around in my mind. I’d used maybe seven or eight times to that point, and now I was about to hear that I was powerless in the face of my addiction and all that other stuff. It just didn’t compute.
The label
addict
had been attached to me just the day before, and sitting there in my room with a suitcase at my feet gave me some time to sort through the events of the last twenty-four hours. My attitude began to change from one of straight confusion to one of anger. I didn’t know why the Devil Rays would unilaterally decide to ship me off to a treatment center, where the label was affixed permanently.
I didn’t believe I was an addict, but here I was. I didn’t associate myself with any of the people here, but here I was. This would be my home for the next thirty days.
The first step was to be interviewed by a therapist. When he used the word
addict,
I was ready. I immediately challenged him.
“I’m not an addict,” I said.
He sat there calmly, like he was dealing with a child. He said something about denial and then repeated the word:
addict.
“I’ve used about eight times, and you’re telling me I’m an addict?”
He looked at me and didn’t say anything. His patronizing manner made me angry.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
The exchange set the tone. In group sessions they made us talk about ourselves and our problems. I cooperated to an extent, but as soon as they heard my story they felt they had the answer. The circumstances that led to my presence here made me confrontational, and their packaged conclusions made it worse.
I folded my arms across my chest and vowed not to cooperate. Everyone here was an expert, and it was all so easy: My parents had suffocated me; they were overprotective; they didn’t give me room to breathe, so it was natural that I would rebel.
It was so obvious anybody could see it.
I disagreed. This was garbage, but it was predictable garbage. It was the same garbage I’d been hearing since I started out in the minor leagues.
“Whatever I did, I did myself,” I said whenever silence wasn’t an option. “My parents didn’t have anything to do with it. They didn’t cause this.”
Nobody heard me. Everything I said was twisted back toward the idea that I was living in denial. I felt trapped, like the walls were closing in. I either had to agree with them or be told I was in denial. There was no other right answer.
In fact, from the moment I told the sports psychologist I’d experimented with drugs, the answers had been decided for me: 1) I was an addict, and 2) my parents caused it.
I got pissed off. I got quieter with each passing day. I seethed. I didn’t speak to my roommate and I tried not to make eye contact. I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t hide my feelings. I spent more and more time with earphones in place, listening to music and tuning out the world.
By the fourth day, I was uncooperative in the meetings. I sat there and let everyone tell their stories and work out their problems while I stared off into space. All this therapy seemed pointless, someone else’s problem. I needed to get healthy and get back on the baseball field, that’s all. I’d done cocaine a few times, big deal. I was still alive, and I wasn’t an addict, and nobody really needed to know my business, anyway.
My increasing noncompliance was noted by the people in charge, I’m sure, and it only cemented their views that I was in dire need of help. At this point, I wasn’t buying into the idea of myself as addict, no matter where I was or how many times someone tried to attach the label.
On my eighth day at Betty Ford, during a break from group, I walked back to my room, packed up my stuff, and walked out the door. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t acknowledge anyone or say good-bye, and nobody tried to stop me.
I called a cab to take me to a hotel, where I used my credit card — one of the few possessions I brought from Florida — to secure the room. I turned on the television and tried to decompress. I made no attempt to understand what I’d just been through, probably because I had yet to understand the actions that brought me to this point in the first place.
After a while, I picked up the phone and dialed the house in Garner. I knew my parents had just purchased two plane tickets to fly out to attend the “Family Days” portion of the treatment program, and I winced when I considered what would go through their minds when I told them the latest turn my story had taken.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said when he answered. “I need to come home.”
Just when they thought their minds couldn’t spin any faster . . .
First, they were introduced to my drug use — at that point, my
limited
drug use — when I called and told them I was heading for Betty Ford. Then, just as they make some sense of this information and decide to come out to support me through the treatment, they get a call from me telling them I’m coming home after eight days.
They didn’t know what to believe or what to tell me.
On the phone, my daddy stammered and said, “I don’t understand. I thought you had to stay.”
“I just can’t take it anymore,” I said. “I can’t stay here, so I’m coming home.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he said he’d be there to pick me up at the airport. I could practically hear him shaking his head.
Word traveled back to Raleigh in whispers and raised eyebrows. First it was the tattoos:
I hear Josh Hamilton is covered in tattoos.
And then the drugs:
You’re not going to believe this, but they’re saying Josh Hamilton is doing drugs.
I left Betty Ford, flew back to Raleigh, and then returned to spring training. The Devil Rays didn’t ask too many questions, and I didn’t offer too many answers. In a strange way, I think the eight-day break from baseball gave my back the time it needed to quiet down and feel better.
When we broke camp, I was sent to Class A Bakersfield in the California League. My career was treading water. The year before, when I was nineteen, Larry Rothschild had told me he would have kept me on the big- league roster if it had been up to him. Now, a year and one trip to rehab later, I was starting my third straight year in Class A ball.
