It’s the middle of the night, and the only people up are vampires, short-order cooks at the Waffle House and Ron Popeil.

At least that’s the conventional wisdom here in the East Valley. If New York is “the city that never sleeps,” we're more like ‘‘the place that hits the sack sometime between ‘Conan’ and ‘Carson’ and snores freely.”
Is there really life out there between dusk and dawn?

I was dispatched by Get Out on a recent Friday afternoon to capture the pulse of the E.V. from sundown to sunup.

I came back — yawning, near-hallucinating and sporting a monster Chevron tab — with a chronicle of love, sin, oddballs, makeshift entertainment and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

6:05 p.m. - ‘A’ Mountain, Tempe

Already, the project is taking unexpected turns. Originally hoping to catch the sunset from South Mountain, I leave the office too late to make it in the hectic rush-hour traffic.

So I come here, to the tiny mountain that butts up against Sun Devil Stadium — a vantage point from which the East Valley can be seen slowly coming to life. Amber lights are flickering on Mill Avenue.

I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since college. But I take a deep breath and dart down the mountain path, off to my first nightly stop.

6:42 p.m. - Salty Señorita, Scottsdale

Happy hour at the Salty Señorita is always packed, with people spilling out of the restaurant and onto the front patio. Margaritas are flowing like water, as everyone’s starting early on a night of partying.

Bartender Eric Neely, a skate-punk spit-take on actor Christian Bale, is schmoozing with patrons and juggling orders. His shift goes to 2 a.m. I ask what it’s like to stay up all night:

“I’m the wrong guy to ask,” he says.

What do you do when you get off work?

“Take painkillers and watch TV.”

When was the last time you stayed up?

“Last night. Up ’til 10 a.m.”

And what did you do?

He laughs. “Took painkillers and watched TV.”

8:10 p.m. - Good Life RV Resort, Mesa

Indie girls in Tucson and Tempe have brought roller derby back into vogue, but any hope of resuscitating bingo for the hipster class dies with one step into Good Life's assembly hall, where mostly gray-haired RVers sit at cafeteria tables, hovering over cards. It’s dead quiet, save for the sound of oversize ink markers hitting paper and a bingo caller with a voice that's a cross between the “Antiques Roadshow” announcer and a square-dance emcee.

A kindly woman, not lifting her gaze from the table, tells me I’ve arrived too late to purchase a card of my own — you have to show up before 7 to get one. “But you should come back,” she says. “They have great pots. For $2, you can get $500.”

As I’m leaving, someone calls out, “We have a bingo over here.”

A rumble of grumbles stirs across the room.

9:05 p.m. - Stratum Laser Tag, Mesa

He won’t give his name. He’ll say he’s 18. Homeless. A baby-faced wannabe punk thug who smells like nicotine, he tips his “A Clockwork Orange” bowler hat forward and tugs at the ripped collar of his Lars Fredrickson shirt, revealing a tattoo on his hairless chest: Bastard.
“That,” he says, “is as close as I get.”

A friend and co-worker from a Little Cesar’s Pizza in Chandler — “We flip pizzas,” a straight-laced Brent Blair says — has invited his buddy (whom he calls J.D.) to experience laser tag at Stratum.

It’s the kind of place that reeks of adult-manufactured “cool”: Imagine Chuck E. Cheese’s for teens, with comic-book art painted on the lobby walls and a laser tag room that’s covered in Day-Glo aliens. Blair has been here 20 times, he figures.

“I’m just looking for something to do,” J.D. says, and though he doesn’t say it out loud, it’s obvious he’s grateful Blair has invited him along, no matter how unhip laser tag may be. “It’s either this or I’d be out drinking.”

10:08 p.m. - Theater 168, Scottsdale

In the strip mall parking lot, the sounds of hoochie dance club thump and bad karaoke from competing bars bleed together. Between them is Theater 168, where the Jester’z improvisational comedy troupe is performing a late-night show for an audience of largely clean-cut twentysomethings.

Dave Thurston — he’s called “Cute Dave” by his fellow Jester’z — is up on stage, doing an on-the-spot impersonation of Dr. Phil. As part of a game, an audience member has asked him for the secret of success.

“You know how to find success, little lady?” he says, channeling the gummy advice guru from Dallas. “Find a black woman and ride her coattails.”

This must be how the sober have fun.

11:20 p.m. - AMC Mesa Lanes

Snuggling in matching leather jackets, newlyweds Maria, 26, and Guadalupe Marquez, 27, rub noses, ignoring the swirling, flashing lights and loud pop music that transform this regular bowling alley into “Xtreme Bowling” late on weekends.

