by Wayne Coffey
So I clammed up. Made stuff up. That was unfair and manipulative, and now she finds herself in a marriage with a guy who may be well-meaning but is doing everything possible to push her away. A guy who is damaged.
A guy who, like so many other sexually abused children, is tormented and shamed.
I am having a difficult year on the mound, and an even worse one in my marriage. Every time Anne and I talk, I hold out hope that it will be amiable, but most of the time we argue.
One afternoon in early August, eight and a half months pregnant, Anne calls me. In the clubhouse. She has never done that before. She never would.
I think the worst. Has something happened to one of the kids?
We need to talk. You need to come home now, Anne says. She’s hysterical.
What’s wrong?
Come home now, she says. If you want any chance at having this marriage work, you need to come home now.
I can barely swallow. My throat feels constricted. All around me, guys are getting ready for the game. I have an idea what I am getting ready for, and I deserve it.
I tell Mike Boulanger that I have to take a three-day personal leave. He sees the look on my face and says, Go. I get a six a.m. flight to Nashville. As the plane descends, I look out at the Nashville skyline, terrified about what is going to unfold with Anne.
Carter Crenshaw, our pastor, meets me at the airport.
I am praying for you and Anne, but the one thing I can tell you is that you have to be completely honest with her, Carter says.
Anne is at her parents’ house. When I see her for the first time, her eyes are red. She looks as if she’s been crying for days. I want to dissolve into the rug in her father’s office. The wood still looks three feet thick and I feel about three inches tall.
Jen, a family friend and therapist, is there to offer support and help us through the process.
I want you to tell me everything, Anne says.
I don’t know what to say, where to begin. I’m responsible for her pain. My guilt is overwhelming. The next two hours are excruciating. I leave the house not knowing if our marriage will survive. I leave wondering if I’ll be one of those fathers who can see his kids only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and every other weekend.
My heart isn’t in baseball, but I have a job I have to hold on to, a paycheck we need. I finish the season with the RedHawks with a 9–8 record and a 4.92 ERA, the sort of numbers that get you released. I have no clue where I am going. I have no clue if I’m going to get home after the season and be a single dad. I pack up my stuff at the end of the year, my eleventh in pro baseball. I drive back to Nashville and get off Interstate 40 East at Exit 204 and go straight to West End Community Church, where I am meeting Anne and Carter. I pull into the parking lot. I pray for God’s mercy. I know I do not deserve it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BOTTOM
Bad things go through your head when you spend too much time alone with your shame. Horrible things. This is where I am at the end of September. When the season is over, I return to Nashville and move into our old house (we still haven’t sold it), while Anne and the kids are in the new one. This is how Anne wants it for now.
I’m not sure if I can trust you, she says. I’m afraid that you are a different person from the person I thought you were.
I don’t try to talk her out of it. There’s no point in that. This isn’t about winning an argument. It’s about regaining her trust.
It’s about rebuilding what has been broken.
That is not an easy thing to do after you have been unfaithful.
It is not easy at all.
How could you do this? How could you lie to me and deceive me? Anne asks.
She deserves to have answers. She deserves that and a lot more. There is nothing I can say to convey how sorry I am. Nothing.
I don’t blame you for feeling angry and betrayed, because I did betray you. All I can do is come to you humbly and admit my wrong and ask for your forgiveness.
Maybe in time I can forgive you, she says. But I don’t know when that will be. I am just so scared. I trusted you so completely. Do you know how much I trusted that you were an honorable man?
What can I tell her?
Nothing. That is what I can tell her.
I don’t even know how it happens. It’s not planned, and there’s little emotional attachment to the person. There’s just a sense of escape, a no-strings-attached simplicity to it. The affair just happens, and then it’s over, except for my guilt and shame over committing a sin and shattering a marital vow. Those things do not go away, ever. They are things I live with every day.
Every morning for an hour I meet with Carter. I tell him everything, share every last failing of mine. Carter is compassionate towards me but he doesn’t baby me, and I don’t want him to baby me.
You have to stay in the ring and take Anne’s punches and not fight back, he says. You have to own everything you did.
I stay in the ring, and I stay in the old house too. I walk in the yellow front door and look at a mostly empty living room. I sleep, or try to sleep, on a white couch with red flowers. I see Anne and the kids during the day and go back to the house at night. It is dark and lonely. I am dark and lonely, so it’s a good fit. Things are so bad, Anne is thinking of changing the locks on the house, fearful that I might drive over and pick up the kids and take off. I stare out the window and take an inventory of my sorry life.
I am a minor-league lifer whose career has been one prolonged disappointment.
I am a man who was sexually abused as a child, with no equipment to deal with that trauma.
I am a man who desperately wants to bury the truth of his past, but there’s no hole deep enough to do it. I am a hypocrite, a man who masquerades as a devout Christian who has betrayed his wife and God.
My self-esteem is so low, it doesn’t even have a reading. God has blessed me with health and intelligence and a beautiful family, and look at where I’ve led them. I’ve turned my life into a hopeless tangle of problems.
