For many years I worked the night shift at the Insect Building, assembling replacements for all of the green and gold Japanese beetles I had killed the summer I was an exterminator. 

The Insect Building was a towering pair of stone slabs offset ninety degrees, like a giant upended V8 engine. I walked through the dirty plaza to the onyx door at its base. Somehow I had a view from above of myself, and also of the stories-high pillar of fire shining and smoking there at the hinge where the Insect Building’s halves met, doing their best impression of the two tablets of the law. 

I worked in the Insect Building all night. Then I woke from my dream in my shotgun house at the corner of Preston and Brandeis in Louisville, Kentucky, and I shaved my face, took a hot shower, drank a cup of coffee, and drove my Nissan hard-body truck or, later, my Pontiac 6000 to whatever my so-called real job was, whether it was valet-parking cars for diabetic hillbilly amputees at the hospital complex, or applying decals to tractor-trailers down at the plant where my father ran the repair shop, or assistant-managing the reshelving department at the library — blue-collar labor with white-collar objects — or driving a box truck for Ermin’s bakery, where Kevin cut off his thumb one morning and lost it in the proof box and Mita slept on the floor. But for years my real real job, at least while I was asleep, was rebuilding insects.

My memory is strange. By the time I was nineteen, I’d had a couple semesters of college. It wasn’t going well. I was a mean, arrogant dick. You couldn’t teach me anything. 

I didn’t want to spend another Kentucky summer working for Orville in the touch-up garage down at the trailer plant, where I was the only man in the shop who still had all ten of his fingers, bolting on bumpers and repainting dinged trailers all day, eating chicken livers from Xpressway Liquors for lunch, and coughing up shiny green flecks of paint in the shower when I got home. 

I found a help wanted ad in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Exterminator, no experience necessary. 

Japanese beetles were attracted to the giant white cargo planes shining on our airfield in the burning summer sun, and they wandered into the planes while containerized packages and loose boxes were belt-loaded through wide cargo-bay doors. 

My team’s job was to make sure no beetles were on board our planes when they landed in California or in Florida, citrus-growing states, lest the beetles destroy the world’s orange juice industry. 

We had nets buttoned and velcroed and tied and draped over all apertures. We had eyes on the boxes as they crawled up their belts. 

And we had our poison gas. At daily morning meetings, our immediate supervisor, Wes, would scoff at inhalation-related safety concerns: “Vehicle safety, now, that’s serious. But these masks, boys, they’re just to satisfy local laws and regulations. If you get overheated and no one’s looking, take ’em off, that’s my advice.” 

Wes would snort a line of pale yellow insecticide powder off his desk, or spray it from an aerosol can right into his mouth, to demonstrate how harmless it was. I wonder where Wes is today.

Where we love, we also hate. Where we hate, we harm. Where we harm who or what we love, we seek to repair the harm we have done. I did not begin by loving Japanese beetles. Our acquaintance began when I agreed to kill them for money. I am sorry for what I did.

A so-called common gray moth, Anavitrinella pampinaria, on the screen door. Idaea dimidiata, the single-dotted wave moth, upside-down on the doorframe under the front porch light. The frequent visitor Amphion floridensis, also called the Nessus sphinx, eating from the daphne in the garden. Agapostemon virescens, the green metallic sweat bee, eating from me as I read the Financial Times in my teak garden chair. Serica brunnea, a pretty red-and brown chafer beetle against the white wall. A Pasiphila rectangulata, a green pug moth. A tiny Idia lubricalis, the glossy black idia, in the corner of my office. Noctua pronuba on the yard-waste bag, a large yellow underwing. (His hindwings are pale orange, really.) Phaneroptera nana, the southern sickle bush-cricket or Mediterranean katydid, on the window. Lucidota atra, the black firefly or woodland lucy, on the closet door. Bleptina caradrinalis, the bent-winged owlet or variable snout moth, under the streetlight. A cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, in the lavender by the stairs. And the beautiful black-and-gold Anomala orientalis, a shining leaf chafer like the Japanese beetle Popillia japonica, here to haunt me. 

What would I say to somebody who didn’t believe he could feel guilty for killing beetles? I would tell him to kill ten thousand of them. 

A lot of the team couldn’t operate a manual transmission. Our bosses didn’t care. Find ’em or grind ’em, they said, we’ve got so many of these vans we don’t know where to park ’em all. 

