Doc and Shasta’s Ouija Board Experience and the Torrential Rain

Doc and Shasta’s Ouija Board Experience and the Torrential Rain is a memory of a drug-seeking trip that turns a spirit board’s apparent answer into a journey through a city under deluge. Its address leads not to drugs but to an enormous excavation, while the storm gives Doc a vision of buried waterways and real estate swallowed by water. Recalled later through a postcard from Shasta, the episode also becomes a rare, tender point of contact between former lovers who know their time together is ending.

The shortage and the board

The episode originates in a prolonged drought of drugs, when people around Doc and Shasta were desperate enough to test remedies that sounded as absurd as they were risky. They opened cold capsules and sorted their thousands of tiny beads by color, hoping the colors corresponded to belladonna alkaloids; they snorted nutmeg, drank Visine mixed with inexpensive wine, and ate morning-glory seeds despite rumors that seed companies coated them with an emetic. The catalogue establishes the desperation behind Doc’s proposal: he asks a Ouija board where they can find dope because ordinary access has become uncertain and judgment has begun to erode.

Doc and Shasta are visiting Sortilège when she mentions that she owns a board. Doc sees it as a possible way to locate a dealer. Sortilège allows them to try, but warns that the usual objection to the practice is the difficulty of knowing whether another person is secretly moving the planchette. Her test is to have Doc use it alone. He settles his fingertips lightly on the planchette, enters the receptive state she instructs him to reach, and asks where he can find drugs. The planchette moves quickly, spelling out an address on Sunset Boulevard, east of Vermont, and a phone number that Shasta copies down.

Doc calls. A woman’s voice offers whatever they need and urges them to hurry before the supply runs out, but the connection ends when he asks who is speaking. Sortilège suggests that the call may have been a recording and points out that its message could be understood as a warning: the supposed dealer might be a police trap. Her caution does not stop the excursion. Doc and Shasta leave before she can finish explaining the board’s uncertainties, turning a doubtful signal into a plan of action.

The journey and the false destination

The drive begins beneath a cloudless sky on Rosecrans Boulevard, its broken surface described as a chuckholed obstacle course. The eucalyptus trees that once shaded the road have recently been cut down. The radio plays a commercial-free Tommy James & the Shondells marathon, and the ordinary signs of a promising day encourage Doc and Shasta to treat the board’s answer as auspicious. That confidence is already part of the scene’s irony: they proceed as if the message has opened a route to what they want, although Sortilège has warned them that the board may not be trustworthy.

The weather changes as they approach the airport. Clouds thicken, rain begins among the hills and oil pumps, and by La Brea the pair are caught in a sustained cloudburst. The storm becomes so severe that people turn on their headlights in the middle of the day. Lightning strikes across the basin, and water sweeps mud, trees, bushes, and lighter vehicles down from the hills. Doc and Shasta spend hours negotiating detours caused by landslides, traffic jams, and accidents before reaching the address.

The promised destination is an empty lot, not a functioning dealer. A gigantic excavation occupies the space between a laundromat and an Orange Julius–plus–car wash; both businesses are closed. Rain and mist obscure the far side of the hole. The board has brought them to a place where there is no visible supply, only a vast cavity made more alien by the weather. The immediate result is not a successful score but a bewildered question from Doc about where the promised drugs are.

The storm as a return of buried water

Sortilège’s later explanation gives the failure a supernatural possibility without settling it into a verifiable account. She says that mischievous spirit forces, ordinarily just beyond human perception, occupy both worlds and enjoy frustrating people still bound to human desire. In that account, the board’s response is less a mistaken set of directions than a taunt: the seekers ask for drugs and are led to an empty excavation in a storm. The explanation does not establish what caused the board to move or whether its answer was ever meaningful. It keeps the episode between chance, deception, and supernatural mischief, just as the participants’ initial doubts leave open whether the planchette is a reliable instrument at all.

