Expiration Date

I woke up on a hospital gurney with a skull-crushing headache and a raw throat. People in blue smocks brushed against my bed, which was jammed up against a wall in a busy hallway. Every time the bed jolted it sent another sledgehammer tap on the spike slowly inching its way to the center of my brain. My mouth tasted like dirty pennies. I wanted to throw up.

After a while I rolled over and used the metal rails to pull myself up to a sitting position. I ran my fingertips across my five-day stubble, patted my chest, my belly. All there. I was still wearing my nylon shorts and T-shirt. The ring and pinky fingers were still attached to my left hand.

But both were dead numb, like I’d fallen asleep on them. They wouldn’t bend either. Not unless I cheated and used my other hand, which I noticed was now hooked up with an IV needle. Good Christ, what had happened last night?

Somebody blew past my gurney, flipping through papers on a clipboard.

“Hey,” I called out, and the guy stopped midstride.

“Yeah?”

“Where am I?”

“Frankford Hospital, man. You O.D.’d.”

“I what? How did I get here?”

“Girlfriend brought you in. She was pretty freaked out. I were you, I’d think about help. But I can’t be the first person to tell you that.”

And then he continued on down the hall. O.D.’d?

I needed to get out of here. I grabbed the IV needle with the three good fingers of my left hand, yanked it out, sat up. Some blood shot out, so I pulled up the tape and recovered the puncture. I hated needles.

So this was Frankford Hospital. I hadn’t been inside this place in years—and that had been the old building, which had been razed and replaced by this one.

My grandpop was here somewhere, on one of these floors. For a moment I thought about stopping up to see him, just to get the obligation out of the way. I could kill two birds with one stone—recover from overdose, check; visit grandfather, check. But then I remembered I was shoeless, hungover and confused. I needed a shower and a nap. A nap to last at least a week.

And I needed to make sure Meghan was okay, and that she didn’t think I was a complete dick.

Once I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to puke, I swung my legs over the side of the gurney then slid off. My first few steps were wobbly, but okay. I walked out of the hospital. Nobody tried to stop me. And why would they? I was just a junkie in nylon shorts and a threadbare T-shirt. Hell, I was doing them a favor.

I made the four-block walk back to the apartment, carefully avoiding beads of glass on the sidewalk. One old woman, wrapped in a dirty gray shawl and a badly stained and ripped dress, stared at me from the doorway of a long-closed delicatessen. There was shock and anger in her eyes.

“It’s you! You finally showing your face around here?”

Welcome home, Mickey Wade.

“You son of a bitch!”

I kept walking.

Meghan had locked the door. But she’d also thought to put the key under the doormat, bless her soul. I could only imagine what I’d put her through last night. No wonder she hadn’t stuck around.

Inside the apartment the sofa bed was still pulled out, covers mussed, pillows twisted up and askew. Boxes had been pushed out of the way. I must have blacked out in bed. She panicked, called 911.

I pressed my face against the pillow that had been hers. It smelled like her—vanilla and the sweetest slice of fruit you can imagine. So at least that part hadn’t been a dream. Meghan had really been here last night.

And somehow I’d managed to O.D. on beer and Tylenol.

There was nothing in Grandpop Henry’s microscopic fridge except two Yuenglings from the night before. I didn’t feel like walking back downstairs to buy something sensible for breakfast, like a Diet Coke or bottle of Yoo-Hoo. So I twisted open a beer. Maybe a beer would outsmart my headache. And if the headache wasn’t fooled, the cold would at least soothe my throat. Besides, isn’t this what unemployed writers are supposed to do? Drink a cold beer at eight in the morning?

I opened my laptop to search the job boards. There wasn’t much to search—not for unemployed journalists, anyway. In years past, an out-of-work journalist could fall back on teaching or public relations. But now actual teachers and public relations flacks were duking it out, death match–style, for the same jobs. Journos didn’t stand a chance.

My eyelids felt like slabs of concrete, so I gave up, drank a few more sips of beer and then crashed on the couch—bed. Somewhere in the haze of unconsciousness I heard my cell ring once. I reached up with my left hand, fingers still numb, fumbling for the phone, half-hoping it was Meghan. Nope; my mom. I hit the ignore button and closed my eyes. She probably wanted to know if I’d found a job yet. Or visited my grandpop yet. Or stopped being a screw-up yet.

Sometime later, the rumble of the El woke me up.

I was more than a little alarmed to discover that the two fingers on my left hand were still numb. Why hadn’t the feeling come back yet? Maybe I whacked them on something on my way to the hospital, causing some nerve damage. Which would be fantastic. What did an unemployed writer need with fingers, anyway?

I rolled off the couch, starving. But Grandpop’s cupboards were stocked with nothing but old-man junk food—a couple of cans of tuna, cream of tomato soup, a box of stale crackers and a foil bag containing some potato chip particulates. Maybe I could stick my face into the bag, inhale some nutritional value.

I settled on the tuna, but it took me awhile to find a can opener. I finished one can and then ate every single stale flakeboard cracker, washing them down with tap water, which tasted like salt and metal.

Okay, enough stalling. I grabbed my cell from the top of the houndstooth couch. It was time to call Meghan and start my awkward apology. And maybe find out what the hell had happened.

First I listened to my mom’s message:

“Mickey, it’s your mom. Just checking in to see how you’re making out over there. Have you stopped by the hospital to see your grandfather yet?”

Yes, Mom, I could truthfully tell her, I visited the hospital first thing this morning.

“Anyway, maybe you could come up to have dinner with Walter and me this weekend. He’s been asking about you. Let me know and I’ll pick you up.”

