“So Billy was probably a little crazy.”
My grandmom paused.
“Well, he wasn’t a normal child.”
“And he probably grew up crazy, and then one day in 1980 attacked my father with a steak knife at random.”
Grandmom looked at me.
“I don’t think it was random.”
Throughout his short life, Anthony Wade never made much money. Some other dads, it seemed—the fathers of kids I knew in college—couldn’t help but walk out onto their front lawns and find $100 bills sticking to the bottoms of their shoes. Some fathers inherited their money; others chose careers that more or less guaranteed them a lot of money; still others worked very hard and eventually made a lot of money.
My father worked hard, but never made much money.
The Wadcheck men seemed to be drawn to the two professions that sound cool but suck ass when it comes to making money: writing and music. Unless you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, you don’t need writing or music. You just need to be lucky, as well as the ability to open up your wallet as the greenbacks come tumbling from the skies.
My father gigged with his band or solo almost every weekend of my childhood, but the most he made was $100 at a time—and that was for two nights of performing, five hours each night. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. When I was born, my mom told me, he’d be lucky to come home with $25 in his pocket.
And a lot of that money usually went to musical equipment—replacing guitar strings, saving up for new speakers or effects pedals.
My father was perfectly content with the amount of money he made playing music. His art supported his art.
What it didn’t do was support his young wife and infant son.
So Anthony Wade had to work at least two other jobs at all times—usually steady but grinding custodial work for whoever was hiring in Frankford at the moment. He also gave guitar lessons to whoever could cough up $5 for a half hour of instruction.
Even when I was a kid I knew my father was miserable with these other jobs. His mood determined the mood of the house. And many weekdays, his mood was lousy.
This probably explained why, when I embarked upon my own low-paying career as a journalist, I avoided the pitfall of a wife and kids. If my profession supported my profession, then that was C is for Cookie, good enough for me. At least I wasn’t dragging anyone down with me.
But I didn’t know the half of it. Because my grandmom started to explain that layoffs were so common, and money so thin, my dad would take other kinds of jobs. Jobs that, she said, broke her heart.
“Your father let them do all kinds of tests on him.”
“Who?”
“Those people at the institute. You know, the one up the boulevard.”
The ex-journalist in me started feeling the tingles. Stories were all about connections. Here was another connection with that lunatic asylum.
“You mean the Adams Institute? What kind of tests?”
Grandmom frowned as if she’d swallowed a fistful of lemon seeds.
“Government drug tests. This was around the time you were born. He’d signed up after reading an ad in the newspaper. Young, fit, healthy male subjects needed for government pharmaceutical studies. Two hundred a week, guaranteed for four to six weeks.”
“I thought the Adams Institute was a mental hospital.”
“Most of it is, but they also did tests. Oh, Mickey, you should have seen him. My twenty-three-year-old son suddenly looked like he was forty years old, bags under his eyes, yellow skin—he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.”
The image of my father in my mind was of a man much older than his physical years. I remember being stunned when I hit my early thirties, and realized that I had just outlived my father. I didn’t look like I’d gone skinny dipping in the fountain of youth, but I also didn’t look as old as the father in my memory.
Meghan reached out and touched Grandmom’s hand.
“You never found out what kinds of drugs he was given?”
“Blind tests, Anthony told me. They didn’t tell him what they were pumping into his veins—they only promised there’d be no long-lasting side effects. I think that was nonsense. Your father was never the same after those tests.”
And I had a feeling I knew who’d been administering those tests.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No. The last time you took these pills, you woke up and wouldn’t talk to me. The time before that, you lost feeling in your right arm. Are we sensing a pattern here, Mickey?”
“How else am I supposed to figure out what really happened? I have to ask Erna Derace. Ask her everything she knows about Mitchell DeMeo and his tests.”
After the weird dinner with my mother and the visit to Grandmom in Hollywood, Meghan had driven me back to Frankford Avenue. I assumed she’d be heading on her way, but she followed me up and then kneeled down and started picking through the boxes and crates again. I asked her what she was looking for, and she gave me a
But I had had another idea. A shortcut.
Asking Billy’s mom.
“Such a bad idea,” Meghan said.
“How else am I supposed to figure this out?”
“Gee, I don’t know, how about the old-fashioned way—
“Did you?”
“Alas, you’re not a reporter anymore.”
“I still have a few long skinny notebooks.”
We spent some more time poring through the dusty cardboard boxes full of notes and newspaper clippings and files that didn’t make any sense. Meghan found a motherlode of family trees, but no “Deraces” or “Wadchecks.” No notes that would explain the “tests” my dad was given.
Around nine Meghan asked if I had anything to eat around the apartment. I asked her if she liked peanut butter and apples.
“Let’s order something that is not peanut- or apple-related. My treat.”
“You forgot the beer. Grains are an important part of the Alex Alonso diet.”
We ended up calling for pizza from a place down the street. I walked under the El to pick it up, and burned my three good fingers on the box carrying it back. A guy in a tattered gray sweater asked me for a slice. I told him sorry, I was just delivering it. He told me to go screw myself. I love this neighborhood.
By the time I carried the pizza two flights up, though, I had convinced myself that the pills were the way to go. Meghan disagreed.
“Those pills are going to fry your brain. Do you want to end up in a coma like your grandfather?”
“I’m not eighty-four years old. And besides, you told me they were placebos. Sugar pills.”
“My friend doesn’t know everything. In fact, I seem to remember that he almost flunked biochemistry sophomore year.”
