Expiration Date

shops. Children’s clothing stores, where you could buy your kids their Easter outfits. There was a place to buy lingerie. There was a candy store. No cigarettes, no bread, no milk, no lottery tickets, no porn mags, no motor oil— just rows of Bit-o-Honeys and Swedish fish and sugared gum drops and Day-Glo jelly fruit slices and ovals of chocolate behind a vast glass counter. You could walk in with fifteen cents and walk out with a small white paper bag full of penny candy. Candy that actually cost a penny each.

You trash a place in your mind for so long you forget that you used to actually love it.

I could wander all night, but it wouldn’t change the truth. I was still a dead broke guy a few credits shy a college degree, living in a bad neighborhood without a job during the worst recession since the Great Depression. So what if I could pop pills and wake up in a different year? No one could see me. No one could talk to me. I didn’t matter to anyone now or in the present.

There had to be something I could do with these pills. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out yet. Maybe my grandpop had it figured out.

Then I remembered the boxes and crates.

Back in the apartment I dove into the papers. What had I been thinking? He must have found a way to use the pills to his financial advantage. Clearly the man wasn’t rich, but he got by. He had to have been up to something in this apartment all this time. And the clues were probably in these boxes and crates.

There were genealogy charts. Seemingly random newspaper clippings going back to the 1920s and running into the 1990s. Real estate listings. Birth notice pages. Medical reports. None of it organized. None of it made sense.

What was he doing?

For instance: one manila folder, marked “Crime Wave” in a shaky scrawl, was jammed with a series of clips from the local paper, the Frankford Gleaner. The articles detailed a series of break-ins and burglaries up and down Frankford Avenue during the summer of 1979. Totally friggin’ random.

Unless my grandpop was taking the pills and much more adept at pinpointing the year he visited? Was it possible he was going back to 1979 and looting the Avenue? And if so, how did he keep the stuff? Did he put everything into a bank safety-deposit box in the past, then open it in the present? Of course, that required the ability to open a box in the past, and you couldn’t do that if you  were invisible. And in a well-lit bank.

Maybe this was just a random series of articles he’d kept because he was a true-crime junkie. Maybe it meant nothing at all.

My head started to hurt.

After a few hours of searching I stumbled across a Florsheim shoe box. It was packed with old photos of my father. I cracked a Golden Anniversary and sat down to examine them.

I had never seen these before. A lot of them showed my father as a little boy, in short pants and everything. He was smiling and crouched next to Grandpop Henry, who—loathe as I am to admit this— did look a lot like me. He was wearing a V-neck T-shirt and smiling. He had more hair.

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