The Man in 3B (3 page)

“Nah, son, I don’t want you to be like me,” he’d tell me. With his hand on my shoulder, he’d look down at me and say, “I want you to be better than me. I want you to use that brain of yours and make me proud.” I looked up to my father then, and now at twenty years old and in my second year of college, I still looked up to him.

Turning my attention back to the street, I watched my father give one last signal to Ms. Pam. He seemed to purposely ignore the other women on the stoop as he headed toward the truck, probably going to introduce himself to our new neighbor.

Instead of watching it all from the window, I decided to go downstairs to be part of the action.

“Benny, come here, son,” Pop said when he saw me come outside. “I wanna introduce you to another Knicks fan.” Our new neighbor was wearing a Knicks jersey. Pop was a die-hard fan.

I carefully maneuvered my way past the ladies to avoid getting cursed out, then walked over to the U-Haul truck, where my father was standing next to our new neighbor.

“Benny, this is Daryl Graham. Daryl, this is my son, Ben Junior. We all call him Benny.”

“Nice to meet you, Benny.” Mr. Graham had been holding a big box. He placed it back in the truck and shook my hand with a firm grip.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Graham,” I replied.

“You can call me Daryl,” he said, then turned to Pop. “Very polite young man you have here, Ben. He’s pretty tall too. He play any ball?”

Pop put his hand on my shoulder. “Benny here played forward in high school. Had a full ride to Hofstra too, but we turned it down.”

Daryl looked confused, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. I mean, how many people turn down full scholarships?

Pop explained, “You see, Benny here’s a little bit of a brain. He got a full academic ride to Fordham University up in the Bronx, so he traded in his sneakers to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. He’s doing pretty well too. I’m proud of him.”

“As you should be.” Daryl nodded approvingly and turned his attention to me. “So, how’s college working out for you, Benny?”

“Pretty good. I’m maintaining a 3.8 grade point average.”

Pop spoke up. “It would have been a 4.0 if it wasn’t for that schmuck racist who taught psychology. Not one black person got over a B.”

“Pop, he doesn’t wanna hear all that.” I shot him a look and he raised his hands as if to surrender.

“All right, all right. I’m sorry, son,” he said as he reached into the back of the truck and picked up the box Daryl had been holding. “I hope you don’t mind, but that movie’s gonna have to wait. I just volunteered to help Daryl carry his boxes upstairs.”

“Oh, man, I didn’t realize you had plans with your son,” Daryl said. “Listen, Ben, I can take care of this. Last thing I wanna do is come between you and your son.” He looked at me. “You do know you’re one of the lucky ones, right? I lost my dad when I was about fifteen.”

I liked this dude. “As a matter of fact, I do. But it’s cool. There are lots of ways a father and son can spend time together—like helping a
new friend move into his apartment.” I smiled and leaned in to take a box from the back of the truck.

Pop tilted his head in the direction of the women on the stoop and said, “Too bad you couldn’t get your little entourage over there to help. You’d probably be finished by now.”

“What entourage?” Daryl asked.

“You mean to tell me that you didn’t notice you have an audience?” Pop clarified.

Daryl glanced in their direction and shook his head. “Man, I’m not even paying attention to them. Only thing I’m worried about is unloading this truck.”

“Well, their lazy asses ain’t gonna help you. I can tell you that. I got a week’s salary that says not one of them offered to lift a finger to help you out.”

My father looked to the women on the stoop. Their ears were deaf to anything he had to say, but their eyes were still clearly focused on Daryl. Lucky for Pop that his snide remark had gotten by them. The women in our building really knew how to stick together when they weren’t stabbing each other in the back.

“Now that you mention it, no, they haven’t offered,” Daryl said.

“Take my advice when it comes to the women in this building. Hit it and quit and don’t get too attached ’cause all of ’em ain’t nothing but a bunch of gold diggers and whores.”

Daryl had nothing to say but nodded his understanding. I couldn’t read his expression, but somehow I got the feeling Pop had gone a little too far calling them whores.

“Anyway, let’s get this stuff upstairs,” I suggested to change the subject.

“You look like a strong young man so why don’t you start with this?” Daryl transferred a heavy box from his hands to mine. “I’ll grab something off the truck.”

As Pop and Daryl went into the truck to unload more boxes, I looked down and realized what I was carrying.

“Oh, wow! Is this the new system Bose just put out?” I called out.

“What do you know about that?” Daryl asked, exiting the truck. My dad followed behind him, his arms full.

“My boy’s a bit of a tech nut,” Pop answered for me. “If it’s got circuits and wires, he knows about it.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Daryl said. If I hadn’t just met the guy, I’d say he sounded almost like he was proud of me. At the moment, both Daryl and my father wore the same smiles on their faces. “And that’s good to know because I’m not. Maybe if I throw you a few ends, you can help me out with setting up some of my equipment. I’m sure a college kid like yourself can use a little money from a side hustle.”

