“Hello? Is someone there?”
After a few seconds I saw her face appear in the window, nervously peering outside from behind the parted curtains. I stopped breathing for a moment. She was only eighteen years old when I was born, but that age is an abstract concept. She’s always been my mother, always been eighteen years older than me. Except now.
Now I was a ghost standing on the porch of my childhood home, I was thirty-seven years old, and I was looking at the face of the woman who gave birth to me—suddenly two decades younger. And she’s been crying. Her cheeks were still damp with tears, her eyes tender and red. She looked lost. Alone. Scared. Freaked out. Everything.
And her husband was out in a bar somewhere in Frankford—or maybe nearby Kensington. She probably told him she’d be fine handling the baby alone, but what choice did she have? They needed the money.
They had a new mouth to feed.
After a while she moved away from the window and started talking to the baby, me, in a robotic monotone. Okay, she said. Okay, I’m coming. Stop crying, I’m coming. Stop crying.
I started feeling light-headed and dizzy again. I didn’t know if I’d wake up in the same place where I’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t want to chance waking up on Darrah Street in the middle of the night.
On the way back upstairs I ran into the red-haired kid again. He was sitting near the top of the first staircase, knees spread and hands curled into tight little fists. His green eyes, full of fury, bored right into mine. I wondered what I’d done wrong.
“You can still see me, huh?” I asked.
“Why do you keep asking me that? Of course I can see you. You’re there, aren’t you?”
“Where’s your mom?”
He paused, looked down at his feet, then said:
“Out.”
“You should tell your mom to stay home with you tonight instead of drinking in bars.”
“Yeah? You tell her.”
Then he stood, raced up the few steps to the second floor and slammed his door shut behind him. The noise echoed in the stairwell like a gunshot.
I waited a few moments, then made my way up to the third floor as silently as possible. I jiggled the knob on the door to 3-A. Still locked. I guess DeMeo had gone home for the night.
And then the door opened suddenly. The knob slipped out of my hand. DeMeo popped out from the doorway holding a small silver gun, which looked like a toy in his meaty fist.
He still couldn’t see me—thank God. The barrel of the gun swung past my face a couple of times as he squinted out into the darkened hallway.
“Who’s there?”
I took a few slow steps backward.
“I heard you rattling the knob! I know you’re out there!”
I pressed my back against the opposite wall.
“There are no drugs here. No money. No nothing! Come back again and I’ll blow your brains out.”
I tried not to breathe. I prayed I suddenly didn’t turn visible.
“Goddamn hippie junkies.”
DeMeo gave the hallway a final up and down before ducking back inside.
I slid down until I was sitting on the hallway floor.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at nothing in the dark. At some point I heard the downstairs door open with a loud bang, high heels clicking on the tile floor of the foyer, a female voice muttering to herself. Cursing. There was the jangle of keys. I had a good idea I knew who it was.
“Go home to your kid,” I said, then repeated it a little louder. “Go home to your kid.”
I wished I could go to Brady’s right now, confront my father, tell him:
Go home to your kid.
The name Anthony Wade probably means nothing to you. But for a brief moment there, it could have.
The way my grandmom Ellie tells it, there was an exciting couple of weeks in early 1971 when my father’s band, which was called Flick, was up in New York for a recording session that was supposed to lead to a recording deal with one of the major labels. They kind of sounded like Chicago—the early Chicago. The good Chicago. Tight rhythm section, a powerful brass thing going on. Only they were from Philadelphia.
But it all went sour when an exec noticed the name of the band painted on the bass drum: FLICK.
Put the “L” and the “I” close together, it sort of looks like a “U.”
The record exec noticed it midsession, and said there was no way he was gonna sign a band who put that word on the front of their drum set. My dad refused to change it. That was the name of the band, man.
Thing was, my dad knew that FLICK looked like that word. That was why he’d picked it, my grandmom had said.
“Your father always had a self-defeating sense of humor.”
I was half-surprised he didn’t go with CLINT.
A year after the New York thing went south, I was born. My dad worked an endless series of menial jobs to make ends meet, but he always played gigs on weekends—even when the band fell apart.
The horns went first; they were too much in demand, and found better-paying gigs easily. My father responded by buying something called a Guitorgan, which fills in chunky organ sounds by pressing your fingers on the frets (while still strumming the strings). This pissed off the keyboard player, who split and took the bass player with him around 1976. This didn’t discourage my father. He simply added bass pedals he could play with his feet. By 1978 the drummer didn’t see the point, so he left, too, only to be replaced by an electronic drum machine.
By then he was known as ANTHONY WADE, HUMAN JUKEBOX, and he’d take out little ads in the local papers. He played a bunch of local places.
Brady’s was a small restaurant and bar right near the end of the Market-Frankford El line. If you got drunk and hopped on an eastbound El train at City Hall, this is where you would be spit out. Just beyond Bridge and Pratt were a series of cemeteries. It was the end of the line on so many levels.
My parents took me to Brady’s once, an hour before one of my dad’s gigs. I felt like King Shit, sitting there, ordering up a cheeseburger and a Coke in a thick plastic mug loaded with ice, watching my dad set up his equipment. This was my dad as Human Jukebox, so there was a lot of it. I remember feeling proud, watching him up there. Pretty soon he’d be the center of attention. My dad.
The next time I saw Brady’s I was a high school senior. I’d cut afternoon classes and went for a walk, ending up at Bridge and Pratt. The windows were dark; the door chained shut. It had closed not long after my dad had died.
You don’t forget things like the morning your mom tells you your dad’s been killed.
God, the way she just said it.
Your father’s been killed.
I asked her what had happened—had he been hit by a car? As a kid, the only way I could wrap my mind around death was to imagine a speeding car. I had been forbidden to cross Darrah Street and told that if I disobeyed, I could be hit by a car, and then I would die, and there would be no more Mickey.
But Mom told me no, your father got into a fight—you know how much fighting gets you in trouble—and the guy daddy was fighting hit him too hard and…
And what? I asked, all the while picturing the scene in my mind, my father out on the hard sidewalks of Frankford, fists in the air, blocking punches and throwing some jabs of his own, just like Rocky Balboa.
And he died, she’d said.
Later, I’d ask her again about my father’s death, and she’d tell me the same thing. He’d gotten into a stupid fight, and the guy hit back too hard, and that was that.