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Story: Tim’s Journal, Part 1

By Karin S. Coddin
Archives - Dates and Topics 2009 online headlines for July 2009 click here for related stories: short story

7-01-09, 11:00 am

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I’m Tim, and I’m a drug addict. Crystal’s my drug of choice, but I also use heroin, OxyContin (gross, the Rush Limbaugh drug), crack, X. I’ve pretty much done them all.

This is really hard for me, because I’ve had to do this three or four times before, at other rehabs and in prison group therapy. And all those other times, I was there only because I was forced to be and I lied and left a lot of major shit out. Dark shit that was nobody else’s fucking business, not even my wife’s – well, my then-wife. She and my daughter are major reasons why I want to get clean, why I want this time to be different. But even if they can’t forgive me or let me try to make it up to them, I’m so tired of hiding in and from the darkness. To cop Jim Carroll’s line from one of my favorite books, The Basketball Diaries, I want to be pure. And the only way I can be pure is to deal with all the ugly shit that has made me feel contaminated most of my life.

I was born 32 years ago, here in LA. My dad’s a sports medicine doctor and my mom’s a homemaker, totally of the “stand by your man” school. My sister Di is six years older than me, and she’s a doctor too, an OB-GYN. Our parents, especially my dad, had extremely high expectations of us. He could be a real drill sergeant. He never hit us, but if we fucked up, it wasn’t pretty. We’d lose whatever privileges kids usually have and get a hell of a blistering lecture. Diana and I both did well in school and in sports – like I said, it was expected of us. Diana didn’t fuck up very often; she’s always been calm and rational, even as a kid. I, on the other hand, fucked up a lot. Nothing major – I tended to mouth off, and in my teens I was careless about curfews, refused to go to Sunday Mass, and got caught coming home drunk a couple of times. All of this pissed my dad off royally. I can only imagine how he’d have reacted if he’d found out that by the time I was 16, I was smoking pot most weekends and occasionally did Ecstasy and acid.

By then, I was my high school’s ace pitcher, and a couple of major league scouts had come sniffing around. This thrilled my dad, and he was convinced I’d end up in the majors after college. He obsessed over coaching me, which he did from Little League on. I was a fastball pitcher, even then addicted to speed and to throwing as hard as I could. My dad helped me develop a decent change-up and slider, not just to keep batters guessing but so I wouldn’t throw out my arm by the time I graduated from high school. He even helped me with hitting. I think he’d have done the same thing if I’d ended up playing tennis or soccer or basketball, the other sports I loved playing as a kid. But when I was 10 I decided that I liked baseball the best, and Dad focused his energies on honing my skills. He insisted I learn to pitch and hit as a lefty, though I’m naturally right-handed My dad knew that southpaws are a hotter commodity in the majors. He designed an entire physical regimen for me, and by the time I was 12 I felt like I’d been pitching with my left arm from the very start.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, probably on purpose. It’s just so goddamn hard to go back to that part of my childhood that looked and felt nothing like the fucking All-American dream my family seemed to resemble from the outside.

I chose baseball for my sport, at 10, as I said, because I knew Little League would put an end to those long summers spent at my grandparents’ house down in Del Mar. That was where we went for most of every summer from about the time I could walk. Put plainly, my grandfather – my dad’s father – used to beat the holy crap out of me whenever the urge struck him. I mean, not just over my typical fuckups but even if he didn’t like the expression on my face. And what really made him go ballistic was when I’d run up and down the stairs instead of taking them one step at a time. He beat me with his buckled belt, with their dog’s choke chain, or with his bare fists. And nobody did anything about it. Or even mentioned it. My grandmother was a kind-hearted person but she was so deferential to her husband that she made my own mom seem like Gloria Steinem by comparison. As for my dad, I don’t know whether this was how his old man treated him when he was a kid or if he secretly thought I deserved it, but he just allowed it, and my mom followed his lead. Actually, Diana hated it, though he never hit her. She begged him to stop but he ignored her, told her how good she was and that good little children never were struck. She worked in vain, to try to help me find ways to forestall if not escape the old man’s anger. Until I got too big she’d lift me up into this crawlspace under the stairs where he couldn’t find me.

