The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  * * *

  *

  I’m standing in Doc Gooden’s living room, but he is not home.

  The house, modest and inconspicuous, is located in the town of Westbury on Long Island east of Queens. It’s a family neighborhood of two-story brick or wood-shingled houses, basketball and hockey nets dotting the driveways. Casa Gooden is home to Doc and four of his adult children. Although they’ve been there for more than a year, they still haven’t fully unpacked, the living room and hallways cluttered with framed photos and baseball mementos waiting to be mounted. In one room stands an old-school video arcade game (Multicade) next to a seat cushion standing on its side and an ironing board. There’s an enlarged photo of Doc celebrating his no-hitter leaning against the wall.

  I walk into the kitchen, which looks out onto the backyard pool, and sit down with Doc’s oldest son, Little Doc. I hand him an envelope with $200 cash as promised, and he offers me a bottle of water. Earlier this morning, he texted me the bad news that while he was still available, his dad was called in to Citi Field (where the Mets play) for a last-minute charity event and that my meeting with Doc would have to wait until tomorrow morning.

  A little girl walks by, chattering to herself.

  “That’s Milan,” Little Doc tells me. “She’s visiting from Maryland. She lives with her mom.” Milan is the youngest of Doc’s seven kids.

  I’m just as interested in Little Doc as I am in his father. Like Carlton Fisk, Doc reached such a level of celebrity that his story is common knowledge. But I want to know what effect his troubled life had on his oldest son, born to a woman his dad had a brief fling with in 1985.

  Wispy and wearing a backward hat loosely fitting his head, Little Doc has a polite and amiable demeanor. While his dad’s narrow features convey a certain austerity, Little Doc’s face is rounder, his smile bigger and more inviting. He’s twenty-nine but retains a teenage innocence in the way he lights up as he talks, his dreadlocks falling past his shoulders.

  “I feel as if I played baseball myself,” he says. Every summer as a child he would join his dad on the road, where he experienced the royal treatment. It may have been because few of the other players had kids, or it may have been because he was Doc Gooden’s son. He would do everything but play in the game himself: shag fly balls during batting practice, sign autographs, even sit in the dugout in uniform. “The other players would just take care of me, give me hundreds of dollars,” he says with a big smile.

  But he was living two lives. The summers were five-star hotels and first-class treatment with his dad. Then when the school year rolled around, it was back to East Tampa to live with his mom, who worked for a medical clinic serving disabled children. She raised Little Doc on a $25,000 annual salary.

  “It didn’t make sense. How is this possible? How could he [his dad] have all this money and my mom is broke?” he asks me. I can see the frustration gathering on his face. He goes on: “Mom didn’t have much income. There was no man around. No one with this,” he says, pointing sharply to his ample Adam’s apple.

  Kids at school teased him, envious of his dad. “Some people would say, ‘Why do you go to school? You should have your own school. You should drive a limo to school!’” he says.

  But it just made him madder and more confused. He wasn’t some rich kid with a silver spoon, he was one of them. He was East Tampa, Hillsborough Avenue, and to prove it, he started spending more and more time in the streets, slinging dope.

  “I was making thousands of dollars in high school. I ended up having $30,000 before I was a senior. It was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but I got me some money.’ You know?” he says. “I was in the streets, just selling drugs, smoking weed, hanging with lots of drug dealers in the hood. I was catching cases.”

  “Catching cases? Does that mean you were getting in trouble?” I ask, confused.

  He laughs at my naivete. “Sorry, yeah, catching cases means I was definitely getting in trouble. I caught a cocaine charge when I was seventeen for possession and attempt to sell. I had three of those at seventeen, actually. I ended up doing thirteen months behind those charges,” he says.

  In a particularly sad turn, Little Doc was in Hillsborough County Jail in 2005 when he was awakened by someone throwing a copy of the Tampa Tribune in his face. His dad had just been arrested for driving under the influence, eluding police, and resisting arrest without violence, and according to the front page, he was being brought in to the same jail.

