LOCATIONS OF THE DAMNED: Featuring the Old, Deserted Insane Asylum!

Locations of the Damned

Featuring The Old, Deserted Insane Asylum!

It was a dark night in a dark city, a city that some called “The City of Angels”, and others called “Lotus Land”, and still others—most others, actually—called “LA”.  It was the kind of night when the oleanders’ deadly blossoms perfume the air, the Santa Ana winds spread their poison and inspire madness, and standby painters look at their paint brushes and dream of finding another occupation, one not bound by such namby-pamby, Nancy-pants niceties as “the legal code”.

In that city, on the West side, inside a long-deserted insane asylum built on land that was worth billions to real estate speculators if they could only get their hands on it, which they couldn’t, because it belonged to the US government, the standby painter worked with her all-female crew on magically transforming the insane asylum’s second floor into another insane asylum’s second floor.

Right now, at 10:45 pm, the young women were adding grime-colored paint to large pieces of something called sandblast paper that had been base-coated with metallic latex paint, either silver or copper, and pre-cut to fit over the asylum’s many hall doors.  The sandblast paper was very thick, and it had a peel-off backing that exposed the adhesive side of the sandblast paper, allowing one to put the paper up over any surface.  Using a simple wallpaper hanging-like process, the painters were transforming simple beige doors into scary-looking apparently solid metal doors corroded and fouled with years of blood and toil.

As they fouled the doors’ metallic surfaces, they used a glue gun and hot glue to attach large fiberglass rivets painted silver to the sandblast papered doors, adding to the dungeonesque feel of the movie world’s asylum.  Lost in their process of ruination, the painters were working their way slowly down the second floor hall in the dingy little pool of their single light, leaving behind them a growing finished section of hallway that was dark, filthy, and ominous.

The unfinished unreal insane asylum would be a nightmarish place, the kind of place where a devil-child would be born (according to the script of the film she was working on) who would someday murder enough people to spawn his own life history told in a half-dozen movies and even a short-lived (or was it murdered??) television series.

The movies and the TV show weren’t part of the standby painter’s film script, of course, but that script had been created because of the movies that came before it, and now we were entering the movie world that existed before the earlier movies were made. It was the coming of age story of the devil-child, made up after he’d grown up, killed lots of people and gotten killed himself (twice).  We were telling the story of the creation of a story—the equivalent of the snake devouring itself, in imagery and usefulness, both.  I mean, it makes an awesome tattoo, but what’s the point?  What does the snake get out of the process?

These were some of the thoughts haunting the standby painter as she worked and wondered about all kinds of horrible things in the dark darkness of the night.  She wondered why the producers were so cheap they wouldn’t give her crew a decent work light.  She fretted over their miserliness at not even providing them with a security guard for the night work her paint crew had to do to keep up with last-minute changes in the shooting schedule.

In truth, the standby painter was on the brink of a whirling pit of madness, and it would have been so easy to fall in (so easy!), but she knew she couldn’t go there.  That would be self-indulgent, and she had no time for such frivolity.  Madness would have to wait.

However, as it turned out, madness wouldn’t have to wait.  It would soon find her.  It would soon find them all.

To Be Continued…