Expiration Date

splurge beer, so I tried to savor every sip. I’d probably be drinking pounder cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from now on.

After a while Meghan came out and I handed her the last one. She thanked me by bumping shoulders. We sat for a while and drank our beers in the warm downtown sun. It would have been a perfect day if I wasn’t moving out.

Meghan leaned back on her elbows, blond hair hanging down across her forehead.

“You sure I can’t give you a ride?”

I swallowed, enjoying the bitter taste of hops in my mouth, the bright sun on my face. Then I looked at her.

“Frankford’s kind of a bad neighborhood.”

“No neighborhoods are bad, Mickey. They’re just misunderstood.”

“No, seriously. It’s bad. There was a story in yesterday’s Daily News. Some high school kid there was murdered by three of his friends. And I don’t mean over a dumb fight over sneakers or drugs. I mean, they planned his execution, killed him, then worked hard to hide the evidence.”

“They didn’t work too hard if the Daily News found out about it.”

Meghan and I had been friends since the year before, when I moved to Sixteenth and Spruce, just a few blocks away from swank Rittenhouse Square. If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia, you know the square I’m talking about—high-end restaurants, high-rise condos. I couldn’t afford this neighborhood even when I was gainfully employed.

But two weeks ago my alt-weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia City Press, decided they could get by with only one staff writer. They wished me all the best. Since no other papers were crying out for my services, here or elsewhere, I joined the ranks of the newly unemployed. Just like hundreds of thousands of other people.

So now my meager possessions were almost packed and I was waiting for a ride from my mom so she could take me to my grandfather’s cramped—yet rent-free—efficiency in Frankford, which was a long, long way from Rittenhouse Square.

Normally I refused to accept any help or advice from my mom. The less she knew about my life, the less I owed her, the better. But my back was up against the wall now. I couldn’t afford another week in this apartment, let alone another month. I had no money for a deposit on another apartment.

I was moving back to Frankford.

Slumming is one thing when you’re twenty-two and just out of college and backed up by a deep-pile parental checking account. But moving to a bad neighborhood when you’re thirty-seven and have exhausted all other options is something else entirely. It’s a heavy thing with a rope, dragging you down to a lower social depth with no easy way back to the surface.

Worst of all, you can still see them up there—the friends you graduated with fifteen years ago—laughing and splashing around, having a good time.

The last thing I wanted was Meghan to escort me to the bottom of the ocean, give me an awkward hug, then swim back up to the party. She’d offered to drive me at least a half-dozen times over the past two weeks, and I repeatedly had told her no, my mom insisted on taking me.

Which was a total friggin’ lie.

“You don’t want to go to Frankford,” I said. “It’s one of the busiest drug corridors in the city. It even used to have its own serial killer.”

“Now you’re just making stuff up.”

“Completely serious. Happened when I was in high school—in the late 1980s. The guy was called the Frankford Slasher, and he killed a bunch of prostitutes. I wrote a piece about it for the Press.”

“That was Jack the Ripper.”

“It was also the Frankford Slasher.”

“Still think you’re making it up.”

I pushed myself up by pressing my palms on the warm brownstone.

“I’d better finish packing. A couple of teenagers could be plotting my death as we speak, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

“Or the Frankford Slasher.”

“Fortunately, I’m not a prostitute.”

“Not yet.”

“Nice.”

There was an awkward moment of silence. Then Meghan looked at me.

“Call your mom, Mickey. Tell her I’m driving you.”

Frankford wasn’t always a bad neighborhood. A couple hundred years ago it was a nice quiet village where the framers of the Constitution would spend their summers to escape the stifling heat of the city. I could show you the place—Womrath Park—where Thomas Jefferson allegedly kicked back and read the Declaration of Independence for the first time in public.

But take Thomas Jefferson to Womrath Park now. Introduce him to the new owners of the park—the hard young men selling little white chunks of smokeable snuff. Walk him into the triple-X theater across the street, where he’d be treated to projected images of people engaged in a very different sort of congress.

You could almost imagine him marching back down to Independence Hall and saying: Look, fellas, I think we oughta think this whole “freedom” thing through a bit more.

A century after Jefferson, Frankford the Quiet Country Village morphed into Frankford the Bustling Industrial Neighborhood. It was a popular way station on the road (King’s Highway) from Philadelphia to New York City. The streets were crowded with factories and mills, along with modest-but-sturdy rowhomes for the workers who labored in them. There were cotton mills, bleacheries, wool mills, iron works and calico print works. There was a bustling arsenal and gunpowder mill. The industry thrived for a while, then sputtered, then died. Just like it did in the rest of the country.

But they say the neighborhood was truly doomed in 1922, the year the city ran an elevated train down its main artery—Frankford Avenue—shrouding the shops below in darkness and pigeon crap. White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, drugs found Frankford, and invited all of its friends to stay.

And I’d told Meghan the truth: a serial killer really did prowl the dark avenue under the El, late at night, looking for drunks and prostitutes in the 1980s around dive bars like Brady’s at Bridge and Pratt. The Slasher was never caught.

A Philly band called American Dream had a minor pop hit back in the early 1970s called “Frankford El.” The chorus explained that you can’t get to Heaven on the Frankford El. Why?

Because the Frankford El goes straight to…Frankford.

Grandpop’s block looked like a junkie’s smile. Starting from the extreme left, you had the dirty concrete steps leading up to the Margaret Street station of the El. Right next door, an abandoned building. Then, a weeded lot. A three-story building. Weeded lot. Grandpop’s building, the ground floor occupied by one of those beer/rolling paper/pork rind bodegas that upset City Council so much. Weeded lot. Weeded lot.

Out of an original eight buildings on this strip of Frankford Avenue, only three remained.

My new place was up on the third floor, where it appeared I’d have an excellent view of the El tracks.

Meghan gazed up at the dirty underbelly of the El through her windshield. Pigeons nested around up there, covering every possible square inch with their chunky white shit.

“It’s not so bad.”

“You’re right. If you squint, it’s eerily reminiscent of Rittenhouse Square.”