BLAME IT ON VEGAS
CityLife’s Matt O’Brien introduces us to the down-and-out in his book Beneath the Neon
BY DOUG FRENCH

There is no shortage of books about Las Vegas. The bright lights and 24-hour party atmosphere make the city a magnet for scribblers. Researching a book makes an excellent excuse to pound the pavement in Sin City, and beats the hell out of writing a book about, say, Portland. 

Up until now, all of these Las Vegas stories have been about what goes on above ground in America’s fastest growing and most exciting city: the successes, the failures, the legends. But just as there is life underneath the seemingly dead, baked desert floor, the tunnels and storm drains underneath Las Vegas are not just where rainwater rushes when the infrequent cloud burst sends water from the west side of the valley toward Lake Mead.

More than a few of those who have succumbed to their weaknesses that this city is so efficient at exposing end up in the tunnels — living, loving, drugging and rationalizing. CityLife’s Matt O’Brien takes us to meet the down-and-out in his book, Beneath The Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas. 

O’Brien’s journey underground started reluctantly in 2002 when the bright idea that the drains under Vegas would provide good story fodder for a CityLife article came to him. Of course, he wasn’t interested in crawling around under the neon, but thought it a great assignment for a ballsy freelancer like Joshua Ellis. But eventually, the strapping O’Brien took the plunge, with a very readable and unique book as the result. 

On the surface, a book about meeting and chatting up the occasional meth addict or video-poker junkie while exploring drains doesn’t sound like a page-turner. But, the author’s stream-of-consciousness chronicling of his tunnel explorations keeps the reader wondering where a particular tunnel ends aboveground … or whether the tunnel just ends, somewhere underneath a city teeming with life above, but silent below other than the chirping of crickets and dripping of water. 

O’Brien also effectively uses stories about other underground societies — the Shanghai Tunnels of Portland, Ore., the tunnels in Vietnam that hid the Viet Cong; the Jews that lived underground to stay alive in Nazi Germany — to move his story along, and pull the reader deeper into the tunnels. 

But this story is about the people O’Brien meets and most importantly about the author himself. As one online book publisher writes: “First books typically have a strongly autobiographical content, regardless of whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.” As O’Brien takes us through the drains we learn about him, his view of Las Vegas and how he identifies with the people he encounters below ground. 

“When I first started it was frightening to me, but nowadays it has become a positive thing, it’s an escape from everyday Las Vegas,” O’Brien told the Review-Journal’s Ken White. “These drains keep drawing me back.”

The author doesn’t like the aboveground Las Vegas that has made so many people prosperous and happy. After all, he is smart, young and handsome, and yet the reader gets the feeling the author doesn’t feel appreciated here. “Las Vegas is a freak show — a circus of corrupt politicians, corporate mobsters, and spellbound tourists,” writes O’Brien. So while 200 people a day move here seeking a better life, O’Brien warns that Vegas is “where the American dream goes to crawl into a dark hole and die.” 

And the methamphetamine addicts (naked and clothed), mentally ill and busted-out gamblers who O’Brien admires feel the same way. Most tell the author they want to leave. If they could just hit that one royal flush, or get their driver’s license back, or stop using drugs, they’d be out of the drains and out of Vegas. Because in Las Vegas: “People here don’t seem to care about each other,” one drain dweller told O’Brien. “All they care about is themselves.” 

Yes, what passes for logic in the drains appeals to O’Brien. Because the “aboveground Vegas — with its heat, traffic, and hate — is much more dangerous than the underground,” he writes.

The tunnels and drains are all that is permanent here. Las Vegas is just another old west ghost town in the making, according to the author. But he will fondly remember the tunnels and its denizens, after he has moved to a more enlightened place like “Portland or Seattle or the Bay Area.” O’Brien should explore the tunnels beneath those cities. He will hear the same excuses, but he and his friends won’t have Vegas to blame it on.

Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine, is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies.