Doc: A Memoir by Dwight Gooden, Ellis Henican Page B

attention to them, Doc,” he cautioned me. “You don’t want to get tangled up in that. Sit down on the couch. Watch some TV. I’ll be back before you know it.”
    I grabbed a beer and sat. I left the TV off.
    In a minute, I could hear the ladies giggling in the bedroom. I looked up, and I could see them making out. The shorter one, I could see, had on purple-colored underpants, white boots, and nothing else. Through the door, I could see one of the women grab a handheld mirror and tap some white powder out of a little baggie. The tall girl used an ID card to push the powder into lines. I was mesmerized by their attention to detail—almost as much as I was mesmerized by them.
    I’d heard people mention cocaine in Tampa. It sounded like a scary drug to me. I had the sense, without really knowing, that people sold it in the projects. No one on the team had ever offered me any, and the topic only came up a few times. When outfielder Jerry Martin joined the team from Kansas City my rookie season, everyone knew he’d been arrested the previous October for buying cocaine. Along with Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, and Willie Aikens, he’d served ninety days in a minimum-security prison. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Jerry for a year but then turned around and reduced his suspension. None of the other Mets seemed concerned about any of it.
    It wasn’t like drug use in sports was a shocking idea. In 1985, six Pittsburgh Pirates—Dave Parker, Lee Lacy, Dale Berra, Lee Mazzilli, John Milner, and Rod Scurry had been called before a Pittsburgh grand jury and questioned about drug use in professional baseball. Their testimony led to drug trials, which made headlines. UPI called baseball’s drug problem the “number one sports story of 1985.”
    The team owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association began negotiating a drug policy, but those talks went nowhere. “These guys must think they’re dealing with the sugar plum fairy,” complained Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was pushing for mandatory drug tests. “We have players that need help and the union is trying to pretend that no one is using drugs.” Union president Donald Fehr said the players felt insulted by the owners’ “guilty until proven innocent” approach.
    In December, while I was hanging around Tampa, the union didtake one step: publishing a children’s coloring book called
The Pros Say It’s O.K. to Say No to Drugs.
It had messages from forty players—including me.
    Given where I was heading, is that ironic—or what? The Dwight Gooden page said: “If anyone tries to give you drugs, say NO! and tell your mom or dad.”
    If only I’d followed my own advice!
    But if I’d been scared of coke, all of a sudden the potent white powder seemed like something sexy women did. And these two seemed to have the mechanics down cold. Chopping up the powder. Lining it up just so. Taking long sniffs, first one nostril, then the other. Then they busted me.
    “Come on in,” Miss Negligee said with a laugh.
    She had just finished snorting a line of powder. She looked up from the mirror and pushed one of her nostrils closed and gave an extra sniff. She smiled and offered me her straw.
    She asked if I wanted to party.
    “No thanks,” I said.
    I was still nervous about messing with cocaine. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to use the drug. “I’m all right,” I said.
    There were two beautiful, half-naked women on a bed in front of me, and you couldn’t call them inhospitable. I was shy, but I was also a guy. I was just hoping they’d transition away from the drugs toward something I knew a little more about.
    “You’re in the major leagues, right?” the shorter, lighter-skinned woman asked, smiling at me.
    “Yeah,” I said, taking another sip of my beer. “I pitch for the Mets.”
    “Ooooh,” the other one said eagerly. “Come on over. We won’t tell anyone.”
    Pretty soon, the three of us were all doing vodka shots, as I joined them