BY ELAINE DE VALLE

 Adrian Mesa rode to freedom aboard the Lollipop on April 24 -- barely a few weeks after turning 18 and three days after the first two boats packed with Mariel refugees arrived in Key West.

 As one of the earliest to camp out at the port of Mariel, he witnessed its overnight transformation into a virtual city.

 ``I got there on April 23 in the afternoon, just as it was getting dark. There were only two tents and government officials decided to only allow the women inside so they could sleep there,'' said Mesa, now a disc jockey at WCMQ-FM (92.3).

 There were no more than 100 people at the port that night -- ``one of those nights that was very nippy.'' He was tired, though, and fell asleep fast.

 Upon waking the next morning, Mesa found himself wondering if he was in the same place. He could no longer see the port. The ground was no longer part of the landscape. There was only green canvas as far as the eye could see.

 ``There were so many tents. Hundreds of them. And it was full of people. All of a sudden there were thousands of people walking around and sitting everywhere.

 ``It seemed as if I had woken up in un hormiguero -- an anthill.''

 By contrast, Mesa remembers, things were calm upon arrival in South Florida. At that very early stage of the exodus, the number of incoming refugees was still small, their processing orderly.

 ``Immigration put us on a bus and sent us to Tamiami Park. And when we got there, there was nothing there. Just a processing center and a trailer for medical exams.''

 One thing was immediately noticeable: The people who greeted him here treated him with respect, unlike how he and the other departing Cubans had been treated on the island.

 In Cuba, said Mesa, ``the police treated us with much despotism. They shouted `Get out!' They said things to provoke you.'' At Tamiami Park, he noted, ``I began to feel like a person, like a human being.''

 He and the relatives who had traveled with him -- his sister and her husband and her mother-in-law -- were processed and immediately released to their family here.

 ``Within two or three hours I was already free . . . It was a reality many people were anxious for in Cuba: to be in another country, free the next day. And I had attained that so easily that it seemed unreal.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald