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Extract from “The Prisoner of San Jose”
Night at the Bus Stop
June 1983 Night at the Bus Stop
I got my first job in Miami at a construction site with the help of another friend from Haiti. While that job had a lot of overtime, it was a temporary job that ended when the project was completed. So when the dishwashing job that I had applied for called, I left and started my dishwashing job.
As a dishwasher, I worked from 2:45 to 11:45 PM. But when the restaurant closed at 11:30 PM., it took some time to clean the last of the dishes and the kitchen. The last bus was at 11:45 PM., so one night, I told the boss that I would miss the bus. He took me home in his car, all the way from Coconut Grove to Sixty-Eighth Street and NE Second Avenue in Little Haiti.
After he dropped me off, I realized that I could easily become a burden for the boss and that he could fire me to avoid taking me home. Also, I was living in a very unsafe neighborhood, which could have unpleasant consequences if something went wrong. The next day, I told my boss that my cousin would pick me up on a regular basis.
Sometimes I got a ride with a co-worker from Haiti. But many nights when my dishwashing job took me past 11:45 PM, I slept at the bus stop until 7:00 AM. When I woke up in the morning, I caught the bus home.
By the way, that bus stop, the first on the route, was at a location where only businesses and restaurants were located. They are closed by midnight. It was a no-man’s-land after midnight.
One night, lying on the bus bench, trying to fall asleep, I saw a minivan park across the street from the bus stop. A man got out and walked to the bus bench. I was awake but pretended to be sleeping. The man sat at the end of the bench next to my feet. He looked at me but didn’t say anything. I didn’t make a move, pretending to be sleeping. He walked back to his van and drove off.
It was indeed a scary moment. I didn’t have a knife, a bottle, or anything else I could have defended myself with.
As you will see from reading this story, I was slowly becoming more and more immersed in my daily readings of the monographs and the recommended exercises. The main reason for this is that, as a believer, I could no longer separate AMORC from the other activities I needed to survive. In fact, at one point, AMORC became my primary key to survival, more important than work itself.
Here was my schedule from March 1983, when I got my dishwasher job in Coconut Grove, to October 1983, when I lost the job.
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