I remember him beating me so hard that I’d throw up, and get beaten again for that. I remember the lies I’d tell my summer friends in Del Mar about bruises on my arms, sometimes on my face. I remember how difficult it was not to cry, but I knew if I cried he’d somehow have “won.” I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that the beatings themselves were already proof he’d won, though I did wonder what would happen to him if he tried this shit once I was big enough to fight back. I’m glad I never found out, because I’m fairly certain to this day I would have killed him.

Little League intervened, along with Diana’s summer job, and we quit going to Del Mar. We still saw them at Christmas, but at my parents’ home the house rules were different, and my grandfather never so much as raised his voice to me. He died of a stroke when I was 22. I didn’t feel anything at all, not even relief. I’d long since put him out of my mind and I didn’t even mention his death to my wife, for fear she’d start asking me about what he was like. Needless to say, I skipped the funeral.

My grandmother moved into a retirement community; I have no idea whatever happened to their house. All I knew was that I’d never have to see that old motherfucker or step inside that dark house again.

But back then, I felt my real liberation had come well before his death, when I left home for college, even if it was only across town. I’d won a baseball scholarship to UCLA. I’d been drafted, and by the Dodgers, to boot, and the pro scouts were now talking to me in earnest, but I never entertained the notion of going from high school right into the minors. With my dad a doctor and my mother an honors graduate in art history from Mount St. Mary’s, there’d never been any question about Di and me going to college. And I wanted to. I liked school, liked learning. And I wasn’t about to miss out on another few years of getting high and meeting and fucking hot babes. I was something of a horndog in those days. I dated cheerleaders, surfer chicks, prom queen-types in high school, never staying with any one girl for long. Give up more of that for A-ball in the middle of nowhere? No way.

My first two years at UCLA went by fast – a whirl of baseball, partying, and screwing. I pitched a no-hitter my sophomore year and was named to the All-Pac-10 team; I maintained a 3.9 GPA; and while I’d yet to have my first taste of crystal, I partook in weed, beer, and cocaine any chance I got. Most of my friends were jocks, baseball guys, whose idea of partying was pretty tame – keg parties, maybe a little pot. By the time I began my junior year, I was restless for newer and different highs. My old roommate, who’d been somewhat straitlaced, had dropped out to go into the minors. Luckily, my new roommate, a football scholarship guy, had an adventurous streak. One night not long after the term started, he said he felt like scoring some crystal meth, knew where he could probably find some, and asked if I wanted in. I was all for it. We headed out from Westwood to West Hollywood, where Scott said a stoner named Dan lived, a dude he knew from a shared sociology class the previous spring. “There’s always craziness going on in his apartment,” Scott said enviously. “Great weed – chronic, not the pussy frat-boy shit. Usually crystal, and the people, man, are something else.”

Upon our arrival I saw what he meant. Even though it was after nine, and a week night, eight or nine people, not counting Dan himself or Scott and me, were hanging out in this tiny apartment, drinking, smoking cigarettes and grass, passing around a blue glass pipe, and listening to KROQ. There was a drag queen in a flowered dress and high heels, and a couple of very hot actual women – one dressed like a dominatrix in black leather and the other tiny, olive-skinned, with huge sparkling brown eyes and dark hair that looked so silky I just knew it would smell nice. But the dominatrix was busy helping the drag queen with his bra and the little brown-eyed girl looked to have a date, some guy I think might have been in my huge freshman Intro to Philosophy class. In fact, I’d recently declared a philosophy major, partly to bug my dad, who thought it completely impractical, and partly to contradict the stereotype that jocks always picked “soft” majors. Maybe that first-year philosophy class could be the ice-breaker to wheedle me an introduction to the guy’s girlfriend.

