Doc: A Memoir (2 page)

“The parade’s gonna be awesome,” Lenny said to me.

“Awesome,” I agreed.

We had to get up early the next morning. I knew that. We were due at the stadium in Queens between eight and nine. Then we’d all pile onto buses and ride into Manhattan for the start of the parade. But no one looked ready to call it a night. I certainly wasn’t. Word went around that the party was moving to Finn MacCool’s, a bar on Main Street in Port Washington, close to where many of the players lived.

I was already too drunk to be driving. I’d had three or four glasses of champagne and at least as many vodka-and-grapefruits. But I didn’t give drunk driving a second thought. Back then, I never did. I walked out to the players’ parking lot and climbed into my car, a gray 1986 Mercedes 300SE. I turned on the ignition and, bleary but still fairly steady, I headed in the general direction of the bar.

But I never got there.

Instead, I jumped off the Long Island Expressway at the Meadowbrook Parkway and headed south, straight for the projects.

My whole plan was to meet my dealer, buy some coke, and do a little bit—then depending on how I was feeling and how late it was, maybe circle back to Finn MacCool’s and have a few last rounds with the boys.

On my way to the dealer’s apartment, I stopped and picked up my friend Bobby, who lived in the same projects. Bobby wasn’t a close friend, just someone I’d partied with in Tampa who lived part-time in New York. He had introduced me to the dealer a few months earlier. When I first started buying, I would give the money to Bobby, and he’d make the transaction for me. But as I’d grown bolder, I was usually buying for myself.

We stopped at the dealer’s apartment. I gave him the money for the drugs. Then Bobby and I headed back to his place to get high. The dealer followed us there.

Bobby’s apartment was on the second floor. It was tiny, and people were already there. Bobby’s sister was one of them, and there were others I didn’t recognize, five or six women and seven or eight men. The music was loud—Run-DMC, Whodini, Public Enemy, old-school hip-hop. The TV was on, playing game highlights with the sound off. It was the last week in October. Even though the windows were open, it was hot and stuffy in there.

Everyone congratulated me.

“Oh, man,” one guy said, hugging me so hard I could feel the heavy gold chain around his neck.

“Oh, man,” I said back to him.

“You’re a world champion,” said a woman in a shiny gold top.

Right away, the drugs came out.

I laid two lines on a mirror Bobby handed me. I slid a rolled-up dollar bill into my nose and sniffed hard. Ah, that felt good.

I did it again on the other side.

A nice, warm feeling was already sweeping through me. This, I thought, is what I had been waiting for.

The first time I remember checking the clock, it said twelve thirty. Then, what seemed like twenty minutes later, it said a little after two o’clock.

I could hear fans partying in other apartments. People were yelling outside and lighting off fireworks. If they’d only known where one of the Mets was! It was crazy, even being there. Somewhere in my mind, I must have realized that. There was no security. At any moment, the cops could have burst in, and I would have been busted. Or someone could have robbed me. My $50,000 Mercedes was sitting outside.

But I didn’t care. This was where the coke was, so this was where I wanted to be.

That’s pretty much how the evening went.

Do a shot.

Do a line.

Talk nonsense.

Look at the clock.

Notice how late it was.

See the coke.

Do another line.

Forget about the clock.

Hear how great I am.

Do a shot.

Watch some highlights.

Bullshit with strangers.

Look at the clock.

Do another line.

And that clock was moving like you wouldn’t believe. I knew I had to get up early, but I had a plan.

“I’m gonna stay here till four o’clock,” I said to myself. “That’ll give me time to go home, get an hour or two of sleep, grab a shower, and be at Shea in time.”

The next thing I noticed, the clock said four thirty. “A couple of more lines, and I’m out of here at five,” I told myself. “No matter what.”

But the drugs kept coming. The shots too. People kept laughing. I was having too much fun to leave.

A girl came over and climbed onto my lap. She was pushing her breasts against me and wiggling around. We were doing everything but having sex. I’m sure if I wanted to, I could have taken her into the bedroom. But sex wasn’t my top priority at that moment. I was far more interested in the drugs.

