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and one shaft of sunlight is pushing its way down from the sky, through a crack between two buildings, across a street full of pickup trucks and Ford Tauruses, through a plate-glass window, and falling heavily upon the table, upon my breakfast. I'm riding on a little less than two hours' sleep. I have seen the sun now and again on this trip. Three days that seem composed only of wedges of time, vignettes played alternately by people on the make or on vacation. Three hours at a crap table here, five hours of blackjack there, a driving range, a stack of pancakes, maybe a bus ride, thirty drinks in those tiny little casino glasses, a six-hour poker tournament, then a sprinkle of rain, a cigar by a river I can't name, and a miraculous hamburger at 4:00 a.m. You've been there. I am in Nevada, leading a life in which the sun is a mere footnote to the mission. Go away, sun, you fucking housefly. I'm doing some livin' here.

But I am utterly grateful just now. Here I sit, facing what seems to be the finest breakfast I have ever seen, brought to me on an outsize skillet by a beautiful dark-haired waitress. It's like that. These little miracles of the getaway Vegas vacation. Only thing is: I am not in Vegas at all.

I'm in Reno. And I am so fucking happy about it.

I want to say this clearly: You cannot deconstruct Reno. It's ruddy and rock hard, self-evident and openhearted. Reno is of a whole. It is a city, not an event. It is clean, safe, small, open, easy to get around in, cheap, seedy in the right ways, elegant in its own small measures. The airport? Intensely easy. Crowds? None that you can't handle. Hotels? None over a hundred dollars. There are mountains -- real ones -- lush, snowcapped, visually magnetic, utterly proximate. In Vegas, the mountains are dead hills in the distance. You know where you are when you're in Reno. You are in the new Vegas.

Every time I'm in Las Vegas, things seem a bit more scaly and reptilian to me. You cannot escape the smell of corporate BO that pervades the Strip. No matter how much they fuck around with color schemes, or depth of carpet nap, or the quality of the shirts and vests worn by the dealers, Vegas casinos are really just each slightly different versions of the same monster.

Everything's all shined up, so that the whole world looks like it's been wiped down with a paper towel and a bottle of Armor All. And most of it is imported. The coffee. The food. The talent. There is nothing local in Vegas, not even off the Strip. What you do have are crowds. And maybe that's the heart of a Vegas vacation for people who are twenty-three, who have never been off the leash or out of suburban Pittsburgh for a weekend before. But I don't like to go to a huge party where I always feel like something better is going on just around the corner but I'm not invited. That, friends, is the heart of the matter in Las Vegas. You may be there, but you're rarely there enough.

So I go to Reno, the deeper adventure, the smaller city, the real deal.

In Reno, you go places. These things draw you. You rent a car and go skiing. You take a drive down to the lake. Or you do what a guy like me wants to do in Vegas but cannot. You walk. Seriously. You can walk from one end of the city to the other, pass six decent casinos, and end up in a great dive like Louis' Basque Corner, eating mussels over rice with a glass of Picon punch while sitting at a huge table next to the family of a local cop.

The streets are wide. You're out there in the morning, people are walking to work. Lawyers, doctors, store owners. There are antique stores tucked in next to casinos. It takes a while to get used to the fact that in coming here you haven't fallen off the map. But no one eyeballs you, dealers are genuinely grateful when you step up, and at night, the city pretty much disappears behind the lights.

Each day, I took that walk three times, gambling a little at each casino as I went, from one end of the old city to the other, taking breaks along the way at the bars and cabarets that line the main drag. The tables are not staked at insane levels, so you don't have to do a bleed-out to survive while you're gambling. Most tables in Vegas are looking for twenty-five-dollar minimum bets these days, whereas I was happy as a lark playing two-dollar craps, sipping free screwdrivers all morning at the Eldorado. Hardly bled at all really, made time chatting up two female golf pros, and stepped out on the street at noon up $400. The crowd was picking up; I was hungry.

In Reno, you find restaurants by asking, not by Googling. Dealers will tell you where to go for the "Awful Awful," a local legend, served only in the dark and seedy diner at the rear of a slot-machine palace called the Nugget. What can you really say about a hamburger, except that it qualifies? Either it's fantastic or it's forgettable. This "Awful Awful"? Fantastic, cheap, and it comes without fanfare. I ate mine almost sixteen hours later, after a big-time run at the small-time craps table, sitting next to a bus driver who told me to try the pie, too. I did not, because it was late and I needed to get back to my hotel to get my two hours of shut-eye. Let me tell you something: I was drunk enough that I took a bus. What the hell. A public bus. The driver was listening to Wyclef Jean on his boom box. Just me and him.

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Let's be clear. It doesn't replace Vegas. It's a little place, in scale and ambition. You go to Reno if you like cities, if you're curious about the desert, if you want smart, cool restaurants that aren't rabbit-caged in the corner of a casino somewhere. You go because it's incredibly affordable. And you go because there's no bullshit at the tables.

