WORCESTER — There’s no logic to it, no reason these four smart, funny men in their 60s should be sitting in this diner on Shrewsbury Street, talking about their long friendships, their families, their work, when so many others fell away.

It could easily have been them, lying cold on some street with needles in their arms, or snatched up by hepatitis or AIDS, or shot to death in a drug deal gone bad. It could have been their mothers and fathers weeping at their funerals, pretending, from shame, that they’d died some other way. That’s where Jim DiReda, Hank Grosse, Rob Pezzella and Jack Maroney had all been headed since they were kids, part of a rambling, close-knit crew who grew up in a struggling neighborhood looking for whatever highs they could find to shake their miseries and constraints.

Spend 15 years or more in that life, as they did, hoping for nothing beyond your next high, and an ugly end seems inevitable — even appealing on the worst days.

Worcester’s East Side had an opioid epidemic years before anybody had a name for it, and decades before anybody would talk about it. It pulled these four friends in around 1968, and they were drowning until 1985 — when all of them washed ashore around the same time.

Only luck saved them. Luck, and having one another. Now these four guys are the upstanding citizens they swore they’d never be.

“We used to call them ham-and-eggers,’’ DiReda says. “They got up and went to work every day, they had the station wagon with the kids. Who the hell wants that? We wanted something fast and flashy and happening.’’

They were parochial and grammar school kids, good students and athletes when they felt like it. But increasingly, they wanted to be like the guys on the corners with the gold chains, the cars, the easy money. A couple of the boys had lousy lives at home, their fathers alcoholic, violent, absent. A couple had more stable homes but wanted to escape anyway. Nobody ever talked about what had drawn them onto Shrewsbury Street, and to each other. They gambled, stole, lied and got blackout-drunk in their early teens; they’d commit spectacular acts of vandalism, sometimes calling the police on themselves for thrills.

“When I found booze and dope I hit the lottery,’’ said DiReda, now 63. “I didn’t need to go any further. It took care of everything.’’

They hit early adulthood just as the world was blowing up, the Vietnam War and the counterculture giving cover to their rebellion. Those years brought waves of intoxicating options: marijuana, LSD, Percodan, cocaine, methadone. Injecting heroin was the last taboo, a shameful line they wouldn’t cross. Until they did.

Everything was about catching the next high. For years they risked their lives, not just with the drugs, but in the trade, picking up guns and jail sentences. Maroney and Grosse went into business together, eventually bringing in pot from Mexico and Colombia. Maroney, now 66, the entrepreneur of the group, seemed to make it big, bringing Grosse along with him. They were partners for years, sharing risks and highs, cheating death with terrifying frequency.

“We used to stay up all night thinking we were gonna solve the world’s problems,’’ Maroney said.

“He did,’’ Grosse, now 65, corrected him. “I was a stone-cold pig, I just loved to get high.’’

Pezzella, a few years younger than the others, had fallen far, and fast, his addiction taking hold in college. An athlete from a well-known East Side family, he was in and out of detox for years.

“Robbie was a customer of mine and I used to say to him all the time, ‘Why do you go in those stupid places, you’re gonna be like this forever,’’’ Grosse said. Even as their friends died, they kept going. It felt like there were no other options.

“This was my fate in life,’’ DiReda said. “There was no way out. I didn’t know anybody who was clean. Our models were hustlers.’’

They each took a different route to recovery. After countless stints in detox, Pezzella, now 60, finally surrendered after an arrest for doctor-shopping in pursuit of prescription pills. At 32, DiReda landed in the very hospital on the hill where he and the others used to taunt the mentally ill patients when they were kids, and he’d finally had enough. After Maroney and Grosse were arrested in 1978 in the biggest drug bust in the city’s history, they served a year in prison and parted ways. Grosse says he was “a skid’’ for the next four years, until he’d lost so much that even he could see it was time. Maroney was the last holdout, living what looked like the high life even though some days he wanted to kill himself — or came dangerously close to having somebody do it for him. A visit from Grosse during his last jail term convinced him that recovery was worth a try.

For the first time, the old friends started talking to each other about the pain that had drawn them together in the first place. They kept one another honest at 12-stepmeetings. There was no faking it with guys who knew your story as well as you did.

“I could take risks in front of these guys,’’ DiReda said. “I couldn’t do that with strangers.’’

Slowly and painfully, they put together lives that had seemed too much to hope for. They got jobs, fell in love, and had kids of their own. Then went back to college. A few of them ran marathons together. They’ve watched each of their lives grow and blossom, fully invested in each other, always there to mark milestones. They still attend meetings together every Thursday.

“There’s no secret,’’ Maroney said. “What makes you happy makes all of us happy. It’s just figuring that out.’’

They became not just ham-and-eggers, but pillars of the community. DiReda, the son of a bookie, has worked in addiction care since he got out of detox. He is a clinician and advocate, and a professor of social work at Anna Maria College. Pezzella is a school administrator and political activist who has brought treatment funds and recovery services to Worcester. In a development that would have convinced the guys they were tripping 30 years ago, he’ll be the grand marshal of this year’s Columbus Day parade. After working for 20 years in the treatment facility where he got his first job after getting sober, Maroney founded Spring Hill Recovery Center, and is about to open another one. Grosse had a series of great jobs, but is most proud of marrying Eileen, the woman he’d known since elementary school, and lost when his addiction alienated even saints like her. They married after he got clean; she died of cancer last year. Now he describes himself as “a retired author.’’

That’s because Gross, Maroney and DiReda have written a book about their neighborhood, and the plague that laid waste to it, called “The East Side of Addiction.’’ They wrote it not just because their stories are riveting and terrifying and sometimes hilarious, but also because they want to convey the notion that, even if you sink as low as they did, it’s possible to pull yourself back.

“You don’t have to die from this,’’ DiReda said. It’s a lesson he and the others took decades to learn. So many they knew didn’t get those years, drugs claiming them before they could imagine escape.

“That could have been us, should have been us,’’ said Pezzella. “Why did we get the gift of recovery and our friends died?’’

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com