Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  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?”

  He paused, looked down at his feet, then said:

  “Out.”

  “You should tell your mom to stay home with you tonight instead of drinking in bars.”

  “Yeah? You tell her.”

  Then he stood, raced up the few steps to the second floor and slammed his door shut behind him. The noise echoed in the stairwell like a gunshot.

  I waited a few moments, then made my way up to the third floor as silently as possible. I jiggled the knob on the door to 3-A. Still locked. I guess DeMeo had gone home for the night.

  And then the door opened suddenly. The knob slipped out of my hand. DeMeo popped out from the doorway holding a small silver gun, which looked like a toy in his meaty fist.

  He still couldn’t see me—thank God. The barrel of the gun swung past my face a couple of times as he squinted out into the darkened hallway.

  “Who’s there?”

  I took a few slow steps backward.

  “I heard you rattling the knob! I know you’re out there!”

  I pressed my back against the opposite wall.

  “There are no drugs here. No money. No nothing! Come back again and I’ll blow your brains out.”

  I tried not to breathe. I prayed I suddenly didn’t turn visible.

  “Goddamn hippie junkies.”

  DeMeo gave the hallway a final up and down before ducking back inside.

  I slid down until I was sitting on the hallway floor.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at nothing in the dark. At some point I heard the downstairs door open with a loud bang, high heels clicking on the tile floor of the foyer, a female voice muttering to herself. Cursing. There was the jangle of keys. I had a good idea I knew who it was.

  “Go home to your kid,” I said, then repeated it a little louder. “Go home to your kid.”

  I wished I could go to Brady’s right now, confront my father, tell him:

  Go home to your kid.

  The name Anthony Wade probably means nothing to you. But for a brief moment there, it could have.

  The way my grandmom Ellie tells it, there was an exciting couple of weeks in early 1971 when my father’s band, which was called Flick, was up in New York for a recording session that was supposed to lead to a recording deal with one of the major labels. They kind of sounded like Chicago—the early Chicago. The good Chicago. Tight rhythm section, a powerful brass thing going on. Only they were from Philadelphia.

  But it all went sour when an exec noticed the name of the band painted on the bass drum: FLICK.

  Put the “L” and the “I” close together, it sort of looks like a “U.”

  The record exec noticed it midsession, and said there was no way he was gonna sign a band who put that word on the front of their drum set. My dad refused to change it. That was the name of the band, man.

  Thing was, my dad knew that FLICK looked like that word. That was why he’d picked it, my grandmom had said.

  “Your father always had a self-defeating sense of humor.”

  I was half-surprised he didn’t go with CLINT.

  A year after the New York thing went south, I was born. My dad worked an endless series of menial jobs to make ends meet, but he always played gigs on weekends—even when the band fell apart.

  The horns went first; they were too much in demand, and found better-paying gigs easily. My father responded by buying something called a Guitorgan, which fills in chunky organ sounds by pressing your fingers on the frets (while still strumming the strings). This pissed off the keyboard player, who split and took the bass player with him around 1976. This didn’t discourage my father. He simply added bass pedals he could play with his feet. By 1978 the drummer didn’t see the point, so he left, too, only to be replaced by an electronic drum machine.

  By then he was known as ANTHONY WADE, HUMAN JUKEBOX, and he’d take out little ads in the local papers. He played a bunch of local places.

  Brady’s was a small restaurant and bar right near the end of the Market-Frankford El line. If you got drunk and hopped on an eastbound El train at City Hall, this is where you would be spit out. Just beyond Bridge and Pratt were a series of cemeteries. It was the end of the line on so many levels.

  My parents took me to Brady’s once, an hour before one of my dad’s gigs. I felt like King Shit, sitting there, ordering up a cheeseburger and a Coke in a thick plastic mug loaded with ice, watching my dad set up his equipment. This was my dad as Human Jukebox, so there was a lot of it. I remember feeling proud, watching him up there. Pretty soon he’d be the center of attention. My dad.

  The next time I saw Brady’s I was a high school senior. I’d cut
afternoon classes and went for a walk, ending up at Bridge and Pratt. The windows were dark; the door chained shut. It had closed not long after my dad had died.

  You don’t forget things like the morning your mom tells you your dad’s been killed.

  God, the way she just said it.

  Your father’s been killed.

  I asked her what had happened—had he been hit by a car? As a kid, the only way I could wrap my mind around death was to imagine a speeding car. I had been forbidden to cross Darrah Street and told that if I disobeyed, I could be hit by a car, and then I would die, and there would be no more Mickey.

  But Mom told me no, your father got into a fight—you know how much fighting gets you in trouble—and the guy daddy was fighting hit him too hard and…

  And what? I asked, all the while picturing the scene in my mind, my father out on the hard sidewalks of Frankford, fists in the air, blocking punches and throwing some jabs of his own, just like Rocky Balboa.

  And he died, she’d said.

  Later, I’d ask her again about my father’s death, and she’d tell me the same thing. He’d gotten into a stupid fight, and the guy hit back too hard, and that was that.

  Whatever happened to the guy? I’d asked my mom.

  Nothing.

  Which didn’t make sense to me. How could nothing have happened to a guy who’d killed somebody, accident or not?

  As I got older, I filled in the gaps myself, inserting pieces of narrative my mom had left out. I imagined some drunk heckling my father. I imagined my dad angry, just like he got sometimes with me when I bothered him. I imagined him pushing some drunk guy in the bar, and the guy pushing back. Imagined my dad taking a swing and losing his balance and his head connecting with the sharp edge of the bar. Imagined the drunk guy saying it was an accident, and being allowed to go free.

