Thom Nickels: The pretzel, the pain, and the prose — Pete Dexter’s Philadelphia years

For a writer, the ability to entertain readers doesn’t require a pronounced accent or a certain pose while smoking a pipe. Raw talent can appear anywhere. It can even assume the guise of the so-called average man in a pickup truck. 

Take Philly’s Pete Dexter, for instance. Dexter is about as far from the “finely cultured” literary gentleman as one can get. In personal appearances and in interviews about his astonishing writing career, he usually appears in a baseball cap (often cocked at an angle), his hair uneven and spiraling out from behind his ears like a country boy.

In YouTube interviews, Dexter doesn’t appear to be as tall as the people who interview him. I noticed something else about the man: he has eyes like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, of course, had a highly dramatic personal life. Dexter’s life, especially when he lived in Philly, was also highly dramatic.   

Like Poe, Dexter didn’t make Philly his permanent home. He was born in Pontiac, Michigan in 1943, did his undergrad work at the University of South Dakota and eventually wound up in Philly because of journalism, arriving just before Christmas 1974, to turn out articles for The Philadelphia Daily News. Before that, the Puget Sound, Washington resident worked a series of jobs like mail sorter in a post office, car salesman and truck driver. He was once even a ditch digger in Florida. This was before he landed his first job in journalism as a novice reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

He lucked out one day when he saw a Help Wanted sign for a reporter in the window of the Sentinel, something that would never happen in today’s world. He got the job, and after that worked as a reporter for The Palm Beach Post. He also started writing for magazines, but his real jump into the newspaper limelight occurred when he began working for the Philadelphia Daily News. 

By the time he left Philly in 1986, he was easily the city’s most famous columnist, but it took two years from his arrival here in 1974 before Daily News Editor Gil Spencer would let him try his hand at writing a column. 

But Dexter hasn’t always gotten along with newspaper editors. There’s a famous story about how he once threatened to push an editor’s head into a pot of chili during a holiday party. 

These were the days when newspaper columnists produced two or three columns a week at 800-900 words per column. Newspaper columnists today appear once a week, if they are lucky. Dexter likes to say that columnists who are published once a week can easily hide who they are, but when you write three, four, or five times a week, you can’t hide who you are from readers. “A pose exposes itself,” he says.

Dexter likes to joke and say that he got his column at the Daily News because the editors there got tired of him pestering them about writing stories. But once he settled into the life of a columnist, he says it was one of the happiest periods of his life. His Philly column writing days were fun and reckless.  He could be seen hanging out (and closing out) bars like Dirty Frank’s, McGlinchey’s and Doc Watson’s in Center City. He had a penchant for pushing the envelope, getting into small fights, wrecking company cars, and carousing into the wee hours.  

He was no G.K. Chesterton. 

Then there was his fateful column on December 9, 1981, about the efforts to combat drug dealing in the tough, often violent, Irish neighborhood of Grays Ferry near Center City. Entitled, In Tasker, It’s About to Stop, the column mentioned the death of a 21-year-old guy. 

The column began, “A couple of weeks ago, a kid named Buddy Lego was found dead in Cobbs Creek. It was a Sunday afternoon. He was from the neighborhood, a good athlete, a nice kid. Stoned all the time. The kind of kid you think you could have saved.”

After the column was published, Dexter got a call from the dead man’s mother, angry that he had called her son a doper in print. The dead man’s brother, a bartender in Grays Ferry, was also on the line with the mother, demanding that Dexter retract everything he wrote. Dexter refused to do that but said that he might go to the bar and have a chat with the bartender where they could iron things out. 

When Dexter went to the bar, he introduced himself to the bartender and made it clear he still wasn’t going to retract anything. At this point the story gets fuzzy. Dexter says somebody hit him from behind, knocking out or “shaving down” some of his teeth; later reports have the bartender attacking him with a pool cue. Dazed and bloodied, the columnist went home and contacted his prizefighter friend, Randall “Tex” Cobb and a few others, and then they all decided to go back to Dougherty’s again to protect Dexter during his second attempt to “reason” with the bartender. 

But as soon as they entered the bar — so Dexter claims interviews — a guy ran out and then came back with numerous men with tire irons, nightsticks, and a baseball bat. Since you cannot reason with baseball bats, often the only thing to do is strike while the iron is hot, but for Dexter, Cobb and friends it was too late to defend themselves. There were just too many people to fight. 

