Beyond Belief (16 page)

In a voice barely above a whisper, she said something I couldn’t quite hear.

“What was that, Momma?” I asked.

Just a little bit louder, with her head shaking and her voice breaking, she said, “God must love ballplayers.”

I didn’t understand. I hadn’t played baseball for more than two years, and I wasn’t even sure I was a baseball player anymore. Normally, I ignored or shrugged off everything someone said to me, especially if I thought it was just more browbeating intending to make me stop using drugs.

But this confused me, and made me curious. Why was she bringing up baseball?

“What are you talking about, Momma?”

“It’s simple, Josh,” she said. “If God didn’t love ballplayers, you’d have been dead a long time ago.”

Katie was on her own. She didn’t know what happened to me, or whether this was temporary or permanent. This was supposed to be the happiest moment of our lives — bringing our beautiful newborn home to our house — and here was Katie, all by herself wondering where the hell I was and what I was doing. She lived in a world where she could send her husband to the drugstore for a prescription and end up with neither the medicine nor a husband.

I missed Katie, I missed Julia, and I missed Sierra. It didn’t matter, though, because the tidal pull of drugs was so much stronger than any guilt or responsibility I might have felt toward them.

Justifiably, Katie wondered whether I would ever make it home again.

One night about three weeks after Sierra was born, I befriended a guy and his girlfriend at a bar. I was craving some coke so I could keep drinking, and I identified them as likely suspects.

When I asked them if they knew where I could get some, they did me one better: They said they knew where we could score some crack.

By this time, I wasn’t particular about my drug use. I couldn’t stomach downers — I never tried heroin, marijuana made me vomit — but if it was a stimulant, I was good with it. These two were telling me my life would never be the same after crack, the high was so much better than powder — okay, I said, I’m up for it. They didn’t need the hard sell.

We drove away from town, down a narrow, dark, two-lane road that ribbons its way into the country past small ranches and ragged trailer parks. We made a left into the entrance of one of those dilapidated trailer parks.

Four years before, I would have punched the gas pedal to get past a place like this as soon as possible. Now I was getting out of the car and walking up a wobbly wooden staircase to get inside. We were met by three black men. I would guess they were in their mid-thirties, but it’s tough to determine the age of a crack addict. They were abnormally thin and their skin was bad, which made them look older. Dental hygiene was not an obsession. The trailer was dirty and hot, and the guys — they were introduced to me as Murd, Leon, and Lester — struck me as kind of scary.

No matter. They had something we wanted. We paid for the stuff and sat down to get started. I didn’t know much about crack, but I learned. You can either poke a hole in a Coke can and smoke it through that, or you can stop at a convenience store and purchase one of those fake roses in the plastic bud vase they keep near the register. These are not intended for guys to impress their girls; they’re cheap and easy crack pipes.

For the price of a ninety-nine-cent rosebud and a box of Chore Boy scouring pads, you can be in business. Pop off the removable cap at the bottom of the rosebud, pack it with Chore Boy, and burn it till all that’s left of the Chore Boy is the copper wire.

The copper wire serves to hold the rock in place and as a filter to allow the smoke to go through. I watched as they went through this process, then took the pipe and — once again — changed my life.

From the moment the drug hit my brain I was hit with a rush of euphoria that could never be replicated.

It was a feeling I’d want, again and again.

I proved it over the next six weeks, when I burned through about $100,000 on drugs. Crack was my new best friend.

Money accelerated from a concern to an obsession. Katie was trying to keep our household going with no income and an erratic and uncontrollable outflow from my drug use. As if she didn’t have enough on her mind, she had a new household task: keep me away from the rest of our money.

Something changed inside Katie when she found I was using crack. Cocaine seemed controllable, treatable, maybe even understandable. But crack? Crack was lowlife, dead end. You did crack when you didn’t care anymore. The crackhead occupied society’s basement. You did crack as a sign to the world that you’d given up.

