God's Pocket (1983)

Pete Dexter, like Bradley, spent a good deal of time in the bars of South Philadelphia, and his tongue-in-cheek accounts of the beating he received in Devil's Pocket—he calls it "the greatest bar fight in the history of South

Philadelphia," which took place in "the worst white neighborhood in America"—both poke fun at and conform to the codes that signal the credentialing of the poet Brown. If a knife cut across the chest is supposed to indicate close engagement with the city of fact, then how much more deeply do a broken back, a broken hip, ninety stitches in the scalp, and a changed sense of taste propose to inscribe Dexter's relation to South Philly on his body? God's Pocket (1983) moves the South Street literature's composite story back to the white-ethnic enclave and the decline, but the master story of postindustrial transformation—and the meditation on the urban intellectual's place in the landscape—retains its formal and thematic shape with remarkable consistency.

God's Pocket, an imaginary little neighborhood that Dexter places on Twenty-fifth, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh streets around Lombard, just north of the extreme western end of South Street, is a composite of Philadelphia's white-ethnic enclaves. Its residents, insular people of Irish and Italian descent, work in construction, at the local refineries, for the city or the mob. They drink in old-style bars like the Uptown and the Hollywood, where people "sit around and argue about the Eagles or the Flyers or the niggers . . . the things everybody agreed on." They live in dark, narrow rowhouses with "two bedrooms, one bath, four Touch Tone Princess telephones."^[16] God's Pocket, then, stands for Devil's Pocket, Tasker, Whitman, Two Street, Fishtown, and other tight little enclaves descended from the world built by people like John Fury: the industrial neighborhood order's immigrant-ethnic villages. Like Bradley's "moving" the Pei towers to Spruce Street to conflate Center City and Penn, Dexter's "moving" Devil's Pocket from south of South to north of South places it right on the line where South Philly meets Center City, an encounter between declining enclave and a new urban world that will give rise to the novel's culminative act of violence.

The industrial moment has passed, and the Pocket is an anachronism in the postindustrial landscape. The financial hub and gentrified neighborhoods of Center City are just to the east, the campus of the University of Pennsylvania just to the west; the suburbs beckon to those who want to move and can afford it, and the expansion of the black inner city since World War II has created a permanent sense of crisis in the Pocket. To show how the industrial neighborhood order has been succeeded, the novel surveys the landscape of North Philadelphia, which was once a vast congeries of white-ethnic neighborhoods much like South Philly and is now dominated by the city's most notoriously immiserated second ghetto. Riding to work on a bus headed south down Broad Street through North Philadelphia, a black construction worker named Lucien Edwards notes that "someone had done a lot of good work in North Philadelphia once." As a bricklayer, he has a professional appreciation for the "good work" apparent in the surviving nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rowhouse architecture of North Philadelphia, which once housed immigrant-ethnic

neighborhoods much like God's Pocket. As a skilled tradesman who makes things, he stands for an older notion of "good work" that has been in short supply for the black residents of North Philadelphia since they supplanted the white ethnics who left, along with most of the factory jobs, in the decades after the war. The white ethnics who remain in the inner city, in places like Fishtown in the north and God's Pocket in the south, see themselves as embattled and surrounded. Lucien can see the newer definition of"good work" from the windows on the other side of the bus: he likes to watch women on their way to the campus of Temple University, an enclave of professionals and aspiring professionals distinct from the neighborhoods around it and the menial service work their residents can secure. Like Penn, Temple is part of the higher education complex so crucial to a postindustrial economy based on intellectual labor and high technology. Twenty minutes later, the bus having passed through Center City and entered South Philadelphia, Lucien can compare the "good work"—meaning both the jobs and the architecture—suggested by North Philadelphia's rowhouse architecture to the Southwark Homes housing projects, part of the second ghetto built after World War II to lock the expanding black inner city in place.^[17] He decides that his wife, who prays every morning for the destruction of a white race bent on corraling and exterminating the black race, must be right about the projects: Southwark Homes, a cluster of forbidding towers crowded with people cut off from economic opportunity, "couldn't be no accident" (20).

