Expiration Date (6 page)

I’ve kept this handy factoid in my back pocket for years, ready to deploy if times got super-lean. Cocaine isn’t cheap, but it also isn’t essential. What kept Alex alive, he said, were the fiber (apples), protein (peanuts) and grains (in the beer, of course).

I was ready to go shopping.

The Sav-N-Bag hadn’t changed a bit in twenty-five years—same dirty orange and yellow color scheme, same crowded aisles, same carts with one wheel that either refuses to spin or forces you to veer to the left your entire shopping trip. Same lousy food.

This was a low-rent neighborhood market that relied on customers without cars. Anybody with a car went to the decent supermarkets in Mayfair or Port Richmond.

Fortunately the Sav-N-Bag was running a special on a big plastic tub of peanut butter. Not a name brand, like Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan. Just generic peanut butter. I put it in my dirty plastic carry-basket, then added a bag of undersized apples. The tab came to nine dollars. Hell, on this budget, I was good for another month and a half.

My grocery order safely tucked inside a planet-strangling plastic bag, I walked back up Frankford Avenue and stopped at Willie Shahid’s beer bodega on the ground floor of the apartment to buy the cheapest six-pack I could find: Golden Anniversary, for $4.99.

Willie—not that I knew his name yet—looked at me, probably thinking,
Wow, you’ve lost your girl and your taste in beer, all in one day. Welcome to Frankford.

I ate dinner as the sun went down over the tops of the rowhomes of Frankford—four tablespoons of peanut butter, one apple and two cans of Golden Anniversary. When dinner was over, I still felt hungry. And not nearly drunk enough.

I tried Meghan, got her voice mail. I left a message:

“Hey, it’s me. Mickey. Or, if you prefer, Mr. Wadcheck. Look, I’m really sorry about last night, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a little confused. If you don’t totally hate my guts, please call me back, okay? Okay.”

Okay.

I put another one of my dad’s old albums on the turntable: Pilot’s eponymous debut LP. I’d loved the second track, “Magic,” when I was a kid, and wanted to hear it again as nature intended—with scratches and pops. The way my dad heard it.

The wah-wah guitars made my head hurt, though. I went into the bathroom and helped myself to two Tylenols. I wanted to take it easy, after all. You know us O.D.-ing, over-the-counter-pain-reliever junkies.

And then it happened again.

One minute I was sitting up. The next, I was on the floor of the same strange office. There was the same brown paper taped up over the windows. Same potted fern. Same filing cabinets. Same lounge chair. Same desk. Same pudgy doctor sitting behind it.

The office was dead silent and stifling from the dry radiator heat. I could smell the burning dust.

What was going on? I had no idea. This all felt and looked real. This was not a daydream nor a fantasy. I was not hallucinating. Every sense I had told me the same thing: I was actually in this room.

Looking down, I saw that the ring and pinky fingers of my left hand were still missing. There was no wound, no scars. Just smoothed-over skin where the digits should be.

If this
was
a dream, then I was again in the past. I wondered what year this was, and started searching for my laptop—realizing a second later that I was being an idiot.

Meanwhile, Dr. DeMeo spun in his creaky metal chair and flipped a switch. A typewriter hummed. He cracked his knuckles, and within a few seconds the room was full of the machine-gun clacking of the keys. When was the last time I heard that noise? High school?

“Don’t mind me, Doc,” I said. “Just going to help myself up off the floor here.”

Dr. DeMeo continued typing, completely oblivious to me.

“You can’t hear a word I’m saying, can you, you fat sweaty bastard?”

The typing stopped, but only because Dr. DeMeo had turned to look at something on his desk. Then he resumed his clack-clack-clack-clacking.

“Hey, you’re a busy guy,” I said. “It’s okay with me.”

I took a few steps forward and peeked over Dr. DeMeo’s shoulder. As a writer, I considered such a thing an inexcusable sin, punishable by dismemberment. But DeMeo couldn’t see me, so what did it matter?

Subject took 500 mg. fell into a restful sleep within 2 min. Subject woke approximate 90 minutes later and proceeded to describe the test room in great, yet vague detail. Pressing him on questions such as what color was the carpet? How many drinking glasses on the table? Did you notice anything of note on the walls? resulted in generalities meant to coax clues from investigator. It is the investigator’s belief that patient was trying to fake a successful experience by supplying details vague enough to appear

He stopped typing and leaned back in his chair, almost smacking into me.

“Erna?” he asked. “Is that you?”

Not by a long shot, big boy.

DeMeo heaved himself forward to check his handwritten notes again. I glanced at the date on the top of the report:

February 25, 1972

So okay, I was still stuck in this dream about the past. A past I could see, smell, touch and hear. I was pretty sure I’d be able to taste something if I licked it. Like, say, the half-eaten doughnut on DeMeo’s desk. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of experimentation yet. I didn’t know where DeMeo’s mouth had been.

The doctor spun himself back to his typewriter. The machine-gun clacking resumed.

I slipped out the front door as quickly and quietly as possible. Did he notice the door as it opened for a quick second, then slammed shut on its own? I had no idea and honestly didn’t give a shit.

Downstairs, Frankford Avenue was quiet. There weren’t many cars, just a few people strolling up and down the sidewalks. The stores were long closed, but a few bars and delis were doing some business with drunks and late-night workers. It was cold. I walked to the corner and stared down Margaret Street.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet: I grew up around the corner from my grandpop’s apartment.

Literally.

