The judge said he wasn’t basing his sentence on my celebrity or what I’d done on the field.
“It doesn’t matter if you were Dwight Gooden, former pitcher, or Dwight Gooden, maintenance guy, or Dwight Gooden, manager of the Target store,” he said. He didn’t want me to be “another one of these people you look up under Wikipedia online and see, ‘Dwight Gooden, geez, pitched a no-hitter,’ did this and that, and look where he ended up.”
Judge Venezia was like no judge I’d ever seen before. At times, I had a little trouble following along with him. But I could tell he was a caring person. And definitely a baseball fan. Finally, he got to the legal business or, as he called it, “the legal mumbo-jumbo.” This was the part the lawyers were waiting for. Me too.
“Per the plea agreement,” he announced, going through the required legalese, “I’ll sentence you as a third-degree offender. And I’ve decided, as I indicated before, and I read the criteria in the record, that Mr. Gooden meets the criteria under 12 2C:35–14,” the New Jersey criminal statute that allows special probation for certain drug defendants, “and sentence him under that statute to a five years’ special probation term based upon his drug dependency and his meeting the nine criteria listed under that statute. In addition, Mr. Gooden must also continue to attend and successfully complete an outpatient drug-and-alcohol rehab program. But it’s got to be for at least twelve months’ duration. I don’t want any of this three-or-four-month stuff. It’s got to be for at least twelve months’ duration. It has to be. You need that.”
He suspended my driver’s license for seven months, reminding me that if I get caught driving on the suspended list, “you’ve got mucho problems, you understand?” He ordered regular drug-and-alcohol testing and fined me $1,500.
His special probation had a lot of special conditions. But it sure beat prison, I knew that much.
“Five years is a long time,” Judge Venezia warned me.
“Yes, sir.”
“So I told you,” he said, pounding the baseball theme one last time, “I already made the trip to the mound. I’ll keep you in. But there’s no more trips to the mound. Because that next one, I take the ball. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then the judge reached beneath his bench. I could see he was holding something in his hand. It was a baseball. Gently, he tossed the ball to me.
“Here,” he said.
I have to admit, even after all I’d heard the past hour, I was a little startled by that. But I reached up my hand, and I caught the ball. Firmly and instinctively. It would have definitely been embarrassing if I’d bobbled it or missed. Only then did I notice something was written on the ball.
It was a note from the judge.
GOOD LUCK, the note said. FINISH THE GAME.
26
Ready Steady
AS THE MONTHS ROLLED ON, I stayed with the Evergreen program at Bergen Regional Medical Center, just as Judge Venezia had ordered me to. But I wasn’t going only for him. I was also going for me. The group meetings and the counseling sessions kept me focused on my recovery and kept me connected to other brave addicts who’d also decided they’d had enough.
Celebrating our triumphs. Facing our disappointments. Sharing our strategies for living clean and sober lives. On this road, it was important for all of us never to feel alone.
Even I was starting to believe I could do this.
The long-term goal of recovery, as Bob Forrest kept reminding me, isn’t to live forever inside a treatment bubble. The goal is to develop the tools to allow a former user to live successfully in the world. It’s a delicate balance: Move too slowly, and you aren’t quite living. Move too quickly, and you’re risking the progress you’ve already made.
Gradually, with Dr. Sharp’s approval, I shifted from three days a week at Evergreen to two. He said I was showing impressive commitment and making solid progress. I had the reinforcement of NA and AA. I was going to three, four, five, or more meetings a week. I was calling Gerry Cooney, my sponsor, every day to check in.
One day, I texted Gerry instead of calling him, saying everything was fine.
“You didn’t call me,” he said when we spoke on the phone the next morning. He didn’t sound mad. He just said it like it was a fact.
“I texted you,” I told him.
“No,” he said. “I need to hear from you.”
“What do you mean? I texted you.”
“No,” he said again. “I want to hear your voice. None of this texting BS. We talk.”
