Expiration Date

Using a butter knife, I chopped a single pill into quarters, doing the math in my head. Last night, I’d popped four pills, 250 milligrams each. I had weird-ass dreams about cars and women in polka-dot dresses and fat, sweaty doctors that lasted pretty much all night long.

This evening I’d taken two pills, and the weird-ass dream thing lasted three, maybe four hours.

So a quarter of a single pill would be what…a half hour?

Okay, worst case, I’d swallow it and it wouldn’t do a thing. Then I’d know it was something else making me dream about February 1972. But if it had been the pills, it would start to explain a lot. Namely, that all of these crazy dreams weren’t coming out of nowhere.

I opened a grape Vitamin Water that Meghan had brought and swallowed the quarter pill. Then I laid back down on the floor, next to the couch, and closed my eyes.

There was no warning, no herald. The pill worked that fast.

Within seconds I was on the floor of the dark, empty office. Two fingers, still missing. El rumbling outside.

This time, however, I stayed put in the office that would someday become my Grandpop’s apartment. As Blaise Pascal once wrote: “All of man’s trouble stems from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Instead, I peeled back some of the cardboard, looked out of the front windows and watched the soft rain land on the early 1970s cars moving down Frankford Avenue. I listened to wet tires against asphalt, a soothing sound broken up every few minutes by the thunder of the arriving El that always, without fail, jolted me, whipping shadows across my face.

There were also murmured voices somewhere in the apartment building. A woman’s. Then an angry kid, saying he didn’t understand, he was being quiet. And then the woman’s voice again, saying something about being done, that’s it, she couldn’t take it anymore. Ah, another quiet night in Frankford circa 1972.

Right? This was 1972?

But I didn’t want to go outside and check. I just wanted to sit on that weird stiff psychiatrist’s sofa and take everything in. Convince myself that I was actually sitting here in the past.

Everything felt real. I could smell the burning dust in the air, baked by the steam radiator in the corner. I could hear the rumble of the El outside. The squeal of the brakes. The thump of the doors opening, then closing. I could feel the fibers of the cushion beneath me, the smooth polished wood of the sofa’s frame. I could blink and breathe. I was able to run my tongue around inside my mouth.

But this couldn’t really be my physical body, could it? Meghan said she’d watched my body in the present—mumbling, convulsing and otherwise seeming to have a perfectly good time by itself.

So what part of me was sitting here right now? My soul? Spirit? Life force? Ghost? Whatever it was, this other me was able to walk downstairs and open doors and pick up newspapers. In fact, except for being invisible to most people and that pesky “dissolved by light” thing, this other me acted just like my physical body.

I thought that maybe I should stand up, test my limitations. Find something this body could do that my real body couldn’t.

But it was too late; time was up. I felt the familiar dizziness wash over me, and then one violent head nod later…

I was back.

I spent the weekend experimenting—nights only. I quickly learned that whatever time of day I popped a pill, that would be the time of day I’d wake up back in the past. Early Saturday morning I took a quarter of a pill, all excited to continue my experimenting, but then almost baked myself alive in the bright, glare-filled office—despite the cardboard taped over the windows. I crawled under DeMeo’s desk and curled myself up into a quivering little ball until the pill wore off.

So by day, I crashed. The pills left me exhausted and headachy, with my body temperature going up and down at random. It all felt vaguely like the flu. I listened to my father’s albums to distract me from the pain.

The only part of my body that didn’t ache were the two numb fingers on my left hand. I found some medical tape in the medicine cabinet and used them to make a crude splint. I can’t tell you how many times I accidently bent them backwards on the cherrywood desk or the couch because I forgot they were there.

From time to time my cell rang, and I would reach up and turn its face toward me and see that is was Mom calling again. Didn’t she get the hint by now that I pretty much never picked up the phone, that I always let her calls go to voice mail? She was unstoppable, though, leaving messages about visiting Grandpop, my job hunt, or coming to dinner—three things I had no intention of pursuing anytime in the near future.

My mom didn’t realize that pushing me resulted in an equal and opposite reaction. Or maybe she did realize, and hoped that at some point I’d snap and the physics would reverse, like the North and South Poles after a massive demagnetization.

So I ignored her.

Meghan called twice, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to her messages. There was still a good chance I was caught on a downward spiral of insanity, and I wanted to avoid sucking her down with me. This, after all, was my pill-popping lost weekend. Just me, the pills, some peanut butter, sixes of Golden Anniversary beer and a bunch of LPs that used to belong to a dead hippie musician. You don’t bring people you care about along for a ride like that.

Besides, what did I think—that we had a future together? I was a philanthropic gesture. A novelty. Sooner or later Meghan moved on to something else. I’d watched it happen. No, I had to go this alone.

So by day I ate peanut butter and apples. If it was late enough in the afternoon, I had a few cold Golden Anniversaries. They actually weren’t bad if you drank them fast enough.

And by night I jumped around the early 1970s.

The more I practiced, the better my aim. The human mind is capable of all kinds of amazing tricks. Like telling yourself the night before that you want to wake up at a certain time in the morning. More often than not, you’ll wake up at that time—even beating the alarm clock you set as a backup.

So whenever I popped a pill, or the sliver of a pill, I started thinking hard about the date I wanted.

February 24.

February 28.

March 10.

March 30.

