Expiration Date

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.