  In my mind, this version of my father’s death quickly cemented itself into fact. This was the version I told friends when they learned that my father was dead. This was the version I embellished for an essay I wrote freshman year of college for Advanced Composition 2. That essay (“My Father’s Killer”) ended up being reprinted in the campus English Department quarterly and had the side effect of launching my journalism career when a professor named Jack Seydow encouraged me to write for the campus paper.

  And according to that version of the story, the guy who killed my father was just some drunk son of a bitch who threw one punch too hard.

  “My Father’s Killer,” I’d hinted at in my essay, was himself. He’d done it to himself. And I had a hard time forgiving him for that.

  Pretty much my whole life.

  My head felt thick, full of sand. I pressed my palms against my eyes and saw stars and comets and nebulae racing toward me. I wondered how long I’d be here, sitting in this dark hallway in February 1972 before the dream ended. Would the sun come up again and blast-burn another part of me away? My arms? My head? Maybe the sun would finish me off this time?

  And then I woke up.

  Meghan was staring at me. Her blond hair was damp and smelled like shampoo. The cleanest, most intoxicating shampoo in the world. She was crouched down on one knee and was touching my chest.

  “Mickey?”

  I blinked a few times, then patted the floorboards just to make sure they were real.

  “Yeah. Hi. Uh, how did you get in here?”

  “You left the door unlocked. I thought you said this was a bad neighborhood.”

  “Most muggers are too lazy to walk up to the third floor.”

  She sat down, crossed her legs, then reached out to touch my forehead. I must have been a sight. She takes me first thing in the morning to the emergency room of a hospital. Now she finds me passed out on the floor.

  “How are you,” she said.

  “I’m okay.”

  The look on her face told me she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.

  “You want anything? I brought some turkey sandwiches. Some Vitamin Water.”

  “No, really I’m fine.”

  She noticed the turntable, and the Pilot LP. I heard the needle running over and over and over in the final groove.

  “Pilot…wow. I think my dad had that album. You been taking a spin back to yesteryear?”

  I bit my tongue like you wouldn’t believe.

  We stayed there on the floor for a while. I was seriously dizzy—like drunken bed spins without the drinking. The tiny elastic hoses that pump blood through my brain were writhing, throbbing. My mouth tasted like metal, and I could feel the thin layer of sweat beneath my clothes. It wasn’t as bad as this morning, when I woke up in the hospital and it felt like my skull had been cracked open. But I also didn’t want to go moving around too much. Not yet.

  I checked the fingers on my right hand. Still attached. Still numb.

  Then I finally pushed myself to a sitting position, across from Meghan.

  “I’m sorry about what happened last night,” I said. “I didn’t meant to scare you like that.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  I remembered a lot of things, but I wasn’t exactly sure they were real. The last thing I wanted was to make this conversation even more awkward. So I lied.

  “Last thing I remember,” I said, “I was in bed with you. Wait…that sounds wrong. I was on the couch with you. I nodded off, and what was it. What did I miss?”

  Meghan looked at me.

  “You were mumbling in your sleep. Saying something like, you can’t hear me, you can’t see me. Then you said something about all of this being a dream.”

  “How did I get to the hospital?”

  “A little before seven you started convulsing, which really freaked me out. I tried waking you up. You wouldn’t. Then you started screaming with your eyes shut, so I called 911. They asked me if you were on any drugs, but I told them I didn’t know.”

  As she spoke, I replayed last night’s dream in my head. While Meghan had been watching me convulse, I’d probably been throwing my shoulder against an imaginary door, trying to break it down. I screamed when my imaginary fingers fell off.

  Meghan took me by the shoulders now. Stared hard into my eyes.

  “Mickey, I know you’re between jobs and everything, but if you need to see somebody, I can help you out.”

  “I don’t need help. I’m just a little tired.”

  “Nobody drinks a six-pack then lapses into a near-coma, Mickey. It just doesn’t make sense. You always seem broke…”

  “Wait, wait—you think I’m on drugs?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m not here to judge. Jesus, I sound like a therapist…look, I dated a guy in college with a serious problem, and we all got him some help. It took awhile, but he’s doing okay now.”

  “Meghan, I swear to you, it’s not drugs. I’m too broke to afford drugs. I had those Yuengling and a couple of aspirin. That was it. You were here with me the whole time, remember?”

  “Aspirin, huh?”

  “From my grandfather’s medicine cabinet. Unless you think he was doing drugs and stashing them in the Tylenol bottle.”

  Meghan touched my face as if she could read minds with her fingertips. I was angry, but part of me softened at her touch.

  “Okay, Mickey. Maybe you just need some rest.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She stood up and started looking through her purse for her keys. As much as I wanted her to stay, I also wanted time to sort through what I’d just dreamed about. All of it was so damn real, so detailed.

  “Let me walk you.”

  “I’m fine—I’m parked right downstairs. You act like this is Beirut or something.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s not Beirut. Beirut has more buildings left standing.”

  Meghan leaned down and brushed her lips against my forehead. I reached up and touched her arm, as if my touch could make her linger. But she pulled a
way quickly and walked to the door. She smiled, told me she’d check on me later.

  I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the bathroom for more Tylenol. The two I’d taken before hadn’t done a damn thing—

  Wait a minute.

  V

  The Clockwise Witness

  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.