My request is granted, but my receipt tells me I only have $47 to my name.
Whoa whoa whoa. That didn’t make any sense. It should have been more like $675. Where was my final paycheck from the newspaper? Today was Friday. Payday. My last one. Possibly ever.
By some miracle I got the City Press’s assistant HR guy on my cell. Funny that the paper can afford to get rid of writers and art designers but never management. The paper currently had a three-man human resources department; with me gone, there was exactly one news reporter on staff. Exactly which humans would these HR people be resourcing?
The assistant HR guy—Howard—explained that my last check has been all but wiped out by sick days I owed the paper.
“No no. That can’t be right.”
Howard assured me it was.
“I never took sick days. I was a reporter—I was out of the office a lot. You know, doing reporting.”
Howard told me his hands were tied.
“Look, Howard, seriously, you’re wrong about this. Check with Foster.”
Howard asked who Foster was.
“Star Foster. The editor in chief? You know, of the paper?”
Howard told me it wouldn’t matter if he spoke with Foster, or what she might say. He had my time sheets in front of him. He goes by the time sheets.
“You don’t understand. I want…no, I need my entire final paycheck.”
Howard told me he was sorry, wished me all the best, then hung up.
Which meant that unless I changed Howard’s mind, I had exactly $47—plus the $60 I just withdrew—to last me pretty much forever.
Like most of America, I had nothing saved. Every month I danced so close to zero, my checking account was more like a temporary way station for a small amount of cash that passed between a newspaper and a series of credit card companies, corporations and utilities.
My economic strategy thus far had been simple: if I start to run out of cash, I slow down on spending until the next payday. That strategy, of course, depended on there being a next payday.
Mom was not an option. Not yet, anyway. Placing me in Grandpop’s apartment was her brand of help—a gentle suggestion, not a handout. Asking for a loan now would just confirm my mother’s lifelong theory that the Wadcheck men could never hang on to anything: marriage, fatherhood (my grandfather), songs, recordings, his life (my father), a relationship, a career (me). I was on my own.
I had written hundreds of articles and interviewed everyone in the city, from the power brokers to crooked cops to addicts squatting in condemned ware houses. And for three years, thousands of people had read my work and knew my byline. The name on my debit card was even starting to get recognized in bars and restaurants. Are you the Mickey Wade who writes for the Press?
Nope. I’m just some idiot standing outside a supermarket in my old neighborhood with no job and about sixty bucks in my pocket.
“You bastard.”
I turned, and it was the old lady from this morning, leaning against the stone wall of the supermarket. She looked even rattier up close. Bad teeth, rheumy eyes. She must hang out on Frankford Avenue all day, waiting for losers to cross her path so she can mock them. She pointed at me with a crooked, bony finger.
“The day’s going to come when you’re going to get what’s coming to you.”
Oh, how I’ve missed Frankford.
A copy editor at the Press named Alex Alonso once told me about the three basic things humans needed to survive. He’d worked one of those Alaskan fishing boat tours where you endure an exhausting, nausea-filled hell at sea for two months in exchange for a nice payday at the end. Alex said it was pretty much eighteen hours of frenzied labor, followed by six hours of insomnia. And for two months he consumed nothing but apples, peanut butter, cheap beer and cocaine.
I’ve kept this handy factoid in my back pocket for years, ready to deploy if times got super-lean. Cocaine isn’t cheap, but it also isn’t essential. What kept Alex alive, he said, were the fiber (apples), protein (peanuts) and grains (in the beer, of course).
I was ready to go shopping.
The Sav-N-Bag hadn’t changed a bit in twenty-five years—same dirty orange and yellow color scheme, same crowded aisles, same carts with one wheel that either refuses to spin or forces you to veer to the left your entire shopping trip. Same lousy food.
This was a low-rent neighborhood market that relied on customers without cars. Anybody with a car went to the decent supermarkets in Mayfair or Port Richmond.
Fortunately the Sav-N-Bag was running a special on a big plastic tub of peanut butter. Not a name brand, like Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan. Just generic peanut butter. I put it in my dirty plastic carry-basket, then added a bag of undersized apples. The tab came to nine dollars. Hell, on this budget, I was good for another month and a half.
My grocery order safely tucked inside a planet-strangling plastic bag, I walked back up Frankford Avenue and stopped at Willie Shahid’s beer bodega on the ground floor of the apartment to buy the cheapest six-pack I could find: Golden Anniversary, for $4.99.
Willie—not that I knew his name yet—looked at me, probably thinking, Wow, you’ve lost your girl and your taste in beer, all in one day. Welcome to Frankford.
I ate dinner as the sun went down over the tops of the rowhomes of Frankford—four tablespoons of peanut butter, one apple and two cans of Golden Anniversary. When dinner was over, I still felt hungry. And not nearly drunk enough.
I tried Meghan, got her voice mail. I left a message:
“Hey, it’s me. Mickey. Or, if you prefer, Mr. Wadcheck. Look, I’m really sorry about last night, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a little confused. If you don’t totally hate my guts, please call me back, okay? Okay.”
Okay.
I put another one of my dad’s old albums on the turntable: Pilot’s eponymous debut LP. I’d loved the second track, “Magic,” when I was a kid, and wanted to hear it again as nature intended—with scratches and pops. The way my dad heard it.
The wah-wah guitars made my head hurt, though. I went into the bathroom and helped myself to two Tylenols. I wanted to take it easy, after all. You know us O.D.-ing, over-the-counter-pain-reliever junkies.
And then it happened again.
One minute I was sitting up. The next, I was on the floor of the same strange office. There was the same brown paper taped up over the windows. Same potted fern. Same filing cabinets. Same lounge chair. Same desk. Same pudgy doctor sitting behind it.
The office was dead silent and stifling from the dry radiator heat. I could smell the burning dust.
What was going on? I had no idea. This all felt and looked real. This was not a daydream nor a fantasy. I was not hallucinating. Every sense I had told me the same thing: I was actually in this room.
Looking down, I saw that the ring and pinky fingers of my left hand were still missing. There was no wound, no scars. Just smoothed-over skin where the digits should be.
If this was a dream, then I was again in the past. I wondered what year this was, and started searching for my laptop—realizing a second later that I was being an idiot.
Meanwhile, Dr. DeMeo spun in his creaky metal chair and flipped a switch. A typewriter hummed. He cracked his knuckles, and within a few seconds the room was full of the machine-gun clacking of the keys. When was the last time I heard that noise? High school?
“Don’t mind me, Doc,” I said. “Just going to help myself up off the floor here.”