As I come to the end of my 7 month experiment as a quasi-resident of this oasis in the desert I can’t help but try to create a neat ‘what have we learned’ montage in my mind, like the final credits of an episode of No Reservations. This is the second of three random observations about the Las Vegas we don’t see on a weekend bender on the Strip. Click here for Part One  and Part Two.

The Las Vegas Strip is welcoming of anyone and everyone. No matter your background, economic situation or interests there is something on the Strip for you. The Harley Davidson Café sits just down the road from M&M World and across the road from Louis Vuitton and Marquee.  Every casino has a high roller room in which it will cost you $100 to pull the slot machine lever just once as well as machines where each pull can cost as little as a penny. It is this open arms approach that makes me call it the Most American city in America.

But there is one class of people consistently ignored if not downright discriminated against up and down the length of the Strip; the long-term, work-at-home resident.

If you want to be live on the Strip and be a productive member of society but have no office in which to complete your work, the Strip wants nothing to do with you.

Of course, that entire population might be limited to me alone, so what do the casinos care?

It is for this reason that as the sun set on football season and I spent less time placing bets and more time writing about bets already won or lost that I started spending more and more time away from the Strip in search of somewhere I could work that wasn’t the same room in my small condo where I had spent countless hours since September.

And so I founded what I refer to as the ‘Maryland Avenue Office’. You will recognize it by the big ‘Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf’ sign on its wall.

In addition to the long term residents that ring the city in endless cookie cutter suburbs and the down on their luck people living in the shabby apartments near the Strip there is another resident of Las Vegas, often forgotten about by visitors to this city. College kids.

UNLV isn’t some remote campus on the hill far removed from the temptations of the Strip, it is a very short drive East. With a campus comes cheap restaurants, fast food joints and coffee shops. Places designed for those with little money and lots of time. In short, perfect places for someone to spend hours on their computer. And so because of that I have spent more time over the last couple months working just across from the campus than in casinos. And the biggest takeaway for me has been the utter normalcy of it all.  A college coffee shop is a college coffee shop. Even if you can see the Wynn in the distance.

With all of this time spent around students, I have tried to take my college experiences (at least the ones I can remember all these years later) and overlay them on to this setting, yet I fail miserably. Where I ended up at a tiny bar each Saturday night that blasted David Alan Coe and Hank Williams while students drank cheap light beer, do these kids end up in the clubs of the Strip?

At FSU, football Saturdays were the highlights of the social calendar, events that the remainder of the year rotated around. Here the stadium sits miles from campus and at the game I attended, UNLV students were out-numbered probably 10-1 by the visitors (Washington State). What sense of community exists among UNLV students? How do eighteen and nineteen year-olds remain productive living so close to America’s playground?

It is the greatest of contradictions to me; the American tradition of time spent on a college campus, a time to transition from child to adult, a time for young people to mature, figure out what life they want to pursue and get those mistakes out of their system before becoming serious – all taking place right next to where adults come to behave like children again.

In the last month as the weather has started to warm (no, seriously it was chilly here for the majority of December and January), my mind has shifted into its annual spring fever mode.

On weekends filled with warm weather and the bright desert sun, I feel guilty not being outside, especially since my entire fall was spent in sportsbooks watching football. This spring fever has led to a few extra hours at the pool in my complex but that gets old rather quickly for me; there are only so many magazines to read.

One recent Sunday, as spring training kicked off a few hours to the south, I wondered if any major league teams would be coming to Vegas for an exhibition game. Typing a search into Google, I was reminded that UNLV’s baseball stadium sits less than two miles to the east of my condo.

Inside of 30 minutes after typing that search on my computer, I sat in the stands of the small UNLV baseball stadium. On one side sat UNLV fans and students, cheering on the players by calling them by first names. Players they have watched for years and seen in class. Fans greeted each other in the stands, and caught up in the opening weekend of the season. It was a scene being replicated in small college towns all across the country.

For those few hours as I spit sunflower seeds, the Rebels and Tennessee Volunteers played into extra innings, palm trees rustled in the light breeze and the sun slowly disappeared behind the Spring mountains it was easy to ignore the tops of the monstrous casinos peeking out above the stands and think of this as a college town in the middle of the desert.  I could have been back in Tallahassee watching the Noles. I was no longer in VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS.

