HEARTBREAK MOTEL

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/NEEDLES

The sun 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, or was until last month, when the FBI traced Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh to the old motor courts of Kingman, Arizona, where he brooded for weeks before driving east.

But sit in the 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 him she had breast cancer. Eight operations and a nervous breakdown later, she is worried about losing her new lover, a gas-station attendant. There's the Chicago doctor whose divorce and emergency-room stress led him to slam methamphetamines. Now a motel handyman, he shows the needle scars on his arms.

For 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 I want as I go, you know." The next week, another drifter, Steven Colbern, was arrested in Oatman, halfway between Kingman and Needles on Route 66. The remains of a methamphetamine lab were found near his trailer. Colbern, a UCLA graduate in chemistry and a fugitive from a weapons charge, had met McVeigh, but the FBI discounted him as a bombing suspect.

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 of their two children, he hit the road in his truck. "I couldn't handle seeing her with another guy," he says. "I was afraid of my own temperament." As his black puppy, Harley, chews on a Gideon Bible, Moreland, now 40, lies back on the bed. "I'm starting to have tears in my eyes, just thinking back," he says. In recent months he has lived in Mesa, Tucson and Las Vegas, working as a day laborer.

Moreland's roommate of several weeks, Sidney Gibson, quietly fries hamburger on a hot plate. A 27-year-old Native American, he traveled to Bullhead City from Oakland, California, with his brother, who "painted a beautiful picture of good work and higher pay. I should have known it was bull." Across the river is the casino boomtown of Laughlin, Nevada, and his brother, a gambler, landed in jail for a bad check, Gibson says. Now Gibson, who spent his teenage years in an Oregon correction facility, works in a Kingman plastics factory. But he dreams of heading to Northern California to pan for gold. "Nothing I love better than being in the mountains, going months without seeing another soul," he says. He pulls a small vial of water and glittering dust from his torn jeans. "I traded the nuggets for beer," he says. "Enough to stay drunk for a week and a half."

Up the 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, the tuition bills-no more." After 21 months on the road, he landed in Bullhead City. "More and more people are selling their homes," he says. "They're sick of society."

Across the parking lot, Duane Stevens, 39, delivers a plate of chili to an elderly motel mate. It's a thank-you to the neighbor, who drove Stevens to the supermarket after he and his girlfriend hocked her Jeep to pay the month's rent of $500. The two of them live in a single room with their 14-month-old son. Stevens, a former construction worker, had been collecting ssi after a sandblasting machine damaged his knees. "Life got harder and harder, living from motel to motel," says his girlfriend Jeannette Urquiza. "But last month I told Duane, 'You're a man. Get off welfare and support your family.'" Stevens took the graveyard shift -- $4.25 an hour -- at a Kingman factory, and gets home at 8 a.m., an hour after Urquiza leaves for her maid's job in a casino. The 30-year-old redhead pines for her two daughters, who live in California with her ex-husband. But she is patching together a new life, having given up drugs and begun night school to become a paramedic. "I know my future's going to be good," she says. "I don't want a white picket fence. But I want to be a mom, have a career and a man I love."

A few doors down, the future for Steven Deswert and Vicki Jackson is less certain. For the past six years they have been on the road together with her two children, Casey, 9, and Michael, 7 -- from New Mexico to North Carolina and back west to Arizona. Deswert, a heavy-equipment operator, makes as much as $17 an hour and goes where the work is, or works where he happens to go. "When I stay in one place, I get bored," he says. But Jackson, a big-boned blond, is ready to settle down. "I'm going to get rid of him," she confides. Deswert seems to be in denial. "We get along fine," he says. "The hell we do," she says. Greeson, the manager, puts in his two cents: "Steve gambles and drinks and won't buy the kids a new pair of shoes." Deswert shrugs off the comment with a vacant grin.

In the 1930s Needles was a place where the Okies, traveling down Route 66, entered California's Mojave Desert -- their first, bitter taste of the promised land. "Murder country," Tom Joad called it in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Today thousands of retirees in lumbering RVs flock here in winter. By April they are gone, and Needles (pop. 6,000) settles into a strange silence, punctuated by the roar of tractor-trailers along the highway. "This is a place for people who are running from something," says Bruce Weekely, the former police chief. "But we don't see these guys in court much. They're kind of ghostlike. They pay their rent and go about their business."

At the 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 in a heart on his back; on his chest another tattoo reads I LOVE MY FAMILY. MARRIED OCT. 12, 1958, CITY TEMPLE, GRANITE CITY, ILL. PAUL AND JANET COYLE. "That way, if I died, they could find me," he says. Nearby, in two cramped rooms at the Budget No. 1 Motel, Robert Givens, 38, lives on welfare with his wife, six children, 11 cats, two pet lizards and a puppy. They were evicted from public housing after Givens, a manic-depressive, was accused of growing marijuana and brandishing a gun. "We're like the Brady Bunch, only different," says his wife Barbara.

For 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 to be left alone," says Doherty, whose back was injured in a tank accident in the Army. "When I come home from work and I've had a bad day, I watch The Lion King," he says. "It makes me cry." He has sheared his purebred Chow, Hobo, to look like a lion: "He's my buddy." Each night, Doherty drinks a 12-pack of beer. "It's the best pain-killer I know," he says.

If some piece of the puzzle of the Oklahoma tragedy was cut from this bleak patch of the Southwest, it seems fitting. But it is a piece that speaks to despair more than to anger, to the nihilism and the anonymity of America's underbelly.