Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski Read Free Book Online Page B

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