As for me, I had learned to drive stick as a boy on a John Deere tractor on the farm my dad half-owned with my uncle Billy Joe. If you’d like to know more about my rural bona fides, feel free to call my toll-free number, 1-800-cornpone-bullshit. 

The boss we had the most to do with was Donna. She had once been a student, a good one, of my mother’s at Southern High School in Okolona, but the two of us were careful never to mention that to each other. 

Donna’s boss was Jimmy, a bizarre figure in his dark suit and tie at our scorching summer morning meetings. Jimmy told me his salary was docked one thousand dollars for every Japanese beetle found on board at the other end in California or in Florida, dead or alive. 

“How many so far this month?” I asked. 

“Three,” he said, “all dead.” 

I don’t know why Jimmy, a middle-aged executive at a multinational shipping company, would have awarded me, a sweaty exterminator, the privilege of this confidence. Maybe Jimmy told everybody. Maybe it wasn’t true.

As a still-recent entrant to the workforce, I had a burning desire to excel, and it was common for me to receive commendations for my hard work. But our acts of daring on the airfield — for example, sprinting up a moving belt-loader, stories into the air, to pick one beetle off the fastener of the net — were frowned on as much as they were admired. I commonly got a positive note on my record in the morning and a reprimand in the afternoon for the same action. And the union took pride in its careful handling of shipped packages, so if we turned them round and round to make sure they were beetle-free, the handlers got testy, felt we were out of our jurisdiction, and would report us, and by us I mean me.

I was the first to shave my head, which started a trend on our team. For all of high school I’d had long hair, long enough that a woman in line behind me at the buffet after church might say to her little boy, “Now, honey, let that nice lady go ahead of you,” and I would say, “No, please, after you, ma’am,” and the woman would stare at me in horror. It’s hard for people to understand what it was like back then for a boy to have long hair in Kentucky. 

I buzzed my hair off not because the shimmering expanse of the airfield was like a pizza oven, although it was, but because I had so many beetles caught in my long hair that I couldn’t do my job.

When I was nineteen years old, my father was the age I am today. It’s not easy for me to imagine what he must have felt when I dropped out of the University of Louisville to be an exterminator. 

He had always warned me to get a job in the air conditioning, but here I was instead, just like him in his garage at the tractor-trailer plant where he wouldn’t let management air-condition his office. 

“See here,” he told Joe Gomez, “I’m not going to let my men in the repair shop look at me sitting at a desk reading invoices in the cool fresh air while they sweat for me.”

Gomez said to my father: “Listen, Pat, you’re making the rest of us look like a bunch of assholes.” 

And my father said: “No, Gomez, you are doing that all by yourself without any help from me.” 

In Louisville, in the summers when I was a kid, the humidity drifted down into the Ohio River Valley but couldn’t make it back up and over, so it hung on you like a net. 

Then, too, there was the thick meat smell of the Purina plant, called dog fog. 

And just driving through Butchertown you could smell the blood. Later, when I lived there, on hot nights I could taste it. But that was nothing compared to the sound of the pigs screaming. The sound of pigs has always been spectral for me. In Clay County, where my father’s foster parents lived, after dinner I would walk in the dark by the fencerow to slop out the pigs. I never saw them by day, but I can still hear them now, grunting and snuffling in the dark. 

My father wanted me to go back to school. But at the same time he was proud that I was working with my hands in the burning sun, putting my body on the line. He was adamant that no one on our street should be told how much the shipping company was paying me, especially not big Mister Skidelsky, who still kept our old Mercury Monarch up on cinderblocks in his front yard. So naturally when my father and I were in the driveway changing the oil in his truck, big Mister Skidelsky wandered up the street to hang around, and my father went in the house to get a couple of cold beers, and big Mister Skidelsky started in on me. 

“Tell me something, Johnny.”

“Yes sir. Ask me.”

“How much are they paying you out there?”

“It’s good.”

“That’s good. How much?”

“I’m real happy. But they make me work for it.” 

“I guess they would. Now tell me how much.”

“No, sir.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t want to tell you.” 

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“I guess you better tell me before I knock the shit out of you.” 

Now I wanted to hurt him.

“They pay me eight dollars an hour, Mister Skidelsky.”

“Eight dollars. Eight dollars.”

“Yes sir.”

“Gosh, Johnny. Eight dollars. An hour. Oh my gosh. I got to go,” he said. “Oh my gosh.”

“Stick around. My dad’s coming out with another beer.”

