Doc: A Memoir (26 page)

I climbed into bed. I drifted off to sleep. I had no idea how my life was about to change.

Monique shook me awake around six a.m. and said, “Can you take Dylan to school?” She hadn’t slept much in the month since our baby daughter, Milan, was a born. I was groggy too.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

I pulled myself out of bed. I climbed into a pair of sweats. When Dylan was ready to go, he and I walked out to the driveway and got into the SUV, a black 2007 Chrysler Aspen. Dylan, who was five at the time, climbed into the backseat, where he usually liked to ride. I put on my seat belt. I don’t remember asking Dylan if he’d put his seat belt on. I backed out of the driveway and onto Old Mill Road toward the Academy of Most Blessed Sacrament on Franklin Lake Road, where Dylan was in kindergarten.

It had been seven hours since my last line of cocaine. The effects from that had long since faded. It was six hours since I had taken the four Ambien. They lingered longer.

The next thing I remember, we were half a mile from home and Dylan was asking me, “Dad, why are you riding in those people’s yard?”

What?

His question startled me. It was like I had just woken up and opened my eyes. I was in a familiar residential area. But clearly something was wrong.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “This is not good. I must have been blacking out.”

Right there, I should have slammed on the brakes and gotten Dylan out of the car. I should never have been driving in that condition, especially not with my child in the car. I know now how crazy that was, driving with my five-year-old, dozing and driving off the road. But when Dylan asked me that question, my reaction was more like, “That’s not good. I have to correct that.” It wasn’t, “Holy shit! Oh my God!”

In my messed-up judgment, I immediately started calculating in my head. “He has to get to school. The school’s not too far. I should be able to make it to the school.”

I went another fifty feet or so. Then, I rear-ended a 2009 black Mercedes-Benz driven by one of our neighbors, a seventy-one-year-old
architect named Ronald Schmidt, who was heading to his office on Englewood Road.

I wasn’t hurt. Thankfully, Dylan seemed okay. And so did Ronald Schmidt, who got out of his car and, under the circumstances, really didn’t even seem all that upset. I believe he recognized me.

“I’m fine,” he said. “There’s no damage to the cars.” He said he didn’t think there was any need to call the police. We shook hands. We agreed we were all very lucky. He drove off, and so did I.

Even then, it hadn’t hit me how screwed up my judgment was. I still hadn’t gotten it into my head that something really bad was happening here. All I could think was, “My wife asked me to drive my son to school. I have to get Dylan to school.”

I was driving across people’s yards. I had no idea what I was doing. My mind was racing. I was trying to stay focused. “I’ll drop him off,” I said to myself in the calmest tone I could muster. “Then I’ll figure out what’s wrong with me.”

Apparently, one of the neighbors called 911. By the time I got back in the car and drove another half a block, we were stopped by the Franklin Lakes Police. I might have also hit a gate or jumped a curb or bounced off a utility pole—I don’t know exactly what. I was zoning in and out. What I do know is that the cops came. They took one look at me and at Dylan. They didn’t think any of this was minor at all.

“You all right, Doc?” one of the cops said. It seemed like everyone in Franklin Lakes knew me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What’s going on?”

I didn’t know what to tell him.

He looked at Dylan and asked, “Are you all right?” Dylan said, “I think so. I might have hit my head.”

Thankfully, Dylan’s head bump was minor. He wasn’t even crying. We were all so lucky no one was badly hurt or killed. Truly, I could have killed three or four people that day.

A police officer asked if I would take a breathalyzer.

“Okay,” I said.

I blew into the little device. It came up zero alcohol.

I didn’t like doing any of this in front of Dylan. But the cop didn’t seem like he wanted to wait. He went away and then came back a few moments later. He asked me to blow again.

Another zero. I heard one of them say to another. “No alcohol.”

The police didn’t know what I was on, if anything. But they could tell something wasn’t right. “I can’t just let you go,” the cop said. “Someone called 911. There are too many people around.”

I could see the officers talking to each other.

“What’s going on?” one of them asked me. “Are you high?”

“I took an Ambien before I went to sleep,” I said, beginning to slump in the seat. “That’s all.”