God's Pocket, then, persists in an urban landscape that has been drastically and purposefully changed, and the Pocket's residents are embalmed in the insularity and xenophobia encouraged by this dissonance. The novel's plot is set in motion when Lucien brains Leon Hubbard, a twenty-four-year-old good-fornothing from the Pocket, with a lead pipe after Leon flies into a rage about "working for niggers" and goes after Lucien with a razor. Leon, an unemployable psychopath fueled by pharmaceuticals and paranoia, had the job only because his stepfather, Mickey Scarpato, is "connected"—he hauls meat for the local mob. Leon's death attracts the attention of Richard Shellburn, the city's best-loved newspaper columnist, who falls instantly for Leon's mother, Jeanie. At the end of a long, fantastically plotted chain of events, the two main protagonists have been banished from the inner city: Mickey is holed up in Palatka, Florida, waiting for the mob's enforcers to come for him, and Shellburn is dead—killed by patrons of the Hollywood Bar who took exception to the wording of his column about Leon Hubbard. Lucien and his foreman, a white Southerner named Peets, get back to work laying bricks but conclude that they have grown old.

God's Pocket, then, is a decline narrative, baroque to the point of self-parody. As in Man with the Golden Arm, a sense of doom pervades the novel, its sources just beyond the characters' range of perception. "'Some strange shit's goin' around,'" says Arthur "Bird" Capezio, Mickey's supplier of stolen meat,

whose electricity keeps going out and whose traditional mob protectors are getting killed and slapped around by young turks on the make. "'Everywhere. I ask but, you know, it ain't on my level or something"' (59). The "strange shit" in question is, in this case, the generational collapse of the Philadelphia mob. Organized crime, like the ethnically based machine politics to which it is tied, flourished in the urban villages of the industrial city, but the sons and nephews of the old mobsters are running the business into the ground. Holed up in Florida with Bird at the end of the novel, Mickey is not even sure the mob will have the wherewithal to find him. "In the old days, you wouldn't of had to wonder" (278). The decline of the mob is part of a larger collapse of the industrial city's orders, a gradual slide readable throughout the novel's social landscape and character system. Lucien and Peets—hard-handed, steady-working, reticent men on the model of John Fury—seem to be the last two skilled manual laborers in a city full of cheap crooks, soft-handed layabouts, and other nonproducers. Like everyone else in the novel, they are childless. Like Golden Arm, John Fury, and even Smith's South Street (in its self-critical moments), God's Pocket imagines the decline of an urban order as a family narrative that ends in barrenness. The many families of the book produce no children (except Leon, who dies), and the only inheritors of the old neighborhood are destructive bad sons on the order of John Fury Jr.: the sons and nephews who kill the old-time gangsters; and Leon Hubbard, who combines the shiftless violence of John Fury Jr. with the simpleminded uselessness of Golden Arm's Poor Peter Schwabatski.

According to the patrons of the Hollywood Bar, "Leon was what the neighborhood stood for. . . . 'He was just like everybody else in here' " (79). Sharing none of the conventional virtues of his antecedents and all of their vices, Leon is an embodiment of the Pocket in steep decline, and the black-comic returns of his corpse to the street from the grave figure the Pocket's historical situation: it is dead, but it mimics the activity of life. Leon dies early in the novel, but his body keeps getting up and hitting the streets. First, the undertaker dumps him in the alley when Mickey loses the money for the funeral at the racetrack; then, after Mickey has temporarily stored the body among stolen sides of meat in the back of his refrigerator truck, a traffic accident deposits Leon on the streets once more. The resourceful residents of South Philadelphia steal all the free meat lying around in the intersection, so that by the time the police arrive "the only meat left on the street was Leon"(213). Leon is meat, and Mickey, who drives a refrigerator truck in a land where the electricity is going out, knows that "anywhere meat went bad, it never smelled the same"(139). When Leon is finally given a funeral, Mickey extends the spoiled-meat metaphor of generational decay to the whole Pocket: he discovers that the funeral home "had that same stale smell as the Hollywood. It never occurred to him before that the smell belonged to the people as much as the bar"(243). Leon, the bad son who

stands for the Pocket, has spoiled; the mob's stolen meat spoiling in Bird's freezer indicates the unraveling of the old criminal order; the industrial-vintage urbanism for which God's Pocket stands is getting old and going bad.

