The lights were bright and blinking everywhere I turned. In the labyrinth that is a casino floor, one can quickly become disoriented, which almost seems like the point. The only thing not readily visible are the exit doors. They exist like a timeless row of mirrors along the wall, just past the slot machines, card tables and poker machines — the point is, one must really look for them and look for them hard.

But I wasn’t looking for the exit doors; I was looking for the Fireside Lounge, a throwback to the early days of the Peppermill Resort in Reno — long before it became the Italian-ish building it is now. (I’m still not sure how Reno, Italy and Peppermill go together, but hey, I couldn’t find the exit door either.) Those sweeping staircases with their Roman/Greek statue re-creations go nowhere, and the whole place sits across the street from an auto-pawn shop.

It was the 30-year anniversary of my Lake Tahoe wedding, and instead of heading straight there to celebrate, we took a little detour to Reno on the way — partly to revisit our honeymoon to Italy and partly because when my wife and I were courting, we often went to the Peppermill’s Fireside Lounge in Corte Madera. It’s now hard to believe that such a place existed in Marin, but it did. It had low red velvet-armed easy chairs at the bar, a sunken bar, scantily clad wait staff and the piece de resistance, the “flaming pool of love,” a round lighted pool with a flame burning inexplicably in the center of the water, all surrounded by red velvet-pillowed couches. It was almost literally a den of iniquity.

But it wasn’t iniquity we were looking for then. It was quiet. We both worked in a busy bar, and when we got off work, the last thing we wanted to do was go to another busy bar. The iniquity was just an added bonus.

Author Thomas Wolfe titled his 1940 book “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and the gist of his reasoning echoed the same reasoning as the shorter Heraclitus quote: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” Wolfe’s character, a writer, discovers that one’s childhood home is analogous to Heraclitus’s river.

This time around, my wife and I were also not looking for iniquity. Past the rows of people pumping their money into $1 slots, past the big video screens showing people who seemed suspiciously absent from the gaming floor enjoying themselves to the fullest, past video menus showing restaurant food items that bore only a passing resemblance to the actual food served, past the payroll check cashing, past the man hooked up to an oxygen tank puffing on a vape pen dispensing who knows what, we found the Fireside Lounge.

Often in the bar business, people will say, “We do the same job,” and often it’s pretty much true. We do all mix drinks. We do all take orders, and we do all serve people. But that’s just the mechanics of it all. For instance, in a tourist-oriented bar, you’re never going to see those people again. The same is true when making drinks at a concert venue or ballgame. At other bars, repeat business is the name of the game. Sometimes it’s the bar that attracts the people, sometimes it’s the bartenders and sometimes it’s the people who go there that do. And sometimes it’s all shaken up together like a cocktail. And we all do know that not all cocktails everywhere are the same.

Casinos exist for an entirely different reason. Sure, they are there as a service, but the main thrust of what they do has nothing to do with that. There’s a reason the exit doors are hard to find, they offer free payroll check cashing and there are gaming machines everywhere inside.

We finally arrived at the Fireside Lounge and poked our heads in. Easy chairs at the bar? Check. Red velvet couches? Check. Flaming pool of love surrounded by pillows? Check, check. It was like coming home — only it wasn’t.

The bar was also filled with video poker machines and TV screens. We took a cursory lap around and decided not to stay. Instead, we found a place down the street where we received exceptional service from a 20-something in a pulled-up hoodie and stocking cap.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• All experiences are meant to be new, not re-created.

• A little iniquity goes a long way, both while dating and certainly when married.

• If they’re playing songs that you listened to in high school in all the elevators, guess what, you’re their target demographic.

• “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker,” said Matt Damon’s character in the 1998 movie “Rounders.”

• You might not be able to go back, but you can always go forward.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant.