![]() It was Freddy Diamonds, a longtime Vegas resident I had met at a steakhouse the night before. Just as I was about to hail a car to the Rusty Spur, my phone rang. But I had seen all I needed to see of this barren, empty bar, so I heeded her advice. She didn’t do a great job of selling it all she really said about it was that there was a big, silver statue of a bull outside. The one place I should really check out, she said, was the Rusty Spur. She rattled off about a dozen spots, with names ranging from fairly normal (“The Mint Tavern”) to absurd (“Moondoggie’s”), and I scribbled them down frantically. Hoping to salvage something from my visit, I turned to the bartender, a tattooed woman in her mid-30s wearing a cutoff T-shirt, and asked her if she knew of any other dives I should see while I was in town. The bar he had elected to take me to was one he was forbidden from entering. I learned that Mike-Mike was 86’d from Dive Bar, and had been for some time. ![]() The two men we’d been sitting with were discussing him with the bartender. When I got back to the bar, Mike-Mike was gone. Though I can’t say it with certainty, I’m fairly confident they were doing cocaine. As I stood before the urinal, I heard two men talking in the stall next to me. That nervous urge to pee came over me again, so I got up to go to the bathroom. ![]() I couldn’t quite tell if Mike-Mike was kidding. “What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna start a riot. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Mike-Mike said. I took a stool at the bar by two men sitting alone, and Mike-Mike sat down next to me. “Happy birthday, motherfucker!” Lolly shouted, barreling toward a man in the back of the room. Not counting myself, Mike-Mike, Lolly, and the bartender, there were five people inside. Kitschy bric-a-brac lined the walls and filled the shelves. Above a dark glass facade, in big block letters, hung the words “DIVE BAR.” We came to a stop in a strip mall parking lot near a cluster of Harley Davidsons. I took a deep breath, pulled open its steel front door, and walked inside. So it was that on a bright, cloudless May afternoon, I found myself squinting at the dingy exterior of the Double Down Saloon. It was there, I imagined, that I might discover the city beneath the city. I figured that when they aren’t waiting tables, dealing cards, impersonating dead celebrities, and otherwise sustaining the maximalist fantasyland we believe Las Vegas to be, these locals could be found in the city’s dive bars: places away from all the hubbub where they can be themselves. But propping up that unreality is an ecosystem of full-time residents keeping the hyper-indulgent dream of Las Vegas alive. Every year, millions of tourists-thirty-two million, to be exact-fly in from all over the world to party and gamble with other tourists, all of them seeking a reprieve from the mundanity of everyday life. Sin City is sold as a hedonistic escape somewhere you go to be someone you’re not. But beyond that, I wanted to see a side of the city you won’t find in a travel brochure. I had lobbied for this assignment, in part, because nothing brings me more joy than crushing Miller Lites in a complete and utter shithole.
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