  Little Doc discusses all this with a sense of calm and openness, his low voice even. It’s when I start digging into the underlying relationship with his father that he gets quieter, his voice reduced almost to a whisper. They lived together before the jail time, but both were careening out of control. While Little Doc knew secondhand about his father’s addiction, he had never witnessed it himself.

  “I had never seen him like that,” he says.

  One day he came home to find a handwritten note on the counter. “He left a letter that said, ‘Carry on the name, the bank people already know you, make sure your grandma and everyone is taken care of, stuff like that,’” he says. Little Doc rushed to the garage, terrified of what he might find, but the car was gone. When his dad came home hours later, they didn’t discuss it.

  “Why didn’t you bring it up?” I ask, following his clouded gaze into the backyard, where the sun is shining brightly.

  Without turning back to me he mumbles, “I don’t think I had enough courage or heart to stop and say, ‘What’s this? What’s going on?’”

  To this day, even living under the same roof, their bedrooms right across the hall from each other, they rarely talk about what really matters. Little Doc wants his dad to know what he feels and who he is. “I don’t even know if he knows how intelligent I am about real life. I’m big on facts, big on statistics. I’m a completer, a seeker. I love research. I don’t know if he knows I have that type of passion and ambition about life,” he tells me, his voice stronger again.

  “Why don’t you tell him?” I ask.

  He shifts in his chair, looks around the room, a bit self-conscious. “I don’t know. A little stubborn, I guess,” he says. “I guess it’s like, if you don’t know [by] now, you ain’t asked about me,” he continues, his voice trailing off.

  He gets up to check the chicken nuggets baking in the oven, lunch for Milan and her playmate who’s supposed to come over anytime now. I take a sip of my water and change directions. “Tell me about your music career,” I say. I had read about his work as a rapper.

  “I started music back in 2007,” he says, sitting back down. “I spent thirteen months in jail in ’04, then was back in the streets, doing the same thing. I was actually bigger. 2006 was my peak. I was sitting in a trap house, weed everywhere, when my buddy Andrew comes in with headphones on and a CD player. I immediately tell him to get to work, and I sat down and put the headphones on. I was like, ‘Who’s this?’ He says, ‘That’s me!’ He was singing R&B. He was like, ‘Yo, you can rap too.’ He told everyone in the house why they can be a rapper, and we all started rapping. The next day he called me and said, ‘Come over to the studio, I’ve got a beat for you.’ I recorded a song called ‘Head First.’”

  Little Doc had stumbled on his passion. While he had grown up dreaming of being a ballplayer just like his dad, he was not his dad. Music was his calling.

  “I said, ‘This is my way out. This is it.’” Using the money he had saved up from dealing, he started his own label, DJR Records, hired an advisor, and gave himself the moniker Prince of the Bay. While the music never hit it big, he still has aspirations of greatness.

  “I want to do something good enough to where I get recognized and then I give my story. I want to speak for kids who had successful parents. I’d like to talk to them. I know there’s tons of them going through what I went through. All of them just want to feel normal. I don’t want to be caught in what my dad did or didn’t do. I’m me,” he says.

  The G
rammys will have to wait for now. Little Doc has two kids to raise from two different moms, one in Atlanta and one in Tampa, and he serves as his dad’s agent. He moved up here last fall to focus on the business and get his head straight, leaving behind the streets of Tampa. But it’s still hard. His brain runs as fast as his dad’s fastball once did, spinning in multiple directions that leave him both excited and anxious. He has never even tried the cocaine he sold for years, preferring the calming effect that marijuana has on his brain. And while he wants to get clean, it’s hard.

  In addition to booking his dad for personal appearances like the one I am attending tomorrow night in Yonkers, Little Doc has launched a clothing line, Gooden Brand, that he is currently modeling. He’s wearing a loose-fitting black T-shirt with “Doc Gooden” in big gray letters and his dad’s silhouette on the front, mid-delivery, his right arm cocked back and ready to strike. “The line’s been out two months now,” he says. “We’ve got T-shirts, hats, performance wear, hoodies, bags. We also have a rehab product,” he says, making me do a double take. But Little Doc means rehab as in pitchers who are rehabilitating their arms from Tommy John surgery.

