Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Think it’s okay to park here?”

  Meghan was born and raised on Philadelphia’s so-called Main Line. You remember the movie—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, all that? That’s the Main Line. I remembered watching the movie on TV as a kid and wondering why they called it The Philadelphia Story, because they certainly couldn’t have filmed it in Philadelphia.

  The Philly I knew was Rocky, Twelve Monkeys. Hardcore gritty tales set in unforgiving concrete canyons. Meghan claimed to love the rough-and-tumble Philadelphia from Rocky and Twelve Monkeys. I had to gently remind her that the latter was a postapocalyptic film.

  Still, I couldn’t blame her.

  She didn’t grow up here.

  When I left Frankford after college I swore I’d never return. You get punched in the face often enough, chased down the block and through your own front door often enough…well, it kind of puts you off a neighborhood.

  As a kid, I mostly stayed in my back bedroom and read whatever I could get my hands on. And later, I wrote stories. Looking back on it now, it seems I was plotting my escape all along, because it was a writing career that got me out of Frankford.

  And now, the lack of a writing career was bringing me back.

  My mom had come up with the idea of me crashing here until I found another job. It wasn’t like Grandpop Henry would know the difference. The downstairs bodega owner had found him a few hours after he’d suffered some kind of seizure and fell into a coma—the same day I lost my job at the City Press, in fact. Not exactly a banner day for the family.

  My mom told me that Grandpop Henry could breathe on his own. But now he was like a TV without cable: the power was on, only he couldn’t receive any programming.

  “You should still visit him. He can still hear you.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’ll only be a few blocks away.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re going to visit him, right?”

  “Okay.”

  My mother delighted in telling me what to do, and I found a not too small measure of satisfaction doing the exact opposite.

  She also told me that Grandpop’s apartment was fully furnished, so I wouldn’t have to worry about pots, pans or utensils. Not that I owned much of that stuff. My worldly possessions included a crate of old LPs from the 1960s and 70s; a box of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski paperbacks—standard issue for journalists; another box of vintage paperback mysteries; a six-year-old Mac laptop; a three-year-old cell phone that didn’t close right; and finally, two trash bags full of clothes and other assorted junk I’ve been dragging around for fifteen years, from Philly to New York City and back.

  It’s sad when your worldly possessions fit into a 2009 Toyota Prius.

  On the upside, we finished unloading in less than thirty minutes, even though it was three flights up to Apartment 3-A. I drove Meghan’s Prius to the Frankford Hospital garage a few blocks away, where I assumed it would be reasonably safe. After all, doctors parked there, right?

  Meghan gave me a playful punch in the arm.

  “So, what now?”

  “Well, I was about to have my boy Tino mix me a gin gimlet before retiring to the terrace to watch the sunset.”

  “Send Tino home for the night. Let’s get drunk on beer.”

  “Excellent suggestion. But I’ll have to go get your car again.”

  “What, and drive back wasted? Let’s go downstairs and buy a few sixes.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “The bodega. They sell beer. I saw the signs in the window and everything.”

  So we walked downstairs to the bodega. I bought two sixes from Willie Shahid—though I didn’t know his name yet. Meghan looked like she was having a grand old time, buying beer in Frankford. Meanwhile, I worried some crackhead in a ski mask was going to pop in, wave a gun around and ask for the keys to the late-model Prius parked in the hospital garage up the street.

  I was also mildly alarmed when the tab for two sixes of Yuengling came to $18, leaving me with about five bucks until my final paycheck was direct deposited the next day. But hey, the lady wanted to get her beer on. Tonight, money was no object.

  Tonight, we were toasting my sad return home.

  About an hour later I’d killed four of the Yuenglings and lined the empties up on top of Grandpop Henry’s massive cherrywood desk. Meghan, first beer still in hand, was on the floor going through his stuff without shyness or apology.

  “I’m a snoop.”