Dan was a big, friendly blond guy, and he welcomed me like a longtime friend. Again luck was with me, because the first people he introduced me to were Brown Eyes and her escort, only they were named Maggie and Ryan and weren’t a couple after all, since Dan teased Ryan about having ditched his boyfriend Eric for the night. Maggie and I got to talking, and I was floored by her. She was so damn beautiful but also smart and funny and spoke her mind. She was a Comp Lit major and didn’t give a fuck about sports. But we really hit it off right away. So, too, did meth and I. From my first hit off the glass pipe I experienced a rush so goddamn exhilarating and electric it was almost enough to make me forget my attraction to Maggie. I left that night with her phone number and a little plastic bag of white powder.

My life hasn’t been the same since that night. Maggie and I got together as a couple on our first date, and we were crazy in love the way you are at 20. She didn’t especially like crystal; she did it a few times with me but at Dan’s she usually stuck to wine or grass. I loved tweaking, though, and couldn’t fathom how I’d gotten by without it. For the rest of my junior year, I used at least a couple times a week. I believed, and part of me still believes, that crystal actually enhanced my academic and athletic performance. I finished that year with my 3.9 intact, nearly pitched another no-hitter (goddamn that bloop single in the bottom of the ninth – it still hurts), and was named an Academic All-American on the NCAA baseball team. The baseball scouts were pestering me constantly trying to cajole me into their farm systems. But while I still loved the game and took pride in my pitching and even my not-bad-for-a-pitcher hitting, baseball was sliding down on my priority list. I wasn’t about to leave Mags, the love of my life. And I hate to admit it, but I was just as determined not to forsake my other love, crystal.

That summer, I bypassed an invitation to play semi-pro ball and took a boring, undemanding job at a campus bookstore, the kind of work that allowed me to be high pretty much 24/7. Maggie finally put her foot down, told me she was tired of never seeing me in an un-altered state, and threatened to dump me if I didn’t quit doing meth. I took her seriously – we were planning to move in together in the fall, Scott having flunked out and transferred to a Cal State college. So I promised her I’d quit, really meaning that I’d cut back to my once or twice weekly routine. But in mid-August, Dan’s connection disappeared and meth was scarce for a couple of weeks. After my third day on compulsory cold turkey, I was praying for death. Imagine the worst hangover you’ve ever had – the headache, the nausea, the simultaneous anxiety and depression – and then magnify that about a thousand times. Maggie wanted me to go to a doctor, but instead I managed to get Dan to bring me about a mountain of Valium. Then it wasn’t so bad – I pretty much slept off the rest of withdrawal.

I’d learned a valuable lesson. Not to give up tweaking, but how to deal with either enforced or voluntary withdrawal.

It still amazes me, though, that I was able to go back to regular if not yet daily meth use and function so well as a student, athlete, teammate, and boyfriend. Everybody, me included, figured I was a shoo-in for a Major League Baseball career. Maggie and I continued to fight a lot over my using, breaking up a few times about it, but we always seemed to find our way back to each other. And then I’d cut down for a while, and then my habit would creep back up on me and we’d fight again, break up again, and so on. All our friends thought we were the biggest drama queens. In retrospect, we probably were both somewhat hooked on the drama. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why she kept coming back. She had so much going for her, not the least of which was a 4.0 GPA and the hopes of one day supporting herself as a writer.

But Maggie and I had a real crisis about midway through our senior year. During Christmas break Maggie realized she was pregnant, and we both knew a kid was so not in our immediate plans. She had an abortion and we were both pretty torn up about it. For one, we’d both been raised strict Catholics and we had all that guilt going on. We didn’t tell anybody – our families would have freaked and it wasn’t exactly something we felt like sharing with either our “night people” friends at Dan’s or our more conventional acquaintances from the team or the Daily Bruin, respectively. I was determined to be there for Maggie, so I decided to get off crystal for good – and ended up OD’ing on about 50 Xanax and one last huge snort of meth, and having to be rushed to the hospital. I had a little crystal in my pockets too, so needless to say, I was outed as a drug user. My dad somehow talked the cops into charging me with only misdemeanor possession, but he didn’t wait for me to be released from the hospital to tear into me for what was at the time my biggest fuckup to date. He called me stupid, spoiled, selfish, and so on; he raged about how I’d let down my family, my teammates, and myself. But when he demanded to know if my, quote, “Mexican girlfriend,” unquote, had gotten me mixed up with drugs, I lost it. I tried to shout every cuss word in the book at him but my voice was raspy from the tube that had been shoved down my throat. My mom got all flustered and somehow found the gumption to tell us both to calm down.