Maria and Guadalupe met at a dance and started dating soon after. “I gave it a year,” Maria says. That was three years ago. They’ve been married four months and live in Queen Creek.

At the other end of the alley, Red Mountain High schoolers David Marinacci, 15, and Stevy Stanley, 16, are all over each other — pawing, touching, smooching, teasing. This is their first date.

“One of her friends told me she liked me, so we started talking,” David says.

Stevy points out that David is a football player. Running back.
Leaving the bowling alley, I stop and ask Stevy’s best friend what she thinks of the new relationship.

“I don’t know,” she says, deadpan. “I give it two or three months. He’s kind of a player.”

Midnight - The Big Bang, Tempe

Mike Clement, 31, has the crowd in the palm of his hand. Sitting at one of two pianos on stage, he’s working the piano like a rock star, belting out Chuck Berry’s double-entendre ditty “My Ding-a-Ling.”

He divides the audience by sex and holds a sing-along contest: Men win: The women take off their tops. Women win: The men have to buy drinks.
At first, it looks as if the women will be doffing, and the men in the packed Mill Avenue piano bar go wild. But there's a last-minute upset, and it’s free drinks for any woman who asks.

“The women,” Clement says afterward, “always win.”

12:42 a.m. - Mill Avenue, Tempe

It’s an hour before last call. Late-night revelers trickle out onto the sidewalk. A slurring couple nearby gets into an impromptu argument, and the girl staggers away, followed by her beau.

A gutter-punk boy strums three chords on a beat-up acoustic guitar and sings, “Drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot.”

B-boy Ryan Madero, 22, stands in the entranceway of a shop and performs a one-handed air baby, followed by a one-handed hollowback. His friends, some fellow dancers with the Manifest Resilience crew, cheer him on.

“We’re out here every Friday night,” Madero says. “Sometimes we get money, but we do it for practice.”

In front of the Bank of America, Pontiac Wells — a Mill Avenue fixture with dreadlocks swinging underneath a fuzzy black pimp hat — strums lefty on his beat-up acoustic and sings Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” with wild abandon.

He breaks a string, sits down to change it and offers to sell me a copy of his homemade CD.

What’s there to do after last call? I ask.

“Sleep,” he says, laughing, his eyes lolling upward. “Try to not get your head bashed in by a drunk.”

He pauses, laughs again. “Well, that’s my objective, at least.”

1:11 a.m. - 14th Street and Farmer Avenue, Tempe

Finding a party in Tempe’s Maple-Ash neighborhood is easy enough: Drive around, look for a cluster of cars, then follow the music up into somebody’s house.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know a soul. Just tuck a cold 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon under your arm and you’re golden.

I’m Pabstless, but Donald Smith doesn’t mind. He gives a tour of his house (typical ASU party pad: Lousy furniture, dirty kitchen, a top-of-the-line computer in the corner, no hope of ever getting that carpet-cleaning deductible back) and, out back, steps over a keg and proudly shows off his backyard tree, which he's strung with white Christmas lights
“I’m proud of this, man,” he says. “Guess how much I spent? Eighty-nine cents. Bought it right after Christmas, on the 26th, when everything was on sale. I’m a bargain shopper.”

1:46 a.m. — Oasis Café, Tempe

Has anyone ever studied the organic nature of how dancing breaks out?
Nazic Shafari, 25, and Tamara Hagobian, 18, sitting in a corner booth in the Oasis hookah lounge, perk up to a throbbing Persian dance tune playing over the stereo. They get up, start dancing, and are soon surrounded by a throbbing amoeba of friends.

Someone back at the counter turns up the volume. The dancers smile, wiggle hips, bend knees, clap to the beat. It’s a glorious sight, and the spirit infests the shaking feet and tapping fingers of people smoking hookahs nearby.

Then the music fades out. The dancers hang in awkward silence, frozen. Another song starts, but it’s too slow. In the back, someone fiddles with the CD player. Then pow, they find the right song, the right tempo, the right energy, and it’s hips and knees and claps all over again.

2:23 a.m. — The Edge 103.9 studio, Scottsdale

Sean Young, working the overnight shift at radio station The Edge (103.9 FM), checks faders on his mixing board and answers the request line.
A girl’s voice answers, slurring.

“I’m a little bit drunk. Can you play some lullabies?”

“Lullabies?” Young says, grinning. This is his after-hours entertainment.

