The Lord’s Work

Driver #11, Dora Dimes was sitting In front of the Amtrack station at around 2:30 AM waiting for a call, while she was listening to a talk radio show about re-incarnation.

“Now what your telling me,” the show’s host said to his guest, “is that everyone goes to heaven, because we are all the same person?”

“Exactly,” the guest said, and further explained, “the same entity lives every life that ever was, is and will be, until completion is accomplished. At some point the same entity is everyone from Mother Teresa to Adolph Hitler, so how could they go to hell?”

“But then if there is no hell,” the radio host countered, “how can there be a heaven?”

“There really isn’t,” the authority answered. “I use the term, because culture demands it. It has become part of the group mind, zeitgeist, and I’m just trying to stay on that wavelength.

“So then if there is not heaven or hell,” the host asked, “what is there?”

“Another dimension of reality,” the authority answered. “What you have to remember is that all we know is…

“Number 11, get Wal-Mart North,” the cab radio blared, as #11 turned down the talk show volume to hear the call.

“Okay,” Dora said, as she wrote it down on her trip sheet.

“Do you have a cigarette?” The voice startled #11, so that she jumped and let out a stifled scream. “I’m sorry,” the voice, that was connected to a homeless man, whose age was probably somewhere between 40 & 60 years old said. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but do you have a cigarette?”

“No!” Dora emphatically said, “I don’t smoke.”

“Are you a Christian?” The homeless man asked.

After waiting a minute, #11 answered with a “yes.”

The homeless man then held out his hand with something in it and said, “here, take this for the Lord’s work.” Then he put something in Dora’s hand.

When she looked at the piece of paper in her hand she realized that it was a hundred dollar bill, and held it up to the dome light to check for the water mark. “This is a hundred dollar bill,” she said, as she put it in her shirt pocket.

“Yes it is,” the homeless man said, “and I want you to use it for the Lord’s work, because the end is coming soon. Jesus Christ will be returning to Earth to take his followers with him, after he smites his enemies and reigns in the new Jerusalem for a thousand years. Then he turned and began to walk off.

“Wait,” Dora called, “do you need a ride?”

“Yes,” the homeless man said, “I need to go to Wal-Mart on Lancaster to get some apple juice.

“Then hop in,” she told him.

After he got in and they started to drive, the homeless man told Dora that his name was Larry and that he was a born again Christian, although he smoked 10 joints one time with Abbie Hoffman, and that Mario Savio had been a personal friend of his.

“The next stage in Christian marketing will be Christian Pornographic stores,” Larry told her. “Every church can open its own pornography store. Imagine, pornography that features only born again, married porn stars, having sex with their spouses. Then there could be dildos shaped like a cross and frankincense and myrrh scented body oil. Imagine a video or Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene in heaven or Salomé having sex with John the Baptist just before he was decapitated.”

Then he changed the subject and began talking about how Jews controlled the world, and that he was a Jew, so he should know. “I used to know Henry Kissenger very well and talked to him about some of the policies that he helped create, back in the early 1970’s. He was a very smart man, but was very evil.”

“Obama is a great man, and I have the deepest respect for him,” Larry said. “Have you read his book, ‘Dreams From My Father’?” He asked and then went on to explain that it was the story of his Kenyan father. The book begins with him living in New York…” Larry wandered from one subject to another as we drove down the deserted streets, towards Walmart.

“…The Sahara desert was where the garden of Eden was. After God drove Adam and Eve out he set an angel at the entrance with a flaming sword, to block anyone from going back in, after He banished them. The angel represents the sun, and how after drought created the desert, the garden of Eden became a myth.”’

Larry apologized for talking so much, but he said that he had a mental disorder that caused him to talk continuously, so it was okay to ignore him. Then he offered #11 another hundred dollars, but Dora refused to put out her hand to take it, so he finally put it away, as they pulled up to the grocery door, where her next passenger was standing with a shopping cart full of groceries. Larry got out and started talking to the man and asked him for a cigarette, but he told him that he didn’t smoke, and asked #11 if she was picking him up.

“Yes,” #11 told him, as Larry turned back to her and asked for her Yellow Cab hat, to which she refused.

“I would like some kind of a souvenir from our encounter together,” Larry said.

Dora thought a minute and then popped the trunk, and opened up her back pack find a Yellow Cab ball point pen, which she handed him. After he thanked her, and walked away, she turned to the elderly man who looked to be in his 80’s with a shopping cart full of groceries. On the drive to his apartment he ranted about the way that people whined about the bad economy, when they didn’t know what deprivation was. “I was born in 1927,” the man said, “ two years before the stock market crash. I grew up during the great depression, so I remember it like it was yesterday. What they call a bad economy today is a joke, compared to back then. There was no welfare system or even social security. People died of starvation. Since then safety nets have been put in place, by the government, so that people are taken care of in a bad economy. Now you have Starbucks and latte stands all over the city, along with tattoo parlors and other unnecessary frivolity, that this spoiled generation considers a need.

After she helped him carry in his groceries and he paid her, #11 gassed up, and headed back to the office, since her 12 hour shift was over.