Gerry’s older than I am by eight years. But he hasn’t lost his boxer’s swagger. I wasn’t about to argue with him. Plus, what he was saying made sense to me. He knew how much could be hidden behind a text message. So did I. Talking’s just better. My mom could always read me the same way. She’d say: “Call me.” After two minutes on the phone, she knew if I was worrying about something or if I felt stressed.
From the minute I came off Celebrity Rehab, my attitude was: push myself hard every day, but make sure my support systems were solid and in place. I was blessed to have lots of backup, and I knew I had to use it. Too often in the past, like a lot of addicts not ready to change, I let myself get isolated. Not this time.
Ron and I spoke constantly. I surrounded myself with my kids and other relatives. I made extra efforts to be available to the fans. I stayed in regular touch with other positive friends from the recovery and baseball worlds. I had people to watch my back, and I told them I wanted them to. The more people I saw, the more I put myself out there, the more people I had helping me. That was a tool for me, knowing any one of them could point at me and say, “Hey, you’re messing up again. I thought you were getting clean.”
I had finally reached a point where I could be open about who I was and what I was struggling with. I could say, “This is how I feel” or “This is what I did” and I know my friends weren’t going to say, “Oh my God, you’re a mess. You’re freaking me out. I can’t believe you did that.”
I’d been hiding stuff so long, I had no idea how good it would feel to be honest with people and to hear them say: “You’re all right.” Or at least, “We know you’re working on yourself. We’re pulling for you.”
I’m not saying this was easy. It most definitely was not.
Even as I got steadier in my recovery, the temptations were always out there. One night I was sitting in my basement at home in New Jersey watching TV. An ad for Rémy Martin cognac came on. I hadn’t had a Rémy since the late ’80s. I remembered it was one of the drinks that came out in the locker room at Shea Stadium when we won the World Series that triumphant and terrible night. I remembered Rémy as a dark liquor. But this commercial had what looked like clear Rémy Martin in a clear bottle.
I saw the commercial. I thought, “Oh, it’s clear now. I’ve never tried that.”
I didn’t go right out and buy a bottle. For the next twenty minutes, the thought bounced around in my head: “I wonder what that tastes like.”
I knew I shouldn’t be thinking like that. I knew that eventually, thoughts like that would come back to bite me. Sitting in my basement, watching TV, preoccupied with thoughts of alcohol, I knew I should call Gerry or someone else I could talk to.
I didn’t.
I told myself, “Oh, that’s not necessary.”
Then, a couple of days later, I was driving through my town past a liquor store that used to deliver to my house. As I drove by the store, I noticed a blue-and-white Bud Light sign glowing in the window. I’d probably seen that sign five hundred times, but this was the first I’d noticed it. “You could get a Bud Light,” I thought. “That would be nice. Just drink one Bud Light. Go straight home and stay home. You’ll be fine.”
Thankfully, I came to my senses quickly.
“Wait a second,” I thought. “I can’t be thinking like that. No, I can’t have a Bud Light! It would never stop with one.” I felt myself getting stronger, more determined. And I shook the idea out of my head.
/> Later that night, I was talking with a friend of mine from AA. I was telling him about the Bud Light sign.
“Something probably triggered that Bud Light craving,” he said. “It doesn’t just happen. Something got you thinking like that.”
Up until that moment, I hadn’t made the connection. But as we spoke, it suddenly occurred to me. “Yeah, I know exactly what it was. It was a commercial I saw on TV.”
I described the commercial to him. “It was for Rémy Martin but it came back to Bud Light,” I said. Because I didn’t recognize the slippery slope I was on, I didn’t reach out for support. Because I didn’t, a couple of days later I was thinking about Bud Light. Probably if I’d talked about the Rémy Martin ad then, the Bud Light thought would never have come into my head.
I was learning another important lesson of recovery: the person I was most in danger of hiding stuff from was me.
