“This is probably the next great undiscovered neighborhood. Look what they did to Fishtown and Northern Liberties.”
“Yeah. They could level the area with a bunker buster and start all over.”
She scanned the block. Across the street was a rusty metal kiosk that, if I remember correctly, used to be a newsstand. Now it appeared to be a community urinal.
“Think it’s okay to park here?”
Meghan was born and raised on Philadelphia’s so-called Main Line. You remember the movie—Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, all that? That’s the Main Line. I remembered watching the movie on TV as a kid and wondering why they called it
The Philly I knew was
Still, I couldn’t blame her.
She didn’t grow up here.
When I left Frankford after college I swore I’d never return. You get punched in the face often enough, chased down the block and through your own front door often enough…well, it kind of puts you off a neighborhood.
As a kid, I mostly stayed in my back bedroom and read whatever I could get my hands on. And later, I wrote stories. Looking back on it now, it seems I was plotting my escape all along, because it was a writing career that got me out of Frankford.
And now, the lack of a writing career was bringing me back.
My mom had come up with the idea of me crashing here until I found another job. It wasn’t like Grandpop Henry would know the difference. The downstairs bodega owner had found him a few hours after he’d suffered some kind of seizure and fell into a coma—the same day I lost my job at the
My mom told me that Grandpop Henry could breathe on his own. But now he was like a TV without cable: the power was on, only he couldn’t receive any programming.
“You should still visit him. He can still hear you.”
“Okay.”
“He’ll only be a few blocks away.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to visit him, right?”
“Okay.”
My mother delighted in telling me what to do, and I found a not too small measure of satisfaction doing the exact opposite.
She also told me that Grandpop’s apartment was fully furnished, so I wouldn’t have to worry about pots, pans or utensils. Not that I owned much of that stuff. My worldly possessions included a crate of old LPs from the 1960s and 70s; a box of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski paperbacks—standard issue for journalists; another box of vintage paperback mysteries; a six-year-old Mac laptop; a three-year-old cell phone that didn’t close right; and finally, two trash bags full of clothes and other assorted junk I’ve been dragging around for fifteen years, from Philly to New York City and back.
It’s sad when your worldly possessions fit into a 2009 Toyota Prius.
On the upside, we finished unloading in less than thirty minutes, even though it was three flights up to Apartment 3-A. I drove Meghan’s Prius to the Frankford Hospital garage a few blocks away, where I assumed it would be reasonably safe. After all, doctors parked there, right?
Meghan gave me a playful punch in the arm.
“So, what now?”
“Well, I was about to have my boy Tino mix me a gin gimlet before retiring to the terrace to watch the sunset.”
“Send Tino home for the night. Let’s get drunk on beer.”
“Excellent suggestion. But I’ll have to go get your car again.”
“What, and drive back wasted? Let’s go downstairs and buy a few sixes.”
“Downstairs?”
“The bodega. They sell beer. I saw the signs in the window and everything.”
So we walked downstairs to the bodega. I bought two sixes from Willie Shahid—though I didn’t know his name yet. Meghan looked like she was having a grand old time, buying beer in Frankford. Meanwhile, I worried some crackhead in a ski mask was going to pop in, wave a gun around and ask for the keys to the late-model Prius parked in the hospital garage up the street.
I was also mildly alarmed when the tab for two sixes of Yuengling came to $18, leaving me with about five bucks until my final paycheck was direct deposited the next day. But hey, the lady wanted to get her beer on. Tonight, money was no object.
Tonight, we were toasting my sad return home.
About an hour later I’d killed four of the Yuenglings and lined the empties up on top of Grandpop Henry’s massive cherrywood desk. Meghan, first beer still in hand, was on the floor going through his stuff without shyness or apology.
“I’m a snoop.”
There wasn’t much to Apartment 3-A—just a big room with a bathroom off to one side, a small closet on the other. A rusty radiator in the corner for all your heating needs. A desktop circulating fan for cooling, which would do jack shit once summer really got under way. A small kitchenette with a miniature oven barely big enough for a TV dinner and a quarter-sized fridge that could accommodate beer or food, but not both at the same time.
Grandpop Henry moved here in 2002, but I’d never visited. I feel a little guilty about that—but then again, I also didn’t go out of my way to return to Frankford either.
Every few minutes the thunder of the Frankford El smashed through the silence, and through the dirty front windows you could see the rushing silver of the train cars as they ground to a halt at the Margaret Street station, then, after a ten-second delay, started moving again, and the rumble would build to a deafening crescendo that bounced off the fronts of the buildings all the way down to the next station.
The place was reasonably clean—no nicotine buildup on the walls, no grease caked on the ceiling of the kitchenette. Grandpop Henry, it seemed, owned only two pieces of furniture: a big houndstooth couch and the big cherrywood desk. No bed, no kitchen table, no chairs. Guess when it comes down to it, all you needed was something to sit on and something to put things on.
Still, the room was cluttered, a ridiculous amount of floor space devoted to cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates and shoe boxes crammed with papers. This was what Meghan picked through.
“What does your grandfather do for a living?”
“He’s retired. But he used to be a night watchman at a hospital. My mom told me he liked the hours, the lack of conscious people.”
“Huh.”
“What’s the
“He’s got a lot of papers here. Newspaper clippings, genealogy charts, handwritten notes. A lot of medical reports, it looks like. I thought maybe he was a journalist or something. Like you.”
“My grandpop? I don’t think he was much of a reader.”
“Hmmm.”
After a while Meghan showed me a yellowed envelope.
“Henryk Wadcheck?”
