Not everyone in Los Angeles is insane. Helpfully, the people who are love to make themselves known. They will trot right up as you smoke a cigarette next to a dumpster under the unrelenting late morning sun and commence talking at you like you’re the oldest of friends, breaking into a story that usually focuses on the actions of another party who has recently aggrieved them. The insane in Los Angeles are always aggrieved, perceiving the world as a hostile place designed to belittle them and them alone. I love when they talk at me. I love their grievances.
This one was a ball of nerves. Shivering like a chihuahua, she bummed a cigarette and had me light it, hands too tremulous to do the task herself. Without provocation, she revealed to me her most recent grievance, that being the actions of the man running craft services for the network drama on which we were both doing background work. She felt he had “singled her out as the skinny girl,” reprimanding her for taking too many snacks. I did not push back at the implication she was the only skinny girl on the set of a network drama.
I remembered sitting next to her as we got our hair styled in those horrific beachy waves that are the staple of every network drama (“I love your gray,” the hairdresser whispered to me in a way which implied I was brave for doing nothing about it). I had marveled at how unwell her legs appeared, all bruises and sinew. Her face had the poreless, ageless look of the new race of woman that has emerged in the past decade, that of copious injections which make 20-year-olds look 40 and 40-year-olds look 20. That being said, my money was on her being 40.
“I just wanted to feed a squirrel,” she lamented, gesturing to the oversized apple in her hand. I made a mental note to look up if squirrels could eat whole apples later. (The answer is yes, though the seeds contain cyanide, which can kill them.)
“I’ve been smoking like a fiend out of stress,” she told me. “The work’s just not picking up like I thought it would. I used to do this three days a week. It was a nice life.”
I had no idea if she was in the union. If she was, it meant she was making approximately $560 a week before taxes, back when life was nice. The average price of a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is $2,700 a month.
She asked me what I did other than background.
“I write.”
“Oh, me too.”
Uh huh.
“But I’m studying real estate.”
A production assistant approached and asked where I got my tea. Before I could respond, the ball of nerves took charge. “Over there,” she pointed. “But you don’t wanna go over there. The black guy will yell at you.”
Sometimes I become self conscious about writing about the same subject twice, but when it comes to background work my hands are tied. (I was, let the record show, also self conscious about using the word “about” two times in the previous sentence; perhaps I am just self conscious.) Yes, I’ve written a newsletter about background work before, but every time I do background I encounter infinite subjects – the waifs reading Uta Hagen while picking at dry salads, the diminutive man with the thinning hair holding but not opening a tattered copy of “Investing for Dummies.” It’s almost like Los Angeles is just a wonderland of stories, both on and off network television. How could I not write about these delusional dreamers? It would be tantamount to a film critic stopping after reviewing just one movie.
Side Note: Standing in between takes, a principal asked a background actor if she was the one he heard singing – the answer was yes. “I went to school for musical theater,” she demurred. He asked if she was working on a show at the moment; she replied she always was. Where does she work? He’ll bring a crew. “Pirate’s Dinner Adventure,” she replied.
Side Note to the Side Note: I am very cognizant of the fact that I am blessed enough to be in the last generation of background, as there is no turning the tide that is ever-encroaching A.I. (I will, however, concede that Fran Drescher is a compelling public speaker). I mourn that when the robots replace the humans hovering in the periphery, the pictures will lose a palpable sense of humanity. I can’t look at a robot over-underacting in a restaurant scene and wonder about the size of the studio apartment in which he lives in the Valley.
The denizens of background appeal to me because my favorite iteration of Los Angeles’ insane are the ones no one asked to be here – the children from the TMZ, born of privilege, don’t fascinate me in the same way. Their senses of entitlement, while abhorrent, are justified. I prefer the entitlement of those whose entitlement has no bearing in reality.
“I swear, now that I’m on my skinny bitch diet I lost, like, 40 pounds,” the ball of nerves told me, her gray skin absorbing but not reflecting the sun. I asked what her “skinny bitch diet” entailed – did she just pivot exclusively to smoking cigs and drinking Diet Cokes?
“I took a parasite cleanse.”
“A parasite cleanse,” I repeated. “Where does one get…a parasite cleanse?”
“On Amazon. Fenbendazole. You shit out, like, 20 pounds. It’s incredible.”
I naturally, immediately, looked up Fenbendazole. I learned it was a dog dewormer that humans originally started ingesting because they thought it could cure cancer – but, like most snake oils, it doesn’t limit itself to only curing one malady. A manufacturer originally dedicated to grifting the cancerous now describes it in these vague, generic terms: “Fenben treats and eliminates a broad spectrum of parasites. More recently, it has been studied and found effective in treatment protocols for a wide range of conditions.”
I watched an Instagram video wherein a woman said she cleanses during the full moon because, “well, the parasites come alive during the full moon.” According to her, a woman on a porch overusing Instagram’s “glitter” filter, microscopic parasites have burrowed their way into our major organs and the waste they produce makes some kind of perfect breeding ground for cancer and “all kinds of bad stuff.”
There are, of course, one metric fuckton of videos dedicated to Fenbendazole on TikTok, where many talk about the defecation that happens as a result of taking it but don’t implicitly state said defecation is for the purposes of weight loss (instead, for “gut health”). They claim it eliminates cravings for sweets, giving users “natural energy” via the process of shitting 6-7 times a day.
Why do you have cravings for sweets? Could it be that sugar is one of the most addictive substances on Earth and, as a result, has been put in fucking everything? No, it’s because you have parasites! Got acne? Parasites! Anxiety? Depression? PARASITES!
The insinuation that every affliction that is clearly a byproduct of modern life (depression, anxiety, exhaustion, inability to shit regular) has a singular, fixable root cause, and that cause isn’t capitalism, is laughable. But it makes sense that people would gravitate to a quick fix, especially in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a town of quick fixes. Frown lines? Botox eliminates them, same day. Home doesn’t look enough like a malevolent farmhouse? Strip off the stucco, throw up some shutters, paint it black with white trim. Directionless? Life has no meaning? Society doesn’t care if you lived or died? Have you considered being famous, or at the very least patronizing the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre?
Ball of nerves, in her ceaseless quest to be the skinniest girl on set, found a quick fix in dog dewormer. It’s like taking Ivermectin (a.k.a. horse dewormer) for Covid, but the disease is vanity.
Side Note: My favorite Amazon review for Fenbendazole is, “I just don't like the white film that I cough up after taking it.”
Circumstances, cruelly, took me away from ball of nerves before she could recite more of her story – I was removed from the party scene that outfitted me in pleather pants in order to perform as a photo double because the original double had ostentatious, unremovable nails. I could not complain; this upgrade entailed a pay bump of $40 a day. I talked to another photo double, outfitted in EMT attire. Sweet, quiet, and with an amateur’s awe of the grandiosity of her surroundings, she was not insane, and it seemed doubtful she would become so anytime soon.
“Was the party scene fun?” She asked.
“No,” I lied.