Paper Man

Legendary former Daily News columnist Pete Dexter has a new book out. His legacy will surely precede his upcoming visit to Philly.

by Steve Volk

Just four words, but anyone who’s lived in Philly and heard the story of Pete Dexter knows the drink should not have been ordered. Not by Pete Dexter, and not for Pete Dexter. Not since an incident that occurred roughly 9,208 days ago.

For Dexter there’s never been anything terribly romantic about tracing a pool cue’s arc across a Grays Ferry night sky. But that event has taken on a kind of luster in the retelling—as if his book Paris Trout, today considered one of the great American novels of the last 50 years, is what came spilling out of his head when the pool cue struck him.

The night he was beaten near to death is Dexter’s signature biographical moment—the instant in time when his already colorful life story entered the realm of myth.

Dexter, so the story goes, was a hard-drinking Philadelphia newspaperman who met up with a bunch of Grays Ferry toughs. They were upset by a column he’d written about a drug-related death in the neighborhood. They beat him with baseball bats.

Dexter suffered a broken pelvis and enough broken skin to warrant 60 stitches. He recovered from his wounds, and—this is important—stopped drinking. Then he proceeded to become one of America’s best fiction writers.

There are, though, problems with the story.

For one, Dexter himself says the incident doesn’t look so important to him through his 63-year-old eyes—he didn’t hear a redemption song in the sound of his own pelvis cracking. Then there’s the matter of the baseball bats.

Tommy Lego, the guy who struck Dexter, doesn’t remember hefting a bat. He says he picked up a pool cue he kept behind the bar.

Lego is talking now for the first time because the dead kid in Dexter’s column was his brother, and because all these years later he never got the satisfaction of seeing the brother he knew rendered in print.

But this story is getting ahead of itself just when it’s time to slow down and watch.

Click here to hear Pete Dexter talk: On Norman Mailer On threatening to drown an editor in chili On "perceived" and "preceived" On Zack Stalberg On Bruce Springsteen Also: Springsteen cribs some Dexter prose.

The thought that Pete Dexter is drinking again could send those in Philly who knew him running for cover. For instance Barry Sandrow, the owner of Doc Watson’s, says Dexter was a lot of fun when he wasn’t drinking, but “you didn’t want to be around him when he was.”

In the 12 years Dexter spent writing for the Daily News—from 1974 to 1986—people got to know the Dexter who haunted Doc Watson’s, Dirty Frank’s and McGlinchey’s, the Dexter who’d go to the Pen and Pencil, the journalism press club, and head-butt fellow Daily News scribe Jack McKinney between rounds of drinks.

He took bets on whether a case of beer could be hurled across Pine Street. He caroused with boxer Tex Cobb, freely loaning him company cars that would end up stranded across the country. For a column he counted transvestites on 13th Street and circled a knife-wielding old man. He threatened to drown an editor in a pot of chili. But that was the old Drinking Dexter.

This new Drinking Dexter finished his vodka and orange juice and started ordering … orange juice. His hands didn’t shake. He didn’t sweat. In fact, ordering one drink and switching to the soft stuff didn’t seem to faze him at all. “I was never really an addictive personality,” he says. “It was about having fun.”

But don’t think those lost days are all behind Pete Dexter. In one of his more recent sober exploits, which his brother calls “a flight of whimsy,” Dexter wandered into the adult diaper section of an Arizona supermarket and started trying on the product. Right there in the aisle. Dexter doesn’t deny the incident, which got him barred from the store.

“I turned to a lady next to me,” he says, “and asked if they made my butt look fat.”

He sees a darkness: Dexter drank, got beat up and wrote about Philly's streets-leaving behind a mythic persona.

Adventurous living took its toll.

“My body,” says Dexter, “there are all sorts of things wrong with it. A couple of weeks ago I woke up and my thumb just stopped working. I don’t know how to explain it. Neither does the doctor. It just doesn’t work.”

