PETE DEXTER blew into town from Florida some 30 years ago with a cowboy limp and a car that smelled like wet dog.
His hips were messed up from an old football injury, aggravated by years of Dexter insisting he could bang with kids half his age in playground basketball games.
He was always bleeding from his ears, gums, recent scabs.
Dexter's car appeared to be upholstered in mouse-colored shag carpet. It was dog hair, layer upon layer, undisturbed, like age rings in a tree. The dog's name was Harry. He was 14, maybe 15 years old.
The Daily News issued Dexter a new company car. Within days, it smelled of wet dog and appeared to be upholstered in mouse-colored shag carpet.
Dexter urinated on its tires, transported a sheep in its back seat, crashed it into a brick wall and founded the Velvet Touch Driving School. The Daily News issued him another new company car.
During the Dexter/Daily News marriage from the mid-'70s to the mid- '80s, he was free to trash cars and blur the line between realism and magic realism as long as he wrote about life's kidney punches from inside the kidney.
Recently, Dexter was on the cell phone from California, driving toward a reading from his new book of old columns - "Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, A Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage."
He's 63 now but, he argued, "I got parts in me that are only 8 or 9 years old. My hips, for example, are practically new."
He said that when he came to the Daily News as a reporter in the early '70s, "Staff and management hated each other, so management held a party at the city editor's house to bring the two sides together.
"It was a chili party," Dexter said. "I threatened to drown the city editor in the chili. That party was my first date with Mrs. Dexter. She cried afterwards and said she didn't know I was like that."
Suddenly, Dexter shouted, "Damn! I just reached into this box between the seats and almost cut my finger off. They'll never figure out how this happened when they find my body. Was it suicide? Or was it murder?
"I forgot I had left an open knife in that box," he said. "I opened the knife because I couldn't get the bottle of capsules open. Damn, that's a lot of blood!"
No need to ask, "What capsules?" Dexter's always in pain, always needs capsules.
He was beaten nearly to death in a bar here by bat-wielding citizens offended by something he had written. Twenty-five years later, his body hasn't forgotten.
"I'm wrapping the finger in my shorts now," Dexter said. "When I go to a restaurant for dinner, they take one look at these shorts and they're not going to seat me in a nice section, I can tell you."
Dexter said the good times at the Daily News arrived along with new editor Gil Spencer in the mid-'70s.
"Spencer got rid of everybody he couldn't stand to look at," Dexter said. "For some reason, I wasn't one of them."
Given a column, Dexter wrote stuff like: "About four-thirty Monday afternoon, someone in the permanent-resident section of the downtown YMCA dropped a bottle of Thunderbird wine out his window, and in doing so broke an old unwritten law of that Christian establishment.
"Yes, somebody actually threw away a bottle that still had wine inside it."
An alleged "19-year-old virgin" wrote asking "Dr. Dexter's Sex Clinic" if his first time would be like riding a horse.
Yes, Dr. Dexter replied. "Rub her nose, feed her a carrot. Coo in her ear as she eats it. Say, 'Nice girl, nice girl,' until you have her confidence.
"It is important to watch the ears. They should be perked, even twitching. If for some reason she suddenly lays them back against her head, get out of there fast."
Dexter's 10-year run here is legend. "There is no way in the world I'd get to do that now," he said, "because most people got a different idea than I do about what constitutes bad taste."
His finger was still bleeding.
"It's hard to drive with a pint of blood soaked into your pants," Dexter said. "Whenever I step out of this truck, somebody is going to call the police."
Since Dexter left here in the mid-'80s, he's written six novels - "Paris Trout" won a National Book Award - and several screenplays, but sometimes he misses the column.
Lucky Al, Dexter said, was a 54-year-old bachelor who won a huge settlement from a drug company, moved to the Puget Sound island where Dexter lives, bought a new house, new car, country- club membership, and rescued a dog from the pound.
Then Lucky Al died in his bathtub. The dog ate him.
"If you had a column," Dexter said, laughing hard, "you could go where they took the dog, interview him, describe the strange odor on his breath - the odor of a dog that has just eaten a human.
"You could note that once they taste human flesh, dogs become man-eaters for life. You could take a cute photo of him, try to get him adopted: 'Nice pet. Free to good home. No kids. No dead bodies.' "
"Damn," Dexter said. "It's bleeding again." *