FSE

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Near the late 2000s, I thought my life was good. My pencil-pushing office job at one of Oasis' many big casinos paid for a large house in the suburbs, two cars, a timeshare in Oregon, a hot tub (Nevada could get unbelievably cold during the winter, mind you!), some stocks and a yearly summer vacation to Las Estrellas' golden coastline with the wife and cubs. Lisa always loved those trips, because I didn't have an excuse to postpone a dinner or miss an important meeting with our cubs' teachers.

Then the Great Recession hit, and everything went to Hell. The bank believed I couldn't make my mortgage payments and foreclosed on my family's house, a rival company sued my employers, so they had to lower my salary to pay for costs. By the time I burned through three-quarters of my life savings, Lisa decided to move herself and our cubs back to the Midwest to be with her parents. She easily got full custody after I revealed to the courts that my permanent residence was in a crappy hotel near Oasis' city limits. Not the best place to raise cubs in.

The weeks afterward became months. I found myself lost. I drowned myself in restless dreams, loveless hookups and bottles of booze that drained away the rest of whatever meager dollars I had left in my account. My boss eventually fired me due to poor attendance. The hotel even went and kicked me straight to the curb when I couldn't pay for another night, leaving me with absolutely nothing.

A year passed, as did everyone and everything else around me. While the economy slowly healed itself and furs started to grow bolder again with their money, I went from a 210-lb male raccoon to a one-hundred-thirty-five-pound male raccoon. As often as the homeless shelters were filled to the brim, there existed other means for me to survive. I panhandled whenever the cops weren't around, begging tourists or passerby with a Styrofoam cup in one paw and a dirty cardboard sign in the other, hoping to get enough money for some new shoes. Or, hopefully, a decent meal from one of the many fast-food joints. It was difficult enough to beg a sympathetic fur or two without getting spit on or beat up, but if a restaurant owner so much as guessed I wasn't just a hipster customer with my ragged appearance and choice of clothing, they'd refuse to sell me anything on their menus.

I could never go to Lisa or any of my so-called 'friends' at my former job for help. They all fucking turned me away when things got tough, abandoning me to save their own hides. Better me than them, am I right?

When the desert temperatures got too hot to panhandle or too dangerous to sleep under a bridge or in an alleyway, I eventually went into the sewers to find safe haven. There, I met the Tunnel Furs of Oasis.

See, I grew up thinking the sin city of Nevada operated solely as a town of casinos, bars and nightlife entertainment in the middle of a heartless desert. I was wrong. An entire underworld lied beneath Oasis' casino strip, a concrete labyrinth of huge flood tunnels, of pipes, stone, trash and refuse that always came from the winter floods. Deep under the neon city of sin and luxury existed another city. We were a city built from old camping tents, tossed clothes, garbage and the like, with its population consisting of heroin addicts, full-time gamblers, potheads, crack dealers, pickpockets, a few urban explorers and one notable instance of an ex-college student denied his hefty trust fund. Not a surprise, considering the hapless tourists damned in Oasis sometimes found themselves on the street following the best night of their lives.

Me? I was just yet another poor soul tossed away by society when the going got tough.

Well, fuck my previous society! What did it ever do for me?

The Tunnel Furs largely consisted of loners or an occasional 'commune'. My first commune I joined about two years after I lost my job. They were all meth and marijuana addicts sharing bongs and whatever crap street junkies used to get themselves desperately lost in their own demented imaginations.

The next commune I stayed with were a shoplifting ring who targeted retailers near and around the strip in order to fuel their needs. Either it was their need to steal or their need to get wasted on the best liquor they could score topside. I decided to stop being with them when one of them ended up having a cop follow him down there.

For another month, I lounged about the flood tunnels solo, occasionally going topside to find dropped change or to buy a deli sandwich when I could, before I finally found another commune within the underworld. Or rather, they happened to find me by accident, after one of them--a handsome, kind yet experienced coyote dressed in Hawaiian shirt and torn jeans--tripped on my sleeping bag while I was sleeping inside it.

His name was Jonas. He attended Oasis University before dropping out when his homophobic parents stopped supporting him. A serious battle with crippling depression, addiction to cocaine and stints with the law ended with him selling his body to horny businessmen before finally going clean. In the years since, the now-thirty-five-year-old coyote operated a semi-homeless commune that preferred living off the grid.

I didn't care that one of the commune's members asked if I was a shapeshifting alien from some exoplanet called 'Epsilon V', or that another religiously murmured the entirety of a Carl Sagan book while staring directly at me in the tunnel. All I cared about initially was that Jonas offered me an entire McLarnold's Happiness Meal after casually mentioning I hadn't eaten something in two days. As I devoured my burger and ignored both the disgusted customers nearby and Jonas' smile as he watched me eat, I remembered thinking it was raining, except the skies were clear and it hadn't showered in weeks. Then I realized I was crying genuine tears of joy and the mysterious coyote pulled me into a hug.

Ever since then, I stayed with the group. I got to know each of them and followed them like a loyal puppy while contributing whenever I could. They called themselves the 'Gutterpunk Gang', a group of conspiracy theorists and self-proclaimed hackers claiming to be an offshoot of The A$$holes (those literal a-holes who liked to troll big companies), but wanted to lay low from the government or whoever was after them.

Me? I only stayed with them for two reasons: one, they somehow always had cash on them--I surmised that they skimmed ATMs or something. Two, I needed to find a way to seriously thank Jonas for saving my life. Somehow, someday.

Long ago, my Dad once said something along the lines of this: Hope can be a brandished shield in the cruel world, but the loss of hope is akin to a knife in the heart.

The same could especially for those living in Oasis' underworld.