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For two hours every day for the last 14 years, 59-year-old James Lillis swims laps at the YMCA of Silver Spring pool. Up and down, back and forth, the water has become a drug for Lillis, the two-hour stints a prolonged high.

It's unlike the fleeting highs of Lillis's past – the heroin, the barbiturates, alcohol, prostitutes, stealing cars – and still, he says, without swimming he would quickly revert to those vices.

"Swimming is like going back to the womb, it's nice and warm," Lillis says one Thursday afternoon outside the YMCA pool on Hastings Drive. As he speaks, his cloudy blue eyes, guarded by hooded eyelids and glasses, stare toward the water. "If I go into the water it takes longer, it's not a quick fix.

"You get that warmth and it's like a freedom, the craving is gone."

Lillis has spent the last 14 years as a lifeguard at the YMCA, the longest he has held one job in his life. He applied for the job after undergoing water therapy sessions following a nasty car accident around 1995. His hiring coincided with the last days of his heroin addiction, an on-and-off battle he had been fighting since his late teens.

Clean and focused on keeping a job, Lillis also completed another milestone around that time. He finished a novel he had been working on since the late 1980s, a process always interrupted by relapses into heroin addiction, writer's block and a recurring sense the book would never be completed.

Five-hundred copies of the book, "A Walk in Dreams," were published in 1998 with the help of two long-time friends. He sold the initial copies to YMCA members and his colleagues, many of whom were students at nearby Montgomery Blair High School. Since, he's made the book available on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble's Web site.

The novel follows a young Irish-American boy named Cashel through 1962 to 1969, his years as a teen in Brooklyn. It's a work of fiction but largely autobiographical, Lillis says.

"The names were changed to protect the guilty," he says.

Lillis remembers those days vividly and surprisingly so, because he spent most of them in a crime- and drug-filled haze. Growing up in lower-class Brooklyn in the 1960s, Lillis rubbed elbows and shared punches with the various ethnically segmented gangs of the era and suppressed the depression of lower-class living whichever way we could, he says.

It started with childhood games, but, as they grew older and the prospects of adulthood looked bleaker, the immature exploits graduated to hard drugs and crime, Lillis says.

Within his group of thieves and bruisers, Lillis says he was the lucky one. The longest stint he's ever spent in jail was one week, thanks to uncles in law enforcement.

"One friend died from an overdose, another died in a car accident with a stolen car, one friend did seven years, another three years, another died in jail," says Lillis with a Brooklyn accent and a slow and measured way of speaking.

After finding girls and drugs, Lillis dropped out of his junior year of high school, eventually got his GED only at the behest of his grandfather and ended a two-week stint in college when he met a girl with a different class schedule and a penchant for heroin. He got an A on his only college assignment, a short story.

Shortly after that Lillis met another girl at a party. Soon she was pregnant and even sooner they were married, another son following three years later. He was 28 with a wife, two sons, no job, no money and a drug addiction. He needed something new. With $20 from his uncle, he went as far as the bus would take him: Silver Spring.

In Silver Spring, as he had done sporadically in New York City, Lillis began driving cabs. He latched on to the sex trade around 14th Street in Washington, D.C., chauffeuring many of the prostitutes to and from their tricks.

"I was 30 and not hard to look at and I was cocky and from New York," Lillis says with a laugh.

Once a part-time model, Lillis's skin has weathered with age. He has a dirty blonde crew cut, three earrings in his left ear and wore track pants, flip-flops with socks and a YMCA sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves revealing a tattoo of the Virgin Mary intertwined with a heart and red cross. He still wears his wedding ring but also wears a necklace with a heart pendant surrounding a blue stone that he "got from some chick."

"My first name was ‘baby' back then," said Lillis, who now lives in the Arcola area of Wheaton. "I would stay with the girls downtown, and you fall back into that lifestyle. But I was better off running with girls, because you get tired of fighting."

Eventually that assessment proved false and after a particularly vicious beating that required a screw to be permanently placed in his face, Lillis ended up on the doorstep of Ellen Passman, who lived in the Top of the Park townhome community on Bradford Road in Silver Spring.

Previously, Passman only knew Lillis as someone who would occasionally smoke marijuana with her, but at that point she told Lillis he could move in as long as he needed. He lived there 12 years.

"It wasn't based on a sexual relationship, and I was more like an older sister," said Passman, 62, in a phone interview from her current home in Delaware. "I just saw him struggling on the lower level of the food chain and thought he was capable of more."

She encouraged him to start writing down the stories he would tell on her back porch in the summer. She had a computer, but Lillis chose to begin his book on her old-fashioned typewriter, because his fingers hitting the keys matched the cadence of his fists hitting faces, he says.

Lillis found the writing process cathartic, expressing his struggles and sorrows on the page, rather than suppressing them with drugs, alcohol and women.

"He found a place where he could speak his truth and he didn't get slammed for it," says Janet Turner, 71, another long-time friend of Lillis and Passman from Top of the Park, who edited "A Walk in Dreams" and also lives in Delaware near Passman.

As he grew more confident that he'd finish the book, he gradually weaned himself off of heroin in the mid-1990s, just before getting a job at the YMCA.

As some of his colleagues know, there's more at stake for Lillis than a little extra spending money. He credits the job for saving his life.

"He does what he's supposed to do, goes home and comes back," says Daniel Roman, a 23-year-old personal trainer at the YMCA from Silver Spring.

The book itself is touching at times and harrowing at others, but rife with the kind of spelling and grammar mistakes expected on a budget of basically nothing and a high school dropout author.

But it's that undeniable story that shines through, a story that Lillis and Passman are unashamed about promoting.

Passman evokes "West Side Story" and "The Lords of Flatbush" when talking about Lillis. Lillis even talks about her dream to have Robert De Niro play the lead in a movie about Lillis's life, and it's clear she's not joking. She's already contacted a local screenwriter in Delaware about adapting the book.

For Lillis, the book is his legacy, Passman says. Lillis's relationship with his sons is somewhat repaired, but his writing is essentially all he has left to his name, Passman says.

"He's 60 now, he never thought he'd live above 35," she says. "He didn't make any major plans because everybody he knew was either dead, in prison or so emotionally beaten down by life that they didn't care.

"But he had something, he had this spark."

Sitting on a bench outside the YMCA pool in January, Lillis engages some gym members who walk by and praise his book, asking if he's writing another. He is, he says. For the past three years he's been working on a novel based on his life in the 1980s but hasn't made much progress.

Other times, Lillis stops members as they walk by, trying to elicit some kind of feedback on his book. They politely oblige and Lillis smiles, almost as if he needs validation that the life he has lived was not altogether a mistake, so long as people will enjoy reading about it. He carries a folded and laminated sheet of paper with all of the five-star reviews readers have posted online.

On Jan. 27, as Lillis walked through the pool hall before his shift, one of his younger colleagues burst out of a nearby office.

"Hey James, did you hear J.D. Salinger died?" the colleague said, referring to the famous but reclusive author, whose novel, "Catcher in the Rye," inspired millions of rebellious teens.

Lillis stopped abruptly and stared, mouth agape, at his colleague, about 40 years his junior.

"That was a great book, man," he eventually says, referring to "Catcher in the Rye." He then walks off and curses under his breath before gathering his next thought. "That was just a great coming-of-age book. Kind of like mine."