God's Pocket narrates the decline with materials familiar to a reader of the South Street literature. It is a neighborhood novel that uses figures of family and landscape to show older orders in collapse, and it features a runaway scene that combines those representational strategies. Mickey, needing money to bury Leon, decides to sell the truck to Little Eddie, a used-car pirate whose Automotive Emporium sits among lines of rowhouses near Third Street and Emily deep in the fabric of South Philadelphia. One of Eddie's employees takes the truck for a test drive without Mickey's permission, and Mickey chases after him on foot, seemingly impelled by a need to watch over Leon's body. It is a dreamlike and unclearly motivated chase, in which Mickey follows the truck in traffic through South Philadelphia—up Third, all the way to Fitzwater, almost to South—at times almost close enough to touch it. At Fitzwater, the truck collides with a city bus just after Mickey stumbles and falls. The chase eerily repeats the horse-and-wagon runaway in John Fury: Mickey, disoriented and defeated in the landscape, futilely tries to keep up with an inscrutable process larger than himself. He is not sure why he is chasing the truck, only that he has to. That futile, bewildered passage through the landscape is again paired with familial collapse: Fury is at his dying wife's bedside, about to lose the family structure that stands for a neighborhood order; Mickey is chasing his dead stepson Leon, the incarnation of the Pocket, who ends up in the street anyway.

Like everyone else in the novel, Mickey tries to make sense of what is happening to him and establish control over it. Chasing the truck, he blunders through an eviction scene, crashing through the furniture on the sidewalk while a woman holding a child "began to cry 'Stop' over and over. He didn't know who she meant, but he knew how she felt" (210). Like John Fury, Mickey cannot get urban processes to stop long enough for him to impose order on his experience of them. In his dash up Third Street through the rowhouse landscape of South Philly, he passes through the stage set of decline—people bewildered in the street, crying "Stop" as the world changes around them—and arrives at an urban limit: Leon and the old mafia's "meat business," two figures of God's Pocket and the declining urbanism it evokes, are the detritus left over after a crash (like the one that broke Sophie Majcinek's body, family, and neighborhood in Golden Arm). The local family drama is part of the larger drama of urban process. At the center of both is Leon, who goes bad despite Mickey's efforts to stop the process.

Richard Shellburn, the newspaper columnist, also finds himself chasing after a sense of control and losing ground. God's Pocket shares with John Fury a notion of how to write about the white-ethnic neighborhood—the decline— and engages the question of "who writes the inner city?" also raised by Smith

and Bradley. Shellburn is one of several writer-characters (and the only white one) moving through the South Street literature. He is an urban intellectual charged with the task of representing Philadelphia by gathering material from the city of fact around him and constructing a city of feeling infused with meanings that sell newspapers. Shellburn, then, is like Mike Royko—although he is closer to Jimmy Breslin in his empurpled style and closer to Herb Caen in the nearly universal adulation he commands until his disastrous run-in with the people of God's Pocket. Like the Bowers brothers and Adlai Brown, Shellburn faces the problem of finding a productive relationship to the postwar city; like Philip Bowers, his failure kills him.

Shellburn is a writer in crisis who has had nothing new or interesting to say for twenty years. Getting by on recycled conventional material while he drinks himself to death, he has been writing what his readers want to read. He cranks out appeals to civic pride from an insider's perspective: "I love this city . . . not the sights, the city. I loved her last night, and I love her this morning, before she brushes her teeth, knowing she snores" (69). He tells stories of neighborhood decline populated by frenzied criminals and extravagantly innocent victims: "The old man had eyes as sad as the dog's. He looked into the empty rooms where he and his wife had lived their lives, quiet lives, and wondered what had happened to his neighborhood, that children would come into the house and beat up an old man for his money. 'At least they didn't hurt Hoppy,' he said" (12). His occasional paint-by-numbers representations of blacks and Puerto Ricans—the latter are "a spirited and proud people" summed up by neighborhood portraits of "burned-out houses, wine bottles, rats, naked children"—are careful never to alienate white-ethnic readers. If he writes a column criticizing the police for their treatment of Puerto Ricans, for instance, he will be sure to write one later in the week ("The Loneliest Job," or "Down Any Alley") that lionizes the police and other white-ethnic icons "for walking around a wino instead of kicking him" (70). He also writes columns decrying the coming of "the New Journalists," a vague category of younger reporters from "places like Florida" who threaten to ruin the local newspaper business in unspecified ways. These "New Journalists" are not the literary-journalistic movement of that name, identified by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, that did change the practices of American newspaper reporting; rather, they seem to be "new" and threatening simply because they are urban intellectuals who have no trouble writing the postindustrial city and do not know or care much about places like God's Pocket.

