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
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
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
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.
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.”