Remember that night before the breakfast? The one where the sunlight pushes down from above? I am sitting in the poker room at Harrah's Reno, playing in a little three-table poker tournament, waiting out a trio of guys who've come here for a bowling tournament. Like everyone else in America, this whole room, which is no more than a pen, really, everyone here seems to think that he has locked in on the secret of Hold 'Em, which is leading them to talk a lot. Me? I don't have any secrets. The blackjack table strips you of that illusion. I'm just hanging around, taking a visual inventory of the people around me.

And that is half of what I take a gambling trip for. In Vegas, I always seem to get set up next to some jackass who thinks he is a high roller. A guy with a $3,000 watch and a Tommy Bahama shirt. He finds a way to tell you how he made his money, as a means of telling you that he can afford to gamble like an a-hole, as a means of telling you that he is different from everyone else here, who are basically foolhardy and out of touch. But this is Reno, and no one here has anything to prove. The rest of the table is made up of locals and ne'er-do-wells, a dealer from the Peppermill, an itinerant masseur/healer just in from Monterey, an old woman whose dentures keep slipping, two Air Force retirees who eyeball each other so much that I am sure they are cheating, a guy who just won a $1,900 parley on four baseball games, me, and the bowlers. They are holding forth, telling us about the lanes set up at the convention center for this tournament.

"Very tricky lanes," one of them says.

Another nods his head and bets. "Very tough. Hardest in the country."

The third bowler pushes all in with sevens. Everyone folds before the masseur calls him with J's. "They are very fast, tough to stay up to your average," the bowler says as he stands. When the jacks hold, he shrugs his massive shoulders. He's a fireman by trade. "I gotta get a haircut anyway," he says, and he walks away.

Me? I leave home for just this kind of thing. Ten people -- now nine -- thrown together from all corners. No attitude. Some people are drinking, some aren't. They want to win, but they don't have everything sunk in the expectation that comes from dropping $600 a night on a suite with a view of some giant sneeze of a golf course.

The dealer used to work in Vegas, but she left. "You can't ski there," she says. "I live here for the skiing."

The healer says he comes here for it. "Waterskiing," he says.

"Snow," the dealer responds. The others ski, too -- snow, water, or both -- except for the woman with the teeth.

I do neither. "I just came here because I'm sick of Vegas," I say.

Everyone nods. The old woman speaks up. "The whole world is sick of Vegas," she says.

"Even Vegas is sick of Vegas," says the dealer. It was getting late.

There are people who want to make Reno a destination again. But the nice part is that when you're there, you are off the grid. I flew in on a propeller plane, which added to my sense that I was headed to a sort of backwater. There aren't cameras everywhere like in Vegas, and even the pit bosses don't seem to track you as hard. Maybe they're just grateful for the action. In Vegas, it may feel like you can be seen, that you might be one of the beautiful people, but in Reno, it feels like you can disappear for a while. It brings to mind any number of forgotten American cities where the reputation does not fit what you find. In Reno, you go for the sin and discover the food. Or for the mountains and discover the lake. Or for the seedy whorehouses that dot the perimeter of the city, only to find the solace of a classy, well-run cardroom like the one at the Peppermill. You're a long way from anywhere, and yet you can still find an upscale restaurant, a tony casino, and a well-stocked bar, and when you do, there is no worry that you aren't in the newest, or the hippest, or the most happening joint. You never crane your neck to see where you should have gone, if only someone had told you, if only you had known. Instead, you're leaning forward, looking down alleys, asking locals, making discoveries.

One afternoon in Reno, I watched a kayak race. I was standing on a bridge, having just gotten dusted out of $500 playing blackjack at the Siena casino, thinking what I always think at moments like that: What a dumbass. Me, I mean. Regret? That part's the same in either place.

I was leaning hard on the railing, just watching these two guys beat their paddles into the water. There was a woman in a white tube top standing on the side of the river watching, too. She yelled to one of the guys in the kayak: "Go, Sandy!" This was late afternoon, maybe early evening. On the road behind me, there were people driving home from their jobs. A jogger went by.

"They aren't supposed to be on the river," she said, "but they're practicing."

I nodded. All I could think about was my lousy $500. She looked at me. "Sandy's really good," she said.

It occurred to me then that I didn't know what I wanted to do next. "Do you know where I can get a good breakfast?" I said.

She looked at me then, shielding her eyes from the sun. "You serious?" she said.

I told her I was. She covered her eyes some more and pointed. "Do you see that road there?" she said. It was hard to pick up in the glare, but I said yes. "You just turn that corner, and you'll come to a place called Peg's Glorified Ham & Eggs. That's the best breakfast I know of." She seemed to think about it. "Best in the world, I would say."

I hmpped. She looked me up and down again. "You'll have to wait till the morning, though," she said. "It's closed. Do you know what time it is?"

She felt sorry for me, I could see. She must have thought I was lost, or drunk, or busted. Truth is, I was none of those things. I knew right where I was: I was more hungover than drunk, and I still had some shekels. I just couldn't see with all the sun. What she didn't know was that I was getting my second wind, even then. So I stared right into the sun, at the spot she'd indicated. I burned it into my memory.

This story is part of our second annual register of emerging ideas, trends, discoveries, products, people, and obscene gestures you should know about before everyone else does.

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