Brevity’s rainbow

IN a farewell to readers in Philadelphia, where he had been a columnist at the Daily News for better than a dozen years, Pete Dexter wrote that he had come to the city empty but no longer was. He had witnessed amazing things -- a pope’s visit, the 76ers’ Julius Erving at the top of his game, the burning down of a block by the city administration (in 1985 to dislodge the radical group MOVE the police dropped explosives on a building and the fire spread to other buildings, killing 11 people, including five children). That the city had done him a profound favor, he declared, was something he glimpsed “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.”

Read a few of Dexter’s newspaper columns and you will come away convinced that those faces are all of ours too: The 51-year-old construction worker who intended to fire a warning shot at a burglar but killed him instead, remarks, “One minute you’re sound asleep at two o’clock in the morning, the next minute -- literally, the next minute -- you’ve killed somebody.” The strongman who backed out of a scheduled fight with a 1,100-pound bull later tells Dexter, “The reason I did that was that unless that animal was awful sick, it was gonna kill me.” There’s the man who, after spending 42 days at his wife’s bedside, waiting for her emergence from an accident-induced coma, had sex with her and was then convicted of rape. Or there is the all-American-boy real estate agent who forces sex on a casual acquaintance, trapping her in a car:

“And so in a few moments a young woman’s life is changed, and then she is dropped off in a parking lot and left. She goes to the sheriff, she goes to the hospital, she sleeps at a friend’s home, she ends up in counseling.... The All-American boy goes home in his expensive car, and a day or two later he’s back at the office, shaking hands, talking to home buyers about safe neighborhoods.”

And while we are at it, Dexter writes about the off-duty policeman knocked unconscious outside his house: “It is a fact that there are places in [Philadelphia] where the streets belong to the kids who drink on them, and sniff their paint thinner on them, and take their drugs. And it is a fact that once in a while they kick somebody senseless.”

That’s newspaper life, a lot of it bleeding out from the police blotter or emergency rooms, more of it lurking in quirky features and profiles, and some of it, particularly if one is lucky enough to be a columnist, condensing from the very air of everyday experience. Dexter started as a reporter in Florida, and after a fall from grace that left him pumping gas, was invited to join the Philadelphia Daily News in 1974 as a reporter and shortly thereafter was offered a column.

Most of the material gathered in “Paper Trails” originated in those venues or in later columns written for the Sacramento Bee -- formatted to a tight length, a crisp 800 words or so (paragraph breaks allowing). They are just roomy enough for a talented writer to perform a pirouette or, rather, to spin the reader in one and deliver a little push-off at the end. Dexter is extremely adept at the form, but his eye for the struggle in life, and his ear for capturing it in people’s speech, lend many of the 82 pieces in the book a gravitas that defies their length. Scattered among them are examples of Dexter’s longer journalism, magazine articles in slicks such as Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Esquire, where his strengths are shown to even greater advantage.

Newspaper columns are created with the life span of a fruit fly in mind; they live a short while and then politely die off to make room for the next generation, whose buzz is ever audible in the background. Put another way, it is a rare journalist who creates columns that are consistently of more than passing interest, that can be picked up years later and not appear to have yellowed on the page. Dexter is aware of the problem, and in his introduction to “Paper Trails,” he puckishly suggests that he and his editor excluded publication dates “to avoid compromising the timelessness of these pieces.”

Perhaps that is so, and yet the dates and venues of publication would have been instructive. Cultural markers appear here and there, if a reader hopes to to place the time: Reginald Denny and the South-Central riots (1992); the death of Ralph Abernathy, former associate of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote about King’s infidelities (1990); the assassination of Anwar Sadat (1981); the Tylenol tampering case that led to seven deaths (1982); a chess match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov (they played each other several times from the mid-1980s on; this match, in New York, took place in 1990); the death of Zerna Sharp, author of the “Dick and Jane” books (1981); and the killing of ABC television news reporter Bill Stewart in Nicaragua by a National Guardsman at a roadblock (1979).

Several of Dexter’s columns pack a wallop, sometimes from the bizarre and violence-laden circumstances that they report, other times from Dexter’s poignant or stark observations or his humor, which is sizable. (A small minority are dogs that could have been left sleeping to no ill effect.) Dexter is ardent about press responsibility, and his short commentary on Stewart is one of the best pieces in “Paper Trails,” contrasting styles of reporting. He notes that as local news became big money, money people took over local stations; being from sales and promotion, “they didn’t know anything about news. And they still don’t.” Yet Stewart was a newsman. Asked by a news cameraman why it is that the good ones get killed, Dexter writes, “The answer is that the good ones will follow a story out where the shooting is. The ones who pay their dues with voice lessons and capped teeth will read the story of a reporter’s death over the eleven o’clock news and say they have lost a colleague.”

Dexter shares with other notable columnists, like Pete Hamill (who wrote the introduction to “Paper Trails”), Jimmy Breslin and the late Mike Royko, an affinity for tales of the disaffected or the powerless, stories of people whipsawed by life, stories of justice delayed or outright abused. He took his stories from bars, from the boxing ring or racetrack, from blue-collar experience, from domestic life, from the courtroom and the backyard as well. It is easy to see why he became a successful novelist (his best-known work is “Paris Trout,” about the murder of a black girl in a Georgia town), for in these nonfiction pieces the interplay of dialogue, mood and structure create very fiction-like scenes.

In one column, Dexter meditates on “moments that shape us and then, in repose, become the heart of who we are.” That about captures the essence of all he reports. In one great sketch, a widowed farm wife remarks of her husband, “I never saw him waste nothin’ but prayers.” In another, a friend just burned out of his house says, “You walk up there and see it burning, and everything you’ve got is inside there, and there’s nothing you can do. It doesn’t feel like anything else you know of.” So there it is, in “Paper Trails,” our prayers and our burning houses, together. *