“Okay,” he said. “You have to take a field sobriety test.”

I was pretty sure I couldn’t pass anything that required manual dexterity. “I can’t stand up,” I said. “My balance isn’t good.”

“We’ll have to take you in,” one of the cops said.

By that point, it didn’t surprise me. I knew I was in no condition to drive.

“Can I call my wife to come and get my son?” Even in my woozy condition, I was thinking I didn’t want my son to ride in a police car. But they put us both in the cruiser and drove to the police station on DeKorte Drive. I remember the officers talking to me. I remember parts of what they were saying, but I kept dozing off.

“Are you high on coke?” one officer asked me back at the station before Monique got there.

“No,” I said.

I thought, “If I was high on coke, I wouldn’t be falling asleep like this. I’d be alert and wired.”

“Just something to help me sleep,” I said. “Ambien.”

“Can you give us some urine?”

“Sure.” I went into the bathroom and peed in a cup.

The urine came back with evidence of Ambien and lingering traces of cocaine.

They charged me with a long list of crimes. Being under the influence of a controlled dangerous substance, driving under the influence of a controlled dangerous substance, endangering the welfare of a child, driving while intoxicated with a child passenger, leaving the scene of an accident, reckless driving, failure to keep right, and failure to change my address on my driver’s license. They didn’t miss much.

I was released on my own recognizance without posting any bail. But because Dylan was in the car with me and my driving had put him in danger, the police notified DYFS, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services. These are the people who investigate child abuse and endangerment cases.

I was free to go. But now I wasn’t only facing serious criminal charges. The state was taking a serious look at something I cared about at least as much as my freedom—my fitness as a father to my kids. Actually, I cared about that even more.

Room Service

I
CAME OUT OF THE HOUSE
the next morning in my usual baggy gray sweats. About a dozen reporters were waiting for me in the driveway. I had never ducked reporters, not since Rusty Staub lectured me in my rookie year. But the accident had happened just twenty-four hours earlier. I’d barely had time to speak to a lawyer. There wasn’t much I could say.

“Now is not the time,” I said. “Sorry.”

Since I wouldn’t comment, the reporters called Ron Goldstein, who had been booking me for public appearances and had become my manager and close friend. Ron tried to put the best possible spin on what led up to the crash. “Doc would never deliberately do anything to put his children at risk,” Ron said. “He is a very good father and a very good friend.”

The Mets got calls too. My arrest was yet another Gooden embarrassment for them. Even my old friend Jay Horwitz, who was always
looking out for me, would say only, “The Mets are aware of the situation.” He did make clear that my planned induction into the Mets Hall of Fame was still on the team calendar in August.

My old teammates mostly just winced. “This is very sad because I care about Doc and I worry about him,” said Keith Hernandez, who’d moved into the Mets broadcast booth.

My old pal Bob Klapisch wrote a piece for the
Bergen Record
in New Jersey quoting someone who claimed to be one of my closest friends: “As much as I hate to say it, whatever Dwight’s got coming to him, he deserves it this time.” I didn’t know for sure who said that. But knowing the star player Bob had talked to in the past about me, I thought I had a pretty good idea.

Waking up and looking at Dylan asleep in his bed, seeing the look in Monique’s eyes, then reading those quotes in the paper—I felt like I’d let everyone down all over again. Over the next days and weeks, I tried to construct in my mind how the accident had happened. Was drowsiness a common side effect of Ambien? Had the coke I had taken many hours earlier somehow made me ripe for a blackout? Had I seemed out of it to Monique as Dylan and I walked to the driveway?

I wracked my brain.

The charges were forwarded by the Franklin Lakes Police to the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. The most serious was child endangerment. Under New Jersey law, my lawyer told me, I could go to prison for ten to twenty years. My freedom and my role as a father were both in serious jeopardy. All of this was weighing on me, and things were getting even more tense around the house.

“What the hell were you were thinking?” Monique demanded.

“I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I thought I was okay to drive. You think I wanted to put Dylan’s life at risk?”