After months in Las Vegas it was nice to find a small sense of real community near the Strip. It was nice to be reminded that amidst the sun-burned drunks stumbling from Margaritaville to Caesar’s Palace there are still some people who make a life here.  It can be done. You don’t have to spend every moment in Vegas like it is day three of a weekend bender. It is that serene scene at Earl E. Wilson stadium that I will take with me when I leave town on Saturday and return to my regularly scheduled life as an adult back in Denver.

Even if the planes buzzing the field on final descent to McCarran were a regular reminder that the machinery of Vegas will never stop producing dreams that can’t ever truly be filled.

As I come to the end of my 7 month experiment as a quasi-resident of this oasis in the desert I can’t help but try to create a neat ‘what have we learned’ montage in my mind, like the final credits of an episode of No Reservations. This is the second of three random observations about the Las Vegas we don’t see on a weekend bender on the Strip. Click here for Part One.

In 2010, the U.S. spent $13 billion to conduct a census of Americans. $13 billion! With the national budget a point of consternation these days, here is a subtle suggestion to save roughly $12.95 billion. Forget the door to door census and instead send a fraction of those census takers to Las Vegas for a year. Plant them on various corners of the Strip, at the airport and the walkways between the major casinos and let them count and interview those that pass by. There is no greater cross representation of America than visitors to Las Vegas.  People of every race, income, education, age and perspective ends up in Las Vegas at some point.

After twelve months talking to visitors and locals alike, I think one could get a much better view of the U.S. than you could ever get going door to door because nothing encapsulates America as well as Las Vegas.

I didn’t come to Las Vegas to gain an understanding of the city; to expose the vast pipework that drives this city unseen. I am not a sociologist. But one would need to be blind or refuse to leave the casino floor to not confront the conflicts inherent in America’s playground.

Is there anywhere where vision and reality differ further than Las Vegas? Casino ads show glamorous models having a great time winning money. Casinos in reality are populated primarily by older, lower income folks, desperately trying to short cut their way to the American Dream. Clubs advertise rich, young kids living the life straight out of Entourage but mostly are filled with young people squeezed into clothes a size too small trying to live the life that E! tells them to.

It isn’t a coincidence that Las Vegas is located in a desert. We all need a blank canvas on which to paint our own dreams.

(NOTE: When I first wrote the above line a few months ago I thought it was Nobel-worthy poetry. I may have been drinking at the time. Now I think it sounds like a particularly bad Successories poster. However, I am leaving it here, so just know that no matter what you think of it, I totally agree with you. )

Yet, of all of those people that visit Las Vegas I wonder how many people make it more than half a mile off the Strip? While the world has a vision of Las Vegas based on one stretch of one road, an entire population lives in and around that road. Someone has to keep those hotel rooms clean and deal those cards that make those vacations so memorable.

There isn’t much other industry propping up Las Vegas. In 2011, 32% of all those employed in Clark county worked in Leisure and Hospitality. The 2 largest employers in the county are the county government and school district; followed by three casinos. The casinos are the foundation, first and second floor of the economy here.

But it is a Faustian bargain: to keep the visitors happy and coming, it is necessary to keep out of view the dirty underbelly necessary to run it all.  The ideal that brings them from Little Rock, Boston and Tacoma with visions of models hanging on each arm and a pile of chips stacked in front of them doesn’t have space for the reality of the city itself.

There is no room in the dream for the homeless or migrant workers – faces tanned to the point of appearing dirty – playing slots behind the checkout counters at the grocery store, where the bottles of liquor are locked up and beer and wine are always on sale.

There is no room for the end of a shift housekeepers waiting to be picked up outside the back of the massive casinos at 5pm for the commute home.

The endless sprawling suburbs stretching across the valley, seemingly built by a computer generated copy-paste functions, that saw some of the heaviest foreclosures in the country during the recession remain far enough removed from the Strip that visitors only see them on take-off from McCarran.

The vast ethnic neighborhoods where rundown shopping centers and burnt out neon lights are carefully kept tucked out of sight and out of mind.

