"she's probably dehydrated"

Fire truck on the boardwalk. Everyone’s attending to a woman on a bench. She’s breathing from an oxygen mask. Someone says “I.V.” The woman is calm—in her 40’s maybe, a bit heavy set, with a warm face and dyed-red hair. She takes the mask off for a second to ask someone to hand her her purse. Beside her, several others are sitting on the bench, also very calm, paying only intermittent attention to the commotion right next to them.

“It’s Jan,” Tommy says. “She’s probably dehydrated.”

“What’s Jan do down here?”

“Not a lot. Just lives out here. Trolls for young guys, sometimes.”

For the tourists, this is a landmark moment—something exciting they will remember from their trips to California, along with the guy on rollerblades playing electric guitar, and the well-oiled man in the Speedo. They form a ring around the truck on the east side of the boardwalk, snapping pictures and pointing, keeping a safe distance.

For the regulars, the ones that live and work here, the trucks are hardly worth note There are fire trucks on the boardwalk every week, at least. They're just part of the basic health care system here--the ones who respond when someone's deydrated, or gets tired of sitting outside in the sun. The musicians don’t even stop playing for the sirens.

At the pagoda beside the trucks, a young man is playing a keyboard on his lap. His fingers whip about the keys, playing frantic snippets of melody. An upturned top hat sits on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him, a blond young woman on the step behind him.

“His girlfriend needs a shaker,” Tommy says. “His rhythm’s all over the place.”

Tommy grabs an empty juice bottle from off the bamboo mat in his stand and starts picking around the edge of the sand, looking for pebbles. He stuffs a handful of them inside the bottle, using the handle of his pocketknife to push through one that gets stuck at the mouth of the bottle. He caps it, and shakes it a couple times. The rocks make dull thudding sounds against the

The next break in the music, Tommy approaches the keyboardist.

“Here,” he says. “For your girlfriend. So she can play with you.” He shakes the bottle again, to make sure the guy gets the idea.

The firemen have Jan on a gurney now. A couple of them wheel her towards the ambulance, while the others chat with Jan’s friends, or pose for tourists’ pictures. Jan sits upright on the bed, looking comfortable, no oxygen mask now.

“Oooh, you look good, Jan,” Tommy says.

She smiles at him. She’s fine.

“Take good care of our girl,” Tommy says to the paramedics.

The firemen shut the doors, and the ambulance pulls away, no sirens, with the truck close behind. The tourists snapped their final pictures. The keyboardist picks up his top hat and flipa it onto his head before he and his girlfriend moved on.

The plastic bottle full of rocks remains on the steps of the pagoda.

“Oh well,” Tommy says. “Guess she didn’t wanna play.”