Expiration Date

by Duane Swierczynski

  “I should have never brought that up.”

  “Come on, what’s the difference now? Dad’s gone, and Grandpop is not in a position to care.”

  “I wish you’d just forget about it.”

  “No, I’m not going to forget about it. This is bullshit. Can you for once, please, just tell me something about my family so I don’t have to keep on inventing details?”

  Oh, the look my mother gave me. A withering, icy-blue stare that instantly reduced me to a child.

  “I didn’t find this out until after you were born, but apparently your grandfather used to beat up your grandmother.”

  My skin went cold as I imagined my grandmother—my sweet grandmother who had nothing but kind words and cookies for me growing up—being struck.

  Mom saw she had me. She kept going.

  “Your father said he really didn’t remember it until after you were born. But when he became a parent, I guess it all came flooding back. He was depressed all the time, and spent most family holidays avoiding your grandpop Henry—only talking to him when he had to. And that’s the way their relationship stayed until your father died. Now can we finish dinner?”

  In 1917 a Philadelphia developer named Gustav Weber went to Los Angeles on his honeymoon. He fell so deeply and promptly in love with the Spanish mission-style architecture that he decided to re-create a piece of Southern California on the East Coast. Upon his return, Weber bought a triangle of land on the outskirts of Philadelphia, divided it up into blocks with street names like Los Angeles Avenue and San Gabriel Road, and then built the homes of his dream: stucco bungalows with red-tiled roofs.

  Weber, however, didn’t take into account the harsh East Coast winters that killed the plants and froze the occupants of the uninsulated homes. By the time the Great Depression hit, Weber was bankrupt.

  But Hollywood never died.

  My grandmom had lived there—at 603 Los Angeles Avenue, near San Diego Avenue—ever since I can remember. While her ex hopped around various apartments in Frankford over the years, Ellie Wadcheck—she never went back to her maiden name—stayed put. I used to waste away many summer afternoons in the postage stamp–sized yard behind her house. Especially in the years after my father died, and my mom needed someone to watch me.

  I didn’t think anything was weird about Hollywood, PA, until I went to college, and discovered that my friends thought I was full of crap.

  Meghan didn’t believe me either—at first.

  “She lives where?”

  “Hollywood. It’s a neighborhood in Abington.”

  “How have I never heard of this?”

  “Oh oh oh, you’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far…”

  “Shut up.”

  We stopped at the Hollywood Tavern. I didn’t have a chance to finish my Johnnie Walker Black at my mother’s, and I needed another drink. Meghan decided she could use one, too. Maybe something that didn’t come from a box.

  The place was a former show home for the Weber development that was later fitted with a brick addition that stuck out like a cancerous growth on the face of the mission-style pad. Inside, the bar was designed for serious drinking and sports watching. I ordered a Yuengling; Meghan had a white wine.

  “My God, you weren’t full of crap. This place looks like it was scraped out of the Hollywood Hills, flung across the country and it landed here.”

  “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Did any famous actors grow up here?”

  “I don’t think so. Unless you consider Joey Lawrence famous.”

  We drank. I pretended to watch baseball—a Phillies night game. But mostly I was thinking about what my mother had said.

  Grandmom Ellie was surprised to see me. I never dropped by unannounced. In fact, I usually tried to wriggle out of family commitments whenever I could. Not that I didn’t like to see my family, but I always found the first ten to twenty minutes of reacclamation to be awkward and painful. There was always an undercurrent of guilt to it—gee, it’s been so long, Mickey, you’re never around, you don’t seem to want to associate with the rest of us…but anyway, how are things? How’s the writing career coming along?

  But Meghan took the edge off. Oh, how my grandmom fawned over her.

  “Look at how beautiful you are! My God. Mickey, do you tell this beautiful woman how gorgeous she is every day?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Wadcheck. So great to meet you.”

  Meghan even pronounced the name like a pro. She was a quick study, that one.

  “Oh, you’re so lovely.”

  The interior of my grandmom’s bungalow hadn’t changed…ever. If I were to pop one of those white pills now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the early 1970s and now until I stepped outside and checked the cars. Everything was off-white or blinding yellow. Yellow is her favorite color.

  Grandmom insisted on serving us giant tumblers of Frank’s vanilla cream soda—which let me tell you, does not go well with Yuengling or Johnnie Walker Black—as well as a tray of the most sickeningly sweet butter ring cookies I’ve ever tasted. If she noticed that I only picked up my soda with three fingers of my left hand, she didn’t let on.

  Instead, Ellie Wadcheck smiled at us, but you could tell she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could count the times I’d dropped by just to visit on…my missing right arm.

  “I wanted to ask you about something, Grandmom.”

  Deep in the throes of sugar shock, I lied and said I was writing a piece about my father, and how he’d died. In my defense, I wasn’t totally lying. Maybe there was a magazine piece in this, or even a book. But writing about my father and his killer hadn’t yet occurred to me. It was just something to say to my grandmom.

  She smiled at us.

  “Billy Derace was the son of a whore.”

  Meghan and I sat there, momentarily stunned.

  “Don’t hold back, Grandmom. Tell us how you really feel.”

  Grandmom laughed. She was pretty much the only relative who thought I was remotely funny.

  “Oh, I didn’t know her. But she was notorious. I’ll never forgive that Billy Derace for what he did, but I’m not surprised, considering how he was raised. He was born to a very immature mother. She married young, but refused to stay home. She worked all day and went out drinking and dancing every night. Eventually the husband had enough, he left. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.”

  “This was Frankford?”

  “Yes—where I lived with your grandfather until I moved here. Anyway, there was a rumor that Billy had a younger brother who died when he was young—only three years old, they say. And Billy was the one watching him when he died.”

  Meghan turned pale.

  “What happened?”

  “The story goes that he choked on a piece of cereal. Billy didn’t know what to do. This was…oh, 1968? 1969? Nobody taught children the Heimlich maneuver back then.”

  “Where was his mother? In 1969, Billy had to be only nine or ten years old.”

  “Yes, he was. His mother was out at a bar, and I suppose she thought that a nine-year-old was mature enough to care for a toddler. Billy and his brother were often left to fend for themselves.”

  Meghan glanced over at me, eyebrow raised a little—but I was already taking mental notes. A three-year-old choking to death would certainly have made the newspapers back in the late 1960s, wouldn’t it? But then why wasn’t Billy taken from his irresponsible mother?

  “So Billy was probably a little crazy.”

  My grandmom paused.

  “Well, he wasn’t a normal child.”

  “And he probably grew up crazy, and then one day in 1980 attacked my father with a steak knife at random.”

  Grandmom looked at me.

  “I don’t think it was random.”

  Throughout his short life, Anthony Wade never made much money. Some other dads, it seemed—the fathers of kids I knew in college—couldn’t help but walk out onto thei
r front lawns and find $100 bills sticking to the bottoms of their shoes. Some fathers inherited their money; others chose careers that more or less guaranteed them a lot of money; still others worked very hard and eventually made a lot of money.

  My father worked hard, but never made much money.

  The Wadcheck men seemed to be drawn to the two professions that sound cool but suck ass when it comes to making money: writing and music. Unless you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, you don’t need writing or music. You just need to be lucky, as well as the ability to open up your wallet as the greenbacks come tumbling from the skies.

  My father gigged with his band or solo almost every weekend of my childhood, but the most he made was $100 at a time—and that was for two nights of performing, five hours each night. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. When I was born, my mom told me, he’d be lucky to come home with $25 in his pocket.

  And a lot of that money usually went to musical equipment—replacing guitar strings, saving up for new speakers or effects pedals.

  My father was perfectly content with the amount of money he made playing music. His art supported his art.

  What it didn’t do was support his young wife and infant son.

  So Anthony Wade had to work at least two other jobs at all times—usually steady but grinding custodial work for whoever was hiring in Frankford at the moment. He also gave guitar lessons to whoever could cough up $5 for a half hour of instruction.

  Even when I was a kid I knew my father was miserable with these other jobs. His mood determined the mood of the house. And many weekdays, his mood was lousy.

  This probably explained why, when I embarked upon my own low-paying career as a journalist, I avoided the pitfall of a wife and kids. If my profession supported my profession, then that was C is for Cookie, good enough for me. At least I wasn’t dragging anyone down with me.

  But I didn’t know the half of it. Because my grandmom started to explain that layoffs were so common, and money so thin, my dad would take other kinds of jobs. Jobs that, she said, broke her heart.

  “Your father let them do all kinds of tests on him.”

  “Who?”

  “Those people at the institute. You know, the one up the boulevard.”

  The ex-journalist in me started feeling the tingles. Stories were all about connections. Here was another connection with that lunatic asylum.

  “You mean the Adams Institute? What kind of tests?”

  Grandmom frowned as if she’d swallowed a fistful of lemon seeds.

  “Government drug tests. This was around the time you were born. He’d signed up after reading an ad in the newspaper. Young, fit, healthy male subjects needed for government pharmaceutical studies. Two hundred a week, guaranteed for four to six weeks.”

  “I thought the Adams Institute was a mental hospital.”

  “Most of it is, but they also did tests. Oh, Mickey, you should have seen him. My twenty-three-year-old son suddenly looked like he was forty years old, bags under his eyes, yellow skin—he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.”

  The image of my father in my mind was of a man much older than his physical years. I remember being stunned when I hit my early thirties, and realized that I had just outlived my father. I didn’t look like I’d gone skinny dipping in the fountain of youth, but I also didn’t look as old as the father in my memory.

  Meghan reached out and touched Grandmom’s hand.

  “You never found out what kinds of drugs he was given?”

  “Blind tests, Anthony told me. They didn’t tell him what they were pumping into his veins—they only promised there’d be no long-lasting side effects. I think that was nonsense. Your father was never the same after those tests.”

  And I had a feeling I knew who’d been administering those tests.

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “No. The last time you took these pills, you woke up and wouldn’t talk to me. The time before that, you lost feeling in your right arm. Are we sensing a pattern here, Mickey?”