“Okay, I’ll stay another thirty minutes,” I thought, still managing to bargain the worry away. “Then I’ll get out of here.”

I looked out the window at one point and felt my first wave of fear. The purple-black sky was turning ever so slightly gray. Dawn was coming soon.

“I gotta get out of here pretty soon,” I decided.

But I was still bargaining. Drug addicts are always bargaining with themselves.

Deciding to stay another fifteen minutes seemed totally logical to me. And then another. I was dripping with sweat. My eyes were totally bloodshot. My clothes stank. But I kept recalculating. I could still rush home, take a shower, get to the stadium, and make the parade. I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t get any sleep. But I’d gone without sleep before. How often would my team win the World Series?

The coke was keeping me up. The booze had been keeping me mellow, though not so much anymore. Both of them had clearly wrecked my judgment.

The sun through the window slammed me hard.

“Uh-oh,” I finally realized. “That’s not good.”

It was after six thirty by then.

Everybody was talking. But suddenly, the voices all sounded like noise. I didn’t want to talk to anybody anymore, and I didn’t want anybody talking to me.

The TV was shifting to the morning shows. The game highlights were still on the screen. I was on the couch where I’d been laughing and talking for hours. Now I was staring straight ahead. This wasn’t fun anymore.

“I’m in no condition to drive,” I thought. “Maybe if I do a line, it’ll pick me up and I can get out of here.”

I did another line, and things got worse.

“This is stupid,” I said to myself. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

One guy looked at me and smiled. “You’re a real dude,” he said. A real dude? I was a real mess. That’s all.

When I first walked in with Bobby, everyone was saying, “There’s a hero.” What were they thinking now? It was more like, “Look at that fuckin’ guy.”

As sunshine filled the small apartment, my high was evaporating fast. You can’t say I was sober. After all I’d put into my body, that made no sense at all. I was just feeling numb and disgusted.

I still had some coke left. But without saying good-bye to anyone, I put the drugs in my pocket and quietly skulked out of there. I was praying no one would see me in the project parking lot.

I looked like crap. I smelled like crap. I can’t vouch for my driving. As I drove toward home with the sun streaming in the passenger window, I was still sweating out of control.

And then I totally lost it.

I started crying, sobbing loudly, literally blubbering in the car.

This was pathetic.

I couldn’t go to the parade this way. I knew that. But how could I not go? Everyone would know what I’d been doing all night. Or at least they would suspect.

My mind was racing nowhere. Everything was pouring down at once.

I walked into my empty apartment and started taking off my clothes. I was thinking I could get a quick shower and maybe still make the parade.

I had messages on my answering machine. The first three were from the Mets’ PR man, Jay Horwitz.

“Hey, Doc, just calling to make sure you’re up for the parade.”

“Doc, you up?”

“Doc, let me know if you need a ride. No problem. We can send a car.”

Just then, I heard a knock on the door. A loud bang, really. I didn’t look outside, but I was pretty sure it was Darryl Strawberry. Darryl
lived in the next complex over. A lot of times, we’d ride to the park together. Either he would drive or I would drive. I couldn’t remember what plans we’d made the night before.

But I didn’t answer. I was too dejected and too scared. After a few more bangs, the knocking stopped.

I finally got the courage to get into the shower. When I came out, I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. I looked horrible.

In my insanity, I thought if I did one more line, maybe I would get the boost I needed. So I did another line.

The phone kept ringing. I heard my mother’s voice on the machine. “Honey, are you on your way to the parade?” The Mets must have called her in Florida. My girlfriend, Carlene, called too. And Jay called again. “Hey, Doc. We’re worried. Wherever you are, we’ll send a car.”

I started putting my clothes on. I wasn’t sure what I should do. But who was I kidding? I was in no condition to go anywhere, much less to ride in front of two million people at the victory parade.

“Oh my God,” I thought. “What am I going to do?”

If I did one more line, I thought, maybe my heart would explode and I would die. Or maybe I could buy an airplane ticket and go somewhere far and hide. I could stay away long enough that people would forget I wasn’t there.