The 38-year-old columnist was out cold on the sidewalk, and Cobb had been injured as well. The rest of the group took off. Dexter had a broken pelvis, bleeding on the brain, a concussion, and plenty of nerve damage to his hands. But his troubles were just beginning. During surgery, there had been a problem with the anesthesia so that while it appeared that he was totally out, meaning mute and unable to move, he could feel the surgeon drilling into his leg but he was unable to do anything about it. What saved the day was the fact that his heart was beating furiously; after that he was numbed sufficiently. 

Dexter says the horrendous pain he felt would have driven a lot of people to the nut house. While recovering from the incident, he started work on his first novel, God’s Pocket. 

The incident would pave the way for his move to Sacramento from Philly. In 1986, he wrote his last column for the Daily News. 

“I have seen a pope. I have seen Julius Erving at the top of his game. I have seen a city administrator burn down a neighborhood. I watched Randall Cobb slowly realize he would never become heavyweight champion of the world. One night I almost watched myself die.

“And as moving as those things were at the time, they are not what endure. What endures are the people I loved.

“Somewhere along the line, this city has done me a profound favor. I glimpse it once in a while at night in the street, among the people who live there, or along the road. Hitchhikers. It cuts fresh every time.

“I recognize the lost faces because one of them, I think, was supposed to be mine.”

In Sacramento, he started a new life as a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, then proceeded to write a series of novels, beginning with Deadwood in 1986; Paris Trout, 1988, which won the 1988 U. S. National Book Award; Brotherly Love, 1991; The Paperboy, 1995; Train, 2003 and Spooner, 2009.  

Dexter has been called “a tough son of a bitch with the kind heart of a natural humorist.”  

Three of his best newspaper columns were included in Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns, which included the works of Jimmy Breslin, Will Rogers, and Walter Lippmann. 

His years as a columnist paid off because when he’d work on his novels he would write two pages or 900 words per day. 

Dexter admits his books are pretty dark but he also says he doesn’t “walk around like that all the time.” 

His novel Spooner has been compared to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and even Mark Twain. It’s not often that you hear the name Thomas Wolfe these days. Of course, it was the very tall Wolfe who used to write in longhand on long yellow legal tablets while standing up and using the top of his refrigerator as a desk top. Wolfe would then take the completed manuscript, meaning boxes of these legal tablets filled with his cursive scribble, into the office of his publisher, Thomas Scribner, who would then hand it to a secretary to type out. 

Dexter likes to write at night, when it is quiet. He writes everyday, unlike some writers who can go for weeks and even months at a time without writing anything. 

Regarding Spooner, Dexter says that he hates the word “memoir,” adding that the novel is “more true than a memoir would have been,” and that the story “kind of follows a lot of the places, characters, and events in my life.” This includes the characterization of his stepfather, whom Dexter says he keeps dreaming about and to whom he dedicated his first book, Deadwood. In Spooner there’s a saintly character named Calmer, an old South Dakota name, who in many ways represents the figure of his stepfather.  

In Dexter’s fourth novel, Brotherly Love, about a power hungry union boss with Mafia connections, the staccato prose style is reminiscent of a screen play. 

The novel captures the underbelly thug culture of the world of roofers and amateur mafiosi. The prose is not for the fainthearted. 

When writing a novel, Dexter says he has the feeling he is not in control. “When I start a book it’s usually with just a character in mind, something small and then I feel like I’m an observer, watching things. The book goes its own direction, don’t try to steer it….I’m not one of those people who outline plots.” 

Dexter believes writers should write to entertain audiences — “If not, what is it for?” he asks — but agrees it’s impossible to predict the marketplace or what the public will like. 

His encounter with the Philly thugs in Grays Ferry marked him for life. The experience changed his taste perception; alcohol, for instance, now tastes like battery acid, so he sticks to just an occasional beer when he goes out with his wife, Dian. He says he doesn’t miss Philly when it comes to the traffic and the noise and waiting in line.

“People don’t realize how much of their lives they spend doing that stuff.” 

The perfect life, he says, would be to transport himself to Philly for three hours a day, get that soft pretzel, and then leave.         

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.