The Man in 3B Read Online Free Page B

whopping $602.83 after taxes. I used to pull in two grand a week minimum. Considering the fact that my rent on a bullshit apartment in a halfway decent neighborhood was $2,000, we were barely making ends meet.
    That’s why I knew Connie was gonna go ballistic when I got home and told her I only had a hundred dollars in my pocket. Most of my paycheck was in the hands of the strippers at Jiggles now. At the time, all I could think about was that a brotha deserves a good lap dance on his birthday, but now I was dreading another fight with a wife who was big enough to pin me to the floor if she wanted to.
    As I walked across the overpass to the Van Wyck Expressway, I stopped and looked over the railing at the cars whizzing by below. I wished I was in one of the cars, speeding away from Queens, away from this life that I hated.
    “Ha!” I said as I put a foot on the railing. “Who am I kidding? What life? Shit, I died when the housing market crashed.”
    Before I knew it, I was standing on the railing, ready to jump. You know what they say: Alcohol is like liquid courage, and those six vodka and cranberries I’d had were making me think I could go through with it. I could jump off the bridge and end my poor excuse for a life.
    I took a deep breath and lifted one leg. “Good-bye, cruel world,” I said, laughing at the cliché.
    “Hey!”
    The voice that came from behind startled me so much that I almost lost my balance and fell over the side. I put my foot back on the railing and turned around to see a man about my age offering an outstretched hand.
    “Mister, don’t do it,” he said. “Trust me, it’s not worth it. Whoever or whatever it is that’s bothering you is not worth dying over.”
    Believe it or not, I chuckled. “How would you know? You have no idea how fucked up my life is.”
    “I know because I was standing on that very same railing a year ago, ready to jump.”
    I stared at him for a second as I tried to read his face. Was hebullshitting me? If he was just saying that to talk me down from the edge, then I was not in the mood. “Look, I don’t have time—”
    He cut me off. “I got turned down for partner in my accounting firm, found out my old lady was cheating on me with my best friend—who was a partner—and that I had cancerous polyps in my colon. All in one day. Trust me, if anyone wanted to die, it was me.”
    Even if he was up here
, I thought,
that doesn’t mean he understands what I’m going through
.
    “Why’d you stop yourself? Didn’t have the guts?”
    He smiled and shook his head. “No, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s will give you the guts to do just about anything. But as I stood right there thinking about why I was going to jump, I realized a few things.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like that bitch I called a wife was just that—a bitch—that colon cancer is treatable, and that there are plenty other ways to make money if I’m willing to put in the hard work.”
    I looked at him, wondering if it had really happened that way. If right before he went splat on the Van Wyck, he’d had some great moment of clarity and found the will to live again. And even if it did happen like that, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be talked out of jumping.
    Dude was determined, though. He kept on with his speech. “More importantly, I thought about how my being dead would affect my kids. All I would be doing is passing the burden on to them, all because I was having a bad day, got drunk, and killed myself. I love my kids. I’d never do anything to hurt them.”
    He was starting to get to me. That was some deep shit he was talking.
    “You got any kids, man?” he asked.
    “Yeah, I got a daughter. I’m really proud of her. She’s a schoolteacher.”
    “You love her?”
    “Of course I love her. She’s the most important thing I got in the world.”
    “Then why in the world would you leave her this burden? Look,man, I don’t know what’s got you up there, but ask yourself one question.