Dark Days, Bright Nights

September 15, 2020
A journalist and social worker shares stories of how a group of flood channel-dwelling homeless people found their way back to society. In this oral-history follow-up to Beneath the Neon, O'Brien's examination of homelessness in subterranean Las Vegas, he chronicles how one group of homeless people were able to leave tunnel life behind. The author structures each of the chapters around a specific question, to which he elicited responses from men and women who had survived everything from poverty to substance abuse during their time underground. His subjects ranged from teenagers to people in their 60s and came from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds. They included drug addicts, military veterans, and ex-cons, many of whom were survivors of dysfunctional or violent childhoods or some other traumatic or personally debilitating event. Two of the most intriguing figures O'Brien interviewed include Szmauz, a young musician from "a loving family in the mountains of southern New Hampshire," and Ande, "who has a doctorate in organizational behavior and human factors [and] lived in the drains for seven years, the last while battling breast cancer." O'Brien asked his interviewees questions that encouraged them to discuss such topics as their childhoods and adolescent and adult years; how they became homeless; and how they managed to navigate the "dangerous curves...hairpin turns...roadblocks and detours" that they faced on a daily basis. Without exception, each of the author's interviewees have faced significant obstacles. Many, like Becky, Iron, and Manny, backslid into self-destructive behaviors (notes Iron, "I do the least amount of wrong I can. That's the simplest way to put it"); one, Jazz, lost his beloved girlfriend to a tunnel flood. Against the odds, all found a way back to sobriety (or close to it) and a more secure life. Powerful and relentlessly honest, the interviews explode myths surrounding homelessness while promoting compassionate views of the growing number of homeless Americans. Compelling reading about what is a depressingly evergreen societal ill.

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