Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  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.

  The whole thing took about thirty seconds.

  Billy derace wasn’t drunk. He hadn’t consumed so much as a swallow of beer. The mug he’d ordered, which sat on the table, was untouched.

  And my father’s death wasn’t a brawling “accident.” Multiple witness interviewed by the Philadelphia Police Department, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Daily News said that yeah, that crazy Billy Derace just strolled up to the tiny stage and started stabbing him in the chest with the steak knife. My dad didn’t even have the chance to throw a punch. Moments later, Billy Derace was beaten to the ground.

  Not long after, Billy Derace somehow vanished.

  Police found Billy Derace at his then-current residence—nearby Adams Institute, which was (and is) one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the country. It has been around since 1813, first known as the Asylum for Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, and later as Frankford Asylum for the Insane, and then finally the more PC-sounding Adams Institute, named after a wealthy family who had owned a buttload of farmland nearby and later lent their name to an adjacent avenue.

  Two cops walked into the room with handcuffs and guns, but Billy Derace already had restraints around his wrists and ankles.

  And he’d had them on for much of the past twenty-four hours, removed only for a sponge bath.

  Derace, the doctors at the Adams Institute told police, was near comatose, with occasional fits and seizures. He was bound to the bed for his own protection.

  One doctor was quoted: Mitchell DeMeo.

  No, Dr. DeMeo said, my patient was definitely not anywhere near Brady’s at Bridge and Pratt. Derace was here, in restraints, and checked hourly by the attending nurses. He’d been in a semi-vegetative state since 1979. Only recently had he shown signs of wakefulness. But to slip out of a mental hospital and make his way to a bar to stab a random guitar player? Impossible.

  Mitchell DeMeo—the same man whose office would later become my grandpop’s apartment.

  To further his point, DeMeo even produced some time-stamped, black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance of the hospital grounds, which revealed Billy Derace did not leave the grounds at any point that week. Or at any point during the previous two years, for that matter.

  The witnesses at Brady’s, however, swore it was Derace. A few even knew him from around Frankford. Descriptions were given to a police sketch artist. The resulting sketch looked a hell of a lot like Billy Derace.

  I was staring at a photocopy of the sketch now. My grandpop had somehow scored one, along with the full police report.

  He also had clipped every single newspaper article about the murder, which honestly, wasn’t much. A dead musician in a dive bar wasn’t the stuff of front pages. The one-man-band thing gave it a strange little twist, but that was only good for a one-liner in the lead. Billy Derace was never definitively placed at the scene of the crime.

  Who were you going to believe? A bunch of working-class folks half in their cups near midnight, or a team of the nation’s top psychiatric doctors and nurses?


  So Billy Derace was never convicted.

  My mom had never spoken a word about this. Neither had my grandmother, or Grandpop for that matter.

  But Grandpop obviously hadn’t let it go.

  And he had a bottle of pills in his medicine cabinet that would send him back to the past.

  Why?

  Grandpop usually seemed annoyed by the rest of the family. He’d show up at holiday events, perch himself in a corner, then crack a lukewarm can of beer. Never a cold can. He liked his lager room temperature.

  Mom would command me to talk to him. I’d go over. Grandpop would eyeball me, then turn his attention back to his beer. If we were going to have a conversation, he was going to be the one to initiate it, not me. And if he did grace me with some words of wisdom, I’d better not even think about weighing in.

  The hell do you know. I have neckties older than you.

  You going to let me finish the story, or what?

  Mickey go get me another beer.

  But now I had a captive audience.

  Grandpop was unconscious in his hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and plastic bags that ran under and over the flimsy gown they’d dressed him in. The room was small and smelled like ammonia cut with lemons. His fingernails were too long, too yellow. A computer kept track of his heart.

  There was so much I wanted to ask. The whole walk over there, the questions wouldn’t stop.

  There are stories about comatose people hearing what’s going on around them. Maybe if I spoke out loud, Grandpop would actually hear me. Maybe he’d reach for a pen and paper, scribble out a few clues so that I would finally understand it all?

  “Grandpop. It’s me, Mickey. Can you hear me?”

  He didn’t respond. All I heard was beeping, like an eternal game of Pong was playing itself out in the corner of the room. After a few seconds Grandpop twitched slightly, but that could have been my imagination. I pulled a plastic chair closer to the bed so I could see him, face-to-face.

  “I found those pills in your medicine cabinet, Grandpop. I accidentally took a few. They’re not Tylenol, I know that much.”

  My grandfather’s right hand twitched a little, one of his gnarled fingers tapping the side of an IV tube. His eyes were shut, but busy beneath their lids. Rolling fast.

  Maybe he could hear me.

  “Did you take them?”

  No response.

  “Did they send you back to 1972?”

  No response.

  “Is that why you never saw any of us the past few years? Have you been busy going to the—”

  The door behind me suddenly opened and a nurse stormed in. She had frosted blond hair that was so severely spiked that if she were to jump up toward the ceiling, she’d probably stick. The nurse ignored me and attended to the machines monitoring my grandfather. I was a visitor, but so what? She had things to do, a shift to finish.

  So I shut up for a while. My questions weren’t exactly for the general public. Oh, don’t mind me. Just talking to my comatose grandfather about pill-popping and time travel. I rested my face in my hands, pretending to pray or something.

  The nurse tapped my shoulder.

  “Hey. You want his things?”

  “Things?”

  “You know. His clothes. They’re in a plastic bag in the closet over there.”

  Grandpop was in a coma; I don’t think he’d mind if his clothes stayed unwashed for the time being. And I wasn’t about to blow three or four of my last dollars on dry cleaning.

