Wherever I Wind Up (24 page)

Meanwhile, the undertow is making it hard to keep my head above water. I am not brave or cocksure anymore. My fantasies about a heroic crossing are as spent as I am.

I do a quick athlete-systems check and assess my plight. My lactic acid is building up fast, my muscles shutting down at the same rate. Later I learn that Laynce Nix puts down the camcorder to say a quiet prayer, fearing he has seen the last of me.

I have one more push in me. But which direction should I go in?

Do I keep going forward, hoping it’s enough to get across? Or do I turn around and try to make it back to the bank I started from? Either way, I know there is a good chance I won’t be getting out of the Missouri River alive. I am positive of that. In a microsecond I feel a deep hopelessness, and brokenness, sweep over me, a man completely humbled by his vast limitations, flailing about in a polluted river, adrift and alone again, this time entirely because of his own flawed character.

I decide to swim back toward my teammates, who are now hundreds of yards upriver from me. I power out fifteen strokes and have to stop because I’m so exhausted. When I stop, the undertow pulls me down. I crank out another set of strokes, but don’t make it to fifteen this time before I lock up, the painful, wrenching cycle getting me not far enough, not fast enough.

From somewhere, I have no idea where, I get the idea to swim underwater. I think of Michael Phelps in the Olympic pool in Athens in 2004, the way he’d push off the wall and swim underwater as long as possible before surfacing. Maybe it’ll work for me, too, and get me there faster, because Lord knows the current at the top is as choppy as all get out.

I last for twenty seconds and come up for air. When I go back down for another swim, I open my eyes and can see absolutely nothing. It’s as if I am swimming in a black hole. I come back up and look toward the bank. I am about fifty or sixty yards away.

I can’t believe it’s still that far. I start to see gigantic spots everywhere. I am getting delirious.

I can’t swim anymore, my stroke reduced to a pathetic dog paddle. My muscles have completely shut down. My lungs are burning and my throat feels as if I’ve swallowed a thousand lit matches. I feel tears start welling behind my eyes. I am sinking. I accept that I am not going to get out of this river. I am underwater and I begin to cry. It’s a very odd sensation, weeping in water. I am filled with contrition. I know I’m not getting to the surface again.

It is time to say good-bye and to make amends.

Anne, I am so sorry that I am leaving you and the kids alone. I am so sorry about my stupidity and recklessness, that I’d allow an asinine attempt to prove something—I don’t even know what—to take me away. I am so, so sorry.

God, please forgive me. Forgive all my trespasses and all the ways I’ve fallen short. Please give me peace. Please, when You take me, make it not so painful.

It occurs to me that if I just open my mouth underwater, I can apologize to God in person.

I am sinking fast now, well below the surface. I am ready to die, and as I spend the final moments of my life engulfed in sorrow and regret, I feel solid ground beneath my flip-flops.

I have hit bottom. Literally. Normally the bottom isn’t good when you are drowning, but it does give me something to push off from. I haven’t felt any spurt of adrenaline for what seems like hours. Now, suddenly, I have one. I use it to coil my legs and push hard off the riverbed floor and power up, power up with strength I had no idea I still had, through probably eight feet of water.

I break through the surface, my head finally out of the river. I can’t remember when my last breath was. The air is delicious. I’m only the distance from home to first away now. I don’t really know how I got so close. I don’t care. I swim with utter fury, with my last bit of energy, I’m sure.

One more stroke. One more stroke,
I keep telling myself.

I am completely done. I don’t have another stroke in me. I stroke again. I lift up my head and see Grant Balfour, a friend and teammate, lying on his stomach on a little platform jutting out into the river. Grant is from Brisbane, Australia, the guy who I have cut my hair to save a few bucks. “Give me the Brisbane,” I always say, and he gets out his scissors and has at it. He gives a pretty good haircut. He’s also good at scrambling over fences and navigating riverbanks, which is how he gets to the platform.

Grant is a reliever, and this is definitely a save situation.

He extends his right arm to me as far as it will stretch.

C’mon, R.A. You are almost there. Grab my hand, he says.

His hand is maybe eight feet away. I make a few more floundering strokes and reach out. I dog-paddle and flail. Five feet now. I keep looking at Grant’s hand. Grant’s hand is the most important thing in my world now. I am two feet away and I paddle a little more and reach and finally I feel Grant’s hand, feel it clasping mine, good and strong. He hauls me in toward the bank as if he were a tugboat. At river’s edge, he wraps his arm around me and guides me toward a small clearing, where I collapse and stay on the ground, sprawled on my back.

You okay? Grant asks.

I nod. I stay sprawled out for a few minutes. Eventually I clamber onto all fours. Grant helps me to my feet. I turn and look at the Missouri. I half expect to see a flying fish emerge, giving some biblical meaning to the ordeal I’ve just been through.

No fish emerges.

Finally I trudge up the bank toward the hotel, Grant guiding me the whole way. When we get to where the rest of the team is, they make sure I’m still breathing, and then the razzing begins about my oil-colored boxers, my bravado, my failed crossing.

Today’s score: Missouri 1, Dickey 0.

Hey, R.A., you do a heck of a dog paddle. You ever think about the Olympics?

If you were going to soil yourself, you should’ve worn a Depends.

They are ballplayers. I expect nothing less.

A few of my closer friends—Chris and Laynce—make sure I’m okay and quietly ask me questions and are quick to appreciate how close a call I’d just had. Back in the hotel, utterly exhausted, I throw out the boxers and tank top and take a scalding hot shower for about forty-five minutes, hoping to rinse off the contaminants before I sprout a third arm.