But things were never the same between my dad and me. Where I’d once looked for – and sometimes found – pride in his expression, now I saw at best only suspicion.

The consequences didn’t end there. I was suspended from the baseball program for my entire, pivotal senior year. It even got mentioned in the Times sports page, though buried fairly far back, as my dad pointed out. The whole thing freaked me out enough that I didn’t do anything stronger than pot for the rest of my senior year. Maggie was devastated too. She’d finally gotten what she’d wanted – me off crystal – but not exactly how she’d hoped it would happen. And given her persistent Catholic guilt over the abortion, she was almost as depressed as I was. We clung together like a couple of old people or a couple of total nerds, rarely leaving our apartment except for classes, staying home most nights to work on our respective honors theses: hers on Octavio Paz and mine on Kant. Once in a while we’d rent a movie. We pretty much stopped having sex during that period. Instead we’d sleep knotted together in silence.

Things started to look up for us as graduation drew closer. It wasn’t just that the old man croaked, a fact that, as I said before, I kept to myself. I still ended up being drafted in June, and by the Dodgers, again, but in the third round. They were a little wary of me now, too, and they offered me a relatively modest contract with their Double-A team in San Antonio, the Missions, instead of the dazzling, six-figure deal with Triple-A that I’d hoped for before my OD. I was due to report to San Antonio on the first of July, and Maggie had accepted a year’s internship at the Times. We realized there would be no more carefree summers for us, and on impulse, we decided to drive to Vegas and get married. This way, even if we had to suffer a long-distance relationship for a year, we’d be doing it as husband and wife.

It was a great weekend in Vegas, maybe the last pure happy time I can remember. We had the ceremony at some Elvissy chapel that had us fighting laughter the entire ten minutes. Then we just wandered from cheesy theme-park hotel to hotel, drinking champagne and commenting on all the weird people we saw. Most of the time we spent in our generic hotel room at the MGM Grand, fucking our brains out like we hadn’t in months. All the hopes for the future that I’d thought I’d killed for good now seemed within grasp again. I made up my mind to pitch my fucking heart out in San Antonio, work like a dog to get back to top playing form, and then how could I fail to get called up to LA before the next season had even begun?

When we got back from Vegas and told our families, my dad was predictably pissed but kind of backed off from the usual tirade; I think he somehow realized it was unseemly to dress down his now-married son as if I were still a teenager who’d broken curfew. At least he no longer blamed Maggie for my problem with drugs. My mom and sister, along with Maggie’s folks, seemed surprised but more or less happy for us. We offered an olive branch to our parents by agreeing to have our marriage blessed by the Church the next weekend. It was a small, dignified ceremony – especially compared to our glitzy Elvis one – though I still wanted to laugh during the priest’s solemn intonations. Afterward, Maggie’s dad turned over one of his restaurants for a reception, where everyone – including our friends we’d barely seen since my OD – drank too many margaritas and danced to a salsa band. My parents, even Dad, actually looked like they were having a good time.