  “Not now. Thanks.”

  She gave me a whatever look and left.

  After a while, so did I. It’s hard asking tough questions when you know you’re not going to hear an answer. It’s all buildup and no release.

  Or maybe Grandpop could hear every word I was saying and decided that his only grandson had lost his damn mind.

  I didn’t know what Grandpop was doing in the past. But suddenly I knew what I wanted.

  I wanted to see my dad one last time.

  I had an overwhelming, primal need to experience my father in the flesh—not in a photograph, not a memory. I wanted to see my father in real life, through my adult eyes. The older I got, and the greater the time since he’d been killed, the more I distrusted my memories. I had no idea what he really looked like. I didn’t care if he couldn’t see me, or that we couldn’t talk. I just wanted to look at him.

  An editor buddy of mine at the City Press—a news editor named Tommy Piccolo—once told me that he’d lost his dad when he was young, too. We were in the bar across the street, drinking many, many beers, and had reached that place where we were feeling mutually nostalgic and depressed. Tommy’s dad died when he was twelve years old, and now he was starting to doubt his own memories of the man.

  “I mean, this was thirty-six years ago. I can’t tell what’s real in my mind, or what I’ve made up. I can’t even hear his voice in my head. I imagine him talking to me and I think he’s speaking in a voice I made up.”

  I told Tommy I knew exactly how he felt. And then I think I ordered us shots of whiskey.

  But now I had a second chance. Who receives a gift like this and pushes it away?

  I’d even be satisfied if this were an elaborate dream brought on by hallucinogenic drugs in pill form. It was better than the alternative. Which was nothing.

  So on the walk back from the hospital, I made my decision. I would pop some little white pills and go back to Darrah Street in 1972 and break into my own childhood home. Maybe I’d bust a window, or throw a rock at the door…or wait. I didn’t even have to break in. I could just knock something over in the backyard. That was the easiest way. There was an alley that led behind the row of houses on our block. I grew up playing in it, even though it was mostly overgrown with weeds, and the slabs of concrete had slowly chipped and shattered, letting the earth beneath reclaim its turf. I used to pretend it was a superhighway behind our house, and my toy cars could take me anywhere I wanted.

  That’s what I would do. Walk up the alley, leap the three-foot-tall rusted metal fence, then find something in the backyard to knock over. I remember my parents kept a small charcoal grill back there when I was growing up. That would be easy to tip.

  Then he’d come out, and then I would see him.

  All I wanted to do was see him one last time.

  If I was going to start wandering the past, I was going to need protection. I stuck tonights, so daylight wasn’t an issue. But streetlights and ordinary household lamps hurt. Someone swings a flashlight the wrong way, it could potentially decapitate me. So I ransacked my grandpop’s closet.

  Every square inch of it was stuffed with button-down shirts and trousers, suit jackets, windbreakers, as well as plastic shopping bags full of ski caps, gloves and socks. It looked like a thrift store had gotten drunk and thrown up in here. Nails had been tapped into one wall, and over them hung cracked leather belts, suspenders and ties so loud they could blind the naked eye. And more boxes full of papers were piled up on the floor of the closet, as if he didn’t have enough things strewn around the apartment. Sometimes I thought I didn’t so much as move into Grandpop’s apartment as his storage facility.

  I pulled on the hangers, trying to separate the clothes for a better look. They seemed to belong to no particular decade. They were old man clothes now; they would have been old man clothes thirty or sixty years ago.

  At least my own wardrobe was consistent. At the City Press, T-shirt and jeans were the order of the day. If I had to seek an audience with the mayor or a member of City Council, sure, I’d put on a shirt with buttons. I owned exactly one pair of black dress pants from God knows when, one navy blazer, and one pair of non-sneaker shoes—black slip-on Sketchers.

  After about twenty minutes of pushing and searching, I found a tan overcoat in Grandpop’s closet—the one men’s accessory that never seemed to go completely out of style. Like a beard, an overcoat could cover any number of sins.

  And it would protect about 90 percent of my body fro
m exposure to the light.

  Grandpop also had a battered fedora hanging on a nail. I laughed when I first saw it. But light protection is light protection. And considering that one beam of light could potentially give me a lobotomy, it seemed like a smart thing to wear in the past.

  It fit, too.

  Dusk fell. It was time. I was buttoned up my shirt and fastened the belt on the overcoat. I tried to do that thing where you roll your hat down your arm, Gene Kelly style, but it just slipped off and floated to the ground.

  I took three pills then laid down on the couch, overcoat wrapped around my body, gloves on my hand, fedora on my head—even though the apartment was sweltering. I tried to relax, let the pills do their job. Question was, would the coat, gloves and hat still be on my other body when I woke up?

  My eyelids closed and then a second later I was back in 1972. And the hat, coat and gloves were still on. I checked the bathroom mirror, even lifting the hat from my head to make sure it wouldn’t vanish on me. But I was afraid to let go. Maybe if contact were broken it would fade away, like the ring and pinky finger of my left hand. I didn’t want to lose the hat just minutes after I’d found it.

  In the past the office was empty. DeMeo had gone off to wherever he hung his cock at night. And the front door was locked.

  Fortunately the tumble lock worked from the inside, so all I had to do was flip the latch and twist the doorknob. But with my other self, simple tasks took on a new and startling complexity. I flipped the latch, but I was unable to grab hold of the knob. The moment I had the knob, the latch would slip out of my three remaining fingers. And…repeat.

  A few minutes later I finally made it out the front door. Halfway down the staircase I heard a shrill laugh, like someone was being tickled to the point of death. I was wrong. It wasn’t a laugh. It was a scream—a child’s scream.