Darrah Street runs parallel to Frankford Avenue, one block away. The street was named for a Revolutionary War heroine named Lydia Darragh. According to legend, she overheard British plans to ambush Washington’s army. She told friends she had to buy some flour from a mill in Frankford. Along the way, she snitched to the Americans, then bought her flour and went home. As a result of her trip to Frankford, the attack was a bust and dozens of American lives were spared—including, possibly, George Washington’s. No idea why the city leaders dropped the “g” from Darragh’s last name when it came time to honor her with a street (formerly a path located near the flour mill). No idea if the story is even true. But it came in handy for a history report or two in grade school.

Other than that, Darrah Street didn’t have much going for it. In 2002, my mom finally moved to Northwood, which was considered the “upscale” part of Frankford.

A few years later, not long after I’d joined the
City Press
as a staff writer, I came across a press release from the state attorney general’s office detailing the bust of a citywide heroin ring. One of the addresses jumped right out at me: the 4700 block of Darrah Street. I couldn’t believe it. A heroin ring, right on the block where I grew up! I called the state attorney general’s press flack for more details, thinking there might be a column in it. As it turned out, it wasn’t just my old block. The drug ring operated out of
my childhood home.

I checked the names of the accused, then called my mom.

She confirmed it: she’d unknowingly sold her home to a pair of (alleged) heroin dealers.

“They seemed like a nice young couple.”

I’m sure they did. Who knew they’d head up an organization that would (allegedly) sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of big H all over the city?

Still, it was unsettling to learn that the house you grew up in, took your first steps in, read your first books in, wrote your first stories in, felt up your first girlfriend in would be the future HQ of people who spent their days stuffing horse into tiny plastic baggies.

I never pursued the story.

If today was really February 25, 1972, then I was three days old and asleep in my crib, just one block away.

I wondered how far I could push this dream.

This stretch of Darrah Street was half residential, half industrial—small rowhomes on one side, a fire station and factory on the other. Everybody who lived on the rowhome side would look out their front windows and constantly be reminded of work. Everybody who worked across the street was constantly reminded of home.

I stood on the opposite side of the street, staring at my childhood home. What seemed so big to me as a kid now looked absurdly cramped through adult eyes. My parents’ black Dodge Dart was parked out front. The porch hadn’t been painted white yet; I remember my dad doing that when I was five or six years old, and me “helping” him. Now it was all the original brown brick and tan cement. There was a light on in the living room window.

From across the street I could hear myself crying.

At least I assumed it was me. The wailing seemed to come from directly behind the front window of 4738. And I was the only baby in the house at the time.

I looked both ways—the street was dead—then crossed and walked up the three concrete steps to my old front porch. It felt like walking onto the set of a children’s school play. Everything was so tiny.

I’d also forgotten what the interior of our home looked like growing up. It was straight out of the pages of
Urban Hippie Digest
: red velvet walls, brown rugs. A Buddha statue had been placed in the corner, surrounded by incense holders and ashtrays. A console TV—a hand-me-down, chipped in places. My mom was sitting on a hand-me-down couch. I remembered climbing on that couch until the frame threatened to break under my weight.

My mom was shaking. No—
sobbing.
Face in her hands.

There was a baby bassinet across the room. It shook a little, too. I couldn’t see myself, but I heard my unrelenting cries. I was either hungry, or I’d befouled myself. Didn’t matter. I needed some sort of attention.

Come on, Mom. What are you waiting for? Pick me up! Where’s my dad? Why won’t he pick me up?

Then I remembered. I’d been born on a Tuesday; this would be Friday. Gig night. My dad and his band would be out on a job.

My crying just wouldn’t stop. I felt my hands tremble. Why won’t she pick me up? Was she already tired of me?

Before I knew what I was doing, my right hand was up. I made a fist and started pounding on the window.

IV

My Father’s Killer

My mother looked up. Her face was bright red. God, she was young. So, so young.

“Someone there?” she asked, her voice muffled by the glass.

I panicked and darted to the left of the window.

“Hello?
Is someone there?
”

After a few seconds I saw her face appear in the window, nervously peering outside from behind the parted curtains. I stopped breathing for a moment. She was only eighteen years old when I was born, but that age is an abstract concept. She’s always been my mother, always been eighteen years older than me. Except now.

Now I was a ghost standing on the porch of my childhood home, I was thirty-seven years old, and I was looking at the face of the woman who gave birth to me—suddenly two decades younger. And she’s been crying. Her cheeks were still damp with tears, her eyes tender and red. She looked lost. Alone. Scared. Freaked out. Everything.

And her husband was out in a bar somewhere in Frankford—or maybe nearby Kensington. She probably told him she’d be fine handling the baby alone, but what choice did she have? They needed the money.

They had a new mouth to feed.

After a while she moved away from the window and started talking to the baby, me, in a robotic monotone.
Okay,
she said.
Okay, I’m coming. Stop crying, I’m coming. Stop crying.

I started feeling light-headed and dizzy again. I didn’t know if I’d wake up in the same place where I’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t want to chance waking up on Darrah Street in the middle of the night.

On the way back upstairs I ran into the red-haired kid again. He was sitting near the top of the first staircase, knees spread and hands curled into tight little fists. His green eyes, full of fury, bored right into mine. I wondered what I’d done wrong.

“You can still see me, huh?” I asked.

“Why do you keep asking me that? Of course I can see you. You’re there, aren’t you?”

“Where’s your mom?”