“How old are you? Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

(The caller mumbles something incoherent.)

“All right. Good night!” Young hangs up, taps the computer monitor where he controls the station’s nighttime playlist, and laughs to himself. “The freaks come out at night.”

3:15 a.m. — Xtreme Bean, Tempe

Three guys, ASU students, huddle around a laptop enjoying wireless Internet access. They are talking about hacking, they say, nervously giggling and Googling. They don’t want to give their names.

They’ve been here since 11 p.m., high on insomnia and tea and the kind of weird philosophical talk that happens late at night in a coffeehouse.

“Oh man, you should have been here earlier,” one says. “We were talking about the correlation of weather and the advancement of civilization. The places that have more dramatic climate swings have more advanced civilizations.”

Another one reveals a napkin, on which they’ve made a Venn Diagram of sorts with chicken scratches and nonsense. “We’ve got correlation without causation,” one sighs.

“There was a girl here,” the third guy says eagerly. “She kept winning at Scrabble, so she left.”

4:11 a.m. — Dream Palace, Scottsdale

Her name is Paris, as far as you know.

“I had that name way before ‘The Simple Life’ came out,” she points out.
Wearing an itsy-bitsy bikini and six-inch Lucite heels, she sits at the bar and counts a wad of money — the ducats she’s earned after stripping for the past eight hours. She flashes an adorable smile, revealing blacklit braces, and explains.

“I’m not the kind of stripper that earns a lot of money and then blows it,” she says. “I invest.”

Paris, 21, has been working the night shift at the Dream Palace for almost four years now. She says she won’t strip anywhere else. Most nights, she’s out of the club and home by 5 a.m. to spend time with her boyfriend, who installs custom car audio for big shots and keeps roughly the same schedule.

“If the sun’s not out when I leave here, it’s not too bad,” she says. “If the sun’s out, you’re like, '(expletive).'”

5 a.m. - Krispy Kreme, Tempe

Krispy Kreme is a piece of Americana, with its clean, retro aesthetic and devout following. I’m here to get the first donuts of the new day.

I'm also there to see the show. Inside the store, patrons can watch donuts being made — taken from the extruder, put through a heater and sent on a lazy logjammer ride that climaxes in a waterfall of sticky glaze — and then, if the sign outside flashes “hot” and “now,” they’ll be handed a free, sugary sample.

A thought: Could someone come in, grab a donut gratis, then split?

“You’d be surprised,” says Dyland Boungert, the overnight manager. “People do that all the time.”

Which is proof: There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but donuts are a different matter entirely.

5:40 a.m. — Casino Arizona, Scottsdale

Somehow, I am the only bleary-eyed one wandering between slot machines in the din of Casino Arizona.

Everyone else — and there are plenty of overnighters here, working their button-pushing/money-losing muscles as dawn approaches — is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Or at least freshly hypnotized.

I approach someone my age walking around aimlessly. Her name is Dollie Davis, she’s 24 and she just moved to Mesa from Hawaii. It’s her first time in a casino, she says. A friend from her apartment complex brought her. She’s been here since 2 a.m. and has long since gone broke. But she likes the atmosphere here.

“I didn’t know it was going to be this big,” she says. “I love it. I don’t want to leave. I love the lights and the people.”

6:59 a.m. — St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Chandler

After a night spent gambling, talking to strippers, eating unhealthy food and singing a song called “My Ding-a-Ling,” I decide a little atonement is in order.

I may not be Catholic, but catch as catch can: Like many Catholic churches in the Valley, St. Mary’s in Chandler has 24-hour adoration and prayer in its small side chapel. This morning, there are five people scattered throughout the few pews. One elderly man is snoring. The rest are praying silently. Volunteers elect to come in at all hours of the night to spend time in adoration.

“The goal,” says one member of the church, preparing for morning service in the main hall, “is to always keep someone in the presence of the Lord.”

7:40 a.m. — Superstition Mountains, Apache Junction

My plans for sunset didn’t go as planned, so I hightail it to the Superstition Mountains Park, hoping to watch the sunrise somewhere scenic.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been here, so I end up woefully lost in the Superstition foothills, a sprawling series of hoity-toity residential developments.

I drive until the sky turns a baby blue and pink. I pull over and park near a golf course.

Call it a craze of exhaustion or insomniac delirium, but I have a kind of epiphany.

Pulling an all-nighter in the E.V. requires more than a little creativity. We may never be New York. We may not be a 24-hour kind of place.

But hey, at least we get our beauty sleep.