Beyond Belief (18 page)

“You don’t look too good, Josh. How about you come in and get you something to eat?”

Once I got into the house, Granny suggested I take a shower while she cooked me some eggs. There was no doubt I needed to clean up. When I got out, she had a plate of eggs waiting for me. She was in the spare bedroom fixing up the bed.

Shame began to creep into my thoughts. What was I doing? What was I putting her through? But I was desperate, too, and the desperation overrode the shame. I needed to be somewhere, and this was the last refuge. I sat down at the small table in Granny’s kitchen and silently ate the eggs while Granny watched.

I was unsteady and unsure of myself. Even the smallest actions were a chore. When I finished eating, Granny told me to come to bed. She led me to the bedroom and stood beside the bed, pulling down the bedcovers. Like a child following orders, I lay down. Granny pulled the covers up to my chin and leaned over. She kissed me on the forehead without saying a word.

I hadn’t been in a bed for days, maybe a week. Granny turned out the light and closed the door. She walked across the TV room to her bedroom, where she dropped onto the bed and began crying, softly at first, before deep sobs overtook her. She lay awake with her tears until exhaustion carried her off to sleep.

The next morning, Granny went to work. She woke me up at ten-thirty and put me in front of another large plate of eggs. “You’re going to eat, Josh,” she said. “You’ve got to gain your strength back.”

My idea — to use Granny’s house as a temporary shelter on my way back to using — wasn’t her idea. If I was going to show up and ask for help, she was going to give it. She sat down next to me at the kitchen table and told me she wasn’t going to let me sleep all day because I needed to get up and get food in me if I was going to start feeling better.

My brother Jason and his family lived in our old family home next door to Granny, so it didn’t take long for everyone to learn that I had shown up on Granny’s doorstep, and that she had opened her door to me and taken me in. The reaction was immediate. Everyone in the family told her she was making a mistake, that I should be left to my own devices if I insisted on living the life of an addict.

Granny disagreed. She is a headstrong southern lady, and all the warnings — that she was enabling me, that I needed to hit bottom — gave her more reason to dig in her heels and prove to everybody that she knew better. She could cure me, she thought, if she had enough time to make it work.

My momma told her, “You don’t know who he’s been hanging out with. You don’t know who he owes money to, and if they show up at your door looking for him you could get hurt, too.”

And Granny, seeming bigger than her small stature — she’s not much over five feet tall — stood over me and said, “You can get better, Josh. You can get all the way better and get back to playing ball.”

My sense of self-worth was so small it was nearly nonexistent. I didn’t want to hear any encouragement, and I especially didn’t want to hear anything about baseball. I was so deep into a hole of self-hatred that even a mention of my past life made my insides recoil. The thought of playing baseball was about as real as the thought of me becoming president of the United States, or pope. I listened politely to Granny, though, because I could lash out against my parents and Katie and any other authority figure, but I couldn’t lash out at Granny. I had retained at least that much of my humanity.

I became Granny’s cause. She lived alone and filled her days with errands and television shows and conversations with family. Now, she had more than that. She had her wayward grandson in her home, and she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass without a serious effort to make it work.

The Granny plan called for me to get back on a regular schedule. She set out the rules: I couldn’t go more than twelve hours without something to eat and drink; I would not be able to sleep past ten-thirty in the morning; I would go to bed at a decent hour.

Right from the start, this became an unusual partnership. She was the last refuge, and I was the refugee. When every other door closed, hers remained open. She began filling my head with positive thoughts. She talked about our family and pointed out the photos of me in my Hamilton Machine baseball uniform, curly blond hair everywhere. She talked about getting healthy, and yes, she continued to talk about baseball.

She didn’t lecture me, and that’s a big reason why I was there. She didn’t scream at me for the decisions I had made that put me in this position. I felt comfortable and safe for the first time in a long time. I felt like I could start being myself again.