Put it like this: Pete Dexter would be about 6 feet long if the right team of professionals could be assembled to stretch his body out that far. As he is, with his head retracted toward his shoulders like a turtle’s, he stands only about 5 foot 9 or 5 foot 10.

Though he’s an impossibly thin-looking 155 pounds, he feels burdened by “an extra 10 pounds of fat.” But his eyes remain alert and transfixing, the color of burnt coffee, staring out from beneath a broad forehead that seems to drag the rest of his body behind it.

Dexter is now on tour to promote Paper Trails, his new collection of nonfiction that includes pieces he wrote for the Daily News and Esquire, along with material he penned later at the Sacramento Bee. The tour will bring him here next month, but last week he was in Seattle, drawing bemused smiles from the crowd when they spotted him limping into the room.

Though the Seattle area has been Dexter’s home for more than 15 years, he doesn’t see much of the city. He lives with his wife Dian on Whidbey Island, accessible from the mainland by ferryboat or a 180-mile highway diversion.

His current marriage has lasted 29 years, and he’s raised a daughter—29-year-old Casey—who’s working as an assistant film editor in Los Angeles. Dexter’s choice of home is sometimes characterized as an example of his eccentricity, located as it is about a quarter mile from the nearest main road.

He entered the Seattle reading wearing a baseball cap, a brown button-down shirt and a rumpled gray sweatshirt, which he told the crowd he’d borrowed from his wife. He started the reading by continually hitching up his jeans, which kept falling down his skinny hips as if they were trying to escape.

“If I show you too much of myself,” he told the bookstore audience, “just raise your hand and let me know. And if you get bored and wanna go on to something else, go on and go. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

He read seven columns in all, touching upon subjects ranging from his wife’s flat chest to Jack Walsh, a strongman who wanted to park a 7,000-pound truck on his own chest as a kind of tribute to Dexter.

Some seemed surprised by how funny the columns were. One woman informed a couple who’d been drawn to the reading by a local newspaper notice, “this was nothing like Paris Trout.”

Dexter is the author of six novels, and has attained a level of literary fame and respect that eclipses the most famous of his Philadelphia peers. He started writing his first book God’s Pocket while convalescing from the famous beating. His third effort Trout won him the 1988 National Book Award and caused his career to explode like a case of beer flung onto Pine Street.

He wrote a screen adaptation of Trout for Showtime, which got Hollywood’s attention, and then penned scripts for Rush, a drug addict love story, and the classic film noir Mulholland Falls. His novels since Trout have received mixed reviews.

The now-out-of-print Brotherly Love was set right here in Philadelphia. The still-in-print Deadwood is the not-so-hidden classic in his backlist, a kickass funny and mercilessly profane novel, which Dexter will gladly tell you was stolen from him by HBO. But the Dexter we know best here in Philly is getting his first real public exposure with Paper Trails. And in Seattle he proved just as hilarious at riffing as he was at reading.

During a Q&A session, a woman asked how many times he’d been married.

“Twice,” he answered, clearly disappointing her, “but I’ll tell you a story about how I knew the first one was over.”

And with that Pete Dexter began talking about the time he wrestled a bear.

See, Dexter was writing about a man who wrestled bears. This man thought that in order to write about it, he ought to do it. So Dexter, after suffering under the bear for a while (“You can’t believe how strong a bear is,” he said), sort of fell in love with the animal and its handlers, and brought them all home.

His wife was asleep. But in what his brother might call a “flight of whimsy,” he ushered the bear into his wife’s bedroom. Then he left the room and closed the door.

“She came out a few minutes later,” he said, “and she was just silent. And I thought, ‘You know, that’s about as good as I get in a relationship, putting a bear in the bedroom, and if she doesn’t enjoy this, I’m not sure this is going to work.’”

Last he heard, his first wife had married a guy who holds up “SLOW” signs at construction sites. “I understand she’s very happy,” said Dexter. “So it all worked out.”