I dove in headfirst. I smoked crack like it could save the world. From the moment the high wore off, I was searching for it again. The low was indescribable. I woke up in the cab of my pickup, or in places I didn’t recognize with people I didn’t know, and I’d pray to the Lord to take me away from the nightmare my life had become.

I prayed to be spared another day of the guilt and depression and addiction. I prayed I would spare the people I loved further disappointment. I prayed to be taken away.

My descent to the bottom accelerated in a manner that shocked and frightened even the people who had watched me self-destruct for the previous three years.

And still I used. I was caught in a horrible downward spiral, and I couldn’t pull out. The brief euphoria can’t be replicated, but the hideousness of the drug makes you try and try till you either die or somehow give it up.

I didn’t care about anything else. I stopped eating, and the weight dropped off me like I was throwing it out the window of my pickup. I could lose fifteen pounds a week, just by living for crack. There were days I forgot to eat.

My relationship with Katie disintegrated, and yet one day she looked me in the eye and said, “God spoke to my soul and told me someday you’re going to be back playing baseball. Josh, there’s a bigger plan for you. When you come back, it’s going to be about more than baseball.”

Katie was not a baseball person. She was not with me because of baseball. The game was never more than a shadow in our relationship.

I couldn’t look her in the eye. There was something about the way she was talking, something about the intensity of her words and manner, that made me look away.

“Yeah, yeah, quit talking to me,” I said.

“Okay, but just remember what I said.”

Here’s a funny story: After my freshman year in high school, I played on an American Legion summer baseball team, and one week we took a trip to Johnson County, in the heart of the North Carolina tobacco country.

It was midsummer, and the weather was unbearable. It was something like ninety-eight degrees with a 98 percent humidity. The tobacco fields began just a few feet beyond the outfield fence and kept going as far as you could see. Behind the left-field fence there was a tobacco processing plant.

I played right field, and the smell coming off the tobacco plants started to make me feel queasy about the second inning. With the heat and the humidity, the leaves gave off an odor that made me feel as if those leaves were packed in my nostrils.

In the stands, my parents looked out at me and wondered what was wrong. I was doubled over, with a pained look on my face, like I was about to throw up. I couldn’t wait for every inning to end so I could get back to the dugout and away from the smell as fast as possible.

Why is this a funny story? Because I think back to that day and wonder how I could go from being a kid who couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco leaves to a man who would sit in a trailer with a bunch of lowlife strangers and inhale crack into his lungs for a cheap high.

My money woes didn’t let up. None was coming in, and a lot was going out. My business managers, Steve Reed and Ken Gamble, still had access to my bank accounts. When one account ran dry, they could move money into another and allow me to access it through an ATM card or checks. I started to call them for money, over and over.

“Ken, can I get $300 moved over?”

“Hey Steve, I need about $200. Can you make it happen?”

It became an obsession. I would call them at their offices in California over and over. I would be driving around, waiting to get some product, and if the call went to voicemail I’d end the call and call back immediately. I repeated this as long as it took for me to get hold of one of them. I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Steve and Ken knew my problems, and they kept in touch long after I stopped being an asset to them. When I received my signing bonus, they set me up as a corporation, with my parents as partners. This turned out to be prescient, in ways nobody could have predicted at the time.

When my drug use veered out of control, Steve called my daddy and told him the time had come for him to invoke power of attorney through the corporation. There was no brake pedal in my life; it was all accelerator, all the time, and I was going to keep flooring it until there was nothing left of me or my bank account. This way, by invoking power of attorney, my parents could take control of my money and keep me from bankrupting myself.

Despite all the problems and heartbreak I had caused, I think deep down my daddy still had hopes I would get better. He couldn’t allow himself to believe otherwise, and the idea of wresting control of my finances carried a sense of finality — of surrender — that he tried hard to avoid. What Steve presented was a realistic view of where my life stood, though, and what could happen in the future. It was difficult for my daddy to absorb.

