After a year of treating me, the outpatient clinic dropped my case. They were moving further west, and there was no effort on my part or theirs to have my case transferred to their new clinic. My therapist said, “Julie, you must take care of your alcoholism or we can’t continue treat you.”

It wasn’t so much that I was powerless against alcohol, a precept of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was powerless period. I didn’t care anymore whether alcohol played a role. I was discharged with a script for a three month supply of medication, which I filled but never finished.

Life marched on at a sleepy pace while I hovered in limbo, between being fine and not so fine. When summer arrived and the pace picked up, I worked at a restaurant where the staff turnover was high—the shifts lasted for as many as seventeen hours, often with no breaks and just one meal. Off medication, I lost weight at a fast clip, becoming thin once again.

The unfortunate victim of scarcity one night, while waiting on my last lunch customers, I missed the compost of rigatoni and red onion thrown together by the kitchen staff. When the chef told me that I was too late for food, sparing no expletives, I told them all where to go and what to do with themselves, announced that I quit, and threw my apron down on the floor, walking out. The Maitre De caught up with me before I reached my car, coaxing me back with the promise that I could have any dish from the menu.

After that night, I was nicknamed “postal girl,” a name that rang too true for my liking. Spinning now out of control, I looked for something or someone to anchor me.

Sliding down a stream atop a mountain, I was again the ten year old girl who needed to be rescued from falling. Rather than call my old clinic, I turned to another type of professional. A frequent customer where I filled in tending bar, his name was Ronny and he was a chef and well known marijuana dealer. I liked him because I felt natural in his company and found him funny.

Brittle, irritable, and with no notion of how to calm my frayed nerves, I felt beholden to him when he offered me a supply of black market Valium and would take no money for it. I reloaded on Valium a few times, sitting and taking the bowl of weed he invariably offered. His Spartan studio apartment was dimly lit; the yellow light from the lamp on his nightstand was, for me, a lighthouse in the distance that promised shelter from wild, rocking seas. By the end of the summer I was sleeping with him, and by fall we were an exclusive couple. There was an ease between us that leant to a symbiotic connection, the rich timbre of his baritone voice striking a deep chord in me. Through shared bad habits, and, on some unspoken level, through pain, we bonded together.

Ronny had a bone degeneration disease that diminished his size, impacted his gait, and caused him chronic and considerable pain. By age thirty seven, he’d had two hip replacement surgeries, a steel reinforcement rod inserted along his spine, and a titanium piece fused to his spinal column at the back of his neck. Except for the months of recovery that each surgery took, he always worked his legitimate profession, as either sous chef or head chef. When he was laid up, he didn’t have worry about money very much, as his modest living expenses were handled easily by his disability payments and dealing profits.

In his illegitimate profession, he played a relatively minor role, picking up his stash of mostly marijuana from a supplier in a nearby town, a lower link in a long chain. He was a discreet and steady worker who spent years serving a strong customer base on the east end of Long Island.

His endurance and work ethic despite his disability were admirable. He was a scuba diver with a passion for underwater life, having studied marine biology in college before dropping out and switching to culinary studies. With his pain minimized by near weightlessness, he had the high he sought to maintain through drug use on dry land.

Less admirable was his distinctly changeable persona. From sleepy-lidded laid back he transformed into rabid rage within a matter of seconds. While he binged on alcohol and frequently cocaine, unsuspecting coworkers, bosses, and friends were often the targets of his fury. He’d strike out, hitting or spitting at whoever earned his wrath, and his frequently perplexed victims usually refrained from striking back, either too shocked to react or unwilling to be accused of hitting a cripple.

Anger was his bandage for pain, a pain of depths so great that others should have to pay. Even so, there was no reason to suspect that he would attack me, as the people he targeted were men. I felt safe with him, enjoying the comfort of expensive dinners and good weed. Riding a current of easy, dreamy living, I coasted into dependency, little knowing that I was circling a drain.

Things changed a few months into our relationship when, one night, after girlfriend and I prepared a drunken dinner for Ronny and her mate, while Ronny and I walked home, he laced into me with a mouthful of hateful insults. Face contorting into a snarl, his nastiness was severe, and the bait too tempting for me not to bite. I was wholly unaware of the sleeping beast that Ronny would awaken in me. Tearing my sundress off, I stripped naked on the sidewalk of Main Street, smack in the center of town, and screamed nonsensically at Ronny.

The fight did not stop there, but continued in his apartment. His rage was loud and explosive, but his eyes were stony. My anger was an inferno, burning hot, flames of screams. When my rage was spent, I sat down on a chair and cried.

Ronny threw his scuba tank across the room, hitting the wall. There was a pause in action before I heard the loud sound of a blow followed by a jarring, stinging pain on the left side of my face. Stepping away, he looked sidelong at me, eyes hard with his hand still balled into a fist. Ears ringing from the force of his punch, I stood up to face him.

Lighting a cigarette, I put it out in my left forearm. Sparks flying, I burned a perfect circle in my skin, singeing black along the edges. At the time, I saw it as a powerful act.

“There’s no way you can hurt me more than I can hurt myself!”

That and the stench of burning flesh was the last thing I recall from that night.

I don’t know how I made it home but I did, because I woke up the next day in my bed, my head throbbing. Ronny punched me in the left upper quadrant of my face, leaving a mottled, raised red mark that spread from the outer edge of my eye and across my temple and cheekbone. I felt humiliated and sick to my stomach. Did anyone I know see me naked on Main Street?

I ran into Ronny a few days later on the street. Since I had started seeing him, my world shrunk and I lost touch with most friends. I didn’t show up for social engagements and stopped calling people. My connections to others gone, I couldn’t think of what to say. Drained, affect flattened by Valium and weed, I had nothing to offer anyone. Ronny was my closest friend. I believed him when he said that he would never hit me again, even though my instincts told me differently.

Late at night, there were times when Ronny would cling to me, shaking and desperate, whispering his dire affection. I went back to him when I should’ve run like hell, succumbing to Ronny’s re-creation of me, my identity obliterated through the eyes of an obsessive lover. My world shrinking further, I circled the drain.

On a hung over morning while I fumed about the noise of jackhammer on the street below, he launched himself on top of me, choking me with one hand as he placed a pillow over my face with the other. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds that I was pinned there on the bed, Ronny depriving me of breath.

The ruptured blood vessels where his fingers and thumb pressed on my throat were impossible to hide. Teased, I was not received well at work when globs of make up couldn’t sufficiently cover the purple marks. Everyone thought that they were love bites, or hickeys, and that would make me seem adolescent and sleazy. Embarrassed, I told my supervisor how the marks really happened. She didn’t say much, but looked at me in horror. She never mentioned it again and I suspected that she didn’t believe me, the truth too unpleasant to deal with.

Imprisoned, isolated, and sucked down the drain and into a world of drugs and violence, I became a live wire, a caged animal, striking when my opponent drew too near. I learned that striking first was a protection—that he was far less likely to attack if I came after him first. When he barged in on me in the bathroom, I hit him. Since I didn’t know when the attack was coming, I hit blindly, unconcerned with the time or place of my preemptive strikes.

While in a bar one night, he whispered something profane and disgusting, leaning into me. Spitting out vitriol, beads of saliva spraying my face, my reaction was unexpected, instinctive, and animalistic. His face inches from mine, I bit his nose. He drew back, blood spewing from his bite wound. I slid off the bar stool and walked out, wandering the winter street for hours. The scar that faded to a white line on the bridge of his nose was a constant reminder of my strange and savage behavior.

Not that there always warfare between Ronny and me. In peaceful moments, we took care of each other—I gave him an audience after he’d had a hard day, and he drew me baths to calm my nerves. For my birthday one year, he bought me scuba diving lessons, and, a few months later, for his birthday, we went on a three week vacation to the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, Cancun, and Cozumel, Mexico.

Scuba diving was a mind expanding experience, better than any drug, and I could see how Ronny had become a diving fanatic. The beauty of the underwater world at ninety feet visibility was awe inspiring, the endless blue of the sea and the life it contained dominating my vision as I drifted off to sleep.

On the night of his birthday, the peace broke. Slurring and stumbling, in a typical drunken tirade, he said that I would be “better off dead.” Way behind him, I had only a couple of drinks with dinner. His target for the night, his pattern was to continue tormenting me until he lost consciousness. I escaped to our hotel room, left alone for only a short time before Ronny, stinking of tequila, lurched into the room.

I went out on the balcony, closing the door against his suggestion that I throw myself off. Normally afraid of heights, emboldened by anger, I stepped barefoot onto the railing. I imagined falling, the bones of my body cracking on the sprawling concrete patio below, skin splitting open on impact.

Caught off guard by the sobering image of my bloody death, and thanks to the ocean wind blowing me back, I stumbled off the railing and fell into a chair. It took me a few moments to catch my breath. Arching my back, I inhaled a mixture of salt water and tropical flowers, and, my eyes turned upward, I was distracted by the beauty of the night sky. In what had appeared as a zero gravity abyss, I saw jewels of precious stars—diamond dust scattered amongst decipherable constellations.

In that moment, a flicker of faith ignited. I inhaled another breath, my senses opening up wider, deeper; the sound of the surf a lullaby. My feeling of faith was not attached to any doctrine or deity, but was an awakened awareness of being part of something bigger; something beautiful; something vast and divine. At the same time, I realized that I’d hit the bottom that my alcohol counselor had warned me of years before. Instead of despairing, I was grateful. It was a moment when the wall of haze came down briefly and I woke up.