Expiration Date (9 page)

I snapped awake and immediately grasped at my chest with my eight good fingers.

No werewolf comic.

And with it, my idea of stealing comics and paperbacks from the past and eBaying them at a 400 percent markup in the future.

Other moneymaking schemes popped into my head, of course. I briefly thought about becoming a private eye. I could meet clients in the past, then use Google to “solve” their cases in the present. Only one problem, of course: almost nobody in the past could see me. Just that redheaded kid down on the second floor. What was I going to do, have a twelve-year-old kid be my Velda?

I could try to set up shop in the present, but there was a problem with that, too: unless I could find dozens of people who had burning questions about events from February 1972, I’d starve. There wasn’t even a good Philadelphia tragedy I could witness firsthand and turn into a book. My time-traveling abilities were limited to the point of being useless.

The only thing the pills were good for, it seemed, was walking around Philadelphia during the first few months of my life and depressing the hell out of myself.

My mother grew up on the fringes of Frankford, near Bridge Street and Torresdale Avenue. The neighborhood is still alive, but you can tell it’s had a few severe beatings. Along the way, the neighbors had gotten the idea that it was okay to throw their trash everywhere—the sidewalks, the gutter, their front porches. Windows broke and stayed broken. A few blocks away, you could hear the constant rumble of I-95.

But you couldn’t in late February 1972, because Interstate 95 hadn’t been built yet.

There were no pimped-out SUVs with throbbing subwoofers cruising the tiny streets. There was no shuttered pizza shop or deli. There was very little trash in the street gutters. There were very few broken sidewalks and crumbled curbs. In 1972 this was just another quiet middle-class neighborhood in the middle of the night.

Standing across the street, I looked at the rowhome where my mom grew up, just four from the end of the block. All the lights were out except for one: the kitchen. Somewhere in that house my mom’s father, Grandpop Ted, was probably enjoying his Saturday night, listening to polkas on the radio, drinking pull-top cans of Schaefer and burning through countless packs of Lucky Strikes. Grandpop Ted would die eighteen years later. Lung cancer.

So was I standing here for a reason? Was I supposed to cross Bridge Street, knock on the door and ask him to kindly cut back on the smoking?

After my dad was killed I spent a lot of nights in that house on Bridge Street, crashing on the green shag carpet in the living room. I’d listen to Grandpop Ted talk to Grandma Bea, both of them drinking and smoking, polkas on the radio in the background. They’d laugh. They’d fight. I’d curl up into a ball and cry a lot, but not so they could hear me.

Maybe I should walk back to my own house and leave a note for my mom:

HI ANNE!

LISTEN, THE GUITAR-PLAYING DUDE WITH A PONYTAIL YOU JUST MARRIED? UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU LET HIM OUT OF THE HOUSE ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1980. TRUST ME ON THIS.

SIGNED,
A FRIEND

I drifted back into Frankford proper, which was littered with the landmarks of my childhood. Instead of a grungy Sav-N-Bag there was a clean, shiny Penn Fruit Supermarket, with new carts and freshly painted walls and rows of boxes and cans and fruit and meat and bread. Farther down on Frankford Avenue there was a poultry shop, where rotisserie chickens would spin in a case near the front window. It was night, so the birds were gone, but the rotisserie machine was still there, along with a sign advertising whole chickens, halves, legs, breasts, thighs. My stomach rumbled at the sight. There was a Kresge’s five-and-dime, with a luncheonette counter. There was a drugstore, not a chain, an honest-to-God neighborhood drugstore, also with a luncheonette counter. You could see it just beyond the front doors, even in the dark. There was a huge toy store named Snyder’s. There were record shops. Children’s clothing stores, where you could buy your kids their Easter outfits. There was a place to buy lingerie. There was a candy store. No cigarettes, no bread, no milk, no lottery tickets, no porn mags, no motor oil—just rows of Bit-o-Honeys and Swedish fish and sugared gum drops and Day-Glo jelly fruit slices and ovals of chocolate behind a vast glass counter. You could walk in with fifteen cents and walk out with a small white paper bag full of penny candy. Candy that actually cost a penny each.

You trash a place in your mind for so long you forget that you used to actually love it.

I could wander all night, but it wouldn’t change the truth. I was still a dead broke guy a few credits shy a college degree, living in a bad neighborhood without a job during the worst recession since the Great Depression. So what if I could pop pills and wake up in a different year? No one could see me. No one could talk to me. I didn’t matter to anyone now or in the present.

There
had
to be something I could do with these pills. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out yet. Maybe my grandpop had it figured out.

Then I remembered the boxes and crates.

Back in the apartment I dove into the papers. What had I been thinking? He must have found a way to use the pills to his financial advantage. Clearly the man wasn’t rich, but he got by. He had to have been up to something in this apartment all this time. And the clues were probably in these boxes and crates.

There were genealogy charts. Seemingly random newspaper clippings going back to the 1920s and running into the 1990s. Real estate listings. Birth notice pages. Medical reports. None of it organized. None of it made sense.

What was he doing?

For instance: one manila folder, marked “Crime Wave” in a shaky scrawl, was jammed with a series of clips from the local paper, the
Frankford Gleaner.
The articles detailed a series of break-ins and burglaries up and down Frankford Avenue during the summer of 1979. Totally friggin’ random.