At the excavation, Doc and Shasta watch the hole’s edges slide inward. As they sit beside the flooded rectangle, its orientation seems to shift until Doc sees it as a doorway, a wet temple entrance opening into somewhere else. The image makes the hole more than a failed destination: it becomes a threshold through which the landscape’s submerged history appears capable of returning. His thoughts turn to the river that once ran through the town, later channelled, drained, and reduced to a public record of greed. He imagines it filling again and rising over its concrete edge, then spreading through the arroyos, flats, swimming pools, lots, and streets until the inland water joins the Pacific.

This vision connects the storm to the region’s material transformation. Land has been filled, channelled, paved, and divided for development; the downpour makes water, normally constrained or diverted, seem to reverse those processes. The scene does not claim that Doc’s imagined inundation comes to pass. It presents the flood as an apprehension of what the landscape’s history might look like if the engineered barriers failed: all the water denied a course returning at once, carrying the built environment into a single connected waterscape. The excavation, an emblem of construction and land alteration, becomes the place where Doc imagines that history being undone.

Memory, intimacy, and the city

The episode returns to Doc much later through a postcard that arrives at his office. Shasta sends it from an unfamiliar island in the Pacific. Its postmark is in French, and the notation about delivery by a coconut catapult is so obscure to Doc that he has to consult a French dictionary. The message is unsigned, but he knows it is hers. Shasta writes that she wishes he could see the waves, recalls the day with the Ouija board, says she misses those days and misses him, and expresses regret that their story did not unfold differently. Her choice to single out the storm-bound excursion gives an otherwise unsuccessful drug search the force of a shared landmark.

The postcard does not erase the conditions of their separation. Doc remembers that by the late stage of their relationship Shasta was already halfway out the door; he saw the departure coming and let it happen. Yet when the memory returns, it carries both the strangeness of the storm and the closeness of the lovers. He recalls that after the rain, back at the beach, he and Shasta made out in the car like teenagers at a drive-in, steaming the windows and wetting the seat covers. For a few minutes they forgot how the relationship would develop. The memory therefore holds two truths together: intimacy was real, but it did not reverse the course toward separation.

The city’s development history gives the scene a political as well as romantic resonance. Elsewhere, Tariq describes a South Central neighborhood that had been Japanese American before the Second World War, when its residents were sent to camps; Black residents arrived afterward, and now face displacement themselves. He calls the prospect another round of white man’s revenge. The narrator situates this in a longer Los Angeles history of land clearance: Mexican families were forced out of Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium, American Indians were displaced from Bunker Hill for the Music Center, and Tariq’s neighborhood was bulldozed for Channel View Estates. The development advertises itself as “A Michael Wolfmann Concept,” while black pedestrians at its edges appear to be looking for the neighborhood that has been taken from them.

Aunt Reet’s knowledge of property offers another way into the same history. She has an almost supernatural grasp of land use from the desert to the sea and of the stories that deeds and contracts often leave out: family conflicts, old grievances, and the ways water used to flow. Her imagined future database would collect lot histories, water rights, mortgages, and encumbrances, but her present expertise already treats land as a record of human relations rather than an empty commodity. Read beside her perspective, Doc’s imagined river is not detached weather fantasy. The storm exposes the difference between the parcelled, engineered landscape and the watercourse and communities that development has overwritten.

A failed errand that endures

The excursion’s immediate practical aim fails: the board’s address leads Doc and Shasta to an empty excavation, and the rain makes their route hazardous and slow. But the failure becomes durable as memory. Shasta’s postcard recalls not a successful score but the day’s odd mixture of desire, warning, danger, and closeness. Doc’s recollection supplies what the brief message cannot: the desperate experiments of the drug shortage, Sortilège’s doubts, the storm’s escalation, the false destination, and the sight of the hole turning in his perception into an entrance to another world.

The scene’s structure depends on that shift between expected answer and actual consequence. A request for drugs yields an address; the address yields no dealer; the journey yields a storm and a vision of land transformed by the return of water. At the same time, a failed quest becomes one of the memories through which Doc and Shasta can still recognize what they shared. The board offers no dependable access to the object of desire, but its episode remains meaningful in another register: as an encounter with uncertainty, as a glimpse of the city’s buried geography, and as an intimate recollection that survives the lovers’ separation.