This isn’t necessarily different from most other American cities. Any Chamber of Commerce worth its weight in pennies does its best to make sure that the face of the city matches the brochures. It is the cities that have broken this unspoken promise that have faced the biggest problems. In cities like Detroit and Cleveland the wall was shattered that separated the myth form the reality and that was the beginning of the end.

But no city has more riding on maintaining the dream without any messy reality creeping in than Las Vegas. When you sell the world a dream, there can’t be any dark shadows lurking in the corners.

As I come to the end of my 7 month experiment as a quasi-resident of this oasis in the desert I can’t help but try to create a neat ‘what have we learned’ montage in my mind, like the final credits of an episode of No Reservations. This is the first of three random observations about the Las Vegas we don’t see on a weekend bender on the Strip.

I was never truly a resident here. I knew a clock was ticking over my head at every moment like an episode of 24. I lived in a condo just off the Strip and the first thing you learn is that locals do not live near the Strip. Locals avoid the Strip like people that live in Orlando avoid Disney World; it’s a place saved for when visitors come from out of town.

Instead of meeting true locals and seeing what it is like to be a resident of America’s playground, I spent my time in a strange sort of purgatory. Surrounded by vacationers here for their VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS weekend but apart from them as well, someone not heading to McCarran on Monday morning; someone that cares what the weather forecast calls for next week.

Whether this universe of one gave me an opportunity to see the real Vegas or left me blind to the realities of both visitors and locals is probably up for debate. I can’t claim to see the city through the eyes of a long timer but I also can never revert to the innocent eyes of a weekend visitor awed by the flashing, beeping machines and the possibilities of a weekend in a casino. The curtain has been pulled and I have seen the wizard, even if I never worked for him.

When I used to visit for weekends, I couldn’t get enough of the casino lifestyle. I remember pangs of guilt when exhaustion would send me to bed with money remaining in my bankroll. I felt I needed to make the most of every second here, that I should only stop when I ran out of money or time.

During this stay, I made a point of getting out and walking portions of the Strip nearly every weekend, visiting casinos and trying restaurants – I am the type of person who wants to try everything – yet a strange thing happened over the last few months. Where I once ran at a full sprint into an embrace of the false glamour of the modern luxury casinos, I now seek something different. Like a sailor that has been at sea too long craving an orange, I most want what is not available. I crave authenticity.

It started with research for my last SBNation article. I spent weeks reading about the old Vegas. The original Vegas that can now only be seen in grainy pictures and old movies. It stirred in me a desire to see that world. When I spent New Year’s Day in a small casino off the strip with a bookmaking legend that came to town the same year I was born, my interest in the latest and newest casinos was replaced with a desire to see the original places. The ones that held some connection to a past when this was still a western town.

It is no coincidence that since writing that article I have gravitated to the downtown area. An area full of old casinos and streets that remind me in some small ways of Cheyenne, Wyoming with their connection to the past. Downtown isn’t flashy or hip but it is true to what it was; outside of the Fremont Street Experience which is even more grotesque in its pandering to visitors than the Strip given its juxtaposition to the real.

Downtown has retained its character to some extent. It isn’t putting on fake airs, holding up a velvet rope that offers false exclusivity like the clubs in every Strip casino. It says take us for what we are – a small town in the middle of the western desert where gambling remains legal. Even beyond the old casinos, downtown retains character and community, aspects in no way relevant to the Strip itself. There are restaurants, non-chain coffee shops and bars that could pop up in any city. Places where there is such thing as being a regular.

Last week I went to the Mob Museum; a fascinating place devoted to exploring America’s long-held and conflicting romanticism of organized crime. We may hate law-breakers and murderers but if they preach family and provide us our alcohol, drugs or women they at some level become heroes.  Given the mob’s role in creating the Las Vegas we see today, it is fitting the Mob Museum is located here, even if many of the exhibits focus on the mobs of New York and Chicago. To its credit though, the museum does house specific exhibits that look at how Las Vegas grew from a tiny western outpost (founded because of the presence of natural springs – who knew!) into whatever it is today. It doesn’t shy away from the intermingling of the legends of Vegas and organized crime; it presents it as statement rather than hyperbole. It takes an ‘It was what it was approach’ to the founding of Sin City. There is no false pretense or aggrandizing. It remains authentic to the truth.

No wonder the Museum is located in an old courthouse downtown far from the delusions of the Strip.