The California League is considered high A ball, but still. The number-one pick — the guy chosen one-one — should be far beyond A ball by his twenty-first birthday.
The meteoric rise I had predicted on the day I was drafted was officially out of the question. This was my fourth year as a pro, and instead of becoming a big-league All-Star I was closer to becoming a major disappointment, both personally and professionally.
I went to Bakersfield on my own. I drifted from my parents, as might be expected, and I got myself an apartment near the ballpark and set out to put my career back on track.
There were enough signs I could still play. During a night game in Bakersfield, I hit a ball that left my bat with such force that it startled me. It rose through the minor-league lights and the Bakersfield moths and kept right on going, over the right-field fence and clear out of the stadium.
When the ball left my bat, it sounded as if every fan in the stands had been punched in the gut at the same time. It was the sound of amazement.
Beyond the right-field fence was a levee running beside the Kern River. The team sent someone out to find the ball, to see if they could measure the blast, and the person who tracked it down found the ball had buried itself in the levee, a couple inches deep in the soft dirt.
They measured it the next day: 549 feet.
The longest home run in history, or at least the longest one anyone ever measured, was hit by Mickey Mantle, the man with whom I had frequently been compared as a high school player. Mantle’s blast was measured at 565 feet.
There was another momentous event in Bakersfield: For the first time, I used drugs during a baseball season.
We had an off-day. I got up late in the morning, ate something, and then went for a drive. I stopped at a bar and told myself I’d go in and have one, maybe two, drinks. It’s a story as old as time: the addict, making a deal with himself he knows he won’t be able to keep.
I had developed a liking for Crown Royal. It was my drink of choice, and I could drink the hell out of some Crown. Sometimes a fifth a day, sometimes more. I chatted up the bartender and spent the afternoon in there, drinking Crown and talking.
As night fell, I started to feel drunk and slow. Instead of kicking myself for my stupidity and calling a cab to take me back to my apartment, I asked the bartender if he knew where I could score some coke.
Of course he did.
Sure enough, one phone call and ten minutes later, I was in possession of an eight- ball. I wasn’t surprised this transaction happened so quickly and easily; the surprise would have been if it didn’t.
I did a little cocaine with my connection to commemorate our new relationship. He also worked as a security guard and had to make his rounds. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I made them with him. Over and over, throughout the night, I walked the perimeter of a building with a stranger, stopping occasionally to do more coke.
I can’t remember a thing the guard and I talked about that night — I’m sure none of it was important — but I can close my eyes and see that building and the parking lot. I can feel the aimless sadness of one in an endless string of wasted nights.
There was no sleep for me that night. I went back to the apartment at some point the next morning, wired to the heavens. I checked to see what I had left, and I figured I had enough coke to get me through the next couple of days. We had a game that night, though, and I began to panic about getting my mind straight in time to make it to the ballpark.
When I got to the clubhouse, I was still hyped, but my strongest emotion was fear. I was afraid that someone would find out. I got dressed, aware of my heart thumping in my chest. Too fast, I thought, and definitely too hard. How was I going to calm myself in time to get loose and play hard without killing myself ?
By the time batting practice started, I was honestly afraid I might die on the field. My heart was still hammering like a bass drum, which made any exertion seem dangerous.
As I did my pregame sprints, I prayed my heart wouldn’t just race out of my chest. Stopping wasn’t an option, though, because I firmly believed any change in the regular routine would raise suspicions. I could see the progression — discovery, hand-wringing, another trip to rehab, another tough call to my parents.
The psychologist was right: The $4 million bonus baby was a drug addict.
I stood in the outfield that night, thinking, “I will never, ever do this again.” I went through my get-me-out-of-this-foxhole prayers — Jesus, if you let me pull through this, I’ll never do this again. I saw the error of my ways, and I would never do this again. Not in a million years. I made deals, promises, vows.
The next day I needed a line or two, just to get me through the day.
Oft-injured. Troubled.
These were the adjectives that began attaching themselves to my name like leeches. It was always written that I was “the former number-one pick” in a manner that dripped with disappointment.
It was hard to argue. My 2002 season ended after just fifty-six games in Class A Bakersfield. This time it was my elbow, which began hurting about a month into the season and grew progressively worse until the doctors decided I needed to shut it down. This time, the MRI showed the problem immediately, and the Devil Rays sent me to Birmingham, Alabama, to see Dr. James Andrews, a famous orthopedic surgeon, who cleaned up bone chips in my elbow.
I came home to Garner and hung out, idling away the days. I met up with a guy from high school named Wayne, and we started hanging out pretty much every day. People would see me with Wayne and look at me funny; he was not someone I had hung out with in high school at all. In the high school world of labels — jock, geek, stoner — he was at one end of the spectrum and I was at the other.