“I got to go. Eight dollars. Eight dollars an hour, Johnny. Gosh.”

My father came back and saw big Mister Skidelsky walking away.

“God damn it, Johnny. What did you do now?” 

“Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.”

“Uh huh. So what did you do?”

“What do you think I did?”

“God damn it, Johnny.”

“I am spending my day off working on my father’s truck, and I think that is pretty wholesome. I am not a lawn dart to be thrown back and forth between two grown men saying god damn it and fuck and shit at me. As soon as the front door closed behind you, he asked me. He wouldn’t stop asking me. When you told me not to tell him, you knew he would ask me. If you didn’t want me to tell him then you shouldn’t have walked away.”

“They don’t pay him that at International Harvester,” my father said, “and they never will.” 

“It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“You don’t understand. A grown man with a wife and three children. God damn it. He’s never made that kind of money in his whole life.”

“He threatened me.” 

“You don’t understand, Johnny.” 

“I’ll tell you what I don’t understand is whose side are you on.”

“You don’t understand anything,” my father said.

Eight dollars an hour for forty hours a week was a fortune. 

I remember making four twenty-five an hour the summer I was sixteen, working for Mister Levine on his furniture-pad assembly line, running the quilted pads through my machine, compressing them tightly and pulling plastic sheaths over them, loading trays of those packages and wheeling the trays out to the dock and throwing the sacks into tractor-trailers all day, then driving to the east end and sixty-nining all night with my best girl, parked by the water tower while we listened to The Birthday Party playing “Nick the Stripper.” I was living the good life.

In this world, we contend with mighty forces. The force that through the green turbine drives the 747 will pitch and toss your meat and bones like nothing doing.

It shoved our vans around, if their wheels weren’t chocked right. I was told that during one shift a perpendicularly parked van caught the wash of a turning jet full on, like a sail, and the van skipped like a stone over the airfield until it crashed into a belt-loader, pinning a package worker between the two machines but miraculously doing no more than spraining his ankle.

We sealed the planes and fumigated them, then reopened them to air them out, always being hectored to keep safe, never cut corners, but at the same time what is all this rigamarole, let’s get a move on.

We searched in a grid pattern over the rails and ball bearings and panels and exposed guts of the containerized cargo planes, searching for the shining green and gold of a living or dead Japanese beetle against all that matte gray metalwork. Some planes were empty, although you could never quite believe it: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Other planes, you walked out onto the raised loading platform with a full sack of dead beetles over your shoulder.

Ten years ago I was drinking coffee at an outdoor table when a man walked up and said: 

 “Hey, sir. My grandmother was a witch, and I can see things. She was Irish. I was a Marine in Vietnam. There was a man walking point. I said to him, Hey. I made this motion with my hand. I said, Over there, two in the trees. He took his night goggles off and asked me how I saw that. I told him my grandmother was a witch, I can see things. I’m a warlock. That’s like a man witch. It’s hard to explain to human people.”

“I know what a warlock is,” I said.

“I’m glad to see you’re drinking coffee, sir,” he said. “That’s a drink for men with integrity. It means you have a plan. Do you want me to tell you what I see when I look at you?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m afraid to find out.”

“I see green and gold everywhere,” he said. “It means luck.”

“That sounds all right,” I said. 

But I was thinking of the wings of the green and gold beetles I had killed that burning summer.

J. B. S. Haldane said: “The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other.” 

In this, if in almost nothing else, I know just how God feels. A short list of the things I know: (1) How God feels; (2) the body is reality, and the disciplines that control the body are the disciplines that control reality; (3) that’s it, that’s all I know.

I took my body to the doctor when my body began to itch this year. Two tiny burning spots on my shoulders, like the spots on Anomala orientalis, woke me in the night. The dermatologist asked me if I’d ever had a semi-serious neck or upper back injury. 

“Sure I have,” I said. “I got my occipital triangle ripped twice, once on each side, in a pair of fights. And one time I was fucking this giant praying mantis and she looked back over her shoulder and bit my head off. Is that the sort of thing you mean?” 

“Exactly,” said the dermatologist, who has known me for years. “Listen. Here’s what I think. You’ve got notalgia paresthetica, also called neuropathic itch or thoracic cutaneous nerve entrapment syndrome. And your scratching and worrying at these little spots has caused what we call lichenification, or rough patches. That’s what these textural anomalies are.” 

“Did you say Anomala?” I asked. 

“Look,” the doctor said, “it’s just a theory.”