Word: desertion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...anxious advocates for the poor and elderly fight to stave off budget cuts, the Pentagon seems immune. 0ne would never know it, however, from the rhetoric wielded on behalf of Pentagon spending. "You couldn't fight Desert Storm today," House Speaker Newt Gingrich told TIME, despite Pentagon assertions that the U.S. military is now primed to fight two such wars at once. "We're going to get people killed if we downsize much more...
...doesn't shine on the desert towns where California, Arizona and Nevada converge. It glares, searing the asphalt highways lined with truck stops and trailer parks until the air shimmers with heat. In the neon nights, the listless and the luckless -- dropouts, boozers, gamblers and speed freaks -- take refuge in cheap motels. No one knows how many drifters travel the roads, how many alienated Americans hole up in motel rooms, in anger or despair. No one can even say if there are more of the rootless in this desolate corner of America than elsewhere. Theirs is an invisible subculture...
...white plastic chair by the ice machine at the Highland Motel in Bullhead City, Arizona; hang around the parking lot at the El Rey Motel in Searchlight, Nevada; knock on doors at the Desert Inn Motel in Needles, California, and the sad stories pour forth. There's the fireman who fled his eastern Washington home when his wife started sleeping with his fire-station colleagues. He moved to Alaska, worked security on the pipeline, then drifted south, where he gambles away his earnings as a casino janitor. There's the Michigan supermarket checker whose husband left when she told...
...Desert Inn Motel, the gossip is of the woman who swims naked in the pool across the street and of the Chinese and Indians who are buying up local motels. Paul Coyle, a 59-year-old retired welder with a long white beard and trembling hands, lives on Social Security and drinks a bottle of 151-proof Bacardi a day. He moved into the motel three months ago, after living in a casino parking lot for two years in his 1967 Cadillac. When his wife left him in 1986, Coyle had the names of his 16 children tattooed...
...loners, a motel offers cheap, hassle-free comfort. Jerald Doherty, 39, moved to the Desert Inn a year ago, after a relative gambled away his rent and utility money, leaving his credit record in ruins. A cook at Denny's, he pays $380 a month for a small room that he has made into a home: a microwave, a tabletop refrigerator, a coffee maker, a hot plate, a vcr, a collection of 28 beer steins and an aquarium with tropical fish complement a ragged sofa with foam spilling out of the cushions and a filthy shag carpet. "I want...