Maggie’s folks had always liked me, and had felt sorry for my recent misfortunes, which they attributed to stress over trying to juggle too many oranges at once. Of course, that’s exactly how Maggie had explained my overdose to them, but they doted on her and had no reason to doubt her version of events. They were more old-fashioned than my parents – who aren’t exactly bohemians – and they kept saying that Maggie should go with me to San Antonio, since she was now my wife. I wouldn’t hear of it – the Times internship was a fantastic opportunity for her, and anyway, this was the 1990s, not the sexist era of our parents’ generation. I wonder, though, if things might have turned out differently had Maggie been with me my first year in the minors. Probably not. Maybe subconsciously I was looking forward to being able to do real drugs again without fear of upsetting her. Maybe I was subconsciously hatching that plan ten years before I knowingly put it into play. I wasn’t even near being over meth. I viewed my OD as simply a freak accident rather than as an inevitable consequence of my dependence on crystal. Plain old bad luck, and so were the repercussions.

In short, none of the bad shit that had happened in January was my fault.

I was, though, relatively clean my first couple of months in the minors. Mainly I drank with the other guys. But I missed Maggie and UCLA, and I really wished I knew how to score some crystal. A few of the guys did greenies, and of course, lots did steroids, but I didn’t have much interest in either. Greenies were so mild compared to meth, not packing much more punch than a cup of strong coffee, as far as I was concerned. Plus, I knew I was under the microscope because of my senior year suspension at UCLA. I worked hard to get my arm in shape and my stamina up, and soon I was pitching middle relief, doing OK if not yet up to my old college form. Maggie flew out weekends or sometimes met up with me when we were on the road. The separation was hard on her too, and she kept reminding both of us that before we knew it October would arrive and I’d be back home in LA.

But as the summer drew to an end I got lucky, or so it seemed at the time. I was having a beer with one of my neighbors on a rare off-night – better than holing up in my practically empty apartment – and somehow the subject of drugs came up. This neighbor was sort of a character, an old hippie type of guy in his late 40s, and through him I found out where I could get some crystal. I met the dealer in a shitty bar in the seediest part of town, and I bought a lot of meth, about $500 worth. I didn’t want to risk being spotted with this dude on a regular basis, I rationalized. The minute I got home I snorted some – I preferred snorting to smoking, until much later when I began shooting it – and it was almost like my first time tweaking. Figuring I was smarter now, I tried to pace myself. None of the guys on the team seemed to notice – fuck, half of them were doing ‘roids or greenies or both. The following weekend, when I saw Maggie, she asked me outright if I was using again, and I lied and said I was taking legal supplements like Ephedra. She bought the lie, probably because she wanted to so badly.

The season ended and I was back in LA. I was somewhat disappointed I hadn’t been called up to the Dodgers or even to Triple-A Albuquerque, but the team brass told me it was a strong possibility for next year. If I worked hard in the off-season maybe I’d even make the big league roster after spring training. The team said I could improve my chances by playing winter ball in the Mexican leagues, but that interfered with my plans to use crystal, for the first time since my OD, without fear of detection that could once again cost me my baseball life. I told them I couldn’t ask my wife to make still another sacrifice so I could play winter ball, and they called me pussy-whipped but didn’t really press the point.

We found a new apartment in West Hollywood, not far from Dan’s, though he was off hard drugs and most of our other doper friends had either dispersed for post-graduation jobs or just drifted away. Maggie was working long hours at the newspaper and was usually tired when she got home. Without school or baseball I was bored and alone during the day, though I swallowed my pride and worked with my dad twice a week on my arm, my delivery, all sorts of ergonomic shit that he said would help me with my pitch location, which tended toward the inside.

It didn’t take me long to find a new drug supplier once I learned Dan was no longer running. Soon I was using several times a week again. Even though he’s a doctor and already held me in low regard for my OD, my dad didn’t notice either. He was actually impressed with my focus, my seemingly endless energy during our workouts. Maggie was another story. She figured it out fairly quickly, and she was pissed, really pissed. Just like old times. We’d fight, I’d clean up my act, and then I’d sneak and start using again. She caught me off-guard when she announced she would come back with me to San Antonio if I didn’t make the LA roster after spring training. She was finally catching on to my tricks.