After the proposal was laid out to him, my daddy thought for a moment and said, “Boy, Steve, I don’t know if I want to do that to him.”

“I know you don’t,” Steve said. “Nobody does, but your son’s going to kill himself the way he’s headed. You need to do what you can to stop him. He’s going to end up giving every last cent to drug dealers.”

Steve convinced my daddy it was the right thing to do, and he eventually did it. I don’t think I even knew it happened, but now I’m glad it did. We were at least able to salvage something, which was important. At that stage of the game, I wouldn’t have stopped till it was all gone.

I’d do anything to get the money to get drugs. Katie came home once to find me unscrewing the television set from the wall. I was going to barter it for crack. In the same way I pawned Katie’s wedding ring for drugs, I used my New York–Penn League championship ring from 1999, my first year in pro baseball, to get crack. I gave one of the guys from the trailer the ring to hold till I got money (same old story), and this time I never did. He kept the ring, and I never pursued it. It’s out there somewhere, the only championship ring I ever won, another casualty of my addiction.

I was feral, free of rules, unconcerned with anyone else’s feelings. I wrote a check for $2,000 to Murd, assuring him the check was good and actually believing it. This was traditionally a cash business, but he agreed to take a check. I was out of options. By the time he tried to cash it, the account was closed. Katie, in an attempt to save what was left of our dwindling resources, moved the money into another account and didn’t allow me access.

I was furious. My mind was so messed up I felt this was my money and I could spend it any way I wanted. My self-absorption and selfishness didn’t leave room for me to see how it would affect other people. It was about me, and about drugs, and nothing else mattered.

I figured I could work on Katie to get some money in the account, enough to cover it. As soon as the guy found out the check bounced, he’d come after me. It wouldn’t be pretty. These were not guys you tried to screw over.

I explained, and Katie said no. I begged, and still she said no.

I tried to scare her, to tell her what might happen to me, to her, to the kids.

She stood firm.

The guy began to call. He threatened me, and gave me a deadline. Just like the movies. I had forty-eight hours.

Katie was scared, but she wouldn’t budge. She did, however, tell her father about my predicament.

Big Daddy called me and said, “Josh, give me his name and phone number, and I’ll take care of it.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you involved in this. I have the money. I just need Katie to let me have it.”

Big Daddy can be pretty forceful when he needs to be. He told me no matter what I said, he was not going to allow Katie to release that money.

I still disagreed, but I had no choice but to give in. I didn’t want anyone else in my business, but he was solving a problem for me.

Big Daddy called the guy to set up a meeting to hand over the cash.

“Will you be packing?”

“Do I need to be?” Big Daddy answered.

That was all Big Daddy needed to know. If they’re asking, the answer is yes, you need to pack.

They set up a meeting in the parking lot of a shopping mall. Both of them were packing when they got out of the car, and before Big Daddy handed the cash to Murd he said, “Let’s get something straight. I’m paying you this one time, but if you ever try to sell Josh drugs again, I’m coming after you.”

The guys laughed. Who
was
this crazy SOB? But while they laughed, Big Daddy never took his eyes off them.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ve been where you guys are. I’m a little bit crazy, and I’m not afraid to die. So you have to decide if you want to take the chance.”

They stopped laughing. The look in their eyes was a little bit different. They took the money and nodded.

“Now, I’m not kidding,” Big Daddy said. “Remember that.”

Big Daddy got into his Escalade and drove off. With the adrenaline still rushing, and the moment still inside him, he was startled by the ring of his phone. He expected it to be his wife, Janice, or maybe Katie — someone wanting to know how it went down.

He answered. It was Murd.

“Hey, you want to come to work for me?”

Katie talked to me about disappointment and loss. Her parents talked to me about disappointment and loss. Everybody talked to me about disappointment and loss.

Mostly, my parents spoke to me about disappointment and loss. They were frustrated, and they told me about how many people I had let down and how much pain I had caused.