Matthew O’Brien is a writer, editor, and teacher who lived in Las Vegas for twenty years and is currently based in San Salvador, El Salvador. His latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: Surviving the Las Vegas Storm Drains (Central Recovery Press), shares the harrowing tales of people who lived in Vegas’ underground flood channels and made it out and turned around their lives. You can learn more about Matt and his work at www.beneaththeneon.com.
Moving Metal
by Matthew O’Brien
Slumped in a seat in the breakroom, dressed in a button-down shirt, lavender tie, gray slacks, and scuffed Hush Puppies, he heedlessly tapped his business card against the particleboard tabletop. “Glenwood Springs Discount Auto Mall—Adam Kominsky—Junior Sales Associate.” To the right of the card sat a styrofoam cup of black coffee, to the left a flip phone. Beyond the far side of the table, through a large rectangular window, he could see the showroom, front lot, and foothills of the copper-colored mountains, which were dusted with snow. He leaned forward, checked the time on the phone’s exterior display: one p.m. He swabbed his palms on his slacks. Then he flipped open the phone, punched in a number he’d scrawled on the back of the card, and pressed “send,” his stainless-steel engagement ring flickering in the fluorescent light.
Two thousand miles away, Dana Fanning sat legs crossed in a small, square, windowless room, dressed in a hoodie and faded jeans and picking at her lavender thumbnail. Her hair was blond with black-brown roots and tied in a bun, displaying gold hoop earrings and a half-finished tattoo—the stem of a rose, which when complete would be in bloom—on the side of her neck, adjacent to an inch-long horizontal scar. (The hoodie hid a pair of eyes centered on her upper back—a tatt she got when she turned twenty-one, so she could “see” what was going on behind her.) Nine cubicles, arranged like a tic-tac-toe grid, crowded the air-conditioned room. Dana occupied the middle-left square, a bottle of water, notepad and pen, and landline on the desk in front of her. The phone rang. She flashed a smile. Then she set her white sneakers on the carpeted floor and reached for the receiver with a pale, veiny hand.
“Hello?” she said in a girlish Southern accent.
Adam and Dana met at a strip club in Atlanta in the early 2000s, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-seven. He was immediately drawn to her—her skin was flawless and she smelled like cotton candy—and he kept buying table dances from her and buying her tequila shots. To her, he was just another handsy client, though she did note his square jaw and muscular build. As the sun breached the horizon, she scrawled a phone number on a cocktail napkin. He was surprised to discover, a few days later, the number was actually hers.
On their first date, he took her on a drug run to south Georgia—dense pine forests, undulating dirt roads, rusted trailer homes—in a stolen BMW. He was worried that would turn her off, but she too was dealing drugs. This marked the beginning of a thirteen-year relationship, which saw them storm Miami, New York, Dallas, Denver, and Las Vegas, sleeping in sky suites when things were rolling and in their car or on the street when the luck ran out. They hit rock bottom in an underground flood channel just west of the Strip, where they lived for more than a year.
Adam was now clean and sharing an apartment with his cousin in Glenwood Springs, Colorado; he attended high school in the area and much of his family still lived there. Dana was in a treatment center on the outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida. They had not spoken since she clutched the handle of a rolling suitcase that was missing a wheel and staggered out of the storm drain—a somber silhouette—one year ago.
“You still alive?” he said into the flip phone. He was born and raised on the southside of Chicago and still had a subtle Midwestern accent.
She laughed. “Dude, just barely.”
“Your mom told me you had surgery on your neck from the spike missing the vein. You relapsed a few times. Went back to Vegas…”
“I stayed in the tunnel for a few weeks. Jake is doing all right; same old, same old. But Pops is dead.”
“I heard. They found him with a needle in his arm? He nodded off and never woke up?”
“Yeah,” she said solemnly.
Adam picked up his card and tapped it on the table. Dana twirled the cord of the landline with her index finger.
“How you doing?” he finally asked her. The tapping ceased, but the card remained wedged between his fingers.
“All right,” she said, her skinny legs rocking gently back and forth in the mesh, swivel chair. “This place is strange, though. Strict and bougie, but Mama thought it’d be good for me.”
“Before I was transferred to you, a message said the call is thirty minutes max and may be monitored. Be careful what you say, Dana.” He cracked a smile, partially revealing his bright new teeth.
When they were a couple, he called her “babe” or “D.” He referred to her by her first name only when he was mad at her or they were fighting, which wasn’t often. The name sounded odd coming out of his mouth, foreign, she thought, and the distance between them suddenly felt real.
She sat up straight in the chair. “I’ve been honest in the meetings,” she said. “I ain’t got nothin’ to hide.”
Her tone was somewhat formal. He found this jarring, but recognized it was the reality of the situation. After thirteen years of being inseparable, this is where they were.
“What have you told them about me?” His smile widened.
She picked up the pen and began doodling on the pad. “That I didn’t like you at first—I thought you were annoying—but you grew on me and we became close. Really close. That we’ve been through things most people couldn’t even imagine and we’re lucky to be alive.”
“Did you tell them about our first date?”
She laughed.
“What about the motel room in Denver?”
After a slow three-month stretch in Dallas, Adam and Dana settled in Denver. He found a job in construction and she was waitressing, and they were hustling and selling drugs on the side. An opportunity arose. Their supplier—a Cuban known only as “Cheo” who favored tight, striped button-down shirts—offered them a half-kilo of cocaine for $7,000; they could cut up the coke and sell it on the street and make more than twice that much money. They scraped up the cash and paid him—and he stiffed them on the product. Eventually, they tracked him to a motel room in downtown Denver, where, in the early morning hours, Adam kicked open the door and beat him with brass knuckles. Blood stained the white stripes of his shirt. Dana found $3,500 and five ounces of coke in a potato chip bag next to the mini-fridge, and she swiped a set of keys off the top of the dresser as she and Adam sprinted from the room. They skidded out of the parking lot in Cheo’s shiny Dodge Charger and drove to Vegas.
“The First Choice Inn,” she recalled, still doodling.
“Which was really the last choice,” he said, delivering the punch line of the running joke.
“Nah, I didn’t tell ’em that story.” She stopped doodling and dropped the pen. “Maybe I do have something to hide.”
“Did you tell them about the last time we saw each other?”
“I told ’em about the tunnel. I told ’em a cop once said our spot was nicer than his apartment in the suburbs, but it eventually went to shit. Told ’em about the blood and pus oozing from my neck. About the day I left—it was cold and rainy and the water split the camp in two. I could barely hear Mama honking over all the noise.”
“Did you tell them I was crying?”
“Like a baby.”
“I didn’t want to call your mom, but I knew if I didn’t we were both going die down there.”
“You did the right thing. I was the one doing things I shouldn’t have.”
“You were doing what you had to do to survive.”
She played with the pen. “Walking out of that tunnel was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Watching you walk out was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Adam reached for his coffee. After taking a sip, he set the cup back down on the table and switched the phone to his right hand. He rested his left hand on the edge of the table and stared at the ring.
The receiver wedged between her head and shoulder, Dana cracked open the bottle of water and took a few swigs.
“How are Spencer and Brooke?” he asked her.
Dana grew up in Alabama, but when she was sixteen her mother divorced her father, and Dana, her little sister, and her mom moved to Oklahoma. Dana dropped out of school and worked as a waitress in a diner, where she met the local preacher’s son. A few months later she was pregnant with his child. His parents forced them to get married, they had a son named Spencer, and they divorced a year or so later.
When she was nineteen and working at a different restaurant in the same area, Dana met a soldier on leave. They began a long-distance relationship—he was stationed more than three hours away and served a tour in Somalia—and she became pregnant with her second child, a daughter named Brooke. Along with often being absent, the father suffered from PTSD after serving in the Gulf War, so they never moved in together or got married.
When she started dating Adam, she didn’t tell him much about her children and he didn’t meet them for a year, after having spent some time with Dana’s mom and sister and the fathers of the kids. He saw the kids sporadically after that: He and Dana flew them into Dallas for a weekend of shopping, parks, and restaurants; and on their drive from Dallas to Denver, they spent five days with them in Oklahoma.
Once Adam and Dana were settled in Denver, Spencer and Brooke, then seventeen and thirteen years old, stayed with them for two weeks one summer. Adam surprised them by pulling them aside and asking for permission to propose to their mom. They granted it and he immediately drove them to Kay Jewelers, where they picked out a $500 white-gold, one-stone engagement ring that he paid for in cash. That evening, as the four of them dined at a dimly lit steakhouse, Adam got down on a knee and asked Dana to marry him. She said yes—but when they were strung out on heroin in the storm drain in Vegas, they pawned the ring for fifty bucks.
Dana screwed the cap back on the bottle and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She smiled broadly.
“They’re doing well,” she said. “Spencer’s in California and close to finishing school. He wants to be a mechanic. Brooke’s living with Mama and helping her with the housekeeping service, but her dream is to be a marine biologist.”
Adam nodded and cracked a smile. Then his expression went blank. “And your dad?” he asked, lowering his voice. “You spoken to him?”
Squinting, Dana scratched the side of her face. “We made amends,” she said. “I had to let it go. I didn’t want that affliction anymore, and I’ve caused people pain, too, so I had to own my own shit and forgive others for theirs.”
The coffeemaker in the breakroom of the car dealership wheezed and dripped. The AC in the treatment center cut off with a thud.
“How the hell you been?” she asked him enthusiastically.
“I’m back home,” he replied. “Once you left the ditch, I realized there was nothing for me down there. I packed my bag and said goodbye to Jake and Pops. Told them to take what they wanted from the camp or rent it to someone else, then I walked to the Strip and hustled up some money on the bridge. One lucky gambler—I’ll never forget his face—gave me a $100 bill.
“Getting here was a bitch—it was an eighteen-hour ride, the bus broke down, I needed a fix—and getting clean was even tougher, but things rolled downhill from there. No twelve-step program. Just one step at a time, with friends and family holding my sweaty hand.”
“I hear they got you wearing a tie again.”
“Yeah, I got a job. Doing what I guess I do best: moving metal.”
“They don’t know about the GTA?” she laughed.
“They do, but my cousin’s the assistant manager. He vouched for me. That’s what’s keeping me in line. I don’t want to let him down.”
Another salesman entered the breakroom. He hurried to the coffee machine, poured a cup, and splashed it with sugar and powdered cream. On the way out, he clumsily stirred the concoction with a plastic spoon.
“I’m taking things slow,” continued Adam, once the door had shut. “I drive a Toyota Avalon, an old-man’s car. The guys at work, who are in their mid-twenties or early thirties, drive sports cars. That’s not where I’m at. I have different priorities now.”
As Dana nodded in agreement, an automated message announced that the call would cut off in five minutes.
Following a brief pause, Adam said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Yeah,” she said, picking up the pen.
The coffeemaker held its breath. The AC jerked back to life.
“I met someone.”
She doodled for several seconds without responding.
“We’re engaged,” he added.
From that first night in the strip club in Atlanta, she’d had the upper hand in the relationship. She was older than him, more experienced, street-smarter, and hungrier for the hustle, and at times he felt she’d used that to her advantage. Anticipating this moment—when he would finally have some leverage—he imagined it would feel triumphant, that he would relish it. But it felt awkward.
She continued to saturate the page with abstract symbols and images. At last, she stopped and said, “So I can finally let you go?”
He exhaled. “Yeah, you can.”
“What’s her name?”
“Michelle. I met her on the lot. Sold her a 2010 Ford Focus and we kept in touch.”
“Isn’t that cute?” said Dana sarcastically.
“She’s got a young girl. Her name’s Grace.”
“Am I invited to the wedding?”
“I don’t see why not. I’ve told her a lot about you. I said there’s someone out there that I love, but we’re not meant to be together. We walked the same path and took care of each other the best we could, and she’ll always have a place in my heart.”
Dana nodded. “I like that.”
“There’s one other thing I want you to know,” said Adam.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t blame you for anything.”
She frowned. “Why would you?”
“You dragged me into some pretty heavy shit, but it made me a man. It’ll make me a better father.”
“Yeah,” she said, smirking. “I guess I did.”
Adam rubbed the engagement ring with his thumb, a habit he’d formed recently. Dana balled up the sheet of paper and underhanded it into a wastebasket.
“You got anything else to tell me?” she asked him.
As he shifted in his seat and started to respond, the line went dead.
Copyright 2026 by Matthew O’Brien