No answer seemed any good. What could I say when people started asking? Major League Baseball had called me in during the season. There were already rumors about me and drugs. This would prove everything. Who would believe me now?

I took off the clothes I’d just put on. I pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt. I climbed into bed and turned on the news, thinking, “I’d better watch this. I know they’re gonna say something about me.”

But as soon as my head hit the pillow, it seemed like the live parade coverage began. It couldn’t have started that quickly, but that’s how it seemed to me.

I stared at the TV through narrow, squinting eyes. And that’s how I watched my own victory parade.

I saw Mookie and Darryl, Keith and Ray, and all the Mets I had played with.

I heard Davey talk and politicians get booed. I saw a kid with a hand-lettered sign.

Dreaming

Whose Dream

F
ROM FATHER TO SON AND
father to son, that’s how baseball dreams have always been handed down. In one of my very earliest memories—maybe I am four years old—my mom is out in the kitchen of our little house in Tampa. My much-older sisters, Mercedes and Betty, are off somewhere. My dad is sitting in the den in his special chair, a huge black La-Z-Boy recliner, like he’s commanding the whole room. The Cincinnati Reds are on the new color television, and my father has a beige wire poking out of his ear. He’s following a second game on his transistor radio—the Atlanta Braves or the Chicago Cubs or the St. Louis Cardinals. Really, it could be anyone. He isn’t yelling at the TV the way some sports fans like to. He is reaching into a bag of Doritos, sipping from a can of Budweiser with salt around the rim—I still don’t know where that came from—and coolly analyzing everything that’s happening on the field.

“I like that rookie catcher,” my dad is saying. “Good field vision.”

I’m on the floor, cross-legged with cookies and a plastic bottle of juice. There is no one in the den but Dad and me. So he’s delivering his running commentary to a four-year-old who clearly has no idea what field vision is. But kids that age have minds like sponges. And somehow I am able to grasp that Johnny Bench, the Reds’ cocky new catcher, is out on the mound with veteran pitcher Jim Maloney, and the two men are arguing about what Maloney ought to throw next.

“They clocked his fastball at ninety-nine miles an hour,” my dad marvels. “What do you think he’ll throw now?”

On the TV, I can see the catcher shaking his head like he isn’t too happy. Then I stare blankly up at my dad.

“That’s right,” my father says. “Another fastball.”

And that’s exactly what Maloney throws—smack into Bench’s waiting glove.

Thump!

“Told you,” my dad says with a sharp nod and the tiniest hint of a smile.

When it came to the skills and strategies of baseball, Dan Gooden was seldom wrong.

Long before baseball became my dream, it was the dream of my father. He got it from the same place I did—from his dad. The Gooden baseball dream wasn’t hatched on the thriving Gulf Coast of Florida. It was born three hundred miles away in the fading cotton fields of southwest Georgia, where my father’s family had lived for generations. That part of the South was known as the Black Belt. It got its name from the rich, dark soil that spread out for miles from there—not the thousands of men and women, slave and free, who had tilled that land. When the slaves won their freedom after the Civil War, some of them set off for Chicago or Detroit or other points north. But many stuck around, living in the same wooden shacks and working the same plots of land they always had. Only now, many were sharecroppers or hourly employees.
Segregated southwest Georgia wasn’t a place of much opportunity. But it was the only home they had ever known. They worked hard to provide for their families and found what enjoyment they could.

“Your grandfather wasn’t just a good baseball pitcher,” my father told me one Saturday morning as we sat in the den. “He might have been the best ever.”

Dad wasn’t joking.

My father’s father was born just after the turn of the century. His name was Uclesee Gooden. I never met him. He died when my dad was eight. From what people said, he was six-foot-four or -five, nearly a giant for his day, with tree-trunk legs and gangly arms. He played for the Albany Red Sox, a local Negro sandlot team.

“He used to carry me in his arms to the park where he played,” my father recalled. “People came from miles. His fastball was smokin’. He was the most powerful pitcher anyone had ever seen.”

Years later, when I would meet my father’s older relatives, they would look at me and say, “You’re good, but you should have seen your grandfather pitch.”