And after three days of eating and resting under Granny’s roof, in the early evening of October 3, I went out and bought more crack. The addiction proved more powerful than the shame or the regret or the unconditional love of my grandma. I scrounged up some money, drove out to the trailer, and bought as much as I could.

Perhaps as a sign of my shame, or a weird pull of responsibility, I had no interest in hanging out and using at the trailer. I stopped and got a rosebud and a box of Chore Boy and drove back to Granny’s house. I retreated to the back bedroom, which is separated from my grandma’s bedroom by the TV room. I closed the door and, under my grandmother’s roof, proceeded to get high. The rush of adrenaline filled every pore, and I was captive once again.

Within minutes of lighting up, I heard Granny outside the door.

“Josh, I smell something funny. What are you doing in there?”

Panic. It was a warm night, and my one-track mind had failed to notice the air conditioner was running. My single-minded obsession had also kept me from realizing I needed to open the bedroom window and blow the smoke through the screen.

“Nothing, Granny,” I said in a tone that couldn’t have been very convincing.

“Well, I smell something.”

I hid the stuff and opened the door. There, about three feet from me, was Granny, standing in a blue haze of crack smoke. My heart sank. The acrid smoke blew through the vents and circulated throughout the house. Granny was watching television as the smoke started drifting under the bedroom door.

She knew. Of course she knew. But she didn’t say anything more. She just looked at me with a forlorn look of hurt and disappointment — it was a look I had seen on so many faces for so many years — and went back to her television.

I felt terrible, but what did I do? I closed the door, opened the window, and took another hit.

It’s difficult to explain the feeling of addiction. I can’t adequately express how the desire for the next fix swarms over you and sweeps away any other desire or thought. Sitting in the den with my grandma, watching television while she encouraged me to get my life together and build my body back up to strength, I knew I had to get clean. I knew I
needed
to get clean. This knowledge was the easy part. When I thought about acting on it, though, I felt trapped and hopeless.

On October 5, I repeated the events of two days previous. I went back to the trailer, got some more crack, and returned to the back bedroom. This time I opened the window before I started and blew the smoke through the screen. I sat there by myself, the world a distant rumor, and retreated into my own altered state. I got high and stayed high, through the afternoon, into the night and straight on through morning.

Granny went about her business without bothering me. She let her rules slide. I went past twelve hours without food, past sixteen, past twenty. I was holed up for hours, doing nothing and feeling nothing. I couldn’t deal with my problems, so I shut them out. In some distant part of my brain, I thought I could make those problems go away by smoking crack out of a rosebud vase packed with Chore Boy.

When I finally emerged from the room, at some time during the morning of October 6, Granny was waiting for me in the hallway. I wanted to walk past, but she wouldn’t budge. My eyes met hers. I could see the tears building in her eyes as she stood there staring at the human wreckage before her. This time, though, there was something different. Along with the sadness in her eyes there was something else: anger, bordering on rage. She was determined to make this work, and I had crossed her. I had betrayed her loyalty. Worst of all, I was making everybody’s prediction come true. I was proving that I couldn’t be trusted, and proving that opening her door had been a mistake.

“I can’t take this anymore, Josh,” she said. “I can’t sit here and watch you kill yourself, and I can’t sit here and watch you hurt all the people who love you. We’re all dying inside because of what you’re doing to yourself.”

Her voice was firm but not loud. She stood, almost coiled, the words measured and direct. I was defenseless, speechless. She had always been the safety net, the one person who wouldn’t judge or preach. Now I could see the stark reality before me: I was in danger of losing her. Without her, I had nothing. Without this partnership, I was on the street, living for the next hit. Through the lingering haze in my brain, I could feel the buzz of shame coursing through my veins. I looked at the floor, hoping to disappear.

“You are such a good boy,” she said. “There is so much good you could do with your life, and instead you’re wasting it. I will not let it happen under my roof. If you’re going to continue to do this, I’m kicking you out. It’s your choice.”