“No doubt,” I answered as Daryl led the way into the apartment building.

The elevator arrived and we all piled on. I was the last one in, closest to the buttons, so I pressed three and we headed up.

I looked over into the box Daryl was carrying and couldn’t believe what I saw on top of it. “No way. Please tell me that is not the new iPad.”

“Oh, that?” Daryl said nonchalantly. “Yeah, a friend hooked me up. I haven’t had time to figure that thing out yet.”

“I told you my son’s a mechanical genius. I bet he’ll have you operating that thing like a champ in no time,” my father said, putting in a good word on my skills.

“I don’t know about a genius,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Pop, who still had a proud grin on his face.

As the elevator doors opened, Daryl said, “I have a friend who hooks me up with all that stuff.”

He said it so casually, but it didn’t come across as bragging. I liked that about him. There was nothing worse than a man who tried to make another man feel inferior by flaunting his worldly possessions. And then he said something that made me like him even more.

“You’re free to come mess around with my stuff whenever you have time. I’m sure you could teach me a thing or two.”

Pop put his hand on Daryl’s shoulder. “Oh, I’m quite sure he could. Benny is a techie, a mechanical genius, a gadget geek… you name it.
I hope you meant it when you said he could come over, because I have no doubt he will.”

Daryl stopped in front of his apartment door and turned to face us. “One thing you’ll learn about me is that I mean everything I say.” He looked at me. “I mean it, son. Feel free to come over anytime.”

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some of Daryl’s stuff.

It was a good thing I wasn’t driving, I thought as I walked home from Jiggles strip club, drunker than I’d been in a very long time. “Happy fuckin’ birthday to me,” I muttered as I stumbled down the sidewalk toward home.

Yes, it was my birthday—my fiftieth, to be exact—and I had spent it alone at Jiggles, ogling the tits and ass of some of the best-looking women I’d seen in a while. Most men would leave a place like that and head home to their wives, where they would make love in the dark, fantasizing that it was a stripper underneath them. Me, I couldn’t stomach the thought of touching my wife, not with the way she had let herself go. It was more than the fact that I was turned off by fat women. Her weight gain pissed me off because her ever-expanding waistline was a symbol for how much everything in my life had gone to shit. Every time I looked at her I was reminded of how far I’d fallen.

See, five years ago I was on top of my game, well on my way to becoming a millionaire as the top-selling mortgage broker for Option One right here in Queens; but when the bottom fell out of the housing market, I became a casualty of my own success. One day I’m the darling of the company, making six figures, newly married to one of the finest women you’d ever wanna see, rocking his and hers Mercedes, and living in a big-ass house out on Long Island. Then the next day, the housing market is in the toilet and they’re letting me go without notice. I think that was the first time, other than when my kid was born, that I actually shed tears as a grown man, but trust me, it wasn’t my last.

With the economy the way it was, the job market was so tight that I couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s, let alone another mortgage company or bank. By the time my unemployment ran out, both of our cars had been repossessed. I can’t begin to tell you how much of a loser I felt like, standing there with my wife, watching those bastards tow away our cars. By that time, I was four months behind on an upside-down mortgage, and like half of America, I just gave up and stopped making payments altogether. Six months later the bank foreclosed on our house and sold it on the courthouse steps for half of what I paid for it. Things were so bad that I ended up filing for bankruptcy. It was an awful time in my life, one I don’t think I could have ever prepared for. I mean, who prepares to be a goddamn loser?

My wife, Connie, tried to be supportive. She’d say things like, “You’ll find another job. Things will get better. You just wait and see.”

She was trying to remain upbeat, but by that time, I was so damn depressed I could barely even look at her, let alone listen to her perky, Susie Sunshine encouragement. It got to the point where I was basically ignoring my wife, and she started drowning her sorrows in junk food.

While I was losing all the material things in my life, my once sexy, superfine, curvy spouse was packing on the pounds—lots of them. She said she’d only put on fifty pounds since I married her five years ago, but I was willing to wager it was more like seventy-five to a hundred. Once upon a time I couldn’t wait to get home just to look at her, and now I was embarrassed to walk down the street with her fat ass.

Yeah, I know I sound insensitive, but I don’t do fat. Never have. That’s why I left my first wife, and Connie, as supportive as she was about our financial situation, knew that. Sometimes I wondered if the real reason she wanted me to find a new job was so I could support her Dunkin’ Donuts habit.

Connie was right about one thing, though. I did eventually find another job about eight months after my unemployment ran out. Now instead of closing deals on million-dollar homes, I was selling furniture at Cheap Sam’s for ten dollars an hour. Oh, I got commission
too, which this past week brought my check to a 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 he
bullshitting 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.