All that time, Bob kept calling from California. That prosecutor in New Jersey might not have believed my TV treatment was legitimate. But Bob was as committed to my long-term recovery as any counselor I’d ever had. He checked in with me every week or so. He really did keep me connected to the boost I’d gotten in Pasadena. He was a great barometer for me. Like Gerry and my mom, he could tell in my voice when I felt concerned or something was nagging at me. The man is amazing. I would never even think of lying to Bob. He would know immediately.
Five months after we taped the show, five months into my time at the Evergreen, Bob came to visit me in New Jersey. I was really thrilled to see him, but it was more than just a social call.
“What’s happening, my man?” I said, greeting him like a long-lost war buddy. He responded just as warmly to me.
He seemed encouraged by how I was doing, but I could also hear some skepticism in his voice. Did he doubt my words of confidence? I guess he did. I don’t know if he was reacting to me personally so much as to my stage of recovery. Probably both. He spoke like a man who’d been disappointed before, disappointed by himself and disappointed by others.
Bob spoke very seriously to me. “The things I’ve been worried about,” he said, “you’ve been worried about too. What happens at about the six-month point. The seven-month point. The eight-month point. ’Cause you’ve been there four times that I know of. Everybody’s gonna think you’re doing fine, and you could go buy an eight ball. What do you do then? I’d like to see that look in your eye like, ‘Fuck coke.’”
Was he reading my mind? More likely, he had stood where I was standing now.
“I’m right there with you,” I told him. “When the outpatient’s over, I know that’s the test.”
I told Bob that working with him and Dr. Drew and the rest of their crew had given me an ideal starting gate. They made me look at myself with a new and brutal honesty. I started fresh relationships with my kids. I’d been given some direction and a firm initial shove. The people at Evergreen and at AA and NA were helping to reinforce that. But still, none of it was erasing my difficult and frustrating past.
“It still comes up,” I said of the guilt I’d felt for so long. I couldn’t deny it. How my use had affected every relationship in my life. With other players. With my coaches and managers. With my parents, my wives, and, most important, my kids.
“You’re always gonna feel guilty,” Bob said. “I still feel guilty.” He’d been clean, I knew, for more than ten years. “But don’t, don’t give up. And don’t be deterred, and don’t let it sway you and take you down again. I want you to imagine something. You say, ‘Fuck it’ at the eight-month point, and you go back to drugs, and you die, and the obituary is in the New York Times, and your mama has to go to the church with her lady friends. Think about that. I’m serious.”
Oh, man.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I let that image sink in. “My mom is a big motivator for me right now. I mean, I put her through so much. I can remember the look she had when I was getting sentenced to go to prison. I looked back at my mom, and I was in this orange jumpsuit. I remember that look. She seemed so devastated. The one thing I promised myself is that my mom wouldn’t see me get in trouble for drugs and alcohol as long as she is living. That’s not gonna happen. And that’s one of my big motivations from here on out.
“But not the only one,” I added.
The truth was, I had many reasons to stay clean. There were my kids. They’d put up with so much already. I had to stay clean for them. And for the fans. I’d thrilled them, and then I’d disappointed them. They did not deserve to be disappointed again. I had to stay clean for my friends, on and off the baseball field, in and out of treatment. They’d believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. I definitely had to stay clean for them.
And for me. That was probably the biggest reason I had to stay clean. Me. Always and every day, I had to stay clean for me. I had so much to be grateful for. I still had so much to live for. I still had so much to give.
“That’s right,” Bob said, after I got done going through that whole long list for him. “You have some pretty good reasons to beat this thing for good.”
After thirteen months at Evergreen, I shifted to their aftercare program, Bergen RENEW. The meetings were smaller, and most of the clients had been clean a while. The one-on-one counseling sessions continued, though over time we spoke less about drugs and alcohol and more about the daily issues of life. But the basic approach to staying clean was pretty much the same: Be honest with myself and others. Take responsibility for the decisions I make. Surround myself with positive people who can support my lifelong recovery. For me, the aftercare was the latest tool to support my recovery, along with the AA and NA meetings I continued to attend. I just had to keep using them. The challenges might be difficult. But this time I knew I never had to face them alone.