Afterward, as the crowd departed, a woman brought him a windup flashlight she’d just bought elsewhere in the store. “You deserve a present,” she said, demonstrating how the flashlight works by winding it furiously.

Another man, in the course of getting his book signed, told Dexter he used to live in Philadelphia. “I saw you in Dirty Frank’s,” he said, “after the incident, after you stopped drinking. You didn’t look very happy. You were just kind of sitting and listening, and you didn’t stay very long. I wondered how hard it was for you to get material for your columns then.”

“Well,” says Dexter, “I did miss out on a lot of fun.”

A separate peace: Philadelphians still talk about the night Dexter got whupped, but the author says he's long since moved on.

Ask Pete Dexter what he remembers about Philadelphia, and he doesn’t bring up the beating. Instead the question leads to a list of People He Cannot Repay. His stepfather. Gil Spencer, the Daily News editor who made him a columnist. A man named Mickey Rosati Sr. And Tex Cobb, for what he did that night. So yes, maybe even a conversation about the People He Cannot Repay leads back to that night. But the endless recycling of this story probably also serves to distract people from what made Pete Dexter so special in the first place.

“I think Pete Dexter might be the greatest newspaper columnist of all time, anywhere, in any century,” says Steve Lopez, a former columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer who now writes a column for the Los Angeles Times. “He was so damn good that it was really demoralizing to work in the same town as him. I was intimidated by it because I’d read something he’d written, and it would be so good I’d think, ‘Why should I bother?’”

And yet Dexter admits he’s lucky he ever got the opportunity to write a column. He trashed company cars, charged his editors like a knight with a spear and drank his way through the city. As his friend Dan Geringer wrote in the Daily News last week, he was “always bleeding from his ears, gums, recent scabs.”

In the mid-’70s, when Dexter was still a reporter, the Daily News learned that an Episcopalian priest in Eddystone was using his pulpit to form a cult. According to then-managing editor Zack Stalberg, Dexter and investigative reporter Hoag Levins were given several weeks to work on the story. Finally, when the time came to write a draft, Dexter produced his notes, which were written—all of them—on the back of a single envelope.

Against a lot of people’s wishes, editor Gil Spencer recognized Dexter’s obvious skill as a writer and made him a columnist. History proved it the right call.

On a memorable hotel: “My friend Fred and I walked into the room they gave us, and there was a body lying on one of the beds. The eyes and mouth were open, and there was dried blood on the teeth. We were younger and harder then, and Fred went over to the other bed and lay down. ‘I think I’ll take this one,’ he said.”

On a shooting: “When the shots started coming out of the third-story window at Mother Elie’s rooming house early Monday night, most of the block figured it was old Curley again, and folks were sorry to hear that he was going to die.”

He described hearing a windmill at his stepfather’s funeral as making “lost-calf noises.”

He wrote up the exchange he’d had with a teenager after a homeless man was accidentally crushed by a 300-ton crane: “This kid was about 15, which I judged to be too old to still find something happy in an old man’s death. ‘He wasn’t nothin’ but an old bum, huh?’ he asked. I said, ‘I don’t know, kid. What are you?’”

The subjects Dexter chose defined him as much as the writing: blue collar, sympathetic to people who’d been done wrong, victims of violence and a good time before the bars closed.

Even before the brawl there was the sense he’d endured pain that had never gone away, what former Daily News editor Zack Stalberg calls, “the wounded-creature aspect to Pete.”

Dexter threw himself so hard into life he must’ve been trying to escape something. Maybe the source was physical, the bad hips and bum knees from playing football.

Or it may have been mental. “His birth dad died when he was very young,” says Dexter’s brother Tom Tollefson. “I think he was not quite 3. Who knows how that turns a life in a different direction?”

Tollefson says Dexter enjoyed a good relationship with his mother’s second husband but didn’t adopt all his thinking. “In our family, achievement in school directly correlated with achievement in life,” he says, “and I think pretty early on Pete realized that was bullshit, and set out on his own path.”

