Beyond Belief (15 page)

In December, Katie got pregnant.

Everything moved fast, faster than I expected.

We bought a house in the town of Fuquay-Varina, a few miles from where I grew up. It was a big house in a cul-de-sac, with a large lot. It was less than a quarter-mile from a nice fishing pond, and we were happy to start a new life together. I still considered myself a ballplayer, and I started to believe I could wait out the suspension and get back in the game.

Katie had never seen me play baseball in high school, and since we reconnected I had been either injured or suspended. To her, I wasn’t really a ballplayer, and I might never be again. That didn’t matter to her; she was willing to accept me with all my problems attached.

But at this time, other than not really having a job, I didn’t have that many problems. I was clean, I was married, I was relatively happy. Then, in January, less than a month after we learned Katie was pregnant, I relapsed. I traveled the well-worn track of my addiction: first too many drinks in a bar, then some coke, then back to the bar.

In my experience, it’s common for an addict to slip up and then set off on a major binge. The guilt of relapsing takes over and you figure what’s the use? But this time, I got myself back together, shrugged it off as a one-time thing, and got back to my life.

For four months, I stayed clean. Then, on my twenty-fourth birthday — Saturday, May 21, 2005 — I brought a bottle of Crown Royal with me to an afternoon birthday party at Katie’s parents’ house. After the party, the plan was for Katie, Julia, and me to meet my parents for dinner at a local restaurant. Over and over, I left the party for a few minutes to sneak to the truck. I would then re-emerge, drunker each time. There was a cake, and one of Katie’s first hints that I was messed up came when she watched me fumble and stumble as I tried to cut the cake. I had been so good for so long she was completely shocked this was happening.

We had to leave to meet my parents for dinner. By the time we got into Katie’s Toyota Sequoia, a Christmas present from me, I was slurring my words and becoming nastier by the minute. I sat in the passenger’s seat, reeling.

“You’re embarrassing me,” Katie said as we drove off. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

The conversation deteriorated from there. I could be a nasty, mean drunk, and I flew into a white-hot rage. I punched the windshield so hard it cracked. I demanded she let me out. Disgusted with me and upset that Julia was witnessing such a display, she pulled over on the highway.

I took off directly into the woods along the shoulder of the road. I didn’t have a destination in mind, but I wanted to be as far away as possible from everybody. I was turning twenty-four, and I should have been seven weeks into my second or third big-league season. Instead I was stumbling through the pine trees along Highway 64 outside Cary, North Carolina.

Katie drove back to her parents’ house, furious and sad at the same time. She told them what happened and Big Daddy and a friend of his decided to drive around and look for me. They found me, at a gas station a few miles from where Katie let me out. They brought me back to Big Daddy’s house.

It didn’t get any better. I felt trapped, and my anger spiked again when I got back to the house. It reached a peak when I stood at the end of the long driveway that snakes toward the pool in the back of this beautiful house in this beautiful neighborhood and challenged Big Daddy and his friend.

I pulled a baseball bat out of the cab of my truck and snapped it over my knee. I tossed one half to Big Daddy and the other to his friend. Then I shouted, “You’re going to need those if you plan on coming after me.”

I had incredible strength when my mind was altered. I once picked up my daddy and moved him away from the doorway in our Garner house because he tried to stand between me and the door. My father is a large man, thick and strong, and yet I moved him the way I would a kitchen chair.

On this night, I felt the strength and rage coiled inside me. I was trapped by addiction, and by my inability to do the right thing. After I broke the bat and challenged them, they told me to leave or they would call the cops. I responded by slamming my fist against one of the side-view mirrors of their friend’s truck.

Justifiably fearing what I might do next, they called the police. Two cops showed up at the house and I went with them without much fuss. They took me to the station and put me in the drunk tank to sober up. Disgusted and angry, I sat there silently and slept little. I had blown four months of sobriety — and blown them big-time — and my reaction was to stay pissed off at the people around me and pretend the drinking was no big deal. I didn’t use, I just drank — what was so bad about that? The next morning, a Sunday, they called me out of the tank and sent me on my way with no charges filed.