  There wasn’t much to Apartment 3-A—just a big room with a bathroom off to one side, a small closet on the other. A rusty radiator in the corner for all your heating needs. A desktop circulating fan for cooling, which would do jack shit once summer really got under way. A small kitchenette with a miniature oven barely big enough for a TV dinner and a quarter-sized fridge that could accommodate beer or food, but not both at the same time.

  Grandpop Henry moved here in 2002, but I’d never visited. I feel a little guilty about that—but then again, I also didn’t go out of my way to return to Frankford either.

  Every few minutes the thunder of the Frankford El smashed through the silence, and through the dirty front windows you could see the rushing silver of the train cars as they ground to a halt at the Margaret Street station, then, after a ten-second delay, started moving again, and the rumble would build to a deafening crescendo that bounced off the fronts of the buildings all the way down to the next station.

  The place was reasonably clean—no nicotine buildup on the walls, no grease caked on the ceiling of the kitchenette. Grandpop Henry, it seemed, owned only two pieces of furniture: a big houndstooth couch and the big cherrywood desk. No bed, no kitchen table, no chairs. Guess when it comes down to it, all you needed was something to sit on and something to put things on.

  Still, the room was cluttered, a ridiculous amount of floor space devoted to cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates and shoe boxes crammed with papers. This was what Meghan picked through.

  “What does your grandfather do for a living?”

  “He’s retired. But he used to be a night watchman at a hospital. My mom told me he liked the hours, the lack of conscious people.”

  “Huh.”

  “What’s the huh for?”

  “He’s got a lot of papers here. Newspaper clippings, genealogy charts, handwritten notes. A lot of medical reports, it looks like. I thought maybe he was a journalist or something. Like you.”

  “My grandpop? I don’t think he was much of a reader.”

  “Hmmm.”

  After a while Meghan showed me a yellowed envelope.

  “Henryk Wadcheck?”

  She mispronounced it the way most people do: wad-chek. As in, check your wad. The kids in grade school figured it out pretty quick.

  “My grandfather’s name. It’s Polish. And pronounced vahd-chek.”

  “My, that’s veeeered. So wait—is that your last name?”

  “Technically.”

  “Your name is Mickey Wadcheck? How did I not know this?”

  “My dad played music under the name Anthony Wade. So I adopted Wade for my byline. You would, too, if you had a name like vahd-chek.”

  Meghan smiled.

  “You know I’m totally calling you Mr. Wadcheck from now on.”

  “Please don’t.”

  Bad enough I have “Mickey” for a handle. The name on my birth certificate is “Mick,” in honor of Messrs. Jagger and Ronson, two of my dad’s musician heroes. You can’t call a five-year-old “Mick,” of course, so it soon became “Mickey.” And my classmates right away thought of the mouse. My childhood was full of M-I-C (see you real soon…gaywad!) jokes, not to mention that horrible stretch in 1982 when Toni Basil totally friggin’ ruined my life. I was ten, and I swore a blood oath to crush the skull of the next person to tell me I was so fine, so fine I blew their mind. The only person who had it worse that year was a classmate named Eileen, who didn’t understand why her leering male classmates were suddenly talking abou
t coming on her.

  “Oh my God—will you look at this.”

  Meghan crawled over and handed me a photo of a man in a WWII-era military uniform. My grandpop.

  “He looks just like you, Mr. Wadcheck!”

  “Don’t call me that. And yeah, I’ve been told there’s a resemblance, but I don’t see it. Maybe if you saw him in person…”

  “Bah. You’re a dead ringer.”

  I twisted open another Yuengling as Meghan picked through another box, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, shoeless. I liked the way her blond hair dangled in front of her face and it didn’t seem to bother her in the least.

  “Did you two used to spend a lot of time together?”

  “Not really. Grandpop Henry’s always been a little weird. Kind of gruff, spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child kind of guy. Imagine Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men.”

  “I thought you two might be close, considering…”

  She left that hanging midair, waiting for me to finish: what had happened to my father.

