Beyond Belief (17 page)
My daddy called me outside one day at our house in Garner. He wanted to take a walk. We walked around the pond below the house, not saying much, the shambles of my life caught in the silence.
Finally, Daddy said, “Josh, you know it hurts me to see you waste away before my eyes, don’t you?”
I nodded, steeling myself for another in a long line of lectures that I had no interest in hearing.
“You know it hurts your mother, too, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“It hurts us to see you ruin your life, and we can’t do anything about it.”
“It hurts me, too,” I said. “It hurts me more.”
This caught him off-guard. He didn’t expect this answer. I had always shrugged off whatever he had to say and then gone on and done whatever I wanted anyway. My parents took that as a sign that I didn’t care what they had to say, and that I wasn’t at all bothered by what had become of my life.
I could sense my daddy tense up. His frustration was boiling over into anger.
Through clenched teeth, he said, “If it hurts you, then why don’t you just stop it?”
I had no answer. I shrugged and looked away. No addict, in the middle of the addiction, has any hope of answering that question. He didn’t understand it, and I didn’t understand it. We had reached the addict’s impasse. He was out of solutions. I was out of answers.
But that’s the question, right?
Why don’t you just stop it?
That’s the central question asked of every addict by every person who loves him. It’s the question you would have asked, and the question I would have asked if the roles had been reversed.
If you know you’re hurting people, and you can see it, and you know what’s causing it, why don’t you just stop?
If only it were that easy.
If only.
I WAS DISINTEGRATING; there was no getting around it. My life narrowed to the pursuit and use of drugs. Everything else was secondary. I didn’t have the interest, or the time, for anything else. Make no mistake, there was no joy in this life. I was miserable — paranoid, sick, unable to think straight. I cared about nobody, especially not myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed or even smiled or felt a flutter of joy pass through me. I was living like an animal.
On a typically messed-up day in the late summer of ’05, when crack ruled my life, I was sitting at the bar in Chili’s when I met up with a group of guys who had graduated from Athens Drive High a few years before me. They weren’t my friends, and they were barely acquaintances. If I had passed these guys on the street five years before, I would have nodded in recognition without ever dreaming I’d be part of their group. And now we were sitting in a bar, hanging out like best buds. The rules had changed.
I’d been smoking on and off that day. As always, I was chasing the high to keep from facing the low. When we’d had enough of the bar, we went to a house where one of the guys lived. I drove my truck, even though I had no business being behind the wheel.
When we got there, I smoked more and drank more. One of the guys had some pills, and he told me he had something I needed to try. At this point, I had crossed every threshold, so why not?
He handed me half a Klonopin. I’d never taken this before, but of course I dropped it in my mouth without asking any questions. Klonopin is a drug in the same family as Valium and Xanax. It’s a sedative used as an antiseizure medication for panic disorders, and it’s also used as an amnesic to provide conscious sedation. It can result in blackouts and partial memory loss.
But since Klonopin works to stop rapid heartbeat and unexplained sweating, it’s something crack addicts use to offset the effects of the drug. When you become immersed in the drug culture, you learn all the tricks. I was a user rather than a student of drug use, but I learned that using one drug against another is a true measure of sickness. Of course, when you’re the one who is sick you’re not thinking that way. Or thinking much at all.
The combination of alcohol, crack, and Klonopin sent me reeling. Klonopin is a downer, and I’ve always had severe reactions to downers. My vision got blurry, and everything around me slowed. I no longer felt social. Eventually I blacked out, but I didn’t have the good fortune of passing out. I was in the fog-world of the consciously sedated.
I don’t remember anything that happened in the next five or six hours. At some point, I left the so-called party and drove my Chevy pickup to visit Katie’s parents at their house. Again, based on what I’ve been told, I was shouting and carrying on in front of the house. As I was leaving I stumbled and fell, hitting my head on an air compressor near the garage. They had visitors, so I don’t think my presence was appreciated.
