Doc: A Memoir (27 page)

“I can’t live like this,” I told myself.

The only person I spoke to regularly was Ron. He’d get takeout shrimp from the Red Lobster and sit in the room while I ate it. He kept saying, “Come stay with me. I’ve got room. This is too depressing. We’ll come up with a plan.”

I wouldn’t budge. The thought of staying in the room seemed horrible. The thought of leaving seemed even worse. I knew this was no good for my disposition or my sanity, hiding in a room all day with the TV on and the curtains closed. But I couldn’t bear the glare of going outside. Truly, I hadn’t felt this low since I was lying on the bed in my Long Island apartment, missing the World Series parade.

One day in June, Ron came to the hotel with our friend Carl and another guy. “You gotta get out of here,” he said. “I’m worried about what’s happening to you.”

They didn’t threaten me exactly, but it was close. It was like the three of them had come to move me out of there, and they weren’t taking no for an answer. What gave them the right? I was really starting to think I wanted to die.

“Okay,” I said finally, just to put Ron off. “I’ll come and stay with you tomorrow.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” For the first time in weeks, he seemed relieved.

I excused myself and went into the bathroom, glad that was over and hoping they would leave. But when I came out, the three of them had taken all my clothes out of the closet and off the chairs where I’d left them and loaded everything in Ron’s car.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“You said you were coming over,” Ron said.

“Tomorrow,” I corrected him. “Tomorrow. Give me my stuff back.”

Ron refused. I demanded. Ron refused some more. We argued back and forth for almost an hour.

“You have no right to take my clothes,” I told him.

Eventually, Ron sent the other two out to the car. They returned to the room with my things.

“Tomorrow,” Ron said as they finally left me alone.

I didn’t leave the next day. Or the day after that. But the confrontation with Ron must have planted something in my head and opened my heart a little. On Sunday morning, I was lying in the king-size hotel bed. The curtains were still closed. I had the radio on. I was just lying in bed looking up at the ceiling, thinking about how messed up things were and how they couldn’t possibly get any better. At some point, I started talking to God.

“Look,” I said, “if you can pull me out of this mess, or at least get me a couple days to get my head right, I’ll turn my life around and get back on track. I have to do something to get some focus, or I really will lose everything.”

Just then, a song came on the radio. It was one of those gospel songs you hear on Sunday mornings, a song you probably wouldn’t hear any other day of the week. The singer had a giant voice that sounded like it could probably blow the roof off a crowded church. I’d never heard the song before or the singer. But it will stay in my head as long as I am alive. The singer’s name was Marvin Sapp.

“I never would have made it without you,” he sang.

Never would have made it,

Never could have made it without you.

I would have lost it all.

But now I see how you were there for me.

It wasn’t just the words. It was also the powerful way they were sung. Together, they pounded against me and cut through my fog. Hearing that song on the radio in that hotel room at just that moment, maybe that was the higher power people in recovery are always talking about. I’m not a real religious guy. I certainly wasn’t at that time. But something undeniable came over me.

And I can say

Never would have made it,

Never could have made it,

Without you

The song went on for five or six minutes. It wasn’t a short song. And it hammered home that message over and over again. It overwhelmed me.

I got up. I walked to Dunkin’ Donuts. I came back to the Comfort Inn. I took a good, long shower and let the hot water roll over me.

I called Ron.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But if it’s okay, I’m gonna stay with you for a couple of days.”

Ron didn’t hesitate a second. “I’m on my way,” he said.

In twenty minutes, he was at my door.

“Wow,” he said when he came in. “You look great.”

That’s the day things began to change.

Saving My Life

Fame Game

I
MOVED INTO RON’S HOUSE
in Old Tappan, New Jersey, and started doing a little better right away. I felt a little weird, living with Ron and his wife, Angela, and their teenage daughters, Brianna and Sara—like what business did I have mooching off these nice people? But the whole family was totally welcoming to me. They didn’t ask a lot of questions. They never said, “How long are you staying?” or “When are you planning to leave?” They just let me live with them and build up my confidence and figure out what I was going to do next.

I lived with the Goldsteins for several weeks. Then I rented an apartment in Edgewater and continued the slow process of trying to pull myself back up. I made myself eat more than Dunkin’ Donuts. I began working out at the gym. I started checking in regularly again with my mom and my sister Betty. Clearly, they’d been worried about me. I tried to reconnect with my older kids. My son Dwight Junior moved up from Tampa and started living with me. He had been working
hard building his music career, and he wanted to make some New York connections.

It wasn’t all perfect. It wasn’t as if I’d had a miraculous rebirth. I never stopped drinking. Every once in a while, I also used cocaine. I kept my worst instincts at bay by attending a day program in Manhattan called the Addiction Institute of New York, which was started by some people who used to work at Smithers. I definitely still had a lot of issues.

But I was far better off than I’d been lying in bed with the curtains closed at the Route 17 Comfort Inn. Most important, I wasn’t feeling like giving up anymore. Ron and I started talking about what my next move should be.

I had two big events on my calendar. One I was extremely excited about. The other one I was dreading. I was only hoping the two of them wouldn’t somehow collide.

I knew that on August 1, I had my induction into the Mets Hall of Fame. I could still hardly believe my good fortune with that. It felt like a vindication to me. And I also had a court date coming up. I didn’t know when exactly. The case kept getting delayed. My lawyer was talking to the prosecutors. Various negotiations were going on. I was worried that the criminal case would scuttle the Hall of Fame. God, I hoped not. Who knew when I might get an honor like that again.

Since my arrest, there had been a flurry of stories in the papers recounting almost every bad thing I had ever done. I wondered if Jeff Wilpon was already regretting his call. The bad-Doc publicity seemed to be everywhere. I’d gotten used to the papers publishing long chronologies, laying out every mistake I’d made since 1986. I didn’t like it, but I was used to it. But what my wife did, so close to the induction ceremony, caught me totally off-guard. Still spitting mad at me and blaming me for outrages true and false, Monique spoke to the
New York Post
and totally unloaded on me.

“
WIFE: GOODEN LEFT KIDS HIGH AND DRY,
” the July 24 headline said.

She accused me of abandoning her and the children. She called me a deadbeat dad. She said she had no idea where I was or how to reach me.

That wasn’t true. Clearly, I’d been a bad husband in various ways. But I’d never, ever, ever run away from my kids. Accuse me of things I’m guilty of. There are more than enough of those. And my recent whereabouts had hardly been a secret since I’d left the Comfort Inn. I did an autograph signing at a hotel in New Jersey. I played in a charity softball game. I appeared at a baseball fan fest. It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to track me down. I didn’t want a public feud with Monique. That was a bad idea for many reasons. I knew how dirty she could fight. I did what seemed right. I made double-sure my kids had what they needed. I tried to stay positive and look the other way.

Monique wasn’t the only one I thought might try to derail my Hall of Fame induction. I got a call from my nephew Gary asking me what was going on. It turned out Darryl had dropped another of his little bombs. “Straw called,” Gary said. “He’s worried about you. He says you’re doing drugs and you’re dying.”

“What? I’m fine, I’m doing good. I’m gonna be there.”

This was becoming a pattern with Darryl, telling stories that had a kernel of truth. But he’d make the problems sound far, far worse than anything that was actually going on. And then he’d call people like Sheff or Monique or even Dr. Lans and say what a concerned friend he was. Of course, he’d never mention that he was doing many of the same bad things I was, worse sometimes.

Darryl could be very convincing, and Gary sounded genuinely concerned. “Are you sure?” Gary asked. “He’s telling people you’re doing terribly. You’re living in a fleabag hotel.”

Now I’d had some rough days back at the Comfort Inn. But I promise you, it was no fleabag, unless fleabags have started offering Jacuzzis and flat-screen TVs and Red Lobsters next door. On Darryl’s part, this felt like wishful thinking to me. I had the distinct idea—I couldn’t
prove it but I don’t think I was wrong—that Darryl wasn’t too thrilled to be sharing his Hall of Fame spotlight with me. It was “Doc and Darryl, Darryl and Doc” all over again.