Instead of calling Katie to pick me up, I took my belongings, headed out the door, and started walking. The police shrugged and gave me a suit-yourself look when I told them I wasn’t calling anyone for a ride. I decided to head for my grandma’s house, to the one place I could always go to relax and avoid judgment. She’d open the door, no questions asked.

It was a ten-mile walk, but I didn’t care.

I was in no hurry.

Back on the hamster wheel, back to disappointment and resentment, back to square one. I’d go a week or two without using, then I’d use, then I’d go a week or two or maybe even three without using again.

For the first time, money became an issue. Drugs and repeated trips to rehab had cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. When Katie and I got back together, I had about $500,000 left over from my signing bonus, and we put about $100,000 of that down on the new house. My erratic behavior had made Katie leery of giving me free rein on the bank accounts, so we started a game of keep-away with money. She would move it, and I would try to find it. The $3.96 million signing bonus — with nearly half going to taxes — wouldn’t last forever.

But I wasn’t the type of addict to let something as insignificant as insufficient funds — or reduced access — get in the way of my drug use. Again, I adapted. In August, with Katie pregnant, I needed some coke but had no means of buying it.

Katie had stopped wearing her wedding ring — we weren’t officially separated, but it was heading that way. She was pregnant, and we weren’t spending much time together. I went into the house when she wasn’t home and got her wedding ring out of the bedroom. I drove to a dealer’s house and told him he could keep the ring as collateral until I got my hands on some money.

He was fine with that, and I left the ring and got what I needed. I had been reduced to this: pawning my wife’s wedding ring for drugs.

The next day, when Katie discovered the ring missing, she was livid. She not only let me have it, but she tracked down the dealer’s number and arranged to meet with him in a parking lot to get the ring back.

“I understand you have my wedding ring,” she said on the phone.

After the guy said something smart, Katie said, “You’re going to give it back. You have no right to that.”

The dealer agreed, providing he got some money in return, and my pregnant wife drove to a parking lot, met with this character, and made the exchange. She had never been so scared in her life, but no matter what she thought about me at the time, she wasn’t about to let my lifestyle destroy all the dignity in our life.

Sierra Hamilton was born on August 22, 2005.

I was there with Katie at the hospital. I had three really good days after Sierra was born.

And on the fourth day, Katie sent me out to the drugstore to pick up a prescription for her. Instead of going to the drugstore, I went to a bar.

I didn’t want to be good anymore. I couldn’t handle the pressure or the responsibility or the feeling of being fenced in by a family and a life I wasn’t sure I deserved.

I drank, I used. I took off on a wild ride that would have killed most people.

I became impossible to live with. I would leave to get a can of dip and not come back for three days. Katie would call and call and get the same answer: “This is Josh, leave a message.” How many times did she call me, with a newborn and a four-and-a-half-year-old to care for, hoping just to hear my voice, to know that I was still alive, only to get that recording?

Most of the time, I would set out to do what I intended to do: buy a can of dip. But then I’d see a bar or get a craving. Once that happened, nothing else mattered. I could walk into a bar, order a Crown Royal, and be done with the real world for the better part of a week. In my mind, I didn’t have anywhere to be, no job or obligations, so who really cared how I spent my days?

The pattern was strikingly similar. I would begin to drink, then I’d start to get drunk, then I’d want some coke so I could keep drinking and stay up and do whatever I felt like doing. Restaurants and bars, in my experience, are rats’ nests of drugs. I could sit at the bar, minding my own business, and within no time I could identify the people working there who would be able to get me drugs or know who might. It was like picking up the spin of a curveball in the millisecond after it leaves the pitcher’s hand.

Sometimes, Katie couldn’t take not knowing where I was. I was sitting at a bar in Cary, hanging out with a group of people, when Katie walked in and strolled right up to the bar.