Next I drove to the house in Fuquay-Varina, where Katie and the girls were sleeping. I was a frightening sight, all glassy-eyed and incoherent. She tried to get me to stop driving around, but she didn’t want to let me in because she was afraid and didn’t want the girls to see me in this condition. She went back into the house and prayed through her tears.
I left. Apparently I decided to head for the trailer park, where I could get more crack. I had a one-track mind, and I didn’t even need to be conscious to want more. Over time, users build up a resistance to crack and reach the point where they need more and more to recapture the feeling of the first high. In the vicious cycle of drug abuse, crack is the endgame. It eats you up from the inside out.
I got back into the truck and headed out for the twenty-minute drive from my house in Fuquay-Varina to the crack house. The road is a two-lane country highway, narrow with almost no shoulder, flanked by pine forests and farmlands.
It was late, after midnight, and I was consumed with the idea of getting to my guys Murd and Lester and Leon. I guess I had a few bucks in my pocket, enough to get a couple of rocks that would get me through what was left of the night.
At some unknown point along the highway, my truck ran out of gas. I got out and left it, so consumed by my mission that walking must have struck me as a sane option.
So I walked. And walked. Up and down the hilly terrain and along the extended stretches of straightaway through landscape alternating between pine forests and farmlands. Every so often a nice new McMansion sits alongside the road, not far from a trailer park or a run-down farmhouse.
This is country, which means the stars and the moon serve as street lights. Traffic is not a big concern. The cicadas and crickets were chirping, and my T-shirt was soaked in sweat on the hot night.
I don’t know how long I’d been walking when I suddenly emerged from the fog and became aware of my own existence. It was like surfacing after being underwater. I had long since lost the ability to surprise myself with my powers of self-destruction, but what I saw when the blackout lifted took me a moment to comprehend.
Between my feet I saw the double-yellow center stripe in the middle of the road. Ahead of me about one hundred yards I saw a pair of headlights, moving in my direction.
I was walking down the center of the highway, oblivious. What a sad sight I must have been: disheveled, wobbly, haggard, covered in tattoos advertising who I once was, walking miles away from my abandoned truck in a quest for more crack.
I was a shell of a human, a soulless being. I had stripped myself of self-respect and lost my ability to feel love or hope or joy or even pain. After I awoke, after I became aware that I was walking down the middle of a narrow, pitch-black, two-lane highway with headlights approaching, I didn’t change anything.
I stayed where I was, right down the middle of the road.
A car came up from behind, slowing to a crawl, inching next to me. The driver was a Mexican man in his early forties. The look on his face expressed a mixture of concern and fear, as if he wasn’t sure he should be stopping but couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.
Tentatively, he asked, “Do you need some help?”
Buddy, I thought, you don’t want to go there.
“I guess I ran out of gas,” I said. “I need a ride up the road.”
I was hot and sweating, and I’m sure I was a hell of a sight. I’m sure there was a crazed look on my face — a look you might associate with a guy who would walk for miles in the dead of night to get crack. He thought for a moment, probably assessing his chances to survive the trip, and then told me to get in. We started up the highway, winding our way through the darkness. He dropped me off in front of the trailer park. I thanked him and stumbled down the gravel road past a row of trailers that popped up like mushrooms amid the pines. My good Samaritan sped off quickly.
Murd and Leon were awake, of course — that’s one thing about crackheads, you usually don’t have to worry about waking them up late at night. They liked to see me coming, because they remembered the days when I paid for more product than I got. Those were my days of high liquidity, and those days were permanently in the past.
During the summer of ’05, I flew through $100,000 on crack and other drugs. Even the false glamour of snorting coke during a night at a club had long since passed me by. I was a freebaser, a crack addict. I knew all the tricks; I bought the rosebuds and the Chore Boys at the gas-station stores and tossed the fake roses out the truck window as soon as I hit the road. I burned the copper off the Chore Boy to create the filter that allowed me to smoke through the rosebud while the Chore Boy wire held the rock in place. I would pull that corrosive smoke into my lungs and feel a brief wave of euphoria.
