FIRST DIBS, LAST WRIGHTS

A NOVEL IN INSTALLMENTS*

“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house, we're born
Into this world, we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm …”

- The Doors, from “Riders on the Storm,” the last song recorded Jim Morrison - aka The Lizard King - before he died in Paris on July 3, 1971

CHAPTER ONE

Dibs looked out the Amtrak train window at the Hudson River and saw instead the landscape of her life, a life that began with so much of her childhood spent on the muddy banks of all this water flickering within her reflection embedded in the window as the train made the noise all trains make as they move onward lurchingly, low to the ground, like she once moved herself when she was a teenager afraid of her own body. She is even more afraid of it now. Wait. Is she? Is she really? It’s not fright exactly just a kind of distaste for the fleshy sediment of herself that she’d become. The whoosh of clanks which she attributed to the train’s steel wheels on its tracks - or whatever steely innards it needs to move in such a manner just as she had needed them to move in hers when she was that teenager - sounded like the spike heels her friend Anna, who hated spike heels, would wear to her family’s stark, uncarpeted church as an act of defiance when her mother, the organist there where Anna’s father was the preacher, made her attend her father’s Sunday services only an hour or two after she’d sneak back into her house after one of their Dibs-and-Anna-All-Alones, those Saturday nights they’d spend deep in the woods that they promised never to tell anyone ever about - especially that very last one that was the reason Dibs fled to Manhattan as soon as she was old enough to flee, the city a much safer place than a little upstate New York town that bordered the belly of such woods and served as the home of such a church.

“That place is neither Baptist nor Methodist - more caught up in itself than even the Catholics - just invented as far as I can tell by those two, Preacher Wright and that odd little bird of a wife, all dirges and indemnities against damnation,” is the way her grandmother, a devout atheist with rather pronounced pagan leanings, described that church and “the Last Wrights,” as she came to call the couple she detested. Dibs’s grandmother had a way with words which flowed like a river themselves from her, the pull of their ever-present current the place where Dibs’s childhood banked itself for a time with a kind of comfort that all murmuring grandmothers can grant to a beloved grandchild although her grandmother wasn’t the quaint sort one would expect to find in an upstate hamlet. Using the woman’s power of description that had been embedded in her as if it were what was left of her grandmother’s own reflection there in the window of herself through which her grandmother had been fated, forced really, to look out into the rest of the world, Dibs told her later-in-life friends down in the 1990s Manhattan of her 20s that her grandmother, garrulous with the gait of a longshoreman who had taken a ballet class or two, reminded her of Tilda Swinton, their new favorite actress, taking a swing at playing Geraldine Page because Dibs had fallen in with a tribe of East Village types who understood that description without even trying, the lot of them looking as if they awoke with a bemused knowingness left smeared on their faces from another night before.

“The belly” was what her grandmother had called such a place within the woods when she had warned Dibs as a child never to go too far into that “forever forest” which is what she also called those clutches of holt that hugged the town on all the sides that were not claimed by the river because those who did venture into that “trance of trees” sometimes, she warned Dibs, never came out. Such a warning was why Dibs turned her attention “riverward” as a child just as she was doing now on the train. “When anything scares you around here, you turn your back on it and face that river,” Dibs was told early on when the rush of her grandmother’s words were beginning to make sense to her. “You face the Hudson. You face riverward. We’re riverward people, you and me. The Light and The River are what save us. There are three types of folks in this town, Deborah,” she’d claim, using Dibs’s real name, the one her dead daddy and mama had given her before they died in a car crash that had not killed her where she was still, at two years old, bound so safely in her child’s seat, the why of how she wound up being raised by such a woman. “There are the forest folks and there are those of us who find the river more of a welcome,” said her grandmother. “And now there are those Last Wrights and their wretched pew-huggers who have moved in, that righteous bunch that just seems a bit too overly religious to be really as righteous as they all make themselves out to be. I have my theories about those folks, but I’ll keep them to myself for now. I do like your friend Anna but that’s because I don’t think she likes her parents too much. She knows things, that one. She’s got more than theories. We’ve got to keep that one close.”

Dibs’s grandmother never ranted but there was that drone of dread threaded within her big-boned bonhomie which Dibs, in her teenage years, overlaid with the music of Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin when she’d play the records that had belonged to her parents in an attempt to understand who they had been and how they had maybe moved within the world themselves. Their two favorite singers were Jim and Janis according to her grandmother who, fighting back tears because she was just not the teary type even when tears tried to arrive, described them, Morrison and Joplin, as “those ghosts who arrived, one right after the other, right before they were ghosts themselves, your mama and daddy. Rock’n’roll will always be ghost music to me now goddamn it.” But then Dibs would - and Anna too when she was visiting - help her grandmother deny her tears by grabbing her by her big rough hands and making her dance to the music with them. That is when that pagan streak in her grandmother would take over and Dibs and Anna would stand back and marvel at her moves, that balletic longshoreman of a woman shorn of shame, making Jim’s “Riders on the Storm” into an anthem of ghost-gutted ritual, shamanic, shimmering before them in the watery late day light reflected off the Hudson below, “riverward riverward riverward” her grandmother would grunt a repetitive, rhythmic whisper and, kicking off the boots she favored, bound about until the floorboards of her old house shook with the weight of both her sock-footed self and Jim’s woeful wail, the together throb of them entering Dibs’s body - she could tell Anna felt it too - like, yes, a lizard slithering kingly into place, its tongue flicking like a flame that did not burn but warmed its cold flicking self with the warmth with which such music in such a moment could fill them. Then her grandmother, laughing, would put back on her boots with the sudden realization that she was just that: a grandmother. And she’d make them all some tea and serve them the always slightly burnt cookies she’d have baked and they’d sit in silence and remember that momentary warmth, that gust of ghosts, that had swept through them all.

