East Injection: Get Your Dose Of The Right

Shall We Dance? Atlantic City Is The Las Vegas On The Beach

Jamie Moran, enjoying a golden streak on the Right Coast’s City of Sin. Atlantic City, New Jersey. Photo: Trevor Moran

Imagine waking up in Las Vegas. You painted the town red. You feared. You loathed. Cloudy memories from the night before collect in your mind, staining your morals and finances. Your body aches, dehydrated. You’re miles away from feeling good and even farther from the cool, healing ocean.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a place where psychosis meets the sea. Where the nightlife sucks you in and the tube spits you out. Where dice dance on tables, ignorant to your savings account. Where you dance at nightclubs, ignorant to your lack of rhythm. And where strippers dance on poles, ignorant that you’ve already lost all your money at the tables. A place where the devil crammed everything we love about Vegas into one package and left it on the New Jersey shoreline.

That place is Atlantic City. Yes, when you wake your wallet is still wounded and your head still pounds. But brace your delicate eyes and rip the shades open — tubes! Allow the ocean to wash away your sorrows. Enter and be born anew. Maybe someday California will fall into the ocean, transforming Las Vegas into a pumping beachbreak with desert canyons funneling swell into The Strip. But until then, A.C. is the place to be. Sin, rinse, repeat. —Brendan Buckley