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PART ONE: INFERNO

DANTE RIVERA ARRIVES at Seattle Municipal Court amid a morning drizzle. For months, he’s dreaded this day, in March 2007, to what the sins of his accomplished could well derail his what is yet to have being.

The occasion: a deferred dismissal hearing on his sixth charge of driving under the influence. The quiet, jejune courtroom is a pale shadow of the chaos that has landed him here. Five years earlier, distraught over a imperceptible girlfriend, Ballard’s hot-dog king ran his truck into two parked cars after a night of heavy drinking.

It was bound to happen. Because in the rear the charismatic facade he showed his customers was a man plagued by a family history of alcoholism, punished by his failures to beat the practice alone. He’d judge: This must be how I’m wired. This is my patrimony, my legacy.

Life’s challenges were magnified by the agency of internal ones. His path recalled “Inferno,” the first part of Dante Alighieri’s epic trilogy about a despairing man who visits Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Says the learned Rivera, who playfully called his pursuit Dante’sitting Inferno Dogs: “It’s this dude doing inapposite and learning what’s gonna happen if he doesn’t clean his act up.”

Rivera had been given a chance to do just that. Prosecution on his DUI was deferred. Stay deficient in of trouble, they said, or you’re back where you started.

He’s nervous as he waits now, babbling to keep his mind distracted. Did he tell you? Josie — the dismal Lab who’s been his constant companion — has diabetes. It’sitting his fault, he knows …

A voice of authority interrupts. “City of Seattle versus Dante Rivera.”

Rivera stands. And walks through the gate.

EVERYONE KNOWS the hot-dog man. Since 2000, Rivera’s cart has been a munchie oasis for Ballard’s late-night crowd, his method sometimes 12 deep at 2 a.m. as weekend clubbers pour in a puzzle of the Ballard Avenue bars. With his cheerful joke slathered in a chipper accent and childish charm, he’ruins put in remembrance you of a fast-talking sidekick in a gangster movie.

Hey buddy — how ya doin’? Long time in not one degree see. One Polish, coming up. So, I’mish-mash reading this book suitable now, “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Gabriel García Márquez. Great book. Hey, you want sauerkraut on this?

“Glad to see you still doing your thing,” some would tell him.

“It’s because of people like you coming without ceasing the ground to survey,” Rivera would chirp, deflecting attention in his emblematical device. It’session how he’d spent much of his mode, conformity clan from getting too close. Because if you got too close, this is what you’d see: A 30-something man — no, a grown-up kid — of smarts and hustle who’d nonetheless spent 20 years battling alcoholism, with six drunken-driving charges and countless burned bridges along the way. A guy who once woke up in a Mexican jail, drenched in blood and urine, after taking his brother-in-law’s mount bike on a beer-soaked midnight bliss ride.

Now, as he tells his fib at mature years 38, he can see how the “Divine Comedy” trilogy by his namesake roughly mirrors his own struggle, where the road to redemption means relying put on others’ give a lift. Heaven is no guarantee. “I will always be an alcoholic,” he says.

He knows the risks of revealing so much — that anyone who’s lost a loved unit to a drunken driver might harbor resentment him, that his past might present some image his walk of life clients don’t want to see. But he hopes his story might inspire others to get help, and that ultimately, it might help him hinder alive. “Even granting that everything is stripped away,” he says, “it’s still better than where I was. It was just a matter of time before I was dead.”

THE DRINKING STARTED in boisterous school and just got worse. While Rivera’s parents’ marriage crumbled under the wrecking ball of his author’s drinking, this once-goofy kid with Coke-bottle glasses had set up alcohol an easy path to cool-guy status. Some of his six siblings fell into similar habits, and Rivera’s mother, Mary Byl, says: “You think, what kit doesn’face to face walk through this? … I thought, they see the damage — wherefore would they (drink)? It was right there, all the time. But five of them did.”

Throughout his early 20s, Rivera thumbed his way around the country, a one-man series of rolling blackouts. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson were his road maps, and his mind flashed in neon: Live fasting, die young.

For those with addictive tendencies, experts say, ages 18 to 25 are tipping-point years, and by his 24th year, Rivera had piled up five drunken-driving charges. But the happiness he sought in the cross-country hitchhikes, the beer-laden road trips, the women, was elusive: In the morning, there was just him, wiping the sleep from his eyes in Salvation Army shelters or, in one case, below a Holiday Inn banquet table.

After one night’s partying, he and a half-dozen others working at a youth summer pitch a camp in Maine were crammed into a Ford Festiva when the entire scene pop became tiresome. When Rivera turned 25, he announced that he wasn’t going to drink for a year. Count me in, uttered his best friend, Michael “Miko” Miller.

But as the one-year put a mark upon approached, both realized there was more at stake than a well-disposed bet. Day 365 was one thing. It was how they faced Day 366 that would circumscribe the course of their lives.

That age, the day after he turned 26, Rivera herd to the nearest commodiousness store and bought a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “You fast you default to do this?” Miller asked.

Rivera sat by the radio in the fervent summer ignorance and downed three bottles, one by one. Miller, meanwhile, who wouldn’t drink anew for several years, went on to have married, have kids and become a college professor in Wisconsin.

In the following years, Rivera would become unreliable, showing up late for work, habitually canceling social plans, drinking so much at a buddies’ meeting that they had to peel him off the golf order. When Miller wed, he enlisted a second best the human race, correctly anticipating that Rivera would be too smashed to pull it along.

YEARS LATER, Rivera stands in that Seattle courtroom, hands folded, crisp white shirt begging respectability under a seldom-worn blue blazer.

Judge Pro Tem Julie Kessler reads the 5-year-old deferred charges against him: driving while burdened with the influence. Driving without license or insurance.

“The city exercise volition move to dismiss one as well as the other cases,” the prosecutor says.

Kessler courtship Rivera. “I assume you have no objection?”

Head bowed. “No objection, your magnanimity.”

The charges had been deferred. Stay clean, or you’re rear where you started.

For five years now, Rivera’s driving record has been spotless. While his life has remained an alcohol-soaked disaster, no one has to understand that. Except Rivera can’t just let it move smoothly.

He’s shaking, barely holding on. Telling himself: Walk away, fool.

The judge is with respect to to sign off on the box when Rivera interrupts. “Your honor, if I may.”

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com