  “I have a vision to do a more sophisticated product line called Dwight Gooden. It’s going to be suits, high fashion,” he adds, taking off his hat momentarily to reveal a retreating hairline.

  Before I go, I want to nail down the plan to meet with his dad. “Tell me again what your dad had to do today?” I ask.

  “It’s a pitching camp. They bring kids and work on pitching at the stadium,” he says.

  “What time tomorrow would work to do the interview?” I ask.

  “I would think noon. We have a car coming at five to pick him up for the event.” We make plans to touch base later today to confirm. Once I’m back in my car, I open my phone and Google the pitching camp at Citi Field where Doc is allegedly working.

  I find nothing.

  * * *

  *

  At 7:02 the next morning I text Little Doc about the planned interview with his dad: “Hey Doc, just wanted to check in so I can plan the day.”

  At 7:21 a.m. he replies: “Hey buddy I’m working on it now. Give me a few minutes.”

  10:38 a.m., Brad: “What’s the word Doc? Is there a problem?”

  10:40 a.m., Little Doc: “Well he’s not here and he said he won’t be back till like 3. I’m trying to figure out the best time.”

  I drive from Brooklyn to Westbury, figuring I should be nearby if Doc surfaces.

  12:18 p.m., Brad: “I’m in Westbury. Is your dad back?”

  12:18 p.m., Little Doc: “He says he is at Sprint getting his phone fixed he dropped water on it.”

  12:18 p.m., Brad: “What do you suggest?”

  12:19 p.m., Little Doc: “Can u come to the event?”

  I tell him I’ll go but will wait in Westbury this afternoon in case his dad shows up. I post up at a Starbucks for a few hours, drinking three dark roasts while compulsively checking my text messages. Finally at 4:00 I head west toward Yonkers, pulling into the Olde Stone Mill restaurant parking lot.

  4:50 p.m., Brad: “What’s going on Doc?”

  4:55 p.m., Brad: “Square with me please. I am sitting at the event.”

  5:15 p.m., Little Doc: “I’m going thru that too bro he didn’t make the event. Trying to figure out what’s been going on with him. It really sucks bcuz I’m in the middle of something I don’t have an answer for.”

  5:15 p.m., Brad: “I hope he’s OK. I understand your situation. Do you have any clue where he is? Do you think he relapsed?”

  5:16 p.m., Little Doc: “If it helps any u have my permission to work it how u like.”

  5:16 p.m., Brad: “Have you seen him today?”

  5:16 p.m., Little Doc: “I honestly don’t know if he relapsed or not he’s been complaining a lot about all the working he has to do.”

  And with that I walk inside and find the man in the yellow polo shirt and his immaculately made-up partner stomping around the bar, livid at Doc’s absence.

  Around the perimeter of the dining room are several pieces of New York baseball memorabilia: autographed photos of Derek Jeter, Gary Carter, C. C. Sabathia, all up for auction to raise money for charity. At the front of the room is the rectangular table where Doc is supposed to sit and sign autographs, but the chair is empty.

  Three generations of baseball fans crowd around plates of hot dogs and french fries, looking out of place in this fine dining setting. I walk over to a lively mix of middle-aged fans who came of age during Gooden’s heyday.

  “He had the best curveball I’ve ever seen,” says Peter, a forty-year-old with black hair slicked straight back and tucked behind his ears. “That thing would just drop off the table.”

  His brother Mike starts rattling off the names of all the players on the ’86 Mets, the last year they won the World Series, as if they’re old high school buddies: Hernandez, Carter, Dykstra, Backman . . .

  The group nods and smiles with increasing delight, and soon a chorus of laughs floods the table as everyone begins chiming in with their own special Mets memory.

  “I met Keith Hernandez at a Who concert!” one yells.

  “I had a friend who had Gary Carter leave a voice mail on my phone!” another boasts.