In three hours straight of steady talking, the only time Dexter seems at a loss for words is when he tries to describe his relationship with the now 73-year-old Mickey Rosati Sr. “He meant so much,” he offers before growing quiet again and shifting in his seat. “He was like a big brother to me.”

To the degree that training was something Dexter did five or six days a week for seven or eight years, boxing was an important part of his life. But the tough-guy impression it creates is false—at least through Dexter’s 63-year-old eyes.

“I enjoyed the exercise, No. 1,” says Dexter. “Even going three or four rounds, it’s a hell of a workout.”

But the ring didn’t mean as much to Dexter as did Rosati, who befriended the newspaperman after he started coming into the gym on a regular basis with Tex Cobb. Rosati treated him like family, inviting the writer and his wife over one New Year’s Eve. “In them days we had shotguns to fire at midnight,” remembers Rosati, “and when we got ’em out, Pete said, ‘I think they’re going to kill us, honey.’

“He’d never seen anything like it,” says Rosati, “the big spread of food, all of us singing and dancing and hugging each other.”

Before Dexter left town he told Rosati all his feelings.

“I never met people like you,” Dexter said. “I love you, I love your son, your family, I love everything you do. You’re so down to earth.”

“You’re down to earth too, Pete,” Rosati replied.

“No,” said Dexter. “I’m shy.”

“I love you just the way you are, Pete,” Rosati told him.

Hearing the old man’s recollection, Dexter nods and says what he misses most about Philadelphia is Rosati and his gym, a tiny cobbled-together workspace, maybe 45 feet long, which continues to operate over the family’s long-running South Philadelphia auto shop at 1937 S. Chadwick St. Whether this is the Pete Dexter we got to know in his columns or not, it seems safe to say—given the way his coffee-colored eyes seem to fill to the brim—this is Pete Dexter as he sits, all 155 pounds of him, complete with thumbs that don’t work.

In the years after the brawl, says Rosati, Dexter had trouble just getting into the ring. The old man would lift the rope for him. Dexter would lay his face on the canvas and crawl inside.

“I don’t really think he knew what he was doing that night,” says Rosati. “I told him later, ‘You can’t go into somebody’s neighborhood when they’re mad at something you wrote and expect them to treat you nice.’ I said, ‘Pete, you come from an educated neighborhood. You’re not used to violence the way they’re used to violence.’ We come from the other side of the tracks, where people start arguing and then they start punching each other.”

Most of the people who’ve written about Dexter have focused on the assault without having read “In Tasker, It’s About to Stop,” the column that caused the drama.

Published Dec. 9, 1981, the piece focuses on an increase in drug dealing in Grays Ferry. Dexter praises the community’s antidrug efforts, and writes this: “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.”

Though Dexter never specifies a cause of death, in some retellings, like the review of Paper Trails that ran in The San Francisco Chronicle, the kid is a homicide victim.

“I was bringing my mother home from where Buddy was buried,” says Tommy Lego, the kid’s brother. “And my other brother was on the steps when I was getting my mom out of the car, saying, ‘You have to read the newspaper.’”

The column broke his mother’s heart, so Lego, according to his account, called Dexter and left a message. The columnist called back almost immediately.

“You wrote something about another junkie dead in the neighborhood,” said Lego. “You gotta print a retraction.”

“No,” said Dexter. “I’m not going to do that.”

Lego asked Dexter for his sources. Dexter said no to that too.

“I know you,” Lego told him. “But you don’t know me. What if one day I come into Dirty Frank’s or Doc Watson’s and I sit down next to you and we have a few beers, and all of a sudden, you won’t know where, you won’t know when, I turn around and beat your head in.”

“Maybe I’ll come see you,” replied Dexter.

Lego told him he worked at Dougherty’s, a bar at 24th and Lombard. Around 8 p.m. Dexter walked inside.

“Are you Tommy Lego?” he asked the man behind the bar.

“Yeah,” replied Lego.

“Do you know me?” asked Dexter.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Can I sit down and have a beer and talk to you?”

Lego, 5 foot 10, was then in his mid-20s and about 250 pounds. “Yeah,” he replied. He poured Dexter a beer.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Dexter said as he started drinking his beer. “I can’t retract this story.”

“Then I don’t know why you came here,” the bartender replied.

“Because I had to see who you are,” replied Dexter. “I ain’t changing nothing, I’m just here to tell you.”

So, Lego says, “I cracked him.”

The original Daily News account, which identifies no source, says Dexter was punched twice by assailants he never saw before he left the bar. An account in Paper Trails says he was set upon by men armed with beer bottles, and lost half his upper teeth.

According to Lego and another man who wants to be called only “Max,” the rest of the evening went like this: Later that night Dexter comes back with a group of six or seven guys, including what Lego remembers as “a pair of big biker looking dudes” and Tex Cobb.

Art Bourgeau, owner of Whodunit Books on Chestnut Street, was one of Dexter’s running buddies at the time. He says the group went there with no thoughts of a fight. “We were there purely so Pete could have some sense of safety while he tried to work this out,” he says.

Were they drinking?

“It was a typical Friday night,” he replies.

Both Lego and Max say the two groups exchanged words, and Dexter asked, “Is anyone gonna jump me now?”

Max got off his stool and walked to another bar about a block away. There he recruited reinforcements and opened the trunk of his car, arming at least half the men with nightsticks, tire-irons and, he claims, one baseball bat, which he himself carried.

When they arrived, maybe 10 to 15 strong, the odds had clearly changed. The most quoted line has Cobb looking around at the men with bats and saying, “I hope this is the local softball team.”

Bourgeau remembers Cobb saying, “We’ll be leaving now.”

In any event, Lego and Max agree that someone in the Dexter entourage said, ‘We could wreck this place,’ which prompted Lego to pick up a pool stick—Max says it was a bat—and slam it on the bar. “Let’s wreck it right now, asshole!” he said.

Cobb started hustling everyone out the door, but the balky-kneed Dexter was quickly caught out on 24th Street, where Tommy Lego began wailing on him with the kind of weapon that can only exist some 26-odd years after a bar fight—a combination pool stick and baseball bat.

The only one in Dexter’s entourage who stayed and defended him was Cobb, the heavyweight. He stood over his fallen friend, pushing away the men who were striking him, and absorbing blows with an arm that was ultimately broken in the fight.

Could Pete Dexter have died that night?

The safest answer is that the men of Grays Ferry who stood over him didn’t really care if he lived or died. He’d come into one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods and tried to intimidate its residents with a show of force. At least that’s the way they took it.

“Write this down,” says Max. “In our neighborhood, we were brought up family and friends. You watch each other’s back. That’s it. For us, that’s what that night was about.”

Cobb carried Dexter off to the hospital. And 26 years later, life has gone on. Lego has a son in Iraq who’s getting married when he comes home on leave in September. It still burns him up when he sees this story retold every time Pete Dexter has a new book out. And it still upsets him that his mother died without ever seeing the son she remembered eulogized in print. For the record, Tommy Lego says his brother Francis “Buddy” Lego wasn’t “stoned all the time.”

“He was a really good basketball player,” he says, “for Neumann. You can’t do that when you’re high. And when he died he was working in the Navy Yard. He was a pipe fitter. He crawled around on ships, through boiler rooms. You can’t do that when you’re high either.”

A call to the medical examiner’s office last week revealed the initial cause of death was “undetermined.” Lego says his brother “experimented” with a mix of drugs that proved toxic to him. “He had heroin in his system, cocaine. He was experimenting, and it went bad.”

The police found his boots and a bottle of beer near the water at 68th and Cobbs Creek. He was 21.

Pete Dexter barely stirs in reaction to the retelling of Tommy Lego’s narrative. He shrugs off parts he remembers differently, the tone of his voice barely changing from the easy, friendly tenor it’s had all night. “If these guys, for whatever reason, want to talk and get their version out, they have that right.”