  “How else am I supposed to figure out what really happened? I have to ask Erna Derace. Ask her everything she knows about Mitchell DeMeo and his tests.”

  After the weird dinner with my mother and the visit to Grandmom in Hollywood, Meghan had driven me back to Frankford Avenue. I assumed she’d be heading on her way, but she followed me up and then kneeled down and started picking through the boxes and crates again. I asked her what she was looking for, and she gave me a duh look that I probably deserved. Meghan was looking for DeMeo’s notes, of course. Anything to do with Billy Derace, or my father. Preferably both. Something that would explain the random attack in Brady’s that night.

  But I had had another idea. A shortcut.

  Asking Billy’s mom.

  “Such a bad idea,” Meghan said.

  “How else am I supposed to figure this out?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, how about the old-fashioned way—research. You were a reporter, right? I mean, you weren’t pulling one long scam on me or something, thinking I had a thing for press cards and long skinny notebooks?”

  “Did you?”

  “Alas, you’re not a reporter anymore.”

  “I still have a few long skinny notebooks.”

  We spent some more time poring through the dusty cardboard boxes full of notes and newspaper clippings and files that didn’t make any sense. Meghan found a motherlode of family trees, but no “Deraces” or “Wadchecks.” No notes that would explain the “tests” my dad was given.

  Around nine Meghan asked if I had anything to eat around the apartment. I asked her if she liked peanut butter and apples.

  “Let’s order something that is not peanut- or apple-related. My treat.”

  “You forgot the beer. Grains are an important part of the Alex Alonso diet.”

  We ended up calling for pizza from a place down the street. I walked under the El to pick it up, and burned my three good fingers on the box carrying it back. A guy in a tattered gray sweater asked me for a slice. I told him sorry, I was just delivering it. He told me to go screw myself. I love this neighborhood.

  By the time I carried the pizza two flights up, though, I had convinced myself that the pills were the way to go. Meghan disagreed.

  “Those pills are going to fry your brain. Do you want to end up in a coma like your grandfather?”

  “I’m not eighty-four years old. And besides, you told me they were placebos. Sugar pills.”

  “My friend doesn’t know everything. In fact, I seem to remember that he almost flunked biochemistry sophomore year.”

  “Look, I don’t have a choice. I need to figure out the connection between Billy Derace and my father. Maybe I can push it and go to the late 1970s, or even 1980. I can snoop around and see what I can piece together.”

  “You told me you tried and you couldn’t go any further than 1975.”

  Meghan blinked, caught herself, turned to the side.

  “Okay, for the record, I can’t believe I made a statement like that…”

  “Look, maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe it’s not just supposed to come to you.”

  “Hmmm.”

  From there we ate our slices in silence. It was ghetto pizza. Very thin on the sauce, with bad, greasy cheese. Frankford didn’t have much going for it in the 1970s, but it once had the be-all, end-all of Philadelphia foods: slices of Leandro’s Pizza. The tiny shop used to be on the ground floor of the stairwell leading up to the El stop. Step off the El, you couldn’t help but follow that intoxicating scent all the way down the concrete staircases, and the next thing you knew your hand was stuffed in your pants pocket, fingertips searching for the two quarters, one dime and one nickel it would cost to procure a slice. During my jaunts to the past I’d purposefully avoided Leandro’s. It would be like a eunuch visiting the Playboy Mansion.

  By midnight we’d turned up very little that made any sense—so many of the notes and clips were about Philadelphia
ns who were living in the 1920s and 1930s, none of them Deraces or Wadchecks.

  So I finally convinced Meghan that the white pills were the way to go. Wearily, she agreed.

  And then I remembered that I’d locked them in the medicine cabinet.

  “Let me guess. You have no idea where the key is.”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you have a hammer?”

  “I don’t know. You snooped around here all night. Did you see a hammer?”

  “What’s in the silverware drawer?”

  “I have silverware?”

  Meghan checked the wooden slide-out drawer that contained a number of puzzling kitchen tools—none of them a hammer. Corkscrews. Many rusted beer bottle openers, some of them emblazoned with the logos of long-dead Philly brews like Schmidt’s and Ortlieb’s. There was a large, plastic-handled steak knife, but it didn’t look like the type that could saw through a tin can, let alone a padlock.

  “I think I saw a dustpan and whisk broom in the closet. Would you mind double-checking that?”

  “What, are you going to sweep the lock away?”

  “No. I’m going to use something big and heavy—your head comes to mind—and shatter your medicine cabinet. Again, for the record, I can’t believe I’m saying these particular words out loud.”

  “Why don’t you let me smash it?”

  “You’ve got three good fingers. Do you really want to lose another one or two?”

  She wrapped her right hand in a dirty gray oven mitt that looked like it had been used to hand-stomp out a grease fire, then picked up a heavy glass ashtray. She walked into the bathroom and a second later, I heard a loud pop and shatter. Then nothing.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Well, it’s open.”

  I looked inside. The door was obliterated, glimmering fragments of mirror were all over the sink, floor, toilet seat and tub.

  “I thought you were going to, like, do it on the count of three or something.”

  “Would that have made you feel better?”