  Late one night at McGillin’s Ale House, the oldest continuously operating bar in Philly, I’d told her about what had happened to my dad. She didn’t press, I didn’t elaborate. It had never come up again, until now.

  I took another pull from my beer.

  “Yeah, well, no. I see my grandmother a lot.”

  “Define a lot.”

  “Holidays? I see her for at least one or two of the important ones.”

  “Thought as much. So they’re divorced?”

  “A long time ago. My dad was ten or eleven, I think.”

  I regretted bringing my dad up, because whenever I thought about him with alcohol in my system, I started getting pissed off and morose. And I didn’t want to be pissed off or morose in front of Meghan.

  I tried to lighten the mood.

  “So to recap: I’m jobless. I live in a bad neighborhood. And I don’t have much in the way of male role models.”

  Meghan smiled, leaning up and touching my face. I loved the feel of her fingertips. They were cool and warm at the same time.

  “And yet, you’re such a gentleman, Mr. Wadcheck.”

  “Please don’t call me Mr. Wadcheck.”

  We sat there together, pretty much easygoing quiet, for another hour or so. I finished two more beers and wondered how long I’d be stuck in this dump. This time Meghan and I were enjoying together was unlikely to happen again. I wouldn’t ask her to drive to Frankford again. Not in a million years.

  So if I wanted to hang out with her again I’d have to take the El back down to Rittenhouse Square. And until I found a job, I couldn’t see myself doing that. What was I going to do, buy her a dog and ask her to sit with me by the little bronze goat in the park?

  A few minutes before midnight, just as I was really starting to dread the idea of walking Meghan down Frankford Avenue back to her car, she blindsided me.

  “Hey, you mind if I crash here for the night?”

  My stomach did a happy little flip. But I played it cool.

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, no, I don’t mind. That would be great. Really great.”

  I was so smooth it sometimes hurt.

  There was no bed—just the scratchy houndstooth couch, which Meghan discovered was a pullout. I prayed for clean sheets; God, for once, heard my plea. Meghan wrestled a fitted sheet onto the wafer-thin mattress as I tugged some cases over pillows.

  “Good night,” I told Meghan’s shape.

  “Goot night, Meester Vahhhdcheck.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “Vyyy know.”

  We settled in for sleep. Well, she did, anyway.

  I sat up and watched her for a while. Her lips were parted slightly, long blond hair fanning the lumpy pillow—a perfect vision of peace. Then again, Meghan seems at ease in any given environment. Put her in a prix fixe Walnut Street restaurant or a South Street dive on PBR and Jack night. She belongs, either way.

  And she can pretty much float in and out of any situation she wants. Once I asked her what she did for a living, and she told me she was “deferring life.” Meghan can do this because she is the youngest daughter of a powerful Center City lawyer.

  I, on the other hand, am the son of a dead hippie musician, and I feel out of place pretty much everywhere. Even people in dives don’t seem too sure about me. I believe that was either my saving grace as a reporter, or my undoing. John Gregory Dunne once wrote that reporters were supposed to feel like outcasts, hands and noses pressed up against the glass, watching the party on the other side. Sounded about right to me.

  Nothing has ever happened between me and Meghan, a state of affairs that seems likely to continue the rest of our natural lives. I belong on the other side of the glass. I am supposed to be content to know that a woman like Meghan exists.

  But why had she insisted on giving me a ride? Was this a goodbye visit? Was she just bored? Or maybe…

  Maybe it was nothing at all.

  A few hours later my eyes popped open, my head pounding. Probably a combination of too many beers and no food. I tossed. I turned. The humidity in the apartment was thick as an afghan blanket. Once in a while I’d glance over at Meghan. She still looked perfect.

  I rolled out of bed and padded my way to the bathroom mirror, where I was confronted by a sweaty, disheveled thirty-seven-year-old who looked like he needed a nap and a hug. I splashed water over his face, cupped some into his mouth and urged him to spit.