I had a really lousy spring training, though. My concentration was shot from tweaking, and the pitch location problems that had started to improve when I was working with my dad returned with a vengeance. In Vero Beach, Florida, where the Dodgers train, it was all hot rain and frustration with myself. I was clean but this time, my body wasn’t rebounding the way it always had. I was the skinniest guy there, a beanpole at 6’2, and people were practically begging me to beef up with ‘roids to increase my strength and stamina. I became depressed, ready to quit baseball entirely, but Maggie and some of the coaches told me to hang in there. Even a couple of veteran pitchers – guys whose names you’d know – stepped in and tried to encourage me. I had the talent, they said; I just needed to work on my discipline and conditioning.

Maggie was the only one who knew the real source of my lackluster spring training, and she suggested I try therapy. She thought if I understood why I was so compelled to keep using crystal despite knowing it could ruin my career, our relationship, and my life, that maybe I could finally quit for keeps. Well, I sure as hell didn’t want some shrink prying into my life or trying to dredge up bad memories I’d never even shared with my wife. I flat-out refused, and she cried but let it go.

I was, however, reassigned to the Albuquerque Dukes, a bump up to triple-A. Maggie found a job easily with the newspaper there, unlike the Times a regular writing job doing restaurant and occasional book reviews. Having her there did help me, at first, keep away from crystal. My game also began to shape up and in June of that year I won my first start, giving up only four hits and an unearned run. About a month after that Maggie got pregnant again, and this time there was no question about keeping it. We were both walking on air, and while I’d secretly begun taking a few of those greenies to curb my meth cravings, I was determined that my crystal days were behind me. My career prospects were looking up, my wife and I were expecting a kid, and I really wanted to be a good father, even more than I wanted to make it to the majors.

I finished the year with a so-so record of 4-5, but an ERA just under 3. More important to me and certainly to Mags, I’d played an entire season without crystal, and I didn’t miss the greenies when I stopped taking them. I still thought about meth every day, but with Maggie living with me I was less prone to impulsively seeking out a new connection.

I did a fair share of cocaine on the road, though, with a couple of other guys on the team. Coke was a lot easier to run across than crystal. But it was fucking expensive, and its rush, while a hell of a lot more potent than greenies’, was relatively short-lived. Both factors kept me from getting hooked, along with my reluctance to do anything to upset Maggie. She really liked her job and wanted to work as close to her due date as she could, so we decided to stay in New Mexico instead of going back to LA at the end of the season. Our families were disappointed, but we placated them by returning for Thanksgiving and Christmas. By then we knew the baby was a girl, and we chose the name Katya because we liked it and thought it sounded Dostoevskian.

On those short trips to LA I did some coke – which I’d convinced myself I didn’t like – with some old friends from UCLA, but as long as it wasn’t meth I could rationalize that I was more or less clean and sober. Unfortunately, the Albuquerque cops didn’t see it that way in January, when I was pulled over for speeding on my way home from buying a big bag of coke off one of my teammates. Like my senior year overdose, my arrest brought major consequences. Maggie was so beside herself that her obstetrician ordered her to bed for two weeks. My lawyer arranged a plea deal that assessed me $10,000 when we could least afford it, and both the court and the team management insisted I check myself immediately into rehab for a minimum 28 days. Not only did I miss the start of spring training, I damn near missed the birth of my daughter and had to beg for the court’s permission to leave Drunk Camp for Maggie’s eight-hour labor. Our joy over Kat – she was so pure and perfect – was tempered by my miserable situation. Thank God Maggie’s parents flew over, because I had to leave them – my wife and infant daughter – to head back to complete the remaining two weeks of my rehab stint.

There against my will, I was sullen and cooperated only enough to keep from being tagged a hopeless case. I aped what they wanted to hear about twelve steps and denial and the moral inventory; I daydreamed during the endless, infantilizing group sessions and high-schoolish “Just Say No” videos; and fought sleep during the equally endless “drug-alogues” and “drunk-alogues.” Mine should have won an award for fiction. I said I’d had a normal childhood, had done great at sports and in school, and that I’d only picked up the cocaine habit in the minors out of loneliness for my wife and LA. The main thing I got out of Drunk Camp was another addiction, to cigarettes. I’d never smoked tobacco, but rehab was so boring and depressing, and our only freedom from the incessant anti-drug, anti-booze indoctrination was the intermittent twenty-minute break period where we inmates would go outside, talk about nothing, and smoke cigarettes.

