Darkness to Light, page 13
When you have a burgeoning drug habit, surrounding yourself with enablers and habitual users is one thing, but rolling with people who have bigger narcotic appetites than yours is like hitting fast-forward on your drug problem.
Coke was everywhere. If I wasn’t crushing it at Scott’s mansion or at the Shore Club with famous one-name superstars, I would sneak it back to my house in California. It was easier if Liza and the kids weren’t visiting. (Liza had moved back to New York after Miami.) Definitely if Greg and Kamal weren’t in LA. I was still perfecting my standard speech about how it wasn’t mine. It’s for the strippers. I give them coke and they fuck. I just want to make sure they have a good time.
I was a drug addict plain and simple. I had arrived at this terrible, unwanted, inevitable conclusion almost on cruise control. It felt like destiny. I had been building the résumé before I had ever rolled my first joint. Or, to be clearer, others had been writing it for me.
My father physically abused my mother, my only source of protection, right in front of me. She screamed and cried and struggled. I was helpless and felt like a coward because I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It stripped me of any power before I knew what those things meant. I’d see my mom beaten. Then we’d go to sleep several feet from one another in our twin beds in the upstairs bedroom of my grandmother’s house on 131st. I could hear Mom struggling to turn over. Her sighs clouded the air like a suffocating black smoke that would be way more destructive than any puff of narcotic smoke I could ever inhale.
These were things that I would never recover from. I haven’t to this day.
My strung-out father disappeared. People made fun of me when they saw him bingeing. I was an only child and any positive view of myself was taken from me before I could even comprehend that I had it in the first place.
I convinced myself that everything I was doing was destiny, but I cringed when I heard Cathy Odom’s voice in those moments of indecision and despair. “Lamar, you are your own light,” she’d tell me. “You are a light for all others.”
But at Scott Storch’s house or the Shore Club, that light went out. I was still, unbeknownst to myself, two years away from the pit of hell, but at least I could get high right now. On one particular weekend at Scott’s house, I poured out what I thought was a reasonable portion and used my Black Card to divide the lines. I would snort each nostril. The lines looked like they went on forever. I would wait for the drip. Then the aftertaste.
But most of all I craved the rush, the high. That’s why you do coke. It’s the best friend you’ve ever had. All the blood rushed to my cock. I wanted to fuck. I’d get two strippers from the club. Always two. Money on the dresser and gone by the time I got out of the shower. I did this almost every night.
I chased the high, hit after hit, wanting it to feel like that first time. If it didn’t work, I’d do another line. Then another.
One night, after several hours of chasing that first time, I had no clue what time it was or even how in the world I’d ended up at Scott’s mansion. A strange feeling began to come over my body. Time slowed down. I couldn’t swallow. My body was burning. I was cold. Then I was hot. I had what I thought was the worst case of nausea ever. A wave of anxiety like I’d never felt in my life hit me like a tidal wave. The fear paralyzed me.
I tried to stand, but my 230-pound body felt like air. I lifted off the ground . . . floating to nowhere and everywhere. The light went out and I crashed to the floor. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes rolled back in my head. My lungs tightened. My heart fluttered.
People rushed into the room screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything. Someone threw a towel over my head and ushered me through the back door of University of Miami Hospital. The official diagnosis was that I was dehydrated and needed IVs and fluids to bring me back around. Yeah, that was it. Anything but the truth.
But I knew the truth.
That was the first time I overdosed. I came within minutes of dying. I nearly killed myself chasing that high.
Depression is like having a demon with a sword at the back of your neck every step you take, but when you turn, he won’t talk to you. The fact that you can’t look him in the eye, or are unable to, is the most frightening of all. You don’t want to acknowledge him. But he’s there. His presence compounded my anxiety. Where do I go? How do I escape? How do I sleep? Everything affects everything else, and no escape is ever good enough . . . not even the cocaine and strippers. You know ahead of time nothing will ever make the demon go away. He will always be there. Drugs are your best defense and worst enemy.