I noticed her feet — she wasn’t wearing shoes. She was so frustrated with calling me and not getting an answer that she got in the car and went searching. She didn’t bother to wear shoes, probably because she had no real hope of finding her vagabond husband. So when she saw my truck in front of the restaurant, not that far from our home, she was so pissed she got out and came in to get me.

And even though she might have wanted to haul me out of there by my ear, she didn’t. Maybe she knew that was a hopeless cause.

She just never understood why I would prefer this life. I had a wife and two little girls at home, including a beautiful newborn. I had a wife who loved me despite everything. I had a support structure of my parents and in-laws and my brother and my grandma. I had a life out there, a good life, and Katie couldn’t understand why I turned my back on it to live a life of random encounters with strangers who shared nothing more than a desire to get high.

I didn’t understand it, either. I just did it. I never gave much thought to it. It controlled my life. Everything I did seemed to revolve around it — wanting it, getting it, using it, wanting it all over again. It’s a cliché to call it a vicious circle, but that’s exactly what it is. The drug’s greatest power is to make you want more. As soon as you get it, you start thinking about getting more. It’s the hamster wheel of drug abuse: You keep running, you get nowhere.

I stopped claiming I was going to clean up. I stopped pretending, I guess, and I stopped saying things because I thought people would get off my back if I could convince them I was willing to try one more time.

One day I was sitting alone in our house in Fuquay-Varina, just sitting in the front room watching television, when I heard something out front. When I looked out through the living-room window I saw a SWAT team assembling in the street. They were all suited up in their riot gear, and they were preparing for an assault on my house.

I panicked. I had an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce) of cocaine in the house, and I was sure they were preparing to bust my door down to come and get it. I ran to where I had it stashed and proceeded to sit down and inhale it. All of it. In a matter of seconds.

This was enough coke to kill some people. It was insanity, a death wish, like pulling out my heart and smacking it with a two-by-four.

Most people, even hard-core users, would have flushed the stuff down the toilet and been done with it. Not me. I couldn’t waste it, so I used it.

My heart starting pounding in my chest, faster and faster, till I could see it bouncing through my shirt.

The doorbell rang. It was somebody selling something.

It’s painful to recall these memories. I’m not proud of any of them, but I’m confident someone can learn from them. I’m confident there’s a higher purpose, that everything happened so I can be here now, sharing my story. I need to turn this pain to joy.

I made several trips to the emergency room. Sometimes I took myself, sometimes other people took me there and dropped me off. If I hadn’t been so young and strong, I doubt I would have made it. I stressed my heart so many times I don’t know what lies ahead, but I try not to think about that.

The mornings were the worst. I would wake up, or still be awake, after a night of heavy using. I would feel my heart beating in my chest and swear it wasn’t working right. It was too fast, or irregular, or pounding so hard it might spring through my rib cage. I would fixate on it, feeling it and watching it and believing I could hear it.

Every time, I was sure I was going to die. I was completely sure, no questions asked, so I would drive in a state of panic to the hospital and walk into the emergency room.

I never consciously tried to kill myself, but there were many times when I ingested enough cocaine to accidentally overdose. It’s only by the grace of God and my big strong body that I didn’t end up dead.

These trips to the emergency room all happened before Katie and I got married, and each time my parents were forced to come to the hospital. Worn down by the constant worry, they were left to hope that I would reach bottom and be forced to get clean. They had lost faith in the treatment centers and scare tactics and tough love that had failed over and over.

I very nearly overdosed and found myself in the ER during one period of binge usage. My mom came into the room and stood next to the bed. She had long since lost her patience for my behavior, and my shame was clear. I pretended not to care what anybody said or thought, but I was in anguish. I could tell by the look on her face how bad I must have looked, and how badly it hurt her to sit there and look at me. There were tears in her eyes. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t promise anything. I didn’t know where to start.

She sat there for quite some time in a thick silence. I had nothing to say, and an apology seemed inadequate at this stage of my deterioration.