My eyes met hers. She gave me one last look with that mixture of sorrow and anger before walking away. I didn’t make any promises or apologies. I didn’t say anything at all, but I walked back to the room and thought about what my life had become. Who was I? I had a beautiful two-month-old daughter and a wife who had stayed with me beyond the point of reason, and I essentially gave them up to chase a high. I thought about baseball, about how good I was and how much I enjoyed the game and how much talent I had wasted.

And then I thought about my daddy, who once told me, “You know the biggest sin of this whole deal? It’s you depriving the people of watching you play ball.”

I had been given so much, and yet I found my life reduced to this — a series of cheap highs and a borrowed room in my grandmother’s house.

This wasn’t life. This wasn’t living. I had lost the joy that came with being an honest man. I had lost the peace that came with having no secrets and nothing to hide. I missed the joy that came with hitting a ball and running hard, or tracking down a liner in the gap, or throwing a laser beam from center field to the plate only to see the runner from third think better of it and scurry back to the base like a mouse returning to its hole.

I missed life.

This wasn’t the first time I had come to these realizations, but it was the first time some basic truths hit home. It was the first time I understood — or chose to understand — how directly and personally I was hurting the people I loved, and who loved me. For whatever reason, my grandma’s words, along with the hurt in her voice and the sorrow in her eyes, were embedded in my mind as I sat in that room.

And in that room I made a decision. I made the decision to surrender. My problems were too big for me, and I concluded I could no longer kid myself into believing I could solve them by myself. I could no longer fool myself into believing I’d get around to straightening up after just one more high. I could no longer fight alone.

In the past, my response to helplessness would have been to use. Using was the all-purpose reaction, good for any occasion, suitable for any emotion. Sad? Use. Happy? Use. Angry? Use. Afraid? Use.

The problems changed, but the response never did.

This time, I began to pray. I dropped my 180-pound body to its knees and asked for help. Tears filled my eyes as I pleaded for mercy. I knew God wasn’t going to come down and smooth out the world for me, but I knew I needed Him if I was to have any chance of getting through this.

I had tried the get-me-out-of-this- foxhole prayers too many times, and I knew they weren’t what God wanted to hear. He didn’t want that kind of relationship. This time, I wasn’t trying to make a deal with God. I was admitting my weakness and telling Him I was ready to live for Him and what is right. I wanted Him to do with me what He would, whether that meant recovery or death. I would go wherever He led me, whether to redemption or to an early grave. Either one would provide relief from this lingering hell. I was at His mercy.

And as I sat there on that bed, feeling my granny’s pain — no, my whole family’s pain — through the walls of her house, I realized this wasn’t the reason I was put on this earth. After so many years of bringing joy to people through my abilities on the baseball field, after so many years of being someone who could bring a smile to the face of a young kid at a ballpark or a young man with Down syndrome, I was now just a conveyor of pain and disappointment.

When my daddy said my biggest sin was depriving people of my ability, he was telling me that my talent wasn’t strictly
my
talent. It belonged, by extension, to all the people who made a special trip to a ballpark in Florida or West Virginia or New York to watch some kid from North Carolina hit or field or throw.

There was a Bible in the room, and I picked it up and absent mindedly started thumbing through the pages. I read a few verses and moved on. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or, really, that I was looking for anything at all, but I ran across a verse — James 4:7 — that caught my attention.

Humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

I read that over and over, committing it to memory. I vowed to change, to make every move from here on a positive one. I battled vicious physical cravings — the devil coming at me hard — and as soon as I felt one coming on I would repeat the verse.

With God and Granny by my side, I white-knuckled my way through the first week. The cravings were impossible to ignore. My hands got clammy and cold, and then my palms would start sweating.
Humble yourself before God
. . . Smells got to me. I would pass a burger place while driving with the window down and it would remind me of the smell of crack.
Humble yourself before God
. . . Everything became a reminder, whether it was a smell or a sight or something that took place entirely in my head.
Humble yourself before God
. . . A restaurant reminded me of drinking, or scoring drugs from someone on the staff.