I get asked this all the time.

What was it like growing up in Las Vegas?

I never know what to say.
What are they really wanting to know?

Does anyone ask, gee what was it like growing up in Calgary Alberta?
What was it like growing up in a Seattle suburb?

No.

So what do they want to know?
What do you want to know?

Well, let me try and think back on what sticks out in my head.

It is really hot. I don’t mean warm. I mean burn your flesh until it peels off the bone hot. No one, except for stupid people and tourists, drive with the windows down because you can’t escape the heat unless you have a constant flow of cool air beating on you.

The grocery store near my house had these huge fans that would blow cold air on you when you walked in. Not a gentle breeze either, it was a roaring hurricane of cool air. It rocked, I loved it. I use to walk back and forth because it was the best way to cool off besides my friends’ neighbors pool.

I lived at 1612 Oakwood off of Civic Center Dr. on the North Side. I had friends who lived 3 blocks up on Renada Circle and almost everyone I knew lived on that circle. We would walk down the middle of the street with about 10 of us in our flip flops, bathings suits and shorts looking for cars outside of the houses with pools. Everybody knew eachother so if there was a car we would knock on the door and basically invite ourselves over. Man, we were jerks when I think about it but a pool was almost more of a necessity than a luxury as I remember it.

My parents bought our house when I was five and I lived there until my Dad got a job transfer to Washington when I was 16. Before we bought the house we lived in apartments but the only place I remember besides the house is a trailer we lived in. The house was cool with a bedroom all of my own, a front room and a huge family room in the back. I remember thinking we were rich because we had a living room AND a front room. That was very cool to me. We also had a fenced backyard with nothing but dirt and a trampoline.

The trampoline became the place that my brothers and sisters and I spent a lot of our time. We played these imaginary games all the time and I sure wish I could remember what they were because we had so much fun. A couple times we would put on my dad’s big t-shirts and tuck them into my brother’s tighty-whiteys and pretend to be sumo wrestlers. We also slept on the trampoline a lot, especially in the summer. It was normal for us to hear sirens from ambulances, fire trucks and a lot of cop cars but it also wasn’t unusual for us to hear gun shots and sometimes we’d hear a lot of gun shots going off. It was weird but it was also kind of normal.

It’s hard to describe.

It was normal but it wasn’t okay. We knew that we didn’t want to get involved with that stuff so we noticed what was going on around us but we didn’t really think about it a lot. We just moved on to other things because we weren’t interested in getting involved and it was always the kids that were fascinated by it that either got shot or ended up shooting someone.

For fun we would walk through the field to the 7-11 and get slurpies. Half of my weight as a kid was cherry slurpie. Saturdays we got donuts in a pink box from the donut shop right next to the 7-11. I still remember what the place smelled like and the chairs they had, little booths (sort of) with attached chairs that hurt to sit in.

While we walked through the field we would find all sorts of stuff. You could find knives, empty beer cans, dead animals from the latest dog or cock fight and a lot of times we would find dried up lizards. They would climb up on the rocks to sun themselves and end up frying. We would pick them up and they would stay stiff and we’d throw them in the air and watch them break on the rocks. I know, I was morbid as a kid.

My house was a hop skip and a jump from Donna Street which was the worst part of the North side for years. My parents were expecting to buy the house, fix it up and flip it but before they could get the money to do that we were right in the middle of the ghetto and we stayed there until I was 16. (You can look Donna Street Las Vegas into google if you want to verify my story, cynical skeptic.)

It was very common to see a huge black man riding a little girls pink bike with tassels on the handles and a basket in the front. He wouldn’t be using his arms because they were always carrying a bike under each arm. They had obviously been stolen and the worst is when you realized that one of those bikes was yours. I was not the type to take on a huge black man with a bike under each arm. I would just keep walking.

My mom was one of those rare stay at home moms (almost every mom was single and working several jobs) so all the neighborhood kids hung out at my house when we were younger. They wouldn’t even be coming over to play with any of us, they would just walk in and go right to the trampoline or the toys or the fridge. As we got older and realized that black kids didn’t play with white kids and white girls couldn’t have crushes on black guys we didn’t hang out as much. Some of my childhood friends had gotten into the neighborhood gangs.

This was back in the day of the Bloodz and the Cripz and I remember being told that we couldn’t wear red or blue on the first day of school and I think I stuck to that rule until I moved away. It may sound stupid but seeing some kid get jumped into a gang because he wore the colors wasn’t stupid. Another gang that got going was the Chucos, a Mexican gang and several of my friends got into that and I remember my mom heckling these guys. She would rag on them for not going to school and stuff. She was never afraid of anyone, especially if she had fed them in her home for years. She would tell them, “If you’re looking for a male role model why not join the boys club?” They would blow her off and when she asked what the name of their gang was called she laughed. In their faces! “Well Chucos sounds a lot like chicken.” This is when the bawking like a chicken started. Like I said, no fear.

So if you have specific questions about what it was like growing up in Vegas, go ahead. I’ll answer them but I don’t have exotic stories of running into celebrities or making big money on the slots. When there are slot machines in every 7-11 and grocery store they lose their appeal before they ever become appealing.