He says he never pressed charges—he could easily have identified Lego—because “I know when something’s over. I made a mistake going there, and I didn’t see a need to send anyone to jail.”

Though he says he’s “sick” of talking about that night, he understands why people focus on it.

Even the foreword to Dexter’s new nonfiction collection seems to portray that night as the fulcrum on which his life turns—from excessive drinking to sobriety, from newspaper writing to success in literature and movies. In the short essay written by Pete Hamill, Dexter himself is quoted as calling the area where the fight took place “one of the worst neighborhoods in America.”

It’s a judgment he repeats at the book reading in Seattle, adding, “it’s this inbred Irish neighborhood.”

At first glance his portrayal of Grays Ferry—he calls 24th and Lombard “the Devil’s Pocket” (it’s perhaps more accurately the border between Center City and Grays Ferry)—would appear to be so false on its face as to be evidence he’s retrofit elements of the story to further inflate its mythic stature. Or that perhaps he does suffer toxic memories of the place, the people, the whole damn night. Bad neighborhoods tend to be defined in a very specific way: Kids can’t walk to school by themselves; old people are afraid to go to the corner store; the innocent are jumped by toughs who rake their pockets for money; gunfire is common.

By that score, the worst corner of Grays Ferry doesn’t even rate among the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, let alone America. But Dexter doesn’t back down from his assessment, which is less emotional than it first appears.

“I don’t know,” he says. “What would you say about a neighborhood where in a minute they’re able to assemble—however many guys, I’m not gonna get into a debate about that—a lot of guys, with long reinforced steel, with bats? What kind of neighborhood is that?”

But there’s another reason Dexter feels disinclined to discuss that evening. His next novel will address both the assault and its aftermath. “I really don’t think I have any great body of work,” he says. “But I have hopes for this one. I think it could be a real step up, but we’ll have to see … In the meantime I can’t talk about that night because I don’t want what I said to influence me when I sit down at the typewriter the next day.”

The book will also address something Dexter counts as a whole lot more important, “something that happened two days later, in the hospital, and just being in the hospital, which were both more profound experiences to me than what happened that night.”

This too may seem somehow convenient, a way of parsing his biography. After all, if he hadn’t been assaulted, he wouldn’t have been in the hospital. But then again, no one stood over his hospital bed with a bat, so how much credit can the men of Grays Ferry claim for his experiences there?

The way Dexter explains it, the beat down he suffered is an anecdote he feels personally if not publicly free from. “If I was going over the top 100 most important experiences in my life, that night would probably be somewhere in there. But it wouldn’t make the top 25.”

His brother Tom also thinks the event’s influence has been overstated. “When you look at everything in its totality,” he says, “what happened, what he’s done and everything since then—being married for almost 30 years, raising a child, all those things in life and all the achievements, I think that night was maybe a little turn in the road, but I don’t think it was formative or transformative. Everything since then is just stuff he worked for.”

Among the many talked-about aspects of that night is Dexter’s history with drinking. He’s been quoted over the years, saying the trauma done to his head damaged his tastebuds. The result: He no longer had “a taste” for alcohol.

He repeats as much in Seattle, adding his customary chaser of wit. “I couldn’t drink the stuff anymore,” he says. “But I started to like fish, which I’d never previously cared for.”

His former editor Gil Spencer and friend Art Bourgeau both say they had conversations with Dexter shortly after the fight during which he described giving up drinking as a choice. “That tastebuds thing is bullshit,” says Spencer flatly.

“A choice,” says Dexter, in response. “We all make a choice not to drink battery acid too. And that’s what alcohol tasted like to me.”

The writer says his natural tastes started to come back in about 1997 or ’98, and these days he doesn’t drink very often or very much.

He did have a screwdriver in Seattle last week. Just one. The rest of the night he drank orange juice. And then he caught the last ferry home.

Steve Volk (svolk@philadelphiaweekly.com) last updated the strange and evolving situation at the city’s two big daily newspapers.