There’s something Americana-core about the insecticide trucks and the children in your story “Insecticide Parade” that reminds me of how post-war small towns like the one I grew up in Southern Ohio are portrayed. But I can’t say I’ve seen any of the big trucks except the ones left unused after DDT was banned in ’72. I also thought about children running after ice cream trucks, and how that transforms into adults chasing other things. Do you think we’ve grown up learning to chasing our own demise as entertainment, the way the children chased trucks loaded down with DDT?
It makes sense that the setting resonates. Pittsfield had one industry, the way many small towns did. General Electric was the sun everything orbited; the PCBs were the shadow no one talked about. I set the story in 1955 because the dread felt ambient—polio, nuclear fear, the Holocaust still echoing, the Cold War tightening, the Beats pressing against the Silent Generation.
The image of children chasing insecticide trucks came straight out of that world. The story stays with a six-year-old because at that age the masks aren’t fully formed yet. A child doesn’t understand ideology or geopolitics, but he feels contradiction. He senses danger before he has language for it. He understands symbols and dream logic instinctively.
So yes—the children chase the trucks the way adults later chase other forms of harm. But the child isn’t chasing death. He’s chasing wonder. The tragedy is that, in that world, the two arrive in the same cloud.
Nelson Algren (or the movie by Otto Preminger?) and beatniks as the cool standard are an interesting way to move from the reality of the trucks into the narrator’s internal world coming into form as he ages. Is the notion of adulthood meant to stand in for heroin? I remember it being a kind of desperate intoxication.
I’ve always been drawn to stories inside stories. Frankie Machine sits in the culture as both warning and lure—caught between addiction, guilt, and the machinery of his own life. In the piece, the shift from the trucks to Algren marks a shift from raw existence to consciousness taking shape.
The child sees adulthood as a constellation of masks. Grown-ups are performing versions of themselves in order to survive. Addiction enters not just as chemistry, but as a kind of spiritual hunger—a way adults try to quiet the fracture without admitting it’s there.
Adulthood isn’t heroin, but it behaves like it. It promises relief. It rarely delivers.
One of the things I really enjoyed about reading and rereading “Insecticide Parade” is the recurrence of certain images over time: the empty chair, the return of the trucks, and the changing relationships to both. Less laughing, more coughing. It’s as if becoming an adult turns into a sickness. Is that what we’re stuck with then? All the hope and idealization, reduced to a cough and the sound of static?
I rely on images to do the work. The empty chair, the returning trucks, laughter turning into coughing—those are the markers of time passing and selves splitting into roles, defenses, expectations.
The 440-hertz hum works on two levels. It’s the tone orchestras tune to, but it also echoes the Emergency Broadcast System—the nuclear threat humming beneath ordinary life. One note holding order and dread at the same time.
I always admired writers with a strong voice who could load a single image that can be read a number of ways. A cough can be illness, disillusionment, or the moment innocence burns off.
Adulthood isn’t the sickness. The sickness is pretending we don’t hear the static.
There’s a realization in the phrase, “We told each other lies we could live with: the county wouldn’t poison its own; the tumble of moths meant something holy ….” and then the insistence on escape that turns out really isn’t escape. There’s a lot therapeutic buzzwords and phrases that have entered the common vernacular, especially in memes and social media reels of “escaping cycles of multi-generational trauma.” Is the narrator, having found himself an adult, cynical about his own escape? What does that say about us, as people?
Those lines mark the narrator’s first clear understanding of contradiction. Adults tell themselves the county wouldn’t poison its own. That the moths mean something holy. These are survival myths—the lies that keep the machinery running.
The narrator isn’t cynical about escape. He’s lucid about its limits. Most escapes are geographic, not internal. We carry the old ghosts with us.
If there’s resolution, it isn’t therapeutic. It’s recognition: hearing the hum and not looking away.
Do you enjoy listening to jazz? If so, is there anyone you could recommend? (If not, what sort of music do you enjoy?)
Jazz is the idiom I think in, but I also like country and folk songs. I love the stories. Jazz and writing touch the same chord in people because they’re both symbolic languages. A single note in jazz can carry multiple meanings at once, creating a connection between the artist and the listener.
Check out Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus. Both artists understood restraint, and how a musician’s voice is what makes the work instantly identifiable. There’s a later live performance of Rollins playing “Who by Fire” with Leonard Cohen. That performance captures what I chase in prose: restraint, clarity, and a voice you recognize from a single line.