And so on.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t go back beyond the day I was born—February 22, 1972. This seemed to be the default line, and it was disappointing. The journalist in me had fantasies about going back to November 22, 1963, staking out the grassy knoll in Dallas and putting that nearly fifty-year-old story to bed. Dear Oliver Stone, my e-mail would begin…

But nothing doing. If I concentrated on February 21, 1972—or any day preceding it—I ended up back in February 22, 1972, by default.

I also couldn’t go back to a time I’d already visited. Maybe this was a built-in protection feature to prevent me from ripping open the fabric of reality, or something.

It worked.

Nor could I venture much beyond 1972. Saturday night I decided I wanted to see the Bicentennial, and my dad playing with his band near Penn’s Landing. This was one of my earliest memories: being down near the riverfront; seeing the tall ships; the red, white and blue streamers; and my father, Anthony Wade, strumming his guitar outside of a restaurant—just one of dozens of musicians hired by the city that day. I’d gotten lost at one point, and wandered off to a restaurant boat nearby along with my aunt, who was only nine months older. Some cop had found us, luckily, and all was good. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t. If we’d stayed lost. It was probably this combination of fear and excitement that imprinted the day forever in my mind.

So I popped four pills and thought hard about the night of July 4, 1976. I concentrated on the date, repeated it to myself over and over and over. I imagined fireworks. Red, white and blue streamers everywhere. Penn’s Landing. Liberty bells. The restaurant ship—the Moshulu. The bustle of the crowd. The sound of my father’s band playing. Every possible detail I could squeeze out of my own head. Again I repeated the date out loud. I went all method—I became the date.

The moment I woke up in the office, however, I didn’t feel right. I was dizzy and easily distracted. Oooh, look at the pretty cars. The speeding El…oooh! A pigeon! Somehow I made it down the stairs and out the front door to Frankford Avenue, which was alive and full of noise and kids screaming. Just make it to the El, I told myself. But the farthest I got was two steps on the sidewalk before I got dizzy, did a head nod and woke up back at home.

The pills wanted me to stick to a particular time frame.

The pills also wanted me to stay in the dark. I realized that losing my fingers wasn’t a fluke incident. Direct light of any kind—be it sun, a lamp or even a flashlight—did my time-traveling body serious harm. When I walked down Frankford Avenue and strayed too close to a neon sign, I felt it. I moved away, I felt better. If I lingered beneath a streetlamp, I would feel dizzy, and my ghostly eyes would water. It didn’t take long to put it together that light equals harm. And in big enough doses, it meant the permanent kind of harm. It was best to stay in the shadows completely.

Again I wondered about this ghostlike “body” I used in the past. Was everyone’s soul or spirit or ghost or whatever this sensitive to light? Is this the way we evolved flesh-and-blood bodies—to protect ourselves?

It’s questions like these that keep you up at night, making you giddy and terrified at the same time.

Somewhere in that timelost weekend it occurred to me that I could have the solution to all of my problems right here in this Tylenol bottle.

I was jobless and broke. Surely I could think of a way to use the pills to turn a small buck or two?

Nothing audacious, nothing that would screw with the thin, gossamer fabric of the space-time continuum. I’ve watched enough bad science fiction movies to know the rules. I also realized that if it were possible to travel back into the past to steal things, countless priceless artifacts would have gone missing on a regular basis. There would be no crown jewels. No Mona Lisa. No Hope Diamond. No moon rocks. Nothing cool at all. Future time-thieves would have nicked them all.

So after a while, I came up with the idea of vintage paperbacks and comic books.

Think about it. They were mass produced, cheap and wouldn’t be missed in their own time. And they were worth a great deal more in the present.

When I’d been gainfully employed at the City Press, I would sometimes hop across town and waste a Saturday afternoon scouring the shelves of a mystery bookstore called Whodunit. Most of the stuff was affordable—five or seven bucks for a Gold Medal hardboiled paperback that originally cost a quarter. But there were some real rarities that went for $20, $30 or even $50. Of course, these tended to be elusive titles from my favorite hardboiled writers—David Goodis, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Fredric Brown, Dan J. Marlowe.

A quarter in one year, $50 in another. I was no Wharton School grad, but even I could see this was an amazing return on investment.

So I did a trial run to see if I could carry something back to the present. I took a half pill, went back to March 30, 1972. I walked across the street. On the rack was a fresh copy of Marvel Spotlight #2: Werewolf by Night.

I’d never owned the original. But parts of it, along with pages from later issues, had been cannibalized and turned into a book-and-record set, which my father left under the tree for me Christmas 1978. He loved the classic monsters—your Draculas, your Frankensteins, your Wolfmen. And I loved that book-and-record, even though it terrified the crap out of me.

Lingering by the comic rack, I finally reached for it, trying to play it all stealthy. I was invisible, so I had that going for me. No one could see me. Even if they could, who would think anything of a middle-aged guy standing near a newsstand? Still, I was nervous, like I was about to knock over a bank. My fingers fumbled. The slick cover slipped out of my grasp once, twice, three times. Could anyone see this? The world’s lamest attempt at shoplifting ever?

After another eternity of hamfistedness, I regained my finger-hold on the thing and ran for it.

Over there, kids! Look at the invisible man with the stolen werewolf comic! Jogging across Frankford Avenue, avoiding the bright headlights, looking all nervous and guilty…

Back in the office I laid down on the floor and tightly pressed the comic to my chest with my palms. I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to wash over me.

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.