And during my time with the guys in the trailer I picked up another handy skill: One night Murd got out the baking soda (one part) and the coke (two parts) and taught me how to cook cocaine into rock form.
The night of the blackout, I passed out on the dirty floor of the trailer. I had stopped caring, or maybe I stopped being able to care, and spending the night in this unsavory place with these sketchy characters was yet another example. I was rapidly losing touch with who I used to be. The athlete, the son, the husband — I had to think hard to remember who that guy was. The photos at my parents’ house of me in my various uniforms might as well have been old family photos of a deceased relative.
I prayed to God to take me away, to release me from this hellish life. I couldn’t escape on my own. Death was the only possible relief.
I woke up that morning in an empty trailer. The heat was stifling. It was so hot and humid inside that metal trailer that I felt like I had been wrapped in aluminum foil and placed in an oven. I pulled myself to my feet and went outside. I felt terrible. My truck was parked in front of the trailer. Someone went out and got my truck during the night, which wasn’t that surprising. When I started running low on available cash, I used my truck to barter for drugs. I’d let them make their runs in my truck in exchange for drugs. Hey, whatever it takes. As I climbed in that morning, I noticed the quarter-panel on the driver’s side was bashed in.
Did I do that, or did they? Either was possible. I didn’t ask, and I never found out. It just didn’t seem that important at the time.
GRANNY WAS AWAKE when my truck rumbled up her driveway at 2:15 a.m. I parked and staggered up the walk to the wooden door at the front of the screened-in porch in the house fifty yards from where I grew up. I was weak, strung out, emaciated. I was coming down from another major crack binge with Murd, Lester, Leon, and a couple of other guys I barely knew in the dirty trailer outside town. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept. My clothes hung off me, the emptiness a pathetic reminder of who I used to be. My once-strong body was reduced to 180 pounds. I was a waste.
Before I arrived at Granny’s, I left the trailer and started driving . . . where? Home? Hardly. Katie got a restraining order against me so she could sell the house in Fuquay-Varina without worrying about me showing up in God-knows-what condition. My parents didn’t want me, and who could blame them, either? There weren’t many doors that would open for me.
Drugs had destroyed my body and my mind and my spirit. I could no longer experience happiness or surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt spontaneous joy. Why was I even alive?
Why was I still here? Why was my life spared?
Was it because, as my momma suggested, God loves baseball players?
Or was it because, as Katie swore, God had bigger plans for me?
It was October 1, 2005. The Major League Baseball pennant races were in final stage, a fact that couldn’t have been further from my mind. I was no longer a baseball player; I was a crack addict, a junkie.
Granny didn’t know I was coming. She hadn’t seen me in two or three months. It was two in the morning. I had no money, no place to stay, and no plan for any of it. I was reverting to the actions of my childhood, when Granny’s house served as my haven, a refuge when I needed to feel comfortable and wanted. I wasn’t thinking straight, but somewhere inside me I knew I would be welcome at Granny’s, and that I didn’t have to worry about being judged.
I was a wreck — dirty, twitchy, barely coherent. I was so absorbed in my own world I didn’t consider the circumstances of my presence here. I didn’t think about the rudeness of showing up at the doorstep of a seventy-two-year-old woman in the middle of the night. This house afforded me the best chance of finding temporary shelter, so here I was. Here’s how my mind worked: If Granny let me in, and I knew she would, I could stay here for a day or two until I could figure out where I could find some money and get back to scoring drugs.
Granny met me at the door in her robe. She must have heard me rumbling into the driveway, or else she was already awake. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask.
She opened the door and said, simply, “Josh.”
She hid the shock she must have felt at the sight of me. There was food on my T-shirt, I was fidgety and sweating, I couldn’t stand still. My nose was congested, causing me to sniffle constantly. There was blood caked on the outside of my nostrils. I had a nasty cough.
“Hi, Granny. Do you think I can stay here for a little while?”