The Sixth Floor: Chapter Two

Time passed on. I was now in my early thirties,married with two pre-teen daughters. I was doing OK,for a high school dropout, I thought. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was a tractor trailer driver,working locally and getting paid pretty well. I had managed to save up enough money for a down payment on a house, but it would have to be somewhere out in the country. You see, I lived in a suburb of New York City, and houses were quite expensive there.

So my wife and I and my best friend ( yes,the same best friend from chapter one),and his wife decided one weekend to take a drive out to the Pocono Mountains in PA. We had read that real estate prices were very low there,and wanted to check it out.

It was about a two hour drive from where we lived. We wanted to look at houses and property out there. We fell in love with the area and decided to seriously begin searching for a home there. After a couple of months,we found the home we liked,in our price range. my friend and his wife also decided to buy a house in the Poconos, 18 miles from mine. My wife and I wanted to be more secluded than our friends,who wanted to be be closer to NJ & NY.

I decided that I would change jobs,rather than commute two hours each way. I was sure that I could find another suitable trucking job. I may have to settle for a slightly lower salary, I thought, but I was confident things would work out,after all, like the song " New York ,New York" said, " If can make there, I'll make it anywhere". I had more than ten years experience as a tractor-trailer driver,by this time and I felt I would have no trouble getting a new job. I found one, driving for a cement hauler, a dry bulk tanker . It wasn't the hourly pay I was used to. It paid a percentage of the load.

The hours weren't regular set hours like I was used to either .In New York, I started at eight pm every night and worked until four- six am. Now I had to start at two or three am. I didn't like the routine change. After a couple of months,I decided to change jobs.

I found a job hauling "municipal waste",a nice term for garbage! I liked this job even less than the cement job. I was starting to wonder if I'd made a big mistake. Should I have kept my job in New York? Should I have not moved my family out to PA?

I wasn't feeling so confident and proud of myself anymore. Once more ,after a couple months at a job I hated, I started looking for another job. I thought my prayers were answered,when I found a tractor trailer job with UPS in NJ. It was about 70 miles from my house, but I thought it would be worth it to work for UPS. The catch was, it was a temporary job,with the "possibility" of becoming permanent, if they liked me. I thought "what's not to like"?

I had a big let down . The 3 month term ended and they didn't want me to stay on as a permanent driver. They didn't like me! I was really loosing confidence in myself now. I was starting to become very depressed. I hadn't felt this depressed since I was 18. I was starting to have suicidal thoughts, but I dared not tell anyone about it. Not my wife, or my best friend.

It was two days before Christmas,and I was not jolly or full of cheer. I was out of work and prospects were not looking good. The want ads were not showing very many trucking jobs. I began looking for fork lift driver jobs in local warehouses, but they were scarce too.

After the holidays, out of desperation, I took a warehouse job packing boxes and loading trucks,hoping that after a while,I'd get an opportunity to move up to forklift driver. After a week or so on this job ,I was feeling worse and worse by the day.

Then one day,a truck driver I knew from New York, backed up to the dock. We talked about work and New York, and how he'd also moved out to the Poconos. He was working steady at a union job. When he asked me why I was working in a warehouse , I could barely tell him. I mumbled under my breath that things were not going well for me , lately. That's when I knew, I wasn't going to be happy at this job.

The next day, I walked off the job. Just walked out of the place. I went home. My wife was just getting ready to leave for her job, and questioned me as to why I was home so early. I told her, I couldn't stand working on a loading dock ,when I should be driving the truck,backing up to the docks instead. She was ,so angry at me. She left in a huff. I knew she was right and I was mad at me too! Only I couldn't leave me in a huff.

Or could I? I decided I'd had enough bad luck, disappointments, and feeling depressed .I was going to kill myself. I was home alone. The wife just left for work, the kids were at school. I didn't stop to think about how they'd feel when they got home and found me, I just wanted the pain to stop.

I thought of a surefire way to kill myself. I wasn't going to try what I did when I was 18. No pills this time. I was going to use carbon monoxide .Death by car exhaust.

I found a plastic hose in the basement that was for the sump pump that neither I ,nor my wife could figure out what its use was. It was just something left behind by the previous owners. I attached the hose to my car's exhaust pipe,then I ran the other end into the car's back door window. I then stuffed the gap left by the partially open window with rags. I sat in the driver's seat,turned on the car's engine, laid down across the front seat, and waited to die.

I thought I was just going to fall asleep,and not wake up again. Once again, I was wrong! I believe it was devine intervention. My wife says she was so pissed off at me,she left work to come home and have an argument with me, but I still think something or somebody made her come back home early. Either way, she spoiled my plans of dying .

I don't remember any of the following details, I was five minutes away from death ,(or so they told me), when she got there and pulled me from the car and called 911.

I was taken to the closest emergency room, then they life flighted me by helicopter to another hospital 60 miles away in central PA that had a hyperbaric chamber. They needed to get the carbon monoxide out of my system. After I was physically alright, they sent me upstairs, to the sixth floor. The sixth floor, or whatever the highest floor is on most hospitals ,is normally where the psychiatric ward is located, for security
reasons , I guess, or maybe it's so if any patients escape out the window ,the high fall will kill them and they won't have to be taken to the ER. Anyway ,that's where I was going. Up to the sixth floor.