I had a strange and eventful time living at the Royal Airport Inn in Brookpark, Ohio. I arrived back in Cleveland on the first of January 1996 with the clothes on my back wearing a windbreaker and carrying an awol bag with a change of underwear, a paperback novel,a couple of good pairs of VIP plastic pants and two sets of diaper pins and a carton of Newports inside and a hundred and seventy dollars in my pocket. Exiting the Greyhound bus terminal I was misted with the whirling snow steadily falling and no idea where I was going to sleep for the night. I decided to see if I could get my job back as maintenance man at the Country inns in Fairview Park, so I caught a cab there. I was here on the job there in late ’94 and had spent the year of ’95 in recovery with my wife in WV. Chis the proprietor of the Country Inns, welcomed me but said I was replaced and made me pay regular rates for a week, (one hundred and thirty dollars). I was a bit down but let it go. The place was in worse shape then when I left, except for the new heating system. Although it was far warmer with the old boiler system I used to have to maintain, I figured I could find another job easy enough. I used one of the cheap bath towels in the room for a diaper and hoped into still hopeful.
To save money I would walk the six miles to downtown and eat in the homeless kitchens, there wasn’t much in the way of shelter back then. It took me about two months to get on my feet working through day labor agencies and sleeping on the streets the first month. In June I finally found a contact I was looking for and was able to get a job from his brother repairing, cleaning and helping install used restaurant kitchen appliances. It was hard but honest work; it was a new venture that never made it out of the red. Gary Lee lived at the Royal Airport in with his brother John who was my contact. Gray was a very likable guy but you had to chase him around for your pay, he loved to get high and hang out in the local strip clubs. After a year and a half I got fed up and moved into the hotel after I foolishly got my car stolen, to do maintenance work for John. The pay was less but it was on time. I had my own bed by then although my room was very rough being an out of service one that only cost me fifty dollars a week. I had a computer by then and had been on the net for over a year.
This was year of the ’97 meet in Oregon but I am ahead of myself again, since I was living there for the ’96 meet too. Live was never routine there, there was always new people to meet and you never knew what was around the corner. I met some good and bad ones, and the staff was mostly good to me. More especially after I came out of the closet. The best time for me was the time I could spend in my room in diapers, plastic pants and a tee-shirt chatting on the computer while I was stoned on some good weed. I had gotten to be good friends with a few of the local hookers and they used to come and ask to hang out in my rooms quite a bit. I was always polite to them and never hassled them about their reasons. I knew the reasons; they wanted a place to smoke their crack without having to worry about someone begging or stealing it.
I wasn’t interested in it, I only asked them to relax and strip down to at least their undies, while they were there and to not invite strangers there. They were fine with it and some of them readily modeled diapers for me, which was very thrilling to me. They never judged me or me them they were living their lives for their own reasons. Life is very raw in the urban jungle and people will work over you before they give you a helping hand. I found people would give you a drink or a joint of weed far sooner then a bite to eat. Life can be very cruel but not everyone that is down on their luck is bad, luck can turn on you in a wink and a working man or woman can find themselves living on the edge of a cliff with nowhere to turn. It is not as hard as you want to believe. A lot has changed in my life since then but I will never forget or regret how I have lived my life, because even with all my faults I was able to discover that life is worth living even if you have nothing to put in the cook pot or no pot to piss in. The most important part is to be able to have friends to share life with, even if they come and go. I would rather live in a cardboard box with good friends then a mansion with strangers and enemies.
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