by Vin Baker
What could go wrong?
I’ll say this: Just because you enjoy dining out or cooking at home does not mean you should own a restaurant. It is a brutal and unforgiving business. I pumped more than $4 million of my own money into Vinnie’s before we even opened the doors, and it floundered from the get-go. I mean, we did okay for a couple of months because of the novelty effect, but that wore off quickly and soon it became just a place to dump money. Tens of thousands of dollars every month going in, and virtually nothing coming out. Since I was no longer collecting a paycheck from the NBA, panic set in. I began drinking again, and got arrested for drunk driving in June 2007. (I pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving, but that’s a subtle distinction; I was inebriated, primarily because of the amount of Xanax I had ingested.) I soon fell into all the old habits: drinking and gambling (in the form of casino visits and foolish investments) and self-pity. No more than a couple of days after I got my DUI, I totaled my Mercedes-Benz by crashing into a guardrail. I was taken to the hospital after that one and somehow managed to avoid not only a serious injury but also a criminal charge.
This time there was no safety net. My parents supported me, emotionally and spiritually, and even financially, as much as they could, but everyone else slipped away. Being broke makes you less popular. I lost contact with Shawnee and our children in 2007. In 2008 the bank foreclosed on both my restaurant and my home. I’d made more than $100 million in my career, and now I was flat busted. People hear that and find it impossible to believe: How could anyone go through that kind of money? He must have something left over. Here’s how it works. When you’re burning through money the way I was, you don’t even realize the enormity of it. I know better now: I watch every penny I earn, keep a careful budget, and live within my means. But back then? I had no clue, no restraint, no common sense. By the time I realized the scope of my financial wreckage, it was too late. See, in order to lose $100 million, you have to go screaming right past zero and into the negative column. You don’t lose $100 million; you lose $110 million . . . or more. It’s catastrophic waste.
Life unraveled with cold and callous indifference after that, with one bad day leading inexorably to the next. I cared only about dulling the pain with alcohol. I tried getting high once, smoking weed for the first time in years, and wound up right back in the emergency room, my heart clawing its way out of my chest, EMT workers signaling ahead that the patient was in trouble.
“Imminent doom,” I heard one of them say at one point. And then again: “Imminent doom.”
Terrifying as that episode was, it didn’t provoke any sort of epiphany, aside from the realization that I couldn’t smoke weed. So I kicked the weed and the Xanax, did a few more halfhearted stints in rehab, and went back to heavy drinking, primarily Bacardi 151. Those stints in rehab were nothing more than a way to temporarily end the physical pain. I wasn’t committed to the process. I had no real desire to do the hard spiritual and emotional work required of a sober life. In fact, I wasn’t even committed to staying sober in rehab!
At one treatment center I was given Librium to help with detox. Librium is similar to Valium or Xanax and permits an alcoholic to be weaned from alcohol while minimizing painful and potentially fatal withdrawal symptoms. But Librium is also a mood-altering substance, of course, and therefore subject to potential abuse. This should not be an issue in a hospital or treatment center, but given the devious nature of many addicts, it does in fact happen.
I liked the feeling of Librium, not just because it eased my withdrawal symptoms, but because it got me a little high. Eventually I found another patient who was in for treatment of another type of addiction, but who nonetheless was receiving twice-daily doses of Librium. I befriended the guy and he agreed to give me some of his medication. This was not a simple matter, as all medication was distributed by a nurse. We were required to put the medication in our mouths and swallow it in full view of the nurse, and to then open our mouths afterward to demonstrate that it had been ingested. If you were lucky and clever, you could beat the system by holding the pill under your tongue and pretending to swallow.
“Look, bro,” my new friend said after successfully completing this task. He spit the tablet of Librium into his hand and held it out. We were sitting in a group therapy meeting, supposedly focusing on our sobriety, and instead we were making a drug deal. “Go ahead. All yours.”
He put the pill in my palm. I was disgusted. The pill was wet and beginning to dissolve. As desperate as I was for another hit of Librium, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow it. I thanked him for the effort and slipped the Librium into my pocket. After group, I flushed it down the toilet.
Good thing, too. I later found out that my friend, an intravenous drug user, had been diagnosed with hepatitis C. Had I swallowed that tab of Librium, I almost certainly would have contracted hep C, which is one of the most contagious diseases. Considering that I was an alcoholic, and that I went right back to drinking when I got out of rehab, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
I lived mostly with my parents or drinking buddies in those days. I had no relationship with my old college girlfriend and the mother of two of my children, aside from conversations between our lawyers related to the child support payments I could no longer afford to make. Shawnee was more sympathetic about my financial situation, although she, too, had quite reasonably decided that I was no longer fit to be a part of her life or the lives of our children.
Most of the time I felt utterly alone, and then out of the blue, someone would extend a hand and offer to help. Rashard Lewis, a teammate in Seattle, found out I was hurting and immediately wrote me a check for fifty thousand dollars. No questions asked, no expectation that I’d ever repay him. While the money helped pay for living expenses, much of it went to drinking and gambling. I figured out somewhere along the line that I was trying to kill myself. I wasn’t the type to buy a gun and blow my brains out, or to intentionally run my car off the road, but I was perfectly content to drink myself to death.