Walter is her boyfriend. I couldn’t stand him. She knows this, but pretends not to know this. I hit erase.

The cell was down to a single bar, so I looked for a place to charge it. I found a black power cord that snaked across the floor, around a cardboard box and into the back of something hidden under a stack of file folders. To my surprise, it turned out to be a silver Technics turntable.

The thing looked thirty years old. I hit the power button on the silver tuner beneath it, then ran my index finger under the needle and heard a scratching, popping sound. It worked.

I fished out one of my father’s albums—Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard—and listened to “The Six Teens” while I finished off the warm Yuengling I’d opened a few hours ago.

This was the first time I’d listened to any of these albums.

The LPs were my dad’s. Mom gave them to me on my twenty-first birthday. She told me I used to love to look at them when I was a toddler. Now, I haven’t owned a record player since I was eight years old—a Spider-Man set, with detachable webbed speakers. So all these years I’ve had no way of listening to these albums. But now and again I’d open the three boxes full of old LPs and thumb through them, taking the time to soak up the art.

You can have your tiny little CD covers, or worse, your microscopic iPod jpegs. Give me LP covers, like George Hardie’s stark black-and-white image of a blimp bursting into flames from Led Zeppelin I. Or the floating tubes on the front of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The freaky black-and-white lion’s head on the cover of Santana, which I’d often misread as having something to do with satan. The Stones turning into cockroaches on Metamorphosis. Grand Funk Railroad, Iron Butterfly, The Stones, Lou Reed, Styx—these were all bands that I loved purely for their cover art.

As for the music inside…well, my mileage varied. You could only listen to “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” so many times, if you know what I mean.

But I would look at the art and think about my dad bringing the albums home from the record shop—probably Pat’s on Frankford Avenue—putting his headphones on, listening to the music, staring at the covers himself, letting his imagination wander, dreaming of making his own records someday.

But he never did make a record. He was killed before he had the chance.

While my cell charged I showered, pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, then ventured out for some food. First, I needed money. There was a battered ATM near the Sav-N-Bag market all the way down Frankford Avenue, near the end of the El tracks. The walk was as depressing as I imagined it would be. Shuttered storefronts. Abandoned shells of fast-food chains that became clinics for a while before they shut, too.

At the ATM I quickly checked my surroundings for possible muggers, then quickly shoved in my card and pressed the appropriate keys. I asked for $60—just enough to buy some cold cuts, maybe a few cans of soup, some boxes of cereal. Bachelor staples.

My request is granted, but my receipt tells me I only have $47 to my name.

Whoa whoa whoa. That didn’t make any sense. It should have been more like $675. Where was my final paycheck from the newspaper? Today was Friday. Payday. My last one. Possibly ever.

By some miracle I got the City Press’s assistant HR guy on my cell. Funny that the paper can afford to get rid of writers and art designers but never management. The paper currently had a three-man human resources department; with me gone, there was exactly one news reporter on staff. Exactly which humans would these HR people be resourcing?

The assistant HR guy—Howard—explained that my last check has been all but wiped out by sick days I owed the paper.

“No no. That can’t be right.”

Howard assured me it was.

“I never took sick days. I was a reporter—I was out of the office a lot. You know, doing reporting.”

Howard told me his hands were tied.

“Look, Howard, seriously, you’re wrong about this. Check with Foster.”

Howard asked who Foster was.

“Star Foster. The editor in chief? You know, of the paper?”

Howard told me it wouldn’t matter if he spoke with Foster, or what she might say. He had my time sheets in front of him. He goes by the time sheets.

“You don’t understand. I want…no, I need my entire final paycheck.”

Howard told me he was sorry, wished me all the best, then hung up.

Which meant that unless I changed Howard’s mind, I had exactly $47—plus the $60 I just withdrew—to last me pretty much forever.

Like most of America, I had nothing saved. Every month I danced so close to zero, my checking account was more like a temporary way station for a small amount of cash that passed between a newspaper and a series of credit card companies, corporations and utilities.

My economic strategy thus far had been simple: if I start to run out of cash, I slow down on spending until the next payday. That strategy, of course, depended on there being a next payday.

Mom was not an option. Not yet, anyway. Placing me in Grandpop’s apartment was her brand of help—a gentle suggestion, not a handout. Asking for a loan now would just confirm my mother’s lifelong theory that the Wadcheck men could never hang on to anything: marriage, fatherhood (my grandfather), songs, recordings, his life (my father), a relationship, a career (me). I was on my own.

I had written hundreds of articles and interviewed everyone in the city, from the power brokers to crooked cops to addicts squatting in condemned ware houses. And for three years, thousands of people had read my work and knew my byline. The name on my debit card was even starting to get recognized in bars and restaurants. Are you the Mickey Wade who writes for the Press?

Nope. I’m just some idiot standing outside a supermarket in my old neighborhood with no job and about sixty bucks in my pocket.

“You bastard.”

I turned, and it was the old lady from this morning, leaning against the stone wall of the supermarket. She looked even rattier up close. Bad teeth, rheumy eyes. She must hang out on Frankford Avenue all day, waiting for losers to cross her path so she can mock them. She pointed at me with a crooked, bony finger.

“The day’s going to come when you’re going to get what’s coming to you.”

Oh, how I’ve missed Frankford.

A copy editor at the Press named Alex Alonso once told me about the three basic things humans needed to survive. He’d worked one of those Alaskan fishing boat tours where you endure an exhausting, nausea-filled hell at sea for two months in exchange for a nice payday at the end. Alex said it was pretty much eighteen hours of frenzied labor, followed by six hours of insomnia. And for two months he consumed nothing but apples, peanut butter, cheap beer and cocaine.

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.