I was no longer in control.
That demon will always be on the back of a twelve-year-old kid. That’s when I first saw him. A kid with no power. It’s easy to torment a kid who can’t fight back. But I’m not twelve anymore, and that’s the most frustrating thing about it. I’m thirty-nine as I write this. I’m not supposed to be afraid or weak.
But I am.
My mother is still dead. Sometimes I had to ask myself if I was, too.
After my overdose, doctors begged me to slow down, get rest, and eat right. Take care of your body, Lamar; it’s the only one you’ve got. Back at home, I felt like I’d been hit by a train. I stayed in bed for days and was frustrated at how weak my body felt. I was angry at myself for letting it come to this. I vowed I’d straighten out and get my life back on track. But deep down I could feel it coming, festering, waiting, calling my name. The demon was gone, but I knew he’d be back. But no! This time I would win. I had to.
Training camp for the 2005–06 season was only five weeks away.
22
When Rudy Tomjanovich stepped down as the Lakers’ head coach in the middle of the 2004–2005 season, the organization was prepared to go on an exhaustive coaching search to find the ideal candidate. But that never materialized because Kobe Bryant only had one coach in mind: Phil Jackson. Kobe worked extremely well with Jackson and wanted someone he trusted. So, on June 15, 2005, the Lakers hired Phil Jackson after just one season away from the team.
When Phil returned to El Segundo, he brought his intricate yet highly successful triangle offense, which was masterminded by his longtime assistant Tex Winter. The Bulls had won six championships with its triple-post offense, and the Lakers won three more in the span of twelve years, so everyone knew it worked. It was based on both player and ball movement that was designed to encourage team play while not detracting from individual talent—all in the interest of getting the best possible shot.
To be honest, the triangle offense confused me at first, and it took me a while to pick it up. I would sometimes be out of place, make the wrong pass, or force a shot when it wasn’t necessary. I could see Kobe getting frustrated with me, and he’d do his own coaching. There was something that just resonated more clearly when someone like Kobe, who could run any offense, pointed out things on the floor to help the learning process.
“We’re going to use you in a lot of areas,” Kobe explained to me one day in practice. “The elbow, mid-post, short corner to break apart defenses. I’m going to see a lot of overload defenses, so with you flashing to the high post, you’ve got the talent to be able to catch the ball and look opposite to make those reads and make the right pass. When I get doubled and make that pass, most teams don’t have anybody with your length and size to make the right pass. We’ll win championships with that hockey-assist play because when I kick it to you, you’ll be the one making decisions.”
Kobe trusted me.
That was really the cornerstone of how well we worked together. He understood the value of what I brought to the table and how to bring it out of me. Honestly, it took a couple seasons to get the kind of patience and understanding of spacing to make it work for us, but obviously the end results were worth it.
In Phil’s first year back, we ended up making the 2005–2006 playoffs despite dealing with injuries to Kobe and me. We even went up 3–1 against the second seed, the Phoenix Suns, in the first round. Ultimately, however, their depth, pace, and the floor generalship of eventual MVP Steve Nash was too much to overcome, and we lost in seven games. But we were headed in the right direction.
In the fall of 2005, Liza was pregnant with our third child, and the baby was due on Christmas Day. We made all of the necessary arrangements for a family that’s expecting. Liza and the kids moved back to Los Angeles so we could be together for the birth.
I bought a Range Rover, which I got off Jason Kidd for cheap—like $9,000—so Liza could have more freedom getting around with the children.
I was so excited for the baby’s arrival, but the only problem was that the Lakers would be playing in Miami on Christmas, and I would miss the birth. But during a home stand in mid-December, Liza began having contractions and was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, the same hospital where LJ was born nearly four years earlier.
I was convinced we were going to have a second girl. I just thought that’s what the universe was going to give us. Since we didn’t know the sex before the baby was born, we hadn’t picked out a name. It didn’t help that Liza and I couldn’t come close to agreeing.