  They regress in age before my eyes, shedding cynicism and gaining poise with each successive story.

  I walk over to another table crowded with boys and their parents. The kids are too young to remember Doc as a player, but their parents remember his dominance. Donna, a Yankees fan on vacation from Houston, fondly recalls Doc’s no-hitter in 1996. At the adjacent table sit a group of nuns who were bused in from the Marian Woods convent.

  As everyone chews their food, keeping their eyes on the room’s entrance, the man in yellow trudges to the front to address the group. “I’m sorry to say that Doc won’t be here tonight,” he says. “It’s very sad. He’s back on whatever he’s on. Of course, we will refund you your money. I’m really sorry again.” A small murmur of concern ripples through the crowd, then the chatter resumes.

  The world is still waiting for Doc to show up.

  * * *

  *

  A couple days later I email Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ longtime PR guy, to ask if he has any photos from the pitching camp at Citi Field that Doc allegedly attended the day I was in Doc’s house interviewing Little Doc. It’s the same Jay Horwitz who frantically called Doc the morning of the Mets’ World Series parade in October 1986 when he shut himself in his apartment following that epic cocaine bender, refusing to answer the phone. Jay has always protected Doc as much as he can; as a PR rep it was his job, after all, for all those years.

  “Sorry Brad there were no photos,” comes his one-line reply.

  What kind of event for kids doesn’t have any pictures, especially from the PR department? I find myself wanting there to be photos, to find some shred of evidence that Doc really was there at the stadium that day and not off in a bathroom somewhere getting high. But nothing on the internet suggests that the event even took place.

  I keep pressing Jay for answers, and he keeps giving me one-line replies. Finally, I write, “Did this event happen?”

  “I checked. It happened but he was not in attendance,” is all he says.

  I think of Little Doc, wanting so badly to do the right thing, disappointed yet again by his dad. Will he say anything once his dad resurfaces?

  “I have so many ‘why’ questions for everyone,” he told me during our interview.

  “Why not ask them?” I said.

  “I think because I already know the answers,” he replied.

  14

  Gone Fishing

  The semester ends for everybody.

  —Richie Hebner

  Day 36

  July 24, 2015

  Miles driven: 7,286

  Cups of coffee: 90

  Westbury NY to Norwood MA

  “Where are you from?”

  It’s a question we get a
sked throughout our lives, but can the answer change?

  I now consider California home. Every time I step off a plane back in the Bay Area and feel that crisp air in the jetway, I smile. But I will always be from Greenville, Rhode Island.

  Everything in this part of the country is old and historic, the Europeans having settled Rhode Island as early as 1630. A suburb of Providence, Greenville is an old mill town dotted with oak and chestnut trees. In the years since my childhood, the town’s name has become less and less apt as tracts of pristine forest have been converted into space for Applebee’s and Target and Home Depot. But as much as the town’s exterior changes, the soul of Greenville remains forever small town. Earlier this morning while eating a bagel at the town café, I overheard three wrinkly men bemoan the state of the world, including baseball: “I don’t even watch anymore—the games take too damn long,” one of them groused. I felt nothing in common with them, my life so far removed from this rural outpost, yet this place is a part of me. If I had a baseball card, this is where the writer would go to find my story.

  12. Rich Hebner

  The house I grew up in is a one-level stone cottage on a pond with meandering hallways resulting from multiple additions over the years. Lucky for me, it’s still in the family, even though no one resides here year-round. I wander in and out of rooms as if I’m touring the house for the first time, picking up on small details I had always taken for granted—a vent here, a light switch there. All vestiges of my childhood bedroom, once a shrine to baseball players, have been replaced by the staid accoutrements of a guest bedroom save for a single piece of sloppy ceramic art I did in ninth grade, a green sculpture of a snake—or is it an earthworm? Art always was my worst subject. But no matter how many coats of paint or new color palettes are foisted on this room, these walls represent my childhood sanctuary, a place where I lost myself for hours amid nautical charts and baseball cards and science books.