  Grandpop Henry’s bathroom was strictly no frills—just a shower stall with an opaque glass door, sink and medicine cabinet. Black-and-white-checkered tile on the floor, framed photograph of a fishing boat above the toilet. An old man’s bathroom.

  I dried my face, opened the medicine cabinet door. Something banged against the wall. I pulled the door back a few inches. A metal clasp had been mounted on it. And on top of the toilet tank was an open rusty padlock. Did Grandpop actually padlock his medicine cabinet shut at night? In case what—junkies broke in and stole his denture cream?

  I found an oversized vintage jar of Tylenol with a worn and cracked label. Old people never throw anything away. I glanced at the expiration date: September 1982. Not exactly promising. Wasn’t that the time around the whole tampering scare? I remember being ten years old and my mother throwing away every medicine bottle in the house, Tylenol brand or otherwise.

  But the pills inside looked okay. It was entirely possible—likely, even—that my grandpop just used the same oversized plastic bottle and replenished the pills whenever he ran out. So I tapped four into my palm. They looked like 250-milligram tablets; a thousand sounded right. A few pain relievers in the middle of the night goes a long way toward easing a morning hangover.

  I swallowed them, scooped more water into my mouth, swirled for a second, then spit. Chances were slim that Meghan would wake up and decide to make out with me, but I didn’t want my mouth tasting like a bar sink, just in case.

  I went back to bed, slid in next to Meghan and tucked my left arm under my pillow. She was in a deep sleep. I was tired, too. Long day.

  I nodded off for a second and then woke up in someone else’s room.

  II

  Good as Dead

  I was on a cold hardwood floor. No sofa bed, no blanket, no pillow.

  No Meghan.

  The room looked like my grandpop’s apartment, only someone had redecorated the place while I’d been sleeping. The front windows were covered with brown cardboard and masking tape. Tiny needles of light from the El station outside shot out from between the cracks. It was dark in here, but I could make out framed photos on the walls, and in the corner, a potted fern. All of the clutter—the boxes, the milk crates—was gone.

  I heard the sound of groaning wood and turned to see a dark-haired woman, about my age, maybe a little older, sitting on a sofa behind me. She didn’t seem to notice me. She was pretty, but had tired eyes, and wore a dress with little multicolored dots that look like they jumped off a bag of Wonder Bread.


  “Uh, hi,” I said.

  She started speaking without making eye contact.

  “You need a break. Come out with me. Have an old-fashioned. My treat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She used her palms to smooth out her Wonder Bread dress, then stood up and walked right by me. Like I wasn’t even there.

  I pushed myself up off the floor, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Had I been sleepwalking? Did I wander into someone else’s apartment on a different floor? The layout of this room was identical to my grandpop’s apartment. Maybe I was in 2-A, or something. Of course, I had no idea how I might have pulled off such a trick.

  Across the room the Wonder Bread Woman picked up a pack of Lucky Strikes from the top of my grandpop’s polished wooden desk. It looked like the same desk on which I’d lined up my empties a short while ago. Only now there was a big guy sitting behind the desk—a seriously big guy. He wore a wrinkled white shirt, and the sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearm hair thick enough to catch flies.

  The woman shook a cigarette loose, clicked open a metal snap lighter, puffed the cigarette to life.

  The big guy sighed.

  “I still need to type up these reports and I have someone coming by shortly for a session,” he said.

  “You work too many nights, Mitchell,” the woman said.

  “I have to. It’s part of the exp—…job.”

  “There are more interesting ways to spend the night than talking to boring patients about their dreams. You could, for instance, be talking to me.”

  There was an awkward silence. Awkward for me, mostly. The fat guy behind the desk—Mitchell—finally broke it.

  “Look, you should go downstairs to your boy, Erna. Feed him some dinner. It’s late. He’s probably starving.”

  “The boy’s fine,” she said. “He knows how to open a can.”

  Mitchell sighed and sat back in his chair. The floorboards creaked under his weight.