There have been three truly great Philadelphia journalists in my lifetime.
Most recently there was
Mark Bowden, author of the bloodsoaked epics
Black Hawk Down and
Killing Pablo, but also the smaller scale (but superb)
Finders Keepers, which I used to assign to my journalism classes a few years back. He was the
Philadelphia's Inquirer's superstar throughout the late 90s. (Coincidentally, just today, we all learned that
Bowden will be returning to the Inquirer to write a new column called "The Point." This is good news for journalism in a town that could sorely use good journalism news.)
Before Bowden was the amazing
Steve Lopez, who wrote a column in the
Inquirer's Metro section during the late 80s and early 90s that was essential reading for every city resident. Lopez was funny as shit, and more importantly, he was right on the money, and not afraid to speak truth to power. A sample opening line from one his columns: "I dropped by City Hall Tuesday around noon, carrying some flashcards, and went up to see the mayor." I was old enough to read him in his prime, and he was one of the writers who inspired me to enter this nutty profession. (Later, in 1992, I also had the pleasure of writing a sidebar to a profile of Lopez in
Philadelphia Magazine, where I called up Lopez's favorite targets and asked them to fire back. Apparently, Lopez loved it; on the back cover of
his 1995 collection, Land of Giants, four of the six blurbs -- e.g., "He wouldn't be the type of guy who I'd have marry my daughter"-- came from that sidebar.) Lopez wrote a few well-received novels, and now
pens a column for the L.A. Times that is just as good as his
Inquirer stuff. It almost makes you want to move to L.A.
But before Bowden and Lopez, way back in the dirty late 70s and early 80s -- can't you almost hear The Cars and The Clash playing on the jukebox? -- there was
Pete Dexter. Before my time, certainly, but his columns for the
Philadelphia Daily News were legend... and still are. Dexter was a man who bled for his column. And I mean that literally. In 1981, after writing a column about a drug deal gone bad that left one man dead, Dexter went into arguably the worst neighborhood in Philly to try to talk to man's brother, who was not happy about the coverage. Dexter went into a bar alone, and left with half of his upper teeth missing. He tapped a buddy of his, heavyweight contender,
Randall "Tex" Cobb (who you may remember from
Raising Arizona), and returned to the bar. That's when 30 neighborhood residents rushed in from a back door, baseball bats in their hands. According to Dexter, Cobb turned to his pal and said, "I hope this is the local softball team."
Of course, it wasn't. Dexter and Cobb made it out of that bar broken men, lucky to be alive.
Later, after a long recovery, Dexter left Philadelphia, and eventually turned to novel-writing full time. And what a series of novels:
Deadwood, Paris Trout, Brotherly Love, and most recently,
Train. But what made my day today was seeing a new Dexter book on the shelves, released just this past Tuesday:
Paper Trails, which is a collection of his columns from the
Daily News, the
Sacramento Bee, and a few other random magazines. Because as great as the novels are, there's something about the columns that fires me up.
On the train ride home, I flipped to a random column. Number 13. It's almost about nothing -- Dexter's walking down the street, and somebody drops a bottle of Thunderbird wine out a YMCA window on a Monday afternoon. That's it. That's
the whole column.
But check out what Dexter does with that moment:
Presently, the oldest one crossed the street and looked down at the bottle and the wet brown bag. Then he leaned back and looked up the side of the YMCA, wondering who would do such a thing.
When he got back, he said, "A whole bottle out the window."
The man with the scar said, "All I know is I got in-surance."
The old man gave him a look. "What the fuck you talkin' about?" he said.
"Just what I'm talkin' about is what the fuck I'm talkin' about," said the man with the scar. "I'm talkin' about in-surance. I'm covered."
The old man said, "You covered in shit."
Goddamn. I'm only a few columns into it, but already, I can't recommend
Paper Trails enough.
The Philadelphia Weekly (our noble competition) has a cool profile of Pete Dexter today. Writer Steve Volk traveled out to Seattle to interview the legendary columnist, and even dug up some new details on the infamous night when Dexter had has ass handed to him outside a bar in Grays Ferry. There's a great little scene that sounds like it belongs in 300:
