THAT SONG—“SHOOTING STAR,” by Bad Company—has been stuck in my head since my first job as a reporter, twenty-five years ago. My beats were courts-martial and homelessness. Soldiers and sailors and marines, going away for impossibly long sentences because they’d gotten into a fight or smoked some weed, and the best places to panhandle, cops you could trust and cops you should run from, the street-level trade in crack and heroin.
This was in San Diego, a city on the ocean that faces away from the water. I lived in a single room occupancy hotel across from the paper, in a small cube of prickly stucco with room for a bed and a ceiling fan, no AC. I spent a lot of time outside. There was a guy named Jim who slept in front of my building and who for a cup of coffee and the change would tell me what I’d gotten wrong in my stories. A lot, usually. I liked having a reader. “You gotta get out more, bro,” he’d say. Not like a surfer; Jim was from Missouri, worked fishing boats when he could but mostly worked at staying high. Sometimes we’d wander together, and he’d tell people I was his little brother. Some believed him, most didn’t care. He told a lot of stories. He liked to say he’d been at the siege of Khe Sanh in Vietnam, which, since he also liked to say he was thirty-four, meant he would have been the U.S. military’s only preteen marine.
But when he wanted to really underline a point he’d drop his jeans, turn around, and point at his ass. From the lower left cheek, an open wound ripped down the back of his thigh. “Split like a baked potato,” he’d say. The stink was astonishing. He said he’d come off a fishing boat flush, booked a room in a fancy hotel, and gone for a stroll. Then, he said, he got rolled—“Cut,” he’d say, running his fingers up and down the raw flesh. It would have healed, he said, but a cop everyone called Sammy gave him a beating, and now it would not close. It looked deep, and he claimed you could touch the bone, but I never verified. He said he used for the pain, and although other users would laugh at such a claim—just another one of Jim’s stories—there was a larger truth to the idea. Crack got him high; heroin seemed to drain straight into the wound. “Keeps me walking,” he liked to say.
One night his friend Edward said, “You on a mission. You fixing to die.” That unsettled Jim. So we walked to Denny’s, the one in the shadow of the old apartment hotel El Cortez, abandoned, windows like an insect’s black eyes, and ordered Grand Slams.
“Let’s go to the beach,” Jim said. It was after midnight. He said we’d find his friend Tommy. When we got there, the beach was empty. “Down there, maybe,” Jim said, “in the dark.”
I hesitated.
The dark, the stories.
No Tommy.
Jim was several steps ahead before he noticed I’d stopped. He turned. Saw me look past his shoulder, saw me not meet his eyes. “Don’t get like the rest of them,” he said. “Not now.” It was too late; I already had. I was. Like the rest of them.
We sat on the sand. No talk. Just the dark and some beer, the sound of the waves and then the sound of Jim snoring.
The next day he let me give him a ride to the hospital. I promised they’d admit him. If they wouldn’t, I told him, I’d say I was a reporter and that’d open some doors, believe me. He didn’t, but he took the ride. At least there was a radio.
He flipped through the dial. “I want some rock ’n’ roll,” he said. Then he found it. “Shooting Star.” He tapped along on his good knee, then he drummed on the dash, then he rolled down the window and shouted the words. “Don’tcha know!”
Mercy wouldn’t take him. I said I was a reporter. I was young enough then to believe that things worked that way. That stories—or even just the threat of one—possessed certain powers. The nurse ignored me. She told Jim, “You’re high.”
Only on heroin.
“Try a clinic,” she offered.
Jim asked me to drop him off by the train tracks. Told me not to follow.
I saw him again my last day in San Diego, on my way out of town. He was walking down by the Pacific Highway, sucking on a pipe. “A clinic!” he said, like it’d been funny. The leg, he said, yeah, still open. Not so funny.
Years later, when I returned to San Diego, I looked for him, but I never did find him. Which is why, I think, I cannot get that fucking song out of my mind.