Shellburn is losing touch, as Nelson Algren did, with the postindustrial city. Like Algren, Shellburn imagines himself to be the last good writer in town, an endangered species in a changing literary-historical ecology. Like Algren, Shellburn looks to the industrial neighborhood order—or, in the early 1980s, to survivals of it—for inspiration and his ideal readership. Looking out the

window of his Center City office, Shellburn sees South Philadelphia, "where the city started. When he looked at a map, he could see how something must have tipped over there and spilled out in two giant stains, the northeast and northwest parts of the city. The source was South Philly. When it came up, he would say he could look out his window and see the people he wrote for" (72). South Philly is the starting point for Shellburn's city of feeling, as it is for Adlai Stevenson Brown's: it is the place that produces writing and readers. In that sense, South Philly produces Philadelphia for Shellburn, hence the image of the rest of Philadelphia as stains poured from South Philly. That image of spilling also captures a demographic movement underlying Shellburn's writing: the movement of white ethnics to the northeast and far northwest portions of Philadelphia since World War II is part of the story of neighborhood decline in South and North Philly that forms an essential component of his stock in trade. Shellburn thus echoes Algren in subject and even in style: Shellburn's ode to Philadelphia as a woman who shares his bed echoes Algren's comparison of loving Chicago to loving a woman with a broken nose;^[18] phrases like "Down Any Alley" share Algren's tendency toward the sentimental universal. Shellburn raises the specter of Algren because he is similarly burned out, an urban intellectual running out of things to say about a city that seems strange to him.

God's Pocket, in keeping with Smith's and Bradley's dramas of placing the writer in the neighborhood, defines this urban intellectual's relationship to the changing inner city by putting Shellburn in a signifying landscape. For all his talk of communing with the people, Shellburn is comfortable only in postwar America's two favorite refuges from the inner city: his Lincoln Continental, "the safest place he had in the city" (70), and his suburban property on Chesapeake Bay, where he half-heartedly plans to build a house and settle down. He does not seem to belong in the inner city anymore. At one end of the social scale, he does not belong in the exclusive, heavily redeveloped Center City neighborhood of Society Hill. During his brief and ill-fated marriage to a socialite—who had planned to gain hegemonic leverage in Philadelphia's social scene via this "cultural juxtaposition" with a regular guy—he lived in a Society Hill townhouse, but the marriage collapsed and he moved out. At the other end of the social scale are the black and Hispanic neighborhoods of North Philadelphia, and Shellburn sends his legman Billy to do his reporting there. Unlike Adlai Brown, who has to see his material up close to write poetry, Shellburn does not really need to do any reporting to trot out the rats, roaches, and naked children of generic ghetto reportage. Billy's diligence allows Shellburn to insulate himself from the inner city, to avoid his readership. When Shellburn finally confronts those readers in God's Pocket, somewhere between Society Hill and North Philadelphia on the social scale, they are toting baseball bats and looking for blood.

In a darkly comic rendering of the urban intellectual's relationship to his subject and readership, Shellburn is beaten to death in the street by expert readers to whom he wishes to pander. Shellburn's column on Leon Hubbard's death uses the decline to conflate the reporter's grievances with those of the Pocket's residents: "Until the coming of the New Journalism . . . you only got to die once in this city, even if you came from God's Pocket. . . . There was a time . . . when a 24-year-old working man could die once, have the event noticed in his local newspaper, and then move on to his reward, without the complications of an additional death" (255-56). Shellburn's account repeats City on the Make' s strategy of positioning writers like himself alongside the decent working people of the old neighborhoods. Both groups have had indignities visited upon them by "the New Journalists": his own paper reported Leon's death at the construction site and the body's reappearance in the truck accident as two different deaths, a professional embarrassment to Shellburn and a social embarrassment to Leon's mother. Shellburn stands up for "the working man" here, his standard pose. What is it about the column, then, that sparks a wave of angry phone calls to the paper, leading to Shellburn's ill-fated peace-making trip to the Hollywood Bar?