I lie in the darkness and pray for God’s help, but I am fighting it.
Why would God want to help someone like me? I think.
Because He’s infinite and compassionate and He forgives you, I remind myself.
One morning I wake up on the couch and feel a bleakness I’ve never experienced before. I don’t know what triggers it. It doesn’t matter.
Maybe I should just end it now. Maybe it’s time for me to stop all this pain once and for all.
I think about options. Carbon monoxide? That’s a possibility. We just built a new garage; the old carport would’ve had too much fresh air.
A knife or a gun? Not in a million years. I don’t like blades or bullets.
What about going out and enlisting in the Army and going to Iraq, or having a high-speed car wreck without a seat belt? That should get the job done.
My mind is spinning fast, way off-center. The options blur together. In my heart I doubt that I will follow through on these thoughts. I’m much too afraid to do that, and there’s too much I want to reconcile. I want to win back Anne’s trust and her family’s trust and be a loving father to our children. I want to make amends and humbly ask God for mercy, and I want to be in a healthy marriage where I can be myself, scars and all. The problem is that I am beating up on myself so hard that the toxic voice inside me won’t go away:
You’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever loved or cared about. You’ve done the worst thing a man can do to his wife. You are not even close to being the man you pretend to be.
The voice is convincing because it is using the awful truth against me.
So, what’s the point? Why continue the charade? Isn’t it easier to be done with it?
I fight back. I’m not listening to this devil’s diatribe. I hear the Holy Spirit: You are no quitter. You have too much to live for. You’ve made horrible mistakes and you’ve hurt people, but you have the Lord in your heart and you are loved.
You can’t take the easy way out, I tell myself. Is that what you want to teach your children: when the going gets tough, the tough take their own life?
The suicidal thoughts continue to infest my psyche as fall turns to winter. One day I’m strong. The next day I come up with a new, pain-free way to check out, two massively conflicting forces dueling for my life. The more I think of leaving my children fatherless, the more abhorrent the thought becomes.
Slowly, mercifully, I regain my resolve.
Choose hope. Don’t choose despair. Choose hope. Fight harder than you ever have on the mound or anywhere else. You need to give that to God and Anne and the kids and yourself—to be a man and put your life back together. The voices continue to rage at each other. My torment runs deep. I choose hope.
I PULL UP into the parking lot of a little run-down office building in the Green Hills section of Nashville, next door to a beauty salon and art gallery. It’s a Friday afternoon. I am here to see a man named Stephen James. He is a counselor and therapist. He has been recommended to me by a friend. I take a creaky elevator up to the third floor. I am afraid and wary when I walk into his office. For years I have had preconceptions about counseling: that it’s for the weak-minded, for people who are lost and don’t know how to find their way, and that it’s a bunch of touchy-feely fluff. Now that I am the lost one, my preconceptions are about to change. I am in a place of secret surrender, yearning for help but still terribly reluctant to open myself up to get it.
Stephen’s office has two chairs and a couch, and a window overlooking a Ruby Tuesday. I am face-to-face with this man, Stephen. It’s too late to skip out and order potato skins. We shake hands and I sit down. I eye him warily. He is about my age, with sandy-colored hair and blue eyes and a warm demeanor, but it’s not going to work with me. I am good at stiff-arming people, keeping them a safe distance away. I’ve been doing it my whole life. Stephen looks me over. I can tell he’s looking me over. I am wearing sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt. Maybe I brushed my hair. Probably not.
I look disheveled and I’m sure he notices—how could he not?—but he doesn’t remark on it.
Stephen says: Tell me what brings you here.
I’ve been going through a little bit of a tough stretch and some people thought it would be a good idea for me to talk about it.
Do you think it’s a good idea?
You are highly recommended and I have an open mind, and I thought it would behoove me to give this a chance.
Stephen nods. He looks directly into my eyes. He lets silence fill the room. He and I both know that I didn’t really answer his question, and I suspect he knows I am mostly full of crap. It makes me very uncomfortable. Whenever I talk, I can tell how carefully he is listening. How present he is with me.
That makes me uncomfortable too.
What’s up with all the pauses? Can’t we just talk? I feel like saying.
Stephen asks a lot of questions.
Are you willing to be completely honest with yourself and with me?
Can you tell me about what’s going on with you right now, and how you are feeling in this moment?
If we do work together, are you willing to be committed to the process, even though it will be painful at times, probing into issues that are hiding behind walls you’ve probably spent years building?
I tell Stephen I understand it will be painful, but of course I really don’t understand. I don’t know what issues I have or what walls he’s talking about. Mostly in that first meeting I bob and weave and give him inauthentic boilerplate and platitudes, answering questions as if I were being interviewed on SportsCenter.
I have spent years honing the ability to be genial to the world, but letting almost nobody into my private, fractured piece of it. I allow myself to be as vulnerable as a boulder. Stephen knows exactly what I am up to.
This guy has perfected the art of practiced sincerity, Stephen says to himself.
For the whole hour I am with Stephen James, I am asking questions of my own, to myself. Is this someone I can trust? Someone who I can share the deepest, darkest secrets of my life with—secrets I haven’t shared with anybody else on earth?
