The Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 2

JUST A NOTE before we devolve back into the exciting adventure we began last week, which, by the way, is a true story according to the Lifetime Network Movie definition of ‘true story’.  There are some excellent, timely, incredibly interesting blogs out this week which put my little narrative to shame, so do read them, and please forgive me this temporary foray into pure entertainment.  I’ll return to more weighty filmic matters again soon.  In the meantime, I invite you to return to…

 

LOCATIONS OF THE DAMNED: Featuring the Old, Deserted Insane Asylum! Part 2

(Yes, I swear this is a true story!)

That dark windblown night in the old, deserted insane asylum, four young women painted side by side, or sometimes above one above the other, for there were two ladders among the standby painter’s substantial catalogue of equipment.  Along with the standby painter, who if memory serves, was called DuBois, there were three other women, who answered to the names Kippy, Neaninte, and Sol, respectively aged 23, 28 and a claim of 32 (iffy—probably more like 37).  DuBois herself was ageless; that is, she wasn’t quite sure whether she was in her early twenties, or perhaps sliding down the last slopes of her eighties, or somewhere in between.

Not that the uncertainty mattered to DuBois.  She had begun to suspect age didn’t mean all that much, especially if you hadn’t done nearly as much with your life as you had planned to do, or even faithfully tried to do, before the weight and ruin of the city, which some called “Los Angeles”, and others called “The Southland”, and still others—most others, actually—called “LA”, sucked the soul out of you and you ended up painting in the dark, having squandered your youth on dreams of humanity someday talking to dolphins and from them learning how to not wage war.  No, while all these dreams passed, it was impossible to measure: age could be either an eternity or nothing at all.

One of the reasons the production company gave for the women not needing a night security guard was the fact that the government-owned complex they were working in had its own security force, and there was already a guard assigned to their complex of buildings.  Unfortunately, due to budget cuts which had led to the end of golf carts for performing rounds, the guard was not able to leave his office, which was a full quarter mile away from the old, deserted insane asylum, at the other end of the old, deserted animal testing laboratories, across from the drainage culvert that emptied into the third hole’s lush, green water trap inside the most exclusive golf course outside of Malibu that lay just on the other side of the twelve foot tall electrified razor wire fence that surrounded the  rambling, mostly deserted government complex.

The single security guard had a phone in his office that was to be used for emergencies, but the painters themselves didn’t have a phone between them, this being the era before cell phones were used by any persons outside the CIA or FBI upper echelons. Even if the women had been given the security guard’s office number (which they hadn’t because they had been told by the film’s UPM to get straight to work and not to wander through the rest of the government complex), the only phone was inside the locked ward of the still-occupied insane asylum across the street from the old, deserted insane asylum they were working in.

You didn’t want to go in the occupied insane asylum for any reason, because that’s where the most troubled and troubling insane lived, and due to budget cuts, there was only one guard on duty for the entire three floors of insane people.  And although the guard was so introverted as to be invisible, the insane people living there felt free to scream out all kinds of suggestions and anatomical observations from the windows of their wards every time they saw a visitor to the complex pull into the parking lot across the street from them.  No, visitors, such as the painters were, did not want to even acknowledge the verbal outpouring from that building, much less enter its doors.

This particular government-owned complex had once housed many, many insane people. Now it had about half the number of insane people it had originally housed.  This will figure prominently in the events that follow.

However, at the time the movie was going to be shot, the old, deserted insane asylum had been emptied of its occupants for almost ten years.  During that decade, lots of film companies had rented the place, or part of the place for their shoots, and all five floors, plus the basement of the old, deserted insane asylum had been used as background for some of the worst-written and exploitative films of all time.  The current film was certainly no exception, and it was just another part of the insane asylum’s long, less-than-illustrious history.

That’s why it wasn’t surprising on one’s travels through the building to find messages scrawled in what appeared to be fresh blood all over the white tile walls of one of the shower areas (left behind from that movie about those women in prison that got attacked by zombies), or rooms painted a solid flat black with fluorescent skulls stenciled in a long line at eye level (left behind from that movie about the punk rock band that got attacked by zombies), or even a small cell-like room with a jar of Wesson oil next to a bloody mattress and what looked like tic-tac-toe games painstakingly etched into every square foot of the moldering green plaster walls.  Actually it was all a bit surprising, really, until one got used to it.

What the women didn’t know was that the strange, cell-like room was not a set from a movie, but was, in reality, a real somebody’s real room.  And even though this person, an erstwhile inmate of the asylum, had been turned out to roam free on the streets some ten years earlier, he still lived there, in the asylum, in secret, in his old room.

But soon his secret would be out.

 

To Be Continued…