Shellburn is guilty of two major offenses. The first is generic. In his column, he portrays Leon as the type of all the "workingmen of God's Pocket"— "small, dirty-faced, neat as a pin inside," just like the rowhouses in which the simple people of God's Pocket live. Leon and the rowhouses look the same because they are both exemplars of a way of life imbued with the dignity of hard work and simple, blue-collar pleasures, like a "drink at the Hollywood Bar or the Uptown, small, dirty-faced little places deep in the city" where the good people of the Pocket argue "about things they don't understand. Politics, race, religion" (257). As the callers and Billy explain, Shellburn is telling the wrong kind of decline here. Dirty hands is the appropriately clichéd image of hard work; "'Dirty-faced is you don't take a bath"' (264). Shellburn has equated God's Pocket with the generic North Philadelphia of his columns, where the people are soiled by poverty and pathological culture rather than honest hard work. The people of God's Pocket also do not want to hear that they do not understand politics, race, and religion. In their preferred story of decline, they are not ignorant anachronisms adrift in a world that has passed them by; rather, they are traditionalists clinging to a proven set of political, racial, and religious beliefs in an increasingly incoherent and valueless world populated by maniacs like the children who attack defenseless old people in Shellburn's columns.

Second, by constantly making Leon's death fresh and more absurd, Shellburn, like Mickey Scarpato, is guilty of telling the Pocket that it is not so much in embattled decline as dead—and grotesquely, comically dead at that. Since Leon is held up by the Hollywood's patrons as everything the Pocket stands for, and the novel offers the recurring presence of Leon's body in the street as a

comic figure of the white-ethnic enclave's zombielike state of life after death, the newspaper and Mickey are telling the neighborhood a joke it does not want to hear. Early in the novel, after the foreman Peets lies to the police and claims Leon was killed in a workplace accident, a "fat kid" named Dick objects to the details of the newspaper's account of Leon's first death. "'They put it like that in the Daily Times,"' complains Dick, "'everybody in the whole fuckin' city sees it, thinks we're a bunch of jerk-offs down here. Walkin' around fallin' off shit all the time"' (100). Dick's animus against the newspaper seems to proceed from a sense that the paper, operating on a metropolitan scale far beyond that of the neighborhood, broadcasts the Pocket's demise as an undignified comic whimper—a matter of "fallin' off shit"—rather than a bang in which the old order makes a last stand against chaos. It is Dick, bat in hand 170 pages later, who announces to the crowd at the Hollywood that Shellburn has "'come down here to get fucked up"' (270). Mickey tries to stop the beating, fails, and is forced to leave the Pocket. The neighborhood has thus punished and eliminated Shellburn and Mickey, both of whom are responsible for holding up a mirror to a living corpse.

"'What the fuck?"' asks Mickey as the crowd closes in on Shellburn, "'Over something he wrote?"' (271). God's Pocket makes the writing of the inner city part of the violent action of the novel. Shellburn, like Mickey in pursuit of his truck, is another of the many characters adrift and disoriented in the signifying landscape of the postindustrial inner city. Like fellow writer-character Philip Bowers, killed by the fathers of the mob at the Hollywood Bar, Shellburn dies violently because he is improperly suited to the task of reading the social landscape through which he moves and representing it on paper. "The truest thing in the world," for Shellburn and other urban intellectuals committed to writing from close observation of the world around them, "was that you showed who you were" in writing a column. "It was almost incidental, what you had for issues. But how you saw things, how physical things went into your eyes and what your brain took and what it threw back, that told who you were" (255). Shellburn's literary relationship to the city through which he moves is nearly exhausted. His electricity, like Bird's, is going out; he is spoiled meat, pale and gray and soaked with bad chemicals. God's Pocket finally puts him, as dead as Leon, on the street in the Pocket, as if to suggest that his sense of how to be an urban intellectual is as parochial and limited as the neighborhood's sense of itself. In the end, the embalmed neighborhood and the doomed urban intellectual deserve one another.