Is this someone who won’t leave me?
Even as I sit in a chair across from Stephen, I feel enormously conflicted. Part of me wants nothing to do with therapy or delving into the past and all the pain that’s going to come with it. The other part is tired of hiding and telling half-truths and wants to be free.
What’s it going to be? I ask myself. You want to keep going down the same grim track, or do you desire the rich, joyful life God wantsfor you?
I shake hands with Stephen.
I will see you next week, I tell him.
All winter long, I take the creaky elevator to the third floor and do the work I promised Stephen I would do. I give him the SportsCenter answers at first, but Stephen calls me on it. It’s the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I tell Stephen about the babysitter. I tell him about the fights in school, and the reckless risk taking, and the nights spent in abandoned houses, and the secrets I kept from Anne, and about how certain I was that if I kept moving and kept starring in sports that I could outrun all of it.
I tell him all about the guilt and shame I’ve lived with, sure that if people knew the real R. A. Dickey, they would want nothing to do with him.
I tell Stephen that now that he knows all this, I am terrified that he will leave me, too, the way so many others have.
Isn’t that how it always goes? People abandoning you? People using you and then going on their way?
I will not leave you, R.A. I promise you that I will never leave you, Stephen says. The room is still. He looks me in the eye. I don’t want to look back at him. Stephen says, Look at me and listen to me, R.A.: I will never leave you.
I believe him. I do. I want to cry, and I do a little. But mostly I hold myself back.
I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I know how painful this must be, Stephen says.
As the weeks turn into months, the scabs gradually get peeled off all the old wounds. I am raw and vulnerable. It’s as if somebody backed up a garbage truck to the house and dumped every last thing on the front lawn.
Where do you start picking things up, and where do you put them?
I don’t know. I have no clue. But I do know Stephen will be there to help me find out how. He is the first human being I have ever unconditionally trusted—the first person I can share everything with, a skilled and steadfast guide who is leading me on the scariest and most important journey of my life.
Even in my pain I know what a blessing that is.
I spend the whole winter searching for my true self and being okay with what I find. I spend it trying to reconcile with Anne and throwing my knuckleball against the gym wall and baring my soul with Stephen. Gord Ash of the Milwaukee Brewers calls and invites me to minor-league training camp. It is the only offer I get. Gord is the assistant GM to Doug Melvin, who moved on to the Brewers after the Rangers let him go. Even if I don’t make the Brewers, their top farm team is right in Nashville, meaning that I could continue the work with Stephen.
What are the odds of that—getting your one and only offer from an organization with a top farm team in your hometown? Exactly the place I need to be while I am fighting for my soul.
Thank you, God, for this miracle, and for the miracle of providing me with the perfect person to help me turn around my life.
I have a ton more work to do on myself. I am learning that the truth-telling process—taking stock of who you are—isn’t tidy or predictable. But as I head off for Arizona and spring training, I hold more hope than I have in a long time. I have let almost everything out, told Stephen almost every secret.
I am becoming a free man.
FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2011
Rangers Ballpark, Arlington, Texas
It’s 2:02 on the scoreboard clock and I am in the visitors’ dugout, being flooded with a Texas-size torrent of memories. The field is pea
ceful and exquisitely manicured, the quiet before batting practice almost surreal. But inside I have so much going on, being back in a place where I have some of my greatest memories—and some of my worst. I look out at the office suites beyond center field and think of Doug Melvin’s face the day he retracted my $810,000 contract offer in the summer of 1996. I look on the mound and see the place where I gave up six home runs to the Detroit Tigers and tied a modern-day record for gopher balling as a neophyte knuckleball pitcher.
But on that mound I also see the place where I also made my big-league debut in 2001, and where I won my first game, in relief, two years later. I see a club that Anne and I were a part of when we had our first three children, Gabriel, Lila and Eli, and where I became friends with quality people like Mark Teixeira, Michael Young, Jeff Brantley, Rusty Greer, and Jay Powell, among others.
I see the place where I underwent a complete metamorphosis—from conventional pitcher to knuckleballer—and dealt with a wild ride of emotions and results in the process.
Through my time in Texas, I played briefly for Johnny Oates and Jerry Narron, and then for Buck Showalter, who was the first manager to really give me a chance. I had fantastic coaches in Orel Hershiser, Mark Connor, Rudy Jaramillo, Bucky Dent, Lee Tunnell, and Andy Hawkins.
Being here reminds me of one of the enduring challenges of living on this side of eternity: how to live fully in the pain of a moment as well as the joy of a moment. Learning to walk through this world holding both has been one of the real gifts my God has given me.
My life here was not always easy, but it was rich, and I have much to be thankful for about it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INTO THE MISSOURI
How many times have I been here, at this window, in this exact place? Ten? Twenty? How many times have I told myself that one day I will stop with the excuse making and take the plunge?
That one day I will prove to everybody and myself that I mean it—that this isn’t just the usual testosterone-fueled ballplayer bravado?
