Hanging the machine guns on the wall was a bad idea, but the burglary wouldn’t have happened if we’d just covered up the little decorative window over the front door. If you stood on your toes in the hallway and looked in through the little window, the guns were in plain sight. Almost everything was in plain sight because most of our third-story apartment was a single large room — a shoddy retrofit of a massive early twentieth-century industrial building on Philadelphia’s north side, in Fishtown, where those kind of buildings are common.

The building owner, a tattoo artist we’ll call Daryl, also lived somewhere on the third floor and ran a printing business on the first floor that employed a half-dozen people, most of whom were heavily tattooed tenants. There was plenty of activity around the building during the day and everyone made sure the main doors were always locked, so we had good reason to believe a burglar wouldn’t be able to break into the building in broad daylight, climb the stairs to the third floor, peek into our apartment, force his way in and carry off our machine guns without being caught. That was naïve. We should have covered up the little window.

The burglary happened on a weird day. I had agreed on very short notice to fill in on lead vocals for a friend’s band that night, a string group that played mostly old covers like “Nancy Jane” and “Wreck of the Old ‘97”. My roommate, Matt, had just started playing percussion with them a few weeks earlier and they were opening for Slim Cessna’s Auto Club at Johnny Brenda’s, a popular venue near our place. I was driving back from my soul-crushing job in the suburbs and trying to prepare mentally for the show when Matt called and asked if, by any chance, did I take the machine guns down off the wall before I left for work that morning. My stomach rolled over.

A word about the machine guns: one of them is mine, the other one is Matt’s, and they were for decoration. The...