It hurt too much to be alive. I couldn’t connect with people. I couldn’t generate any purpose in my life.
I couldn’t see a way out of the blackness.
15
The Prodigal Son
The amazing thing is that I never spent a night in jail. Through all the episodes of drunk driving, the procuring of prescription narcotics through illicit means, the missed child support payments, the passing of bad checks (yes, I did that, too, a couple of times, quite deliberately, but no one ever pressed charges)—I somehow managed to avoid any serious interaction with law enforcement. Perhaps it was divine intervention. I’m careful about invoking the possibility of that sort of thing, for I believe that God has enough on his plate without worrying about whether I have a soft landing every time I stumble.
Yet there is no disputing my good fortune not just in surviving the mess that I made of my own life (and of the lives of so many around me), but also in the resurrection that I have been so blessed to receive. I believe God bestows on us free will and holds us accountable for our actions, but I also think he is willing to open his arms to anyone who seeks help and forgiveness, and who is willing to undertake the work to set things right.
It’s something of a cliché in the world of addiction treatment to say that asking for help is the hardest and most important step. It’s also not really true. I asked for help (or at least accepted intervention) multiple times without really meaning it, simply because it was a way to at least temporarily end the misery and to get people off my back—to accommodate doctors and attorneys and employers. In other words, to stay one step ahead of trouble. True change, though, comes only with diligence. It is emotionally and physically exhausting. It is spiritually transformative.
It’s also worth it.
From 2008 through early 2011, I was utterly adrift, existing but not really living. Whatever money came in—for example, a $100,000 settlement from the new owners of my restaurant, who changed the nam
e and politely asked me to stay out of their way—quickly went right back out. For all practical purposes, I was completely broke. I moved into the modest home in which I had been raised, while my parents stayed in the more spacious home that I had purchased for them many years earlier. I rarely left the house, preferring instead to simply sit alone in my living room, watching television (until the cable was turned off) and drinking myself stupid. Weeks and months passed in a blur. At some point I stopped drinking Bacardi 151 and went back to Hennessy, rationalizing the move as a step toward healthier living. Not sobriety, though. Not even close. I just knew that 151 would kill me sooner. Hennessy I could drink all day.
For the last six months of my life as a drinker, I put away between a gallon and a gallon and a half of Hennessy every single day. Aside from what it did to my body, I couldn’t afford the habit. Hennessy at the time cost nearly fifty dollars for a one-liter bottle, and I needed at least four or five a day just to stave off the effects of withdrawal. So, you’re looking at a two-hundred-dollar-a-day habit, or roughly fifteen hundred dollars per week. It’s fair to say that every penny I had went toward drinking. And when I ran out of money, I’d sell stuff, which is how I ended up pawning the old tires out of my mother’s Mercedes.
There is no act too humiliating for the addict, no deed that will shame him into sudden remorse and a different way of life. He thinks only of the next fix, and of how he can avoid the pain that accompanies an absence of his drug of choice. I judge no one, because I have been this low. I know in my heart that the gap between me and the wretched soul who sells her body for a twenty-dollar hit of crack or meth is almost too small to be measured. Different drugs, different methods of obtaining a fix. Same outcome.
A slow and steady slog toward death.
Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t take the pain any longer. For six months, beginning in mid-October 2010, I started every day in the same exact manner—with a swig of Hennessy, a mouthful of food, and several minutes of ferocious nausea and vomiting. I’d need a good half hour to an hour just to recover from the physical ordeal, and then I could start drinking again. I hardly ate at all, which is why my weight slipped to 190, some sixty pounds below my NBA fighting weight. I’d shuffle around the house all day, in slippers and sweats, one hand clutching a glass filled with Hennessy, the other holding on to the waistband of my pants, to keep them from falling down. From the neck down I was skeletal, but my face was bloated and puffy, except for my eyes, which had sunk into my skull and had taken on the ghastly yellow pallor of a man who is flirting with cirrhosis. I couldn’t sleep on my back, because the pressure caused intense pain in my liver. I developed sores in my mouth and throat, a by-product of the corrosive effect of chronic vomiting. Sometimes I’d vomit blood instead of bile, which freaked me out at first but eventually just became another symptom of my descent into alcoholism.
There was psychic pain as well, the steady drumbeat of loneliness and depression. I hated my life. I hated myself. I couldn’t stand the misery any longer, and despite my best efforts to drink myself to death, my body refused to give out. Instead, it just doled out pain on an epic scale, day after fucking day. Unable to endure it any longer, I finally surrendered. I gave up. I asked God for help, and then I called my father, and together we drove to the Rushford Center, a rehabilitation hospital in Middletown, Connecticut. I drank on the way to rehab, not because I lacked commitment, but because I physically needed to drink. I’d been through the drill before, several times, and knew that a bit of time could pass between my arrival and the first dose of medication designed to stem the tide of withdrawal, so I wanted to make sure I was well oiled before I checked in. My father glanced at me as he drove and did not even respond to my drinking. My dad is a hard man, but he’s also a spiritual man, a preacher, and he could see the depth of my pain. If this is what it took to get me on the road to recovery, it was a small price to pay.
“I’m never drinking again after today,” I told him.
“I know, son. I believe you.”
This was not an empty promise. I had made a commitment to God and to myself to lead a different life, one based in spirituality and honesty and service. My father was the only person left who would listen to me, the only one willing to distinguish bullshit from a sincere desire to change. There was no one else.
Only my dad.
Part of this was paternal love, but it also stemmed from the fact that my father was a deeply religious man. He knew from being a pastor that there was a higher power, and that by turning my life over to that power, I could find redemption. Dad believed in me; he believed in the power of the holy spirit, and the possibility of change.
“You can do this,” he said on the drive to Rushford.
I didn’t need to hear that, but I liked hearing it.
Even then, with a bottle of cognac between my knees, I was excited about the prospect of starting over. But I had to fix my broken body first; I had to go through detox, clean out my system. Once that was accomplished, I knew I’d be okay. I knew it was true. I felt it in my heart. I was done with drinking. I was ready to put it all behind me. I had died in every way but the physical, and if I didn’t clean up my act, that was coming, too. I entered Rushford battered and beaten, but with a sense of spiritual determination I had never known. I walked through the doors accompanied only by God, armed only with prayer. I had no expectations of what life would be like afterward; I just knew that I wanted to be alive. Every other time I had gone through rehab, it was because I was trying to work an angle of one sort or another. This time my motives were pure. I wasn’t doing it to save my job or to meet the terms of a contract. I wasn’t doing it for the Celtics or for John Lucas, or even for my family.
I did it for me.
Until I took care of myself, I couldn’t possibly hope to take care of anyone else. I wanted to be a dad, to get back into the lives of my children, but that wasn’t possible unless I was sober and healthy.
This was my fifth attempt at rehab and ultimately one of the shortest. It also was the one that worked. It worked because I had experienced a fundamental change in attitude. On every previous attempt at rehab, I merely went through the motions. I was ashamed, lonely, resistant to treatment. My ego got in the way. I wasn’t truly ready to embrace sobriety. This time, emboldened by a desire to serve God, I had made up my mind. I was all business when I walked through the doors of Rushford. No swagger, no aliases, no con jobs. I was there to get clean and sober. On the very first day, when they came into my room at three o’clock in the morning to distribute medication and take my vitals, I was already awake.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m ready.”
On any of my other trips to rehab I would have greeted the staff at that hour with a grumble and a sour face. I would have pulled the blankets up over my head and pleaded, “Leave me alone.”
Not this time. I was eager to get to work. The sooner I got healthy, the sooner I could leave and get on with my life and my ministry. It was that simple. It was that clear.
Unlike in my previous stints in rehab, I did a lot of listening this time. I’d always been the talker, trying to fake my way through treatment with charm. After a while I’d get comfortable and be honest about my story. I’d tell everyone that I was a professional basketball player, and that I was an alcoholic, but there was as much bragging as there was contrition.
This time I tried to keep my mouth shut, not because I didn’t want to share my story, but because I thought I could learn more by listening to others. People knew who I was, but I didn’t make a big deal about it. It didn’t matter anymore. I had been humbled. I wanted to be quiet. I wanted to take care of the business at hand, as opposed to turning rehab into my own personal show. The irony of it is, I knew the drill; I knew the right things to say. I knew what was expected and what would have played well. None of that mattered anymore. This time it was in my spirit.
The first few days of rehab were all about survival. I was a very sick man, tr
ying to recover from years of self-abuse. My existence had depended entirely on alcohol, and now I was paying the price yet again. Like everyone else going through detox, I wandered the halls like a zombie, withered by my own pain and suffering. But I’d been through this before and I knew that it would end soon enough. I avoided the conversations and camaraderie that help make the experience bearable for many patients—the sharing of war stories and the dark humor that marks conversation outside a formal group setting. A lot of the patients were smokers. On break they would all go outside together and share cigarettes. I was not a smoker, which gave me an easy excuse to pass up these interactions. In the past I would have jumped in. Now it was merely a distraction that I did not need.
There’s something that happens after a few days in rehab, when the body begins to clear itself of toxins. We call it the “pink cloud.” It happens to almost everyone—a euphoric feeling of freedom and clearheadedness.
Oh, my goodness. I’m sober! I’m going to stay this way forever!
I’d been in the pink cloud several times, and it always produced a false sense of security. This time I would not be fooled. When the pink cloud lifted me up at Rushford, I did not overreact. It was just part of the process.
They gave me Librium again, but I viewed it strictly as a tool to facilitate my goal—a release from the pain of addiction. Three days into what was supposed to be a thirty-day program, I began telling the staff that I would be out in roughly a week, as soon as I had completed detox and was out of danger. They’d heard this sort of thing before, usually from patients who were either scared or lacked commitment, or both.
“Vin, you’ve been down this road,” one of the therapists said to me. “If you leave early, you’ll go right back to your old life. We both know that.”
I didn’t argue with her. She had every right to feel that way. She had the wisdom that comes with experience, and she knew my personal story. But I had something else: faith.