In one of my meetings not long ago, someone had a great way of making that point. “It’s almost like having cancer. You might go in for major surgery at the beginning. That’s what residential treatment was. But you have to follow that up with chemo. These meetings and staying in contact with each other, that’s basically our chemo. That’s what will give us the strength to fight addiction. That’s what will keep us healthy and clean.”
I think he got that right.
I’ll be at this forever, one well-focused, hard-working, mutually supportive day at a time. But God, I was liking the way it felt.
27
Why Now?
SO WHAT WAS DIFFERENT this time? What did Celebrity Rehab have that Smithers, Betty Ford, and the other programs did not? I have thought a lot about that over the past two years.
First of all, there was nothing wrong with those other places. All of them had caring counselors and thoughtful treatment plans. But a couple of things did happen in Pasadena that touched me deeply. I had that reunion with Dwight Junior, which was so powerful for both of us. Dr. Drew and Bob had also had that insight about the way I’d been hiding from pain throughout my life—in bathrooms, no less. That helped me see how my early trauma and my later drugs might be connected. I have no secrets anymore.
Still, something else was different this time, something beyond what was said in all those meetings and discussion groups. That something else was me. When I went out to California for that drug-treatment reality show, I was ready to change my life. And I hadn’t been before.
I was older. I was more mature. I had grown totally exhausted by the turmoil I was living in and all the problems I was causing for people around me. I was sick of disappointing everyone and sick of disappointing myself. I’d been through treatment. I’d been to prison. I’d been to the Comfort Inn. And I wasn’t ready for the cemetery. I knew if I didn’t get it right this time, that was where I was heading next. Celebrity Rehab might have sparked my recovery. But the power to make that change—and the timing of it—came from deep inside of me.
After all that I’d been through, I still had the values my parents had taught me, values that lie at the core of who I am. Do your best. Shoot for
greatness. Don’t make excuses. Respect yourself. Treat others decently along the way. Even in my darkest hours, I still had Dan’s and Ella’s voices bouncing around in my head. I was still their son. After all this time, after so much disappointment, I still wanted them to be proud of me. My dad was dead. My mom was pushing eighty. I was slouching into middle age. But I was still their son.
When the change finally came, it wasn’t a famous baseball player who was changing. It was just a man. It wasn’t Doc. It was Dwight. This was my life, and I’d finally decided to save it.
On one visit home, a cousin of mine, Roy White, came over to my mother’s house. Roy was in his late fifties. “Cousin,” he said to me. “It’s good to see you doin’ well. I know what you been through.”
Roy had come out of prison after four years. I was glad to see him too. “People in the family,” he told me, “they were worried about you, worrying since you first started using drugs. But you know what? I told them, ‘When he’s ready to come in, he’ll come in.’ And you did.”
Yes, I did. I was ready, and I came back in. I think Roy got that right. It took a while. But I’m in. And I make a solemn promise to those who have loved me, to those who have stood beside me, to those who have cheered me on.
My promise is I will try.
I will try with the deepest fiber of my being. I will try with everything I have. I will try today and try tomorrow and try until the end. I will never give up again.
I hope I never stumble again. But if I do, I promise to pull myself back up again and try some more.
Everywhere I go now, people say how good I look. They see me smiling, and they remember the old Dwight, the old Doc. It’s amazing how many people—in their own lives or in the lives of their relatives and friends—have been through some battle with addiction. People come up to me constantly and say, “I’m in recovery” or “I know Bill W.,” or “Hey, how’s it going? We’ve been pulling for you.” People are so kind like that. It helps to lock me in. It’s like their faith in me is returning.
Doc: A Memoir Page 26