For boy names, my first choice was Luke, after my close teammate Luke Walton. I was going for basketball names. I thought Dominique would be great, too. But Liza wasn’t feeling it. She wanted the name Jayden. Ever since Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith named their son Jaden, Liza couldn’t get it out of her mind. Plus, it would work for a boy or a girl.
On December 15, we welcomed Jayden Joseph Odom into this world. I held him in my arms and stared directly into his huge brown eyes. The next night the Lakers had a game against the Wizards. As I chipped in fourteen points and eleven rebounds, my feet didn’t touch the ground. I thought of my beautiful boy the entire time.
After Jayden was born, Liza wanted to have her tubes tied. She was twenty-four with three children, and we decided that our family was complete. However, when she met with her doctor, he told her about a patient in a similar situation whose infant died at three months from a heart defect. The patient regretted tying her tubes. The doctor stressed that Liza shouldn’t do it. And she didn’t.
For much of the early part of 2006, life felt right and we were as close a family as we’d ever been. Because Liza was a young mother, she had hired a nanny to help her out with the children. Liza put the kids in a private school in Marina Del Rey, driving them back and forth every day. Destiny went to classes with the son of Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G. His widow, Faith Evans, would drop off and pick up Biggie’s son every day. When Destiny got her yearbook, we all gathered around to see the legendary Christopher Wallace’s son. He looked like a light-skinned Biggie.
In June 2006, my aunt Sandy passed away. She was the third of Grandma Mildred’s daughters. Liza, the kids, and I returned to New York in the middle of the year to pay our respects.
We had bought a home the previous summer in the hidden waterfront town of Atlantic Beach between Queens and Long Island. The plan was for Liza to raise the kids there in the off-season.
She would say that I always got lost in the summer. I would disappear and go my separate way to either Miami or some far corner of New York. We would bicker about it constantly. She thought I was hanging out with my friends in the city too often. And I was. Sure, I would always check in with her when I was out, but because I wasn’t present, it was a problem. She wanted me home. I wanted to be in the city.
After the funeral, we stayed at the Atlantic Beach house for the summer. Liza’s mother moved in to help take care of our three young children. Liza set up Jayden’s room right next to our master bedroom, which was complete with a baby monitor so she could keep tabs on him.
On the morning of June 29, Liza woke up and checked on Jayden as she had done every day since he had been born. She got his bottle ready and walked into his room. He was still, and his blankets were undisturbed from the night before. Liza felt happy. She noticed that he was on his stomach, which was a bit unusual. But he was still sleeping and looked content so she didn’t disturb him.
She went downstairs and joined her mother in the kitchen. There was a pot of coffee on the counter. The smell of decaf wafted on the air. The sunlight shone through the bay window, filling the kitchen with natural light.
“Good morning,” Liza said cheerily.
“How’s Jayden?” her mom asked. “Is he okay?”
Liza stopped in her tracks. Her blood went cold. Why wouldn’t he be okay?
She dropped her coffee mug and raced back upstairs, taking two steps at a time. She burst into Jayden’s room. He was lying there in the exact same position. His blankets were undisturbed, wrapped around him. She picked him up and turned him over.
His face was a dark blue. He wasn’t breathing.
Liza screamed hysterically. Liza’s mother, a registered nurse, immediately took Jayden.
“Call 911!” Liza’s mother screamed. Liza frantically dialed the number.
The operator who answered the phone was distant and emotionless. Liza would recall for years how cold he was. But an ambulance and fire trucks were dispatched in minutes. Emergency crews rushed into the house and dashed upstairs, immediately taking Jayden away in the ambulance. Liza and her mother were screaming uncontrollably. They were still in their pajamas.
“We can’t wait for you,” said an EMT as the ambulance sped off. A police officer told them to get in his cruiser, and he drove them to the hospital.
I had spent the night partying in Manhattan, and Liza called me from the back of the cruiser.
“Something happened to Jayden,” she shouted into the phone.
“What?” I said, waking up in a haze. “What happened to LJ?”
“No! Jayden!”
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong with LJ?”
For some reason, it just didn’t register with me that the problem was with my newborn son. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I got dressed and took the long journey to South Nassau Communities Hospital, where our entire family was gathering. Liza and her mother called aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins.
My cousin Sherrod drove me, and it seemed like there was traffic and construction everywhere we turned. I took forever to get to the hospital, and all I could think was that when Liza needed me the most, I wasn’t there.
I was the last to arrive at the hospital. I was quickly ushered into a private room where Liza was waiting. The room was freezing, and Liza was wrapped in a hospital blanket. All we knew was that the hospital was running tests. That was the only information they gave us. Fifteen minutes after I got there, a doctor entered the room and grasped Liza’s hand. There were tears in the doctor’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “As a mother I’ve experienced crib death, too.”
Crib death.
That was the first time I had ever heard that term. I didn’t know what it was. Jayden had died from sudden infant death syndrome. SIDS is when a healthy baby less than a year old dies from unknown causes, usually in his or her crib. Doctors think that babies sleeping on their backs are less likely to die from SIDS. Liza put him to sleep on his back. When she found him in the morning, he was on his stomach.
It just didn’t make sense to us. How could our baby just die in his crib? This couldn’t be a real thing. I was stunned, numb, almost emotionless. I couldn’t move.
I did not cry then. Or the next day. I did not cry for Jayden for three years. I thought if I cried it would make it real. I did not cry so that he might live.
The doctor brought Jayden into the room where Liza and I could hold him one last time. She handed him to Liza. She gripped him tightly as she sobbed.
“Do you want to hold him?” she asked through tears.
I took him in my arms and was immediately struck by how heavy he felt. His body was cold. He looked peaceful but didn’t move. I pulled him close to me, pressed his small body to my chest, and leaned forward. I rocked back and forth with my son’s body in my arms. I couldn’t form a thought, much less keep one in my head.
I was lost. I handed Jayden back to Liza and held her as if for the first time.
Later that night, after Liza had gone to bed, I sat on the front porch of our home with Greg and a few friends. In a daze, I talked a mile a minute. I spoke about things I had never talked about before and haven’t since. Opening a restaurant. Starting a car dealership. Learning how to play an instrument. Going to India. I couldn’t control my thoughts. My son was dead.
The next several days were a blur. I couldn’t escape what was happening to our family. As a man, I had to step up. There were duties I felt only I could do. I returned to the hospital the next day and arranged for the autopsy. I organized family gatherings at the house and finalized funeral arrangements.
Everyone grieves differently. Liza spent a lot of time in her room. She didn’t want to see those who came to pay their respects. She just wanted to be alone. People would occasionally go upstairs and talk to her for a few minutes. I tried to accommodate everyone. I greeted people and showed them around the house. I even took several people upstairs to show them Jayden’s room. Liza came out of the master bedroom and shot me an angry look.
“It’s not a museum,” she snapped before slamming the door behind her. She didn’t want anyone in Jayden’s room. She felt violated. I quickly apologized to her from behind the closed door and went back downstairs.
When Jayden died, Liza had a lot of nervous anxiety and sorrow. She would often go into the exercise room on the second floor of our house and walk for hours on the treadmill. There was a wall-mounted TV in the room. One time, a commercial for a religious artifacts store came on. At the end of the commercial, in purple ink (her favorite color), were the words “Jesus Loves You.” To Liza it was a message. She was overcome with emotion and collapsed to the floor.
In the following weeks she just wasn’t herself. We both struggled to communicate with one another, and I felt us drifting apart. But I couldn’t let that happen. Not now. I had to be strong. I had to be the rock. Liza would, in her grief, try her best to open up.
