Word: motel
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...most of these motel dwellers along the dry plateaus between the Dead Mountains and the Black Mountains, political violence is the last thing on their mind. The FBI discovered that when it arrested two drifters who had passed through Kingman and also Perry, Oklahoma, where McVeigh was arrested. Journalists converged on Kingman only to find that the two men spent weeks watching television, rarely emerging from their motel rooms except to buy beer and food. "I'm a drunk," explained a baffled Robert Jacks on Nightline, after the fbi finally released him. "I just pick up work -- or anything...
...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, or was until...
...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...
Broken homes are the common thread that binds the lives of drifters. An accident or an illness can push someone over the brink. Wes Moreland, living in a $125-a-week room at the El Rio Motel in Bullhead City since March, says his life fell apart after a near fatal car accident in 1984. A onetime maintenance man in Thornton, Colorado, he lost three years of work, 64 lbs., and "my wife felt I wasn't the handsome young man she married." Three years ago, after his wife divorced him and got their $140,000 home and custody...
...road at the Highland Motel, manager Alden Greeson, 57, spends his days bantering with the guests who stop by the ice machine. Greeson, a recovering alcoholic, owned 18 alcohol-treatment centers in northern Florida. "At 50," he says, "I just got up and walked away. I bought two Harleys and a van. I wanted to be free." He left his business, several homes and $2 million to his wife. "I'd always been a good father and a good husband. I raised five healthy kids. But I didn't want to be part of it anymore. The hollering kids...