Beyond Belief (12 page)
I could read the faces of those who had known me for a long time. When they saw me with Wayne their thoughts were so obvious they could have been printed on their foreheads.
Everything they’re saying about Josh must be true.
At this point, I wasn’t sure who I was, or who I should be hanging out with. My sense of self was gradually eroding, so maybe it wasn’t that unusual that I gravitated toward someone who wasn’t at all like me. Wayne was a guy with no direction in high school, and he was a guy with no direction when we started hanging out. In that sense, given my growing aimlessness, maybe we were perfect.
I was still the Devil Rays’ property, and when my elbow started healing they sent me to Durham, right down the road, to rehab with the Triple A Durham Bulls. I dressed for games and worked out during the day, but I never played for the Bulls. I wasn’t officially a member of the team, but the Devil Rays thought it would be the perfect place to keep an eye on me and also allow me to stay at home.
Even though I wasn’t playing, I was still subject to the same rules as any other minor-leaguer, which meant I was subject to random drug testing. And one day before a game in Durham I was given a cup by a drug tester and told to pee while he watched.
My cocaine use was nearly every day, but I peed in the cup with the confidence of a man who had yet to realize the extent of his problem. I wasn’t panicked or nervous; I was untouchable.
Bill Evers was the manager of the Bulls, and he called me into his office a few days later. He brought me in, closed the door, and said, “Josh, we got a failed test.”
“What? Of mine?”
“Yes, yours.”
And so, with that, I entered into Major League Baseball’s drug treatment program. I would be subject to stricter testing and a fifteen-game ban from playing. Since I wasn’t on an active roster, that didn’t matter much to me.
In fact, I was remarkably unaffected by the whole thing. I convinced myself it wasn’t real, that I didn’t fail a test. It must have been a false positive or some other mistake. Maybe they got my sample mixed up with that of somebody else, a real drug user.
That must have been it.
It couldn’t have been me.
Wayne thought it was a big deal to hang out with me. I don’t like to say that because it sounds conceited, but it was true. Wayne got some mileage out of hanging out with Josh Hamilton, especially since nobody would have ever suspected it was possible.
It didn’t take long for our relationship to center on drugs. Wayne served a purpose for me — I could send him out to get the stuff and have him hold it for me. I always felt cleaner and less guilty if I wasn’t the one driving out to buy it, or the one holding it. I had to watch myself. At this stage, with baseball still in the picture, it felt like less of a problem — less real — if I could just sit back and use the stuff when it was presented to me without having to do the dirty work.
One day in August I had seen a high school classmate of ours named Katie Chadwick. She was a pretty single mom with a daughter about eighteen months old. Katie and I knew each other in high school, but we weren’t really friends. She was not a baseball fan and never saw me play, and she was unimpressed and mostly unmoved by the Josh Hamilton Phenomenon that swept through Athens Drive High School during my senior year.
When her friends were walking around the hallways with baseballs for me to sign, she asked them, “What are y’all doing? Is that something I should be doing?”
But when I saw her this time, I told Wayne I wouldn’t mind getting to know her better, and before I knew it he was on the phone to her.
“Katie, I’ve got Josh Hamilton here, and he wants to meet you.”
For Katie, this was confusing on many levels. She wasn’t a friend of either of us in high school, and now she was being asked to digest a bunch of conflicting information. First, it was hard for her to get her mind around the idea that I was even associating with Wayne. She didn’t know me that well in high school, but she knew me well enough to know I didn’t hang out with guys like Wayne. Second, she didn’t know whether to believe I really wanted to meet her, because we had had no contact since high school and the only things she knew about me were from the newspaper reports of my baseball career.
She agreed to meet with me, anyway, and we began dating. I immediately fell in love with Julia, Katie’s daughter, and I used to change her diaper and play with her all the time. Katie and I got along well, but she soon discovered that her suspicions were correct: If I was hanging out with Wayne, I must be using drugs.
After four or five months, we broke up. My drug use was the big factor in ending our relationship. There were times when using and hanging out with Wayne and some other hangers-on was more important to me than being with Katie, and that wasn’t what she had in mind for our relationship.
Katie’s father, Michael Dean Chadwick, was a recovering addict who grew up in Baltimore selling and using crack on the streets. He was a remarkable success story, having overcome his past to become one of the most respected and successful homebuilders and developers in the Raleigh area. Katie’s mother, Janice, stayed with Michael and helped him beat his addiction. The Chadwicks also drew on their faith to get them through the tragic death of Katie’s little brother, nine-year-old Mikey, who was killed in an automobile accident. Katie’s dad told the family’s story at local churches, and his speeches were dynamic and motivational.
Katie understood addiction, but that didn’t mean she was willing to accept whatever I threw at her. We liked each other, and we got along great, but this one thing stood between us, prying us apart.
THE LAST PLACE I should have been during February 2003 was at a major-league spring training. I was a mess, using every day, growing increasingly paranoid and defensive, listening to nobody. And yet there I was, at the Devil Rays’ spring training complex in St. Petersburg, trying to hide my addiction and make the ballclub.
The second half of that statement is debatable. My first drug suspension was over, but I don’t know how hard I tried to make the club, or even whether it was a possibility. My head wasn’t in it, and my heart followed.
The Rays made a big move before the 2003 season, bringing Lou Piniella out of retirement to manage the team. Lou was known as an old-school hardass, the kind of guy who flourished working for George Steinbrenner and the Yankees. He was going to usher in a new era of Rays’ baseball, where guys played hard and were held accountable, and failure would no longer be seen as a by-product of wearing the uniform.
To me, it didn’t really matter. Drugs had taken over. They’d gone from a recreational mistake, something I stupidly thought I could control or ignore or deny, to a full-blown personal disaster. It was astonishing and perfectly natural how quickly drugs and the drug culture had taken up residence in my life.
By the time spring training started, I had cocaine with me nearly all the time. It was with me at my apartment, but I couldn’t leave it there when I left for the ballpark in the morning because I might need it. I couldn’t leave it in my truck in the players’ parking lot; I was too worried about what might happen if someone either saw it or broke into my truck and found it.
The cocaine would stay in the pocket of my pants, I decided. Inside the pants, it would stay on a hook hanging inside my locker while I took the field. Freaked, I would spend my whole time on the field worried the clubbie might go into my locker to hang something up and accidentally knock the pants off the hook, spilling a vial of cocaine all over the clubhouse floor and exposing my secret for the world to see.
While I was in the shower, I worried that one of my teammates might reach into my locker for some deodorant or toothpaste and inadvertently catch a finger on my belt loop and upend my pants, spilling a vial of cocaine all over the clubhouse floor and exposing my secret for all the world to see.
It wasn’t rational, but nothing about me was rational.
Baseball wasn’t fun. I was on guard all the time, protecting my secret. I avoided people, even teammates who had been my friends, like Carl Crawford. I couldn’t see people for who they were; I saw only the reflection of me I could see in their looks and behavior. I couldn’t relax to save my life.
Carl and I share a business manager, Steve Reed, and early in spring training Carl called Steve and asked him what was up with me.
Steve said, “Nothing as far as I know. Why?”
“I don’t know, man,” Carl said. “Your boy’s changed. You might want to see what’s up with him, because he’s tense and edgy all the time. Guys are wondering what happened.”
Not surprisingly, my play on the field was erratic. I’d have days where I felt like the old Josh, ripping balls over the fence in batting practice and doing all the things that made me one of baseball’s top prospects. But most of the time my mind drifted and I played like a guy who had lost interest. I struggled to do things I used to be able to do in my sleep. I could hide the cocaine in my pants pocket, but I couldn’t hide its effects. I was sick, and that was impossible to hide.
During the second week of spring training, I stayed up most of the night, went to sleep around 5:00 a.m. and didn’t wake up in time to get to the ballpark in time. I was about an hour late, and in spring training nobody — and I mean
nobody
— shows up late.