Monique and I had fought before, but now we were arguing all the
time. I started sleeping down in the basement. I’d leave the house and stay out for hours. I’d come home and sit in the dark and not talk to anyone. “We just had another baby!” she yelled. “And now this?”

I had to try to make some changes, as much as I was capable of. After the accident, I knew I had to stay away from cocaine. And I did for a while. But I was still self-medicating with alcohol, with the same predictable consequences. I was using the alcohol to dull the guilt and the shame. That made things even worse. Then I would feel more guilt and shame, which I tried to drown in more alcohol.

My marriage was pretty much over.

Every time Monique and I would get into it, she would call the investigators from the state’s Division of Youth and Family Services and tell them, “He’s high around the kids again,” which wasn’t true. “You have to do something.”

She cried on the phone.

She demanded they arrest me.

She accused me of threatening her.

Some days, she called ten or twenty times.

The truth is I never threatened her. I wasn’t using drugs in the house. I wasn’t acting out violently. Mostly, I was just morose. I stayed inside, up in my bedroom or down in the basement, cut off from my own family and from the outside world, depressed, withdrawn, and miserable.

In late April, state investigators ordered me removed from my home. “You can’t be here,” the social worker said. “You have to move out.”

I didn’t fight it.

On May 1, I moved to a Comfort Inn on Route 17 in Paramus. Monique took Dylan and baby Milan and moved back to her parents’ house in Columbia, Maryland. We ended our lease on the house in Franklin Lakes. I was totally depressed and feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t stand all this drama and bitterness and the constant allegations.
Now the thought of losing contact with my two youngest children, the only two who’d known me as a full-time live-in dad—that was almost too much to bear.

All I wanted to do was to hide from myself and the world. Behind the locked door of room 133 of that suburban Comfort Inn, at least I could find some relief in the drugs.

I stayed inside the room almost twenty-four hours a day and revved up my coke habit again. I still had some money from doing public appearances, and there was a dealer I knew who would drive to the hotel and make small deliveries. I slept at strange hours. I paced around the room. I watched TV a lot, hours and hours and hours of ESPN. I kept forgetting to charge my cell phone. The room had a Jacuzzi, but I was too paranoid to use it. I thought I might slide into the water and drown. I did more coke.

I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone seeing me like this. I would sneak out at night and get something to eat. I’d go to Wendy’s. I’d go to Dunkin’ Donuts. There was a Red Lobster next to the hotel. A couple of times, I went in there. But that wasn’t quick enough for me. No telling who might see me in there.

I’d go to the ATM when I ran out of money, but I wouldn’t go inside the bank.

Sometimes, when the maids would come to the door, I’d say, “Leave the towels outside.” Then later, I’d carry the clean ones into the room and leave the dirties in the hall. Several times, I called the desk clerks to change the key card for my room. In my paranoia, I had the idea someone might be sneaking in when I walked out for my Wendy’s Baconator burger, fries, and Frosty.

I had a few public appearances that summer. Not too many, but a few. I turned down some jobs that people called or texted me about. I just didn’t think I could do them. I tried to clean up for the ones I did, just enough to do my appearance and make a little money and get out of there as fast as I could. I did what I could to hide the shape I was in.
I don’t know if the casual fans could tell how messed up I was. I hope no one saved those pictures.

A few people pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Doc, hang in there.…” “I got twenty years.…” “I got eighteen years.…” “You can do this.” They were telling me they knew I was struggling. They wanted me to know they were pulling for me.

My wife was gone. I wasn’t seeing my kids. I wasn’t even calling my mother in Florida. I didn’t know what to say the couple of times she got me on the phone and she asked, “How are you, baby?” I had almost no communication with anyone. It was just me and my drugs, feeling sorry for ourselves. Instead of once or twice a week, soon I was using two or three days in a row.

I thought constantly about the accident. How it could have happened. How it was ruining my life even more than my life was already ruined. How mad I was at Monique for making me sound even worse than I was and taking my kids away from me. How much I blamed myself. And any time I needed more to worry about, there was the real possibility I’d be heading off to prison again—and not just for a couple of months this time. And when I’d sober up from being high, the guilt and shame would wash over me again. Which, of course, pushed me to do more drugs.