The car was filthy and battered, and the driver, a lanky and talkative young soldier named Abdelaziz who had an ecstatic grin on his face, soon told me he was running out of gas.
Rum is for when you can't afford the good stuff," says Freddy Afanador, 62, the driver of a battered taxi.
Drivers on the battered Gowanus and Cross Bronx Expressways would agree, as would residents of Staten Island, a borough with a single pothole repair crew assigned to tend to 3,000 miles of streets.
It is unknown where the Iraqi ruler is -- in Baghdad or in some hideaway in the desert, perhaps in his hometown, Tikrit; in some deep bunker complex, or driving about Baghdad in a battered Volkswagen, alone but for a driver, as he is reputed to have done during the American air attacks that accompanied the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
We walked past taxi drivers kneeling beside their battered cabs on small rugs, supplicating themselves in prayer.
He is most proud of two programs he started: the domestic violence unit, under which orders of protection are now served to abusers by sheriff's deputies instead of by the battered women themselves; and the drunken drivers rehabilitation center, which has cut down on repeat offenders by 75percentt.
Sat in the driver's seat of his battered pick-up truck, he's armed with a 20-year-old sniper rifle.
In August, late-model sport utility vehicles with out-of-state plates sparkled in the parking lot at the Peaks Island ferry landing, sharing space with a battered Volvo with plastic sheet serving as its driver's side window, a Chevrolet Silverado savaged by rust and a Mercury Marquis with a door permanently ajar -- all with island-use stickers.
The sum total of my survival equipment is a battered plastic ice scraper that has been under the driver's seat of my car for the past 10 years.
The battered woman who kills in self-defense, the reckless driver who kills a pedestrian, the hired assassin who kills for pay: though each of them has taken a life, there are differences among their acts--differences that come under the legal rubric of "intent"..