And this wasn’t the first time Darryl had started downing me in the buildup to a big Mets alumni event. In 2008, a few months before the Shea Goodbye ceremony, he was down at spring training in Port St. Lucie when he gave an interview to our mutual friend Bob Klapisch. The headline in the next day’s
Bergen Record
summed up the piece fairly well. “
GOODEN OUT OF CONTROL,
” it said.

Darryl admitted we hadn’t spoken for a year, but he made it sound like I was totally out of control. He said I was “in the middle of a long, downward spiral,” that my life “had turned into a blur of old addictions.” The way Klapisch wrote it up, he made Darryl sound like a perfect little angel and me totally on the skids. “As Gooden drifts out of control, Strawberry has found structure, if not peace,” Klapisch wrote.

“It broke my heart, really,” he quoted Darryl as saying. “Doc is such a great guy, I love him forever. But he never got away from the people who ruined his life. He’s still out there with them, doing crazy stuff. So I keep busy with other things now.”

What a phony!

I certainly had my problems. But why was Darryl blasting them everywhere, with his own exaggerations thrown in? Didn’t Darryl have his own issues with drugs, alcohol, and reckless behavior? I didn’t feel any need to run around saying alarming things about him.

I saw him after the story was in the paper, and I asked him about it. “I didn’t say that,” he told me. He tried to blame our old friend Ray Negron. All I knew was that, with another big ceremony coming up, Darryl was at it again. I just hoped his stories—and Monique’s—weren’t getting too much attention in the Mets’ executive suite.

The Mets never blinked.

If team officials ever got cold feet about putting me in the Hall of
Fame, no one ever said anything to me. To my great relief and appreciation, they didn’t seem rattled at all.

My mom flew up from Florida for the Hall of Fame weekend, and it almost felt like a family reunion. My kids Dwight Junior, Ashley, Ariel, Devin, and Darren and my grandson, Emiere, all came. My nephew Gary, who was finishing out his career as a Met, was there, along with his wife, Deleon. So was my ex-wife, Monica. She and I had been married for sixteen years. She’d been with me for a lot of the things I was being honored for. I was happy to share the weekend with her. Monique was too angry to come. She stayed back in Maryland with Dylan and Milan, the two littlest ones.

The Mets put on quite a show. We had a charity luncheon on Saturday with fans in one of the new Citi Field club suites. People brought 1980s Mets memorabilia for Darryl, Davey, Frank, and me to autograph. Lots of reporters came, including many of the beat writers who had covered that World Series team. They seemed to feel as much emotion as we did. I was happy to pose for pictures in a Mets cap.

“I beat myself up over so many things,” I said. “I didn’t live up to expectations but nobody had higher expectations for me than me, and I let myself down a lot. But the fans never gave up on me.”

I’m sure everyone knew I was still struggling. But no one seemed to dwell on that. This was a weekend for celebration.

“I am deeply, deeply honored by this,” I said. “I’ve had chills since I was told about it. I’ve always wanted to come back and right the ship. The Mets have always been on my mind and in my heart. Now it feels like a homecoming. Everything feels right, and this is where I belong.”

The celebration culminated at Citi Field on Sunday afternoon before a blowout 14–1 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Maybe the new Mets should have let the old-timers play that game.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to a crowd like that. I thought I might have trouble containing my emotions as I talked about how blessed I felt to be getting this honor with Frank, who signed me to my first
contract, and Davey, my first manager, and Darryl, the player I’d be paired with forever whether I wanted to be or not. I’d just speak from the heart, that’s all.

At the stadium to support us were several other members of the Mets’ Hall of Fame, fanning out on both sides of the podium. The group included Bud Harrelson, Rusty Staub, Ralph Kiner, Keith Hernandez, Mookie Wilson, and Gary Carter. A lot of talent there and a lot of old friends.

All of us looked a little worse for wear since we’d actually run those bases. And there was a lot of teasing back and forth. Keith and Mookie and Gary kept making fun of all the extra pounds I’d put on. “Hey, it’s the Nutty Professor!” Mookie said. I certainly didn’t think I looked like the rotund Eddie Murphy character. But they kept coming over and patting my belly and breaking out in laughs.