I lie on the bed and don’t have anything to say—not a common occurrence. I fall asleep for an hour. Chris makes sure I’m up so I get to the ballpark on time. We have a game against the Omaha Royals that night. I am not pitching, of course.

For the rest of the day and night, I reflect on my swim and thank God not just for sparing me but for teaching me. I began this crossing looking to be a hero, to use my strength and my will to forge some sort of epic transformation. I ended it as humbled as a man can be, nearly crushed in body and spirit on the banks of the mighty Missouri, left on all fours, in a posture where God could do His most significant work with me.

I jumped in the water thinking I was in charge. I found out He was in charge.

As I throw in the outfield before the game that night, swells of gratitude and humility keep washing over me. I don’t have a grand epiphany in Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium on June 9, 2007. It’s more subtle than that. God has already given me a second chance as a husband and father. He’s already given me a second chance as a pitcher. Now He has given me a second chance as a human being. When I was weeping underwater in the big brown currents of the longest river in North America, I was sure my time was over. God, it turned out, had other ideas, giving me a chance to see if a man who had spent a lifetime running away from the present could possibly find a way to embrace it.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011 CINCINNATI

It is late at night. I am sitting in my hotel room, surrounded by slumbering Dickeys (Anne and the four kids came up from Nashville to visit). I feel as if I am writing an obituary. Nobody died, so I guess I’m being a tad melodramatic, but today my friend and teammate, Carlos Beltrán, was traded to the San Francisco Giants. I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m pretty angry about it. Mostly, I’m feeling an acute sense of loss.

You’d think, with all my stops in pro baseball, that saying good-bye to a teammate wouldn’t be a big deal. But with where I am in my life—trying to be fully present with all of my feelings—it does feel like a big deal.

I’ve known Carlos for more than a decade, going back to our time as teammates in winter ball in Puerto Rico. We became closer still as Mets teammates the last two years. Anybody who has followed Carlos’s career knows how gifted a player he is, but what I appreciate is his generosity of spirit, his constant willingness to help young players like Jason Pridie and Lucas Duda—to help everybody. It is a side of Carlos that I think is completely unknown to fans.

Ask José Reyes which teammate was always there for him whenever he was going through a rough patch, and José will tell you it was Carlos. Late after one game earlier this year, I was in the sauna with Carlos and Duda and was fascinated to listen to Carlos share with twenty-four-year-old Lucas his thoughts about hitting—not so much the mechanics of it as the psychology of hitting and the thought process he brings with him to the plate. Carlos has never been one to cultivate the media—it’s just not on his list of things he regards as important—so this side of him is not widely known, but this is a good man and a good leader, a man who cares about other people.

When Pridie got called up from the minors, Carlos set him up with his tailor and bought him a couple of suits so he’d have something to wear on road trips. I know he’s done it for other guys too—not because Carlos told me, but because the players with the new threads did. Last night, when it became clear that a deal was close, Carlos took the whole team to a fancy Cincinnati steak house. I wished I could’ve gone, but I stayed back with Anne and the kids. You might find it odd that I didn’t honor Carlos by being there, but if I’ve learned anything in my itinerant ball-playing life, is that any family time you have, you better seize it, because your next good-bye is never far away. I heard later that Carlos spent $8,000 on the baseball version of a last supper.

As for the trade itself, I am trying to be fair and see all aspects of it. I understand the front office has a vision for the future and think they are getting a good deal in receiving young Zack Wheeler, a promising pitcher, from the Giants. I also understand that, as a free-agent-to-be, Carlos was just about ten weeks away from heading out the door anyway. But what sort of message does this send when you deal one of your best players when you are fighting for the playoffs? Doesn’t it say that Sandy Alderson and the front office don’t really believe in us? As I write this, we are two games over .500. Okay, we’re not catching the Phillies, but there isn’t a player in the clubhouse who doesn’t think we can make a run at the wild card. I look around the league and see teams with similar records to us adding players, not subtracting them. So in this moment the competitor in me is perturbed that we seem to be getting written off by our own organization.

Of course, Sandy and his lieutenants—John Ricco, J. P. Ricciardi, and Paul DePodesta—have to think long-term and sometimes tough decisions have to be made. Maybe Zack Wheeler will turn out to be as good as his scouting reports and the trade will ultimately be seen as a steal. I believe in Sandy. Is my reaction to the trade one of emotion more than a dispassionate assessment? No doubt about it. I am a ballplayer, an emotional one, a guy in the midst of a six-month grind. Dispassion isn’t in the mix for me right now. Either way, it doesn’t make writing this baseball obit any easier.

I know that for a lot of Mets fans the enduring image of Carlos will be taking that strike-three, game seven curveball against the Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright to end the 2006 National League Championship Series. I know, too, that there is a perception of him as a passionless player, a guy who has one and only one gear. No, Carlos doesn’t throw stuff and burn hot, but just because he isn’t demonstrative doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. He is one of the best players the New York Mets have ever had. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more even-keeled player—a guy you can count on to be the same person and the same competitor every day, whether he went 0 for 4 or 4 for 4 the day before. That’s huge in baseball, the ultimate get-up-and-do-it-again sport. I’m not making excuses for him; I’m just saying that Carlos is a pro’s pro, a man who makes a hard game look easy. He is somebody I’d want to have on my side any day.

I found out about the trade just before batting practice today. The clubhouse was stirring with the usual activity, guys getting treated and dressed, picking up their bats and balls, heading toward the field. I spotted Carlos at his locker. Hewas packing up his stuff, number 15 of the New York Mets nomore.