On my drive in to the ballpark from home, I settled on a story: car trouble. Not very imaginative, I know, but that’s not the point. The point is, I convinced myself it was true. I repeated it for twenty minutes on the drive, and by the time I parked in the players’ lot and walked into the clubhouse, it was no longer a story. It was the truth.
Besides, I couldn’t tell Lou that I was out all night and couldn’t get up in time to be at the ballpark by eight-thirty. My behavior in the first two weeks of spring training had already caught the attention of the team and Piniella. I couldn’t just hand over the evidence.
I told Lou my story and he just looked at me and said, “Okay, don’t let it happen again.”
Two days after, I was late again. This time I drove to the park perfecting a story about my alarm clock. I walked in with a sheepish look on my face and muttered something about oversleeping. This time Lou just looked at me and nodded.
My ability to concoct stories and convince myself they were true was the same ability that allowed me to deny a positive drug test. At some level of my soul, I still couldn’t come to terms with my drug use. The truth was too hard to face, so I denied tests and made up excuses and somehow convinced myself I could believe both.
The team was aware of my problems, and they were trying to put rules in place that might keep me from creating more problems for myself. Since most of my problems occurred in Bradenton, the team forbade me to cross the bridge between Tampa and Bradenton.
That didn’t last. I went across the bridge one day during spring training and decided not to come back. I hung out and used and forgot about baseball. No lies about car trouble, no oversleeping, no worries about the clubbie discovering cocaine in the jeans hanging in my locker.
For four days, I stayed gone. I slept when I felt like it, which wasn’t often. I didn’t answer the phone or make any calls or read the newspapers. No excuses, just AWOL.
At the end of the fourth day, I made a phone call to Devil Rays’ general manager, Chuck Lamar.
After being patched through to his office, I said, “Mr. Lamar, Josh Hamilton.”
I could feel the disappointment in his voice. They were starting to wonder if I would ever fulfill my promise, if they would ever get a return on their investment. I had my doubts, too.
Mr. Lamar came up with a plan. I would take a ten-day leave of absence. The team would announce it was for personal reasons. This leave would take me through the end of spring training, and I would report to Double A Orlando when the leave ended. I would go home to Garner, gather my thoughts, and return ready to play.
It sounded better than anything I could come up with. I agreed and apologized.
Back home in Garner I sat in the big house on twenty-two acres, the house and land bought on the promise of my baseball talent, and wondered where this would go next. I was scared, sick, and paranoid. I didn’t want to hear from anybody, and I wouldn’t listen if I did. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that stubbornness is a great way to hide weakness.
I kept using. Ten days at home, with nothing to do but fish in the pond out back and ponder the future, wasn’t going to fix anything. It got me out of the team’s way, but it wasn’t meant to fix anything. That was my job, and I wasn’t willing to sign on.
My parents knew, but they couldn’t reach me. Nothing worked.
After the personal leave, I was sent to Double A Orlando. Because of my previous failed drug test, I was in the program and subject to regular testing. I had been told I would be tested the day I showed up in Orlando, and still I used that day and showed up at the ballpark knowing I would fail that day’s test.
And so, on the afternoon of May 14, 2003, the drug tester brought me the cup and stood by to watch and make sure it was my urine that ended up in it. My heart racing and my mind surprisingly dead to the world, I peed in the cup, watching the stream carry my career away with it.
This would mean a suspension of thirty games. And after that, I would be subject to more testing and more severe penalties. This didn’t feel like a temporary disruption — another in a long line of them — as much as a conclusion. This felt like the end, the final straw, the last act of self- destruction.
I put on my uniform, thinking it might be the last time. I went through the motions of pregame warmups, but since I wasn’t in the lineup I didn’t overexert myself. When the game started, I sat next to hitting coach Steve Henderson, a former big-leaguer and a good man. I trusted Hendu, and seeing him made me realize I had let good people down. I was staring out at the field, trying to keep my mind on the present, trying to calm the frantic beating of my heart.
The scene before me was so familiar, and normally so comforting. The geometry of the game — the baselines, the batter’s box, the distance between bases. This was home for me, and playing the game was the one thing I could do better than anyone I knew.