He was created in a Newark slum, rife with roaches and rats, and came into the world in January 1950, the son of a construction worker and a waitress at the local diner. His parents, according to the morality of the age, had had no choice but to marry when a meeting in a neighbourhood dance hall and a few glasses too much of bad hooch had led to things getting out of hand and his own conception. Early on, he knew nothing of this. Babies never know how or by whom they got here. They have to find out, sometimes the hard way.
His father was not a bad man, by his lights. After Pearl Harbor he had volunteered for the armed forces, but as a skilled construction worker he had been deemed more useful at home, where the war effort involved the creation of thousands of new factories, dockyards and government offices in the New Jersey area.
He was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he tried to live on the straight and narrow, bringing his wage packet home unopened, trying to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio.
But later, after the Korean War, the job opportunities slipped away. Only the industrial blight remained and the unions were in the grip of the Mob.
Calvin was five when his mother left. He was too young to understand why. He knew nothing of the loveless union his parents had had, accepting with the philosophical endurance of the very young that people always shouted and quarrelled that way. He knew nothing of the travelling salesman who had promised her bright lights and better frocks. He was simply told she had ‘gone away’.
He had accepted that his father was now home each evening, looking after him instead of having a few beers after work, staring glumly at a foggy television screen. It was not until his teens that he learned his mother, abandoned in her turn by the travelling salesman, had tried to return, but had been rebuffed by the angry and bitter father.
When he was seven his father hit upon the idea to solve the problem of a home and the need to search for work far and wide. They moved out of the walk-up tenement in Newark and acquired a second-hand trailer home. This became his home for ten years.
Father and son moved from job to job, living in the trailer, the scruffy boy attending whichever local school would take him. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, the Beatles over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam.
The jobs came and the jobs were completed. They moved through the northern cities of East Orange, Union and Elizabeth; then on to work outside New Brunswick and Trenton. For a time they lived in the Pine Barrens while Dexter Senior was foreman on a small project. Then they headed south to Atlantic City. Between the ages of eight and sixteen Cal attended nine grade schools in as many years. His formal education could fill an entire postage stamp.
But he became wise in other ways: street-wise, fight-wise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet nine inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch. Once he challenged the booth fighter in a fairground sideshow, knocked him flat and took the twenty-dollar prize.
A man who smelt of cheap pomade approached his father and suggested the boy attend his gym with a view to becoming a boxer, but they moved on to a new city and a new job.
There was no question of money for vacations, so when school was out, the kid just came to the construction site with his father. There he made coffee, ran errands, did odd jobs. One of the ‘errands’ involved a man with a green eyeshade who told him there was a vacation job taking envelopes to various addresses across Atlantic City and saying nothing to anyone. Thus for the summer vacation of 1965 he became a bookie’s runner.
Even from the bottom of the social pile, a smart kid can still look. Cal Dexter could sneak unpaying into the local movie house and marvel at the glamour of Hollywood, the huge rolling vistas of the Wild West, the shimmering glitz of the screen musicals, the crazy antics of the Martin and Lewis comedies.
He could still see in the television adverts smart apartments with stainlesssteel kitchens, smiling families in which the parents seemed to love each other. He could look at the gleaming limousines and sports cars on the billboards above the highway.
He had nothing against the hardhats of the construction sites. They were gruff and crude, but they were kind to him, or most of them anyway. On site he too wore a hard hat and the general presumption was that once out of school he would follow his fa
ther into the building trade. But he had other ideas. Whatever life he had, he vowed, it would be far from the crash of the triphammer and the choking dust of cement mixers.
Then he realized that he had nothing to offer in exchange for that better, more moneyed, more comfortable life. He thought of the movies, but presumed all film stars were towering men, unaware that most are well under five feet nine. This thought only came to him because some barmaid said she thought he looked a bit like James Dean, but the building workers roared with laughter, so he dropped the idea.
Sport and athletics could get a kid out of the street and on the road to fame and fortune, but he had been through all his schools so fast he had never had a chance to make any of the school teams.
Anything involving a formal education, let alone qualifications, was out of the question. That left other kinds of working-class employment: table-waiter, bellhop, grease-monkey in a garage, delivery-van driver; the list was endless but for all the prospects most of them offered he might as well stay with construction. The sheer brutalism and danger of the work made it better paid than most.
Or there was crime. No one raised on the waterfronts or construction camps of New Jersey could possibly be unaware that organized crime, running with the gangs, could lead to a life of big apartments, fast cars and easy women. The word was, it hardly ever led to jail. He was not Italian-American, which would preclude full membership of the Mob aristocracy, but there were Wasps who had made good.
He quit school at seventeen and started the next day at his father’s worksite, a public works housing project outside Camden. A month later the driver/operator of the earth mover fell ill. There was no substitute. It was a skilled job. Cal looked at the interior of the cab. It made sense.
‘I could work this,’ he said. The foreman was dubious. It would be against all the rules. Any inspector chancing along and his job would be history. On the other hand, the whole team was standing around needing mountains of earth shifted.
‘There’s an awful lot of levers in there.’
‘Trust me,’ said the kid.
It took about twenty minutes to work out what lever did which function. He began to shift dirt. It meant a bonus, but it was still not a career.
In January 1968 he turned eighteen and the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive. He was watching television in a bar in Camden. After the newscast came several commercials and then a brief recruitment film made by the army. It mentioned that, if you shaped up, the army would give you an education. The next day he walked into the US Army office in Camden and said:
‘I want to join the army.’
Back then every American youth would, failing some pretty unusual circumstances or voluntary exile, become liable for compulsory draft just after the eighteenth birthday. The desire of just about every teenager and twice that number of parents was to get out of it. The Master Sergeant behind the desk held out his hand for the draft card.
‘I don’t have one,’ said Cal Dexter. ‘I’m volunteering.’ That caught their attention.
The MS drew a form towards him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away.