Unless my grandpop was taking the pills and much more adept at pinpointing the year he visited? Was it possible he was going back to 1979 and looting the Avenue? And if so, how did he keep the stuff? Did he put everything into a bank safety-deposit box in the past, then open it in the present? Of course, that required the ability to open a box in the past, and you couldn’t do that if you  were invisible. And in a well-lit bank.

Maybe this was just a random series of articles he’d kept because he was a true-crime junkie. Maybe it meant nothing at all.

My head started to hurt.

After a few hours of searching I stumbled across a Florsheim shoe box. It was packed with old photos of my father. I cracked a Golden Anniversary and sat down to examine them.

I had never seen these before. A lot of them showed my father as a little boy, in short pants and everything. He was smiling and crouched next to Grandpop Henry, who—loathe as I am to admit this—
did
look a lot like me. He was wearing a V-neck T-shirt and smiling. He had more hair.

All of us Wadcheck men look alike. It was like the same guy was reborn again, and again, and again, with only minor genetic input from the mother.

And yes, there was Grandmom Ellie, beaming, holding my baby father in her arms. Presumably, Grandpop Henry had been the one taking the photo.

These photos offered glimpses of a world I barely knew existed—some magical fairy-tale kingdom where my dad was alive, and his parents were still married, they loved each other, and things still had the chance of turning out okay. The furniture was shabby, the walls were chipped, but they were just starting their lives together in a quiet Philadelphia neighborhood. They had no idea of the tragedies that awaited them.

The man in the V-neck T-shirt had no idea he’d be burying his son in about thirty years.

The woman holding the baby had no idea her husband would leave her, and she’d live more or less alone the rest of her life.

The baby had no idea that he would lose his temper in a bar and kick-start a thirty-second fight that would end his life.

I had another beer, then dug deeper into the box. I was surprised to see some grainy, orange-baked Polaroid photos of myself.

There was me, lounging with my dad on our threadbare brown living room rug. Me, hanging on to his arm, both of us sharing an oversized doughnut, the console TV in the background playing a
Star Trek
rerun. Me, pounding away on a toy organ, while Dad strummed his acoustic guitar. Me, hanging next to my father’s band during his Bicentennial gig down at Penn’s Landing. Which, if I indeed had stayed lost, would have probably been the last photo of me my parents would have seen.

What I
do
remember of the time I spent with my father was that it always revolved around music or horror movies or science fiction shows—in short, the things he liked to do. He was indoctrinating me. Giving me an early booster shot of the good stuff. Back then I was completely enthralled by him. I’d perch myself on the landing leading down to the basement, listening to my father running through chord changes or trying to pick up chords from Top 40 singles or organizing his records and lyric sheets in a filing cabinet. The basement air would always be thick with the aroma of cigarettes or pot.

Maybe, had he lived, we would have shared our first joint together.

Outside the El rumbled. I opened a Golden Anniversary and put on another of my father’s albums—Styx’s
Paradise Theatre.
This was one of the few in the collection that he’d never had a chance to hear. My father belonged to some album of the month club, and it arrived in the mail (along with Phil Seymour’s
Phil Seymour
) a month after he died. My mom was too much of a wreck to notice I’d claimed the album for myself. And remember, this was two years before “Mr. Roboto” made it embarrassing to like Styx.

I finished my beer and wondered if maybe I really was losing my mind, and imagining all of this. Maybe
I
was the one lingering in a coma, victim of a drug problem I wasn’t even aware I had.

At the bottom of a milk crate I found a scrapbook. It had big obnoxious brass rings holding the thick velvet cover and the stiff, crinkly pages together. It was the kind of photo album where you peel up the plastic, from left to right, place your photos on the white sticky backing, then smooth it back down. Unless you had the patience and steady hand of a sober monk, you’d always end up with crinkles. And it looked like Grandpop Henry had tied one on when he slapped this thing together.

I flipped through the pages for a few minutes before I realized I had been absolutely wrong about my father’s death.

VI

This Could Be the Last Time

My father, Anthony Wade, the Human Jukebox, played three sets at Brady’s, from nine until about eleven forty. That’s when some witnesses say twenty-year-old William Allen Derace—because all killers come with three names—walked into Brady’s, sat down, ordered a mug of Budweiser and a sirloin steak.

He sat in a booth alone, and watched my father, the Human Jukebox, perform some Stones, Doors and Elvis cover songs. Derace’s steak remained untouched; it sat on top of wax paper in its red plastic basket until after the cops had come and gone. He did not drink any of his Bud.

And then at approximately 11:45, five minutes before my father was set to take a break, and in the middle of a guitar solo during his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” Billy Allen Derace walked up to the stage, smiled, showed my father the steak knife in his hand, muttered something, then began to stab him in the chest.

By the second knife blow my father’s aorta had been punctured, and he had probably gone into shock, but he still managed to lift his Guitorgan to parry the third strike. The
Daily News
had published a photo of the guitar, with a slash mark running down its black lacquered body and into the fret board. Derace stabbed my father a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, then a final seventh time before a pair of off-duty firefighters pulled him away from the stage and subdued him. Derace, however, managed to wriggle free and escape through the back alley.