Basketball Junkie: A Memoir by Herren Chris & Reynolds Bill

Author:Herren, Chris & Reynolds, Bill [Herren, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

In October 2000 I was introduced at a press conference as the newest member of the Boston Celtics, one of a handful of New England guys who had ever played for the Celtics.

The Celtics were everything when I was a kid. I idolized them. When I was out in the driveway with the spotlight on the basket, playing imaginary games in my head, the shot clock ticking off while I made the big shot to win the game, I was Danny Ainge, Larry Bird. Every ball I bounced, every shot I took, it was always about the Celtics. My father had taken me and my brother to a big rally in Government Center in Boston in 1986 when they won the title. I was eleven years old. I even had an autographed picture of Larry Bird, which said, “To Chris, keep playing,” signed on a place mat from a Boston bar that my father and his cronies used to frequent.

But that day at the press conference none of that mattered. That day should have been one of the highlights of my life. Instead, it’s all a blur, half-remembered, if remembered at all. My life was much too painful by then. Everything was about just trying to get through the day and keep the lie going, because the reality was that by the time I got to the Celtics, I was hooked on OxyContin.

I started getting into opiates that summer, when Heather and I left Denver for what was supposed to be a happy summer with our baby, Chris, in Fall River. Actually, I had started in my junior year at Fresno after I came back from rehab, and was getting off cocaine. I’d always hated cocaine, even when I was using it, hated coming down from it, the depression, the empty feeling. Cocaine brought me to a point where I couldn’t look at myself. Vicodin was different. Vicodin was mellow. It slowed things down. And for some reason, I could play basketball on it. The first few times it made me sleepy and tired me out, but after a while it was like a pep pill. Kevin Mikolazyk and I were chasing it everywhere, “med-seeking” from emergency room to emergency room. Eventually, we had to pull back the reins, because it was becoming constant chaos, complete with NyQuil to go to sleep.

But in the summer of 2000 I discovered OxyContin.

It was the first time OxyContin had been in Fall River, and I began using it.

Why did I take it?

That’s the million-dollar question.

Was it just my insecurities, fears, anxieties?

Was it my addictive personality that had never been dealt with, even if I had lived a fairly clean year in Denver?

Was it the fact I never had felt comfortable in my own skin and still didn’t, even if on the surface it seemed like I was living some dream life?

Was it all of the above?

Whatever it was, if drugs were around, odds were I was going to take them.

If it was cocaine, I was going to snort it.

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