‘Mr. Noir’ and the randomness of life

“I am the guy who breaks things,” Pete Dexter says, looking up from under his eyebrows, a worried but amused expression on his wide-open face. “... for fun,” he adds.

This is exactly how Dexter, Mr. Noir (in both the literary and personal sense), writes his exquisite, painful novels. He has been messing with his readers this way for almost two decades now, with such characters as Paris Trout, murderer (from “Paris Trout,” 1988), and Ward James, a young reporter (from “The Paperboy,” 1995), and now Miller Packard, a police sergeant (from his new novel, “Train”).

He’s the Faulkner of our time; just when you’ve passed judgment on a character, Dexter pulls the rug out from under you. We can never, really, understand each other -- that’s what Faulkner showed us too. There is no one correct way to treat another human being. You must rely on whatever humanness exists.

None of the issues we face in this world is safe in his hands, either. You think you understand fear and race? Read “Train,” in which a nice white woman (NAACP supporter, ACLU supporter) gets raped by a black man and his buddy after they’ve hacked her husband to death. Read on to see her rapists mutilate her breast (you’ll put the novel down, you hate it, you won’t read this, then pick it up again, you will). Watch a young black man, Lionel Walk, nicknamed Train, who works as a caddie at a Los Angeles golf club in 1953, get beaten and humiliated by everyone from a fat white golfer to his black employer.

Head spinning? A lot like life, isn’t it? Of course, the author knows he works up against the line of decency; he knows when he crosses it. And about every 10 pages in “Train,” he crosses it.

An excerpt: “They came back downstairs, and without a word [he] began slapping her again, back and forth.... The other one reached down, just out of sight, and pulled once, violently, as if he were starting a lawn mower, and came up with the knife that had been in the bone of her husband’s neck.... And then his hand moved, so fast she didn’t really see it, and then she felt him let go of her nipple, and then she saw the knife, and the blood....”

And yet, here he is.

“You’ll know me by the nice blue shirt I’m wearing,” he says. “And because I’m wearing shorts.” Sometimes, the gap between an author’s written words and his demeanor is enormous. But isn’t that true of everyone? We all know what we know about the world, but at our best, we like to behave the way we think the world ought to be.

He is in the unlikely, if elegant, Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel as part of his book tour, for which he is driving across the country by car. Why? Because he has so much metal in his body from various injuries he’s received in fights (each with its own logical explanation) that making his way through airports these days can be difficult. He has, in other words, lived a little of the life he writes about.

He grew up north of Aberdeen, S.D. The first few years were a struggle. “When I was 3 and my sister, Kitty, was 5, my mother married my stepfather, possibly the kindest guy in my life. It must’ve been like going to the ASPCA and picking up two of the worst-looking pit bulls, or neurotic parrots, you could find.”

He could have been left for dead, is what he’s saying. Instead, he’s become a successful writer with a house on Washington state’s beautiful Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, a 25-year-old daughter and a happy marriage. “One half of the people I love in the world are there,” he says. “I wake up happy. I go to bed happy. It feels like I just fell into it. I spend exactly no time with people I don’t like.”

It wasn’t always this good. He once had no idea where he was going. His friends went to law school and medical school. “Studying, well, you know, it seemed beneath me,” he says, and it doesn’t sound arrogant, somehow, the way it would coming from someone else.

The only thing he was good at was math. He could remember numbers. He recites a few from childhood. So Dexter ended up at a post office in New Orleans. “I knew all the ZIP codes. I probably still hold the record for reading the punch holes. Turns out, I was sending everything to some town in Alaska. A supervisor told me I would have to leave the U.S. post office.”

Cut to Florida, where Dexter wins a grant for ... poetry? “It was mediocre poetry,” he shrugs. “I was the Palm Beach poet!” He wrote a column for the Miami Herald in the ‘70s. When the editor endorsed Nixon over McGovern, he and a friend quit in protest. His friend went to work at a TV station, Dexter at a gas station -- 11-hour days. “It was nice to get home when it was done,” he says, meaning, you know, to leave your work at the office.

Then Juan, a friend and an ex-cop, bought a vicious dog from a Greek across the street and then ... Dexter ended up at the Philadelphia Daily News. The stories tumble out, some linking to others, others just there for the taking.... This is how storytellers are nurtured.

So then, and this one has a direct link to his life, he wrote a column about a kid who died in South Philadelphia in a drug-related killing. The column upset the kid’s family. The brother (who ran a bar) got on the phone “and started talking about killing me. This was Dec. 7,” he says, not specifying the year. “About 8 o’clockish.”

So, Pete Dexter, somewhat mild-mannered reporter, went to the bar to talk things out with the brother and within minutes was hit across the mouth with a bottle of beer, sheering off his top teeth. He was with a friend, a boxer. Someone hit Dexter with a crowbar. “If he’s dead,” Dexter remembers his friend saying, “so are every one of you.” (“He was never the same after that fight,” Dexter says of his friend. “Maybe the next novel should be more autobiographical.”) Much of the metal in his skull and legs is a result of that fight.

“If I took one thing from that South Philadelphia experience,” he leans across the table, over the Chinese chicken salad and the $22 salmon, “it’s that I will never again go into a place like that and expect people to be reasonable.” He’s trying to explain why it is so much easier to write about Train, the caddie, than about Norah, the wealthy Brentwood rape victim in his novel. “You cannot presume to put yourself in anybody’s head,” he says. “It’s a precarious world. In the best of all possible worlds.” When his daughter was young, he says, the family had very little money. “She never liked peas. To her mother’s great horror, I once offered her $20 to eat one pea.”

He checks to see that his point has been made. It seems he’s just happy that life has the capacity to turn out this way. You can have an uncertain childhood, a few violent experiences and, somehow, you are saved and safe in late middle age.

Still, Dexter admits he is always worried that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than he is. How does he define fun? “Well, there’s this bar called Dirty Franks in Philadelphia. An FBI guy walks in, a kind of idiot savant bragging about his work. ‘Bet you can’t throw a full case of beer bottles across Pine Street,’ ” Dexter allows. And the guy tries. And he doesn’t make it.

“It’s one of those moments you’re so glad you’re there for. You know, when you wake up the next day feeling satisfied.”