An acquaintance, Jill, told me a new club was opening—Faith, named so because it was in an abandoned bank edifice. And it would be after-after hours.

“Hooray!” I thought. “I can continue to do drugs, have anonymous sex, and let the pounding house music a DJ, Chris Citadel, would play blot out my problems—MY problems.

I went to the opening at four in the morning on a blistering hot Maryland summer day. Chris played a long litany of house, and I danced and flirted and snorted coke. As was de rigeur now, I had to scurry to the bathroom several times as blood fell from my nose and seemed like it wouldn’t ever stop.

When I got it to stop—I bought more from a swarthy dealer with shifty eyes. Up my nose it went.

Finally, at noon, it was time to empty the place. I couldn’t bear the thought of going home, as usual, facing my life and those huge problems I mentioned, having to think about how my approach to their solutions—drinking, drugs, sex, all manner of reckless behavior that amounted to a slow self-slaughter, as poet Rachel Speght put it—weren’t working. Eventually only two people, the DJ, and me were left. The two people on the dance floor were dating, I assume, because they were doing some trippy, sexual dance. They glared at each other, as if they were the only two people in the room—in the world and made oddly choreographed movements toward each other. Or was I hallucinating?

A couple bouncers approached me like angels of death in their dark clothes and scary presence.

“Dude—Akbar. You have to leave now.”

I looked over at Mike Mike, someone we called that to distinguish him from…well, Mike. He nodded in agreement that I had to leave.

I stumbled out of the club into what seemed like a concrete maze. I think it was meant to be art.

I opened my eyes. I lay in the concrete maze staring into the sun. I had left my backpack inside, but I had my purse with my wallet, drugs, some guy’s number scrawled on a cocktail napkin, and my cell phone in it.

I called at least ten people to please come help me. I didn’t know where my car was. I didn’t know where I was (both literally and figuratively). Most of my calls went unanswered. The few “friends” who answered my calls declined to come rescue me. They had babies to look after, dealers to meet to get drugs to sell the coming night, or they just didn’t feel like it. I now felt like shit emotionally too.

The only person who cared enough to pick me up was my angel, Josh. I don’t know whose house he was staying at or where he got a giant SUV to come pick me up in, tires screeching.

“Come on, baby,” he said, his voice as gentle and reassuring as always. He helped me up, putting my arm around his back. I could feel his musculature, his bones. He was svelte but not emaciated like me and so many others I hung out with, because he could control his drug use at that time. Sometimes he didn’t even do any when we hung out!

“You got it. There you go. Good!” he said, like a nurse giving me a shot, as he eased me into the passenger seat of this pimp mobile. He told me to wait there. I had no energy to respond. I heard a rush of air as he shut the door and ran into a fried chicken joint a few hundred yards away, as if he were a superhero. He was, to me.

I looked over when I heard the deep click of the car handle as he opened the driver’s side door.

“You’re still a vegetarian, right?”

I just smiled.

He came back to the car, arranged a bunch of bags from the friend chicken joint, muttering things like, “We can put that…How does this…OK! Ready to go!”

He had bought me some French fries and a coke. As we drove back to my house, I ate and drank his life-saving gift of junk food. After I took a few bites and sips, and could make a little sense of the world, Josh drove me around until we found my car. I told him he had to come back to my house. He agreed. So I drove my car, despite feeling like I’d been run over by a steamroller. And Josh drove the SUV.

My parents looked relieved to see me, of course, but Josh too. His goodness, his moral energy emanated from him. They both smiled at us, and we went upstairs where Josh ate potato chips and watched “Cops.” I fell asleep on my blue, foldout, Ikea couch. I had to work the next day at my job as “Periodicals Assistant” at UMCP’s McKeldin Library.

Josh drove me there next morning, on what was to be another burning hot and stifling humid. I drank vodka straight from the bottle as he drove me. Sobriety isn’t a lesson to learn. When addiction has control of your mind you do things like almost die on the streets of Baltimore from drug use and dehydration…and then drink the next morning.

Outside the white marble façade of McKeldin, Josh and I squinted at each other as he told me he’d meet me when my shift was over. He could always find ways of entertaining himself, that Josh!

I went in and walked to the back where the periodicals were.

“Hi, Miss Marcia!” I said, cheery with drunkenness. I wondered—but didn’t care—if they could smell my breath, or that, as my sister put it, “You always smell like alcohol, because it’s oozing out of your pores. You never stop drinking.”

I put back magazines and journals in the beige display ledges, ones people had used and left to be re-shelved. I helped a couple people use the microfiche machines and do some searches for journals.

Josh drove me home, and I hopped out of the car. He didn’t move, he just smiled at me and said, “Bye,” when I looked over at him.

I walked around to his side of the car and took his face in my hands. I looked him directly in the eye: “I love you, OK? A lot. I can never thank you enough for what you did for me.”

He smiled and I backed up and shut his door. He started reversing up when I yelled, “Wait!” I had left the bottle of vodka on the passenger side floor.

He stopped and I ran to the other side as if he were going to drive away and leave me without my in/sanity-juice.

“Please be…” he began “I will.” I couldn’t bear to hear him say “careful”. I still wanted to believe I was fine, that constant intoxication was what I needed. I shut the door, and smiled as I watched him drive away. My eyes welled up. Another ending, abandonment, desertion.

Like so many times before, I thought, “If you’re going to start crying every time someone pulls out of your driveway, you should just kill yourself. You weren’t meant for this world.”

This sort of routine—sauced weekends on some combination of alcohol and drugs (or sometimes no alcohol, because I’d went on and off alcohol a couple times), 24-hour maintenance drunkenness where nothing externally bad happened because I would become a shut-in at those times. I’d had enough of driving places intoxicated, getting caught committing prescription fraud, showing my neo-vagina to random people to get a private jail cell. And the horrific withdrawl.

And then Nisa and Emily, on the same week, texted my links to a story in the Atlantic. Doctors who prescribed a new anti-diabetic drug, Ozempic (Semaglutide), doctors all over the country. had been reporting totally unexpected reduction or remission of compulsive behaviors in the patients who took it as an anti-diabetic. From nail-biting to compulsive shopping, to drinking, to drugging, Semagultide was turning out to be nothing short of a reimagining of the human experience. We’re all behaving compulsively. When we feel we should turn out the light and go to bed, it’s because our dopamine reward system, the same that had killed probably hundreds of thousands of addicts over the millennia.

I asked Dr. Kaplan if I could try it Ozempic. He said he wanted to look into its effects for himself over the weekend. By Monday I had a prescription—four injections for the low, low cost of $1,000, to be taken weekly.

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling like a completely different person. Unbeknownst to me, when I would have described myself as craving-free…I was wrong. An part of me would take a while to get in touch with this miracle—a cure—yes, a CURE for the addictions I had thrown my entire life away onand would lurk there for some time comeut they got less and less every day. My brain felt so: roomy! With no thoughts of using any substance as a reaction to my life, no compulsion to use them, I didn’t even know what to do with all that spare space! Or time!

Josh had been kicked out of Maranatha, a Christian college, for being gay. I thought about that sometimes: how he was the one who came when I called, the one who fed me, the one who remembered I was a vegetarian, the one who helped me into the car as gently as a nurse. Whatever they thought Christianity was, Josh seemed to me to be practicing the version with Jesus in it.

This irony never escaped me. Josh was kicked out of Maranatha Christian College when an RA found him in bed with a guy. Yet, he was the only one who followed Jesus’ cue and rescued me from hell with no promise of reward.