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happened.
    First I listened to my mom’s message:
    “Mickey, it’s your mom. Just checking in to see how you’re making out over there. Have you stopped by the hospital to see your grandfather yet?”
    Yes, Mom, I could truthfully tell her, I visited the hospital first thing this morning.
    “Anyway, maybe you could come up to have dinner with Walter and me this weekend. He’s been asking about you. Let me know and I’ll pick you up.”
    Walter is her boyfriend. I couldn’t stand him. She knows this, but pretends not to know this. I hit erase.
    The cell was down to a single bar, so I looked for a place to charge it. I found a black power cord that snaked across the floor, around a cardboard box and into the back of something hidden under a stack of file folders. To my surprise, it turned out to be a silver Technics turntable.
    The thing looked thirty years old. I hit the power button on the silver tuner beneath it, then ran my index finger under the needle and heard a scratching, popping sound. It worked.
    I fished out one of my father’s albums—Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard —and listened to “The Six Teens” while I finished off the warm Yuengling I’d opened a few hours ago.
    This was the first time I’d listened to any of these albums.
    The LPs were my dad’s. Mom gave them to me on my twenty-first birthday. She told me I used to love to look at them when I was a toddler. Now, I haven’t owned a record player since I was eight years old—a Spider-Man set, with detachable webbed speakers. So all these years I’ve had no way of listening to these albums. But now and again I’d open the three boxes full of old LPs and thumb through them, taking the time to soak up the art.
    You can have your tiny little CD covers, or worse, your microscopic iPod jpegs. Give me LP covers, like George Hardie’s stark black-and-white image of a blimp bursting into flames from Led Zeppelin I. Or the floating tubes on the front of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The freaky black-and-white lion’s head on the cover of Santana, which I’d often misread as having something to do with satan. The Stones turning into cockroaches on Metamorphosis. Grand Funk Railroad, Iron Butterfly, The Stones, Lou Reed, Styx—these were all bands that I loved purely for their cover art.
    As for the music inside…well, my mileage varied. You could only listen to “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” so many times, if you know what I mean.
    But I would look at the art and think about my dad bringing the albums home from the record shop—probably Pat’s on Frankford Avenue—putting his headphones on, listening to the music, staring at the covers himself, letting his imagination wander, dreaming of making his own records someday.
    But he never did make a record. He was killed before he had the chance.
     
     
    While my cell charged I showered, pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, then ventured out for some food. First, I needed money. There was a battered ATM near the Sav-N-Bag market all the way down Frankford Avenue, near the end of the El tracks. The walk was as depressing as I imagined it would be. Shuttered storefronts. Abandoned shells of fast-food chains that became clinics for a while before they shut, too.
    At the ATM I quickly checked my surroundings for possible muggers, then quickly shoved in my card and pressed the appropriate keys. I asked for $60—just enough to buy some cold cuts, maybe a few cans of soup, some boxes of cereal. Bachelor staples.
    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,