The Plan

My acting class was cancelled today for various reasons, which meant that Richard and I were finally able to meet up again and think musically for the first time in a very long while. For those who don’t know, he and I had been working together for a while and then just sort of dropped things, as often happens. We’ve finally started to correct that mistake.

We met up at the park at the corner of Palms and Sawtelle - I really need to learn the name of that thing, especially since I spend so much time there - and headed up the PCH. We didn’t head very far; we were just looking for a stretch of beach less crowded than Venice or Santa Monica where we could pull out the guitar and just sing with the ocean for a while.

We ended up at Will Rogers State Beach, which is kind of ugly compared to every other beach in the vicinity. Still, it was more than enough for our purposes. We left the car with a valet and walked down the stairs to the beach. This is when we first saw the problem.

We didn’t really do anything about it at first. I guess we wanted to make sure it wasn’t a non-issue before we called the cavalry, but I sort of knew we would eventually.

We chose a couple of rocks that weren’t entirely bathed in fresh gull guano and got to work. The ease with which we fell into harmonies and rhythms that we hadn’t practiced in a year or so was reassuring. “In My Head” is one of my favorite songs (of mine) and it still works just as well as a duet. “Blue” is still strong, but needs some re-working, so we polished “Keep Getting Better” to give us two to take into an open mic situation. We’re going to try to sign up for something tomorrow night, and if we figure it out in time I’ll post it here.

We stayed for maybe an hour, and then it was time to do something about the problem. The problem consisted of a number of items around a large rock on the beach. A plastic bag, which I eventually opened to find a Koran, an empty DVD case and a USB connector cable. A number of photographs, all of the same woman. A few pieces of clothing which we didn’t examine closely enough to identify. A cane. Several prescription medicine bottles. Receipts for same.

I don’t think of myself as someone who jumps to outlandish conclusions, but it looked bad. We decided to find a park ranger or something since, even if nothing awful had happened, eight or ten bottles of meds don’t exactly reinforce the family atmosphere the Parks and Rec department is looking to maintain. We ended up talking to the staff at the restaurant at the top of the stairs, since they were prettier.

Richard took them down to the ’site’ while I emptied the sand from my shoes. When he came back, he said that they were going to find the lifeguard on duty and report it, but that they thought it was nothing. That was Richard’s first impression as well. They may well have been right.

But I don’t think so.

There were two things about the scene that are still bothering me. The first was the cane: it was well-worn, and it was resting upright against the rock. When I say worn, I mean it - tape on the foot, a worn patch where the hand would go - the thing had seen some use. It was resting against the rock; it hadn’t been dropped or tossed, it had been rested. It looked abandoned. But you can’t have a cane that’s well-worn AND abandoned, all things being equal. The fact that it’s worn is strong evidence against the user being able to abandon it. At least, not without the use of another cane.

The other thing that’s sticking with me is the medicine bottles. I didn’t count them all, but let’s say they were eight. That’s a lot of medicine to lose, and it doesn’t imply good health. They were big bottles, twice as long as what I think of as the standard size. They were dated 9-8-06. And one of them was open.

There were little white round pills all over the place. I didn’t read the labels on the bottles; I guess I felt like I was being intrusive enough as it was. But I have this hunch that if I were to look up the one drug that had been opened and spilled, it would turn out to be a sedative or a pain reliever.

Maybe the guy was senile or confused and just walked away and left his stuff there. Maybe he got mugged. Maybe he was just a block or two away playing with his dogs. Everybody else thought it was nothing.

But I saw the pills. The pills and the photos and the cane. I know all about Occam’s Razor, but Occam refers only to simplicity, not to pleasantness - and my explanation is as simple as any other. I think the guy decided to go swimming one last time.

But it would be nice to be wrong.

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I had called the pharmacy on the labels, but they didn’t have much advice to offer. Once the staff said they’d find the lifeguard, we left it in their hands. Who knows if that was right. The name on the bottles was Arnell Bell. I put that here with no expectations. It just seems like the right thing to do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 6:07 pm and is filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.