They wouldn’t even allow caffeine in there, yet every patient was almost immediately pressured to go on one antidepressant or another. I had no interest in any drug that provided no buzz, but I was afraid a refusal would look bad to my probation officer and the team. I gamely signed on for Zoloft, which made me kind of irritable but otherwise had no effect as far as I could tell. I stopped taking it the day I was discharged.

That same day, Maggie informed me she was going home to California to stay with her folks. She was exhausted, not just from the baby, but also the stress of my arrest and exile to rehab. She didn’t think she could handle my road trips once I rejoined the team. I’d never seen such dark hollows under her eyes; it almost looked like she was wearing the eyeblack grease some players use as a sunblock. She insisted that she wasn’t leaving me, that she still loved me, and that soon we’d all be together as a family. But I knew she was running away from me, and having achieved a new level of fucked-uppedness, I couldn’t exactly blame her. But even I knew better than to drown myself in drugs to blunt the pain. One more fuckup and I was likely to lose not only my family and my career, but my freedom.

The guys on the team were sympathetic, but I was rusty as hell, back in the bullpen and struggling to make up for lost time. I’d missed all of spring training, and I was half-surprised not to have been demoted still further down the farm system food chain.

Because I had to pee in the drug-test cup on a regular basis, I couldn’t even have a beer. Being this alone with myself was torture. I couldn’t sleep more than two or three hours a night, and I was reluctant to call Maggie too late; she was so tired and sleeping poorly herself. All those dark hours between midnight and dawn, wanting my wife and kid, wanting to sleep, and most of all wanting to get high. I couldn’t concentrate to watch TV or movies. I played hour after hour of computer solitaire or poker. I chainsmoked cigarettes. Sometimes I’d go for a long walk, studiously not thinking about anything except the hollow sound of my footsteps, the tired rhythms of my breath, against all that darkness.

Amazingly enough, though, I was starting to regain my previous season’s form. Maybe it was because my mind welcomed a concrete focus, an absorption in a self-contained system outside of which nothing else of my life outside of baseball existed. At the beginning of May, one of our starters was called up to LA and I got his place in the rotation. The pressure I put on myself was intense. I kept thinking, if I pitch really great, maybe I’ll be the next one called up, and Maggie and Kat and I can all be together. I was rocked my first start, so obsessed with not walking anybody that almost everything I threw was 98 miles an hour and right over the plate. But my second shot, coming five days later, started out like a dream. I had a no-hitter going into the fifth, and I was in the zone – calm, completely focused, in total control. The catcher signaled for a changeup. I wound up, focused, and released. I heard a sharp crack as the bat made contact, and for a second I thought, fuck, there goes the no-no. Then I was overwhelmed by such fierce pain that I collapsed on the mound, clutching my left elbow. The agony was so intense that it wasn’t until later I realized what had happened – not the ball, but a huge piece of the broken bat had struck me with the velocity of a supersonic missile. If it had hit me in the face it could’ve blinded or even killed me. My reflexes had always been good, and I prided myself on my defense; Greg Maddux was one of my idols. Sometimes I still wonder if drugs had somehow slowed my reaction time, even a millisecond, but time enough to have ducked that broken bat coming at me.

What a way to finally get some drugs. The pain was bad enough to merit morphine. The injury was worse than I’d expected. I needed immediate surgery to patch together my shattered elbow with a bunch of rods and pins. I was so stoned that it didn’t really sink in when the doctor told me it would be half a year before I could even begin rehabbing my arm. I do remember exaggerating my already considerable pain so they’d give me more morphine, and I remember making all sorts of bad puns whenever the doctor mentioned my humerus bone – “I see nothing humorous about it” – stupid shit like that.

Hospitals don’t usually send you home with morphine unless you’re dying of cancer or something. Flying home to LA, mildly stoned on Demerol and my arm in a cast, it was dawning on me what a totally fucked-up predicament I was in. Rehab or not, mine was the kind of injury that ended pitching careers. A goddamn freak injury. Without baseball, what was I going to do with my life? How would I support myself, much less my family?

I was paralyzed with self-pity, but not to the extent of burying my head in the sand. I knew I could count on my dad to give it to me straight, no false hope or Horatio Alger pep talks. He examined my arm, looked at the X-rays, and told me dispassionately I’d never pitch again.

I was still under contract and drawing a paycheck, but I was consumed with anxiety over my uncertain future. Maggie didn’t pressure me. She’d started doing freelance writing and editing from home so she could be with Kat, and she didn’t mind me just hanging around the house, getting to know my little girl who was the only light in my gloom of self-pity and painkillers. We rented a little house in Hermosa Beach. I forced myself to run on the beach every morning because the exercise, combined with the drugs, helped me not to think.

It wasn’t long before meth was creeping back into my life. I ran into an old druggie friend from college, Andy, at a club in Redondo Beach. He was a systems analyst for TRW, very white-collar yuppie, and for him crystal was simply a way of sustaining eighty-hour work weeks and a horndogging social life. Once my cast came off I began surfing most mornings with Andy. Surfing and tweaking at the same time became my new obsession. I was tapering off the painkillers, using them mainly when I needed to conceal from Mags how wired I was.

Remember on The X-Files, how alien abductees were said to suffer from “lost time”? Whole blocks of time that just seemed to have vanished from their consciousness? That’s kind of what happened to me for the first couple of years out of baseball. I know rationally that Maggie was losing patience with me and we were fighting a lot. I want to remember, but don’t quite, my little girl taking her first steps, saying her first words. I’m sure that my dad was giving me shit, my mom was clucking meekly, and Diana was trying to get me to go to graduate school. But the memories are hazy and feel twice-removed, as if I’m remembering someone telling me about all of this rather than my own experiences. I got off meth when Andy lost his job and had to move to the Valley. I managed to track down another former acquaintance from “the Dan days” who turned me on to heroin. It took Maggie a while to realize I was using junk because its effects are so different from crystal’s. To humor her, I was going to therapy once a week. The shrink was low-key and I just fed him a lot of bullshit about being depressed over losing baseball, having no direction, blah blah blah. I pretended to take his suggestions and pretended to both him and Maggie that I was taking the antidepressants he told me to get from my GP. It was easy, then, to blame my lethargy and spaciness on the Zoloft. I assured Mags that the doctor said eventually my body would adjust and I’d be less zoned out. Man, I was so devious. If I’d applied half the energy I expended on getting drugs and trying to conceal the fact from my wife to a Ph.D. program, I’d have an endowed chair in Philosophy right now. If I’d spent half that energy trying to beat the odds and developing my right arm, my natural throwing arm, maybe I’d have a Cy Young right now. But that’s all water under the bridge, just more shadows.

When Maggie finally did find out about the heroin – and the lies – she threw me out. I was pretty much flat-broke, and for a while I slept on the living room floor of Brian, my drug dealer, occasionally running for him in return for room, board, and meth. I’d gotten bored with smack and the lethargy. Brian put me in touch with a quack who rapid-detoxed me, again in return for running some drugs, and soon I was back on the meth rollercoaster. On the rare occasions I had my wits about me, Maggie let me see Kat, though always with her supervision. On even rarer occasions still we’d end up in bed together, and she’d beg me to get clean and I’d promise to try. Once, I made it an entire month, and we discussed my moving back in. Then I fucked up again, and that’s when she filed for divorce.

--Excerpted from THE SHADOW MAN, copyright 2007, 2008 Karin Coddon; available at Amazon.com.


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