(Above Janis Joplin, 1943-1970, and Jim Morrison, 1943-1971.)

Dibs continued to survey the landscape of her life from the train’s window and realized in her reverie that, at 54, she was now the same age her grandmother had been when she took her in when Dibs was left orphaned back in 1972 and, doing the math, her grandmother had been 70 in 1986 when she’d dance about to Jim Morrison and conjure such otherworldly warmth for sixteen-year-old Dibs and Anna in that house she had left Dibs in her will. Very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone else on the train, Dibs found herself humming “Riders on the Storm” and denying her own tears, weaving the tune into the muffled train car conversations of the seat mates behind and in front of her and the louder one-way cellphone one of some rude asshole a few seats back, an annoying nattering on about nothing at all that nobody wanted to hear including, Dibs presumed, the person on the other end of the phone, the asshole now musing about what kind of mustard was the best to put on a hotdog and complaining about how expensive the last one was he had had at Yankee Stadium. Dibs, newly dumbfounded by the rudimentary rudeness not just of one Amtrak rider but of all humanity if she were forced to harp on it, tried to concentrate instead on the train’s side-to-side rustle as if it had those big-boned hips her grandmother had back when Dibs was that teenager sneaking back into her own house a few hours before sunrise when her grandmother would wake on those cold upstate mornings wearing her dead second husband’s woolen long johns beneath the robe she’d owned since she sold a line of the flannel things back in the 1960s in her dry goods store located on the town’s Main Street.

Dib’s grandmother had finally died at the age of 92 in 2010 even though for the last 22 years of her grandmother’s life and the last 36 years of her own, Dibs had refused to return to that town that had taken so much from her and where her grandmother in a defiance much greater than tottering on spiked heels on the noisy floor of some now burned-down church refused to leave except for the occasional visit with Dibs in downtown Manhattan only two hours away. Dibs had thought about moving back up to the house during the COVID lockdown - or even selling it since the prices upstate were spiking along with the infection levels at the time and the place on a prime piece of river real estate was becoming so dilapidated in its own big-boned beauty that the newest batch of local kids latched on to its history to convince themselves that it was haunted with ghosts who still had too much gumption - but she had stayed put in a Manhattan which seemed rather ghost-gutted itself at the time. Plus, she knew - knew it in her own bones - that someday she would return to that house and the town. And now that day - here it was - had arrived.

The train was passing Rhinecliff, and Dibs - her hum sliding into one long sigh so deeply felt that it were as if she were nothing but the sigh itself - looked up at the storm clouds uncurling their thick strands of grey that looked like what had sat atop her grandmother’s head when Dibs would help her untether it all late at night from her whalebone combs that kept it swept upward into a sculpted hive, a swarm of hair into which her grandmother would often stick what she’d need that day, a freshly sharpened pencil or a note to remind her of some errand or journal entry she wanted to make or an incantation she needed to memorize before burning the little piece of paper with the lone cigarette she allowed herself at 5 p.m. which she’d stick up there too. Dibs even thought she saw the face of her grandmother in the shifting clouds as they kept trying to figure out what they were supposed to be doing there above Rhinecliff and the Hudson River - stenciling a projected image within their formations above it all for those below to decipher (a teasing signal that they all, the clouds and all below, had agency) or just fumbling about for some more fucking upstate weather? Dibs smiled at the thought put there by her momentarily spotting her grandmothers’s face in the grumbling grandness of it all since the old woman had possessed that same characteristic which had so endeared her to Dibs so early on. If only I had inherited some of that grandness, she also thought, a grumble itself that matched the first slight rumble of thunder and, as she thought it, the thud of home that the town had instilled in her - that thing that the horror of the place had balled itself into, tight, tiny, so she could carry it inside her all these years - began, as she approached the town’s station, finally to be honed into something that felt more like a speck of vastness. Was that a thought as well put there by her grandmother? A speck of vastness? It sure sounded like something her grandmother would have said as she held Dibs as a child in her lap as they rocked on the porch and they looked out at this river and this sky and the billowing, bellowing skirt of clouds they’d gather, the river and the sky, about themselves, the real and the reflection of what is real, or “the embedding” as her grandmother grandly grumbled into Dibs’s little attentive ear when her grandmother was acknowledging other deeply felt “arrivals,” as she called them, when the late-day light turned into a sharpened shock of blue as if to shear the shore from the river and it from the shore, a melding of “both matter and what matters.” Because this - this - was the biggest surprise Dibs was feeling as she was remembering her grandmother’s grandness, her growls, those evenings on the porch when she’d fall asleep in her grandmother’s lap with the old woman’s words, the river of them, lapping, in turn, at her ear. This melding. This: it wasn’t feeling like a return, after all, but another kind of, yes, arrival, a new start, a feeling as oddly freeing as her exit from the place had been. And that thud? She was now realizing after all these years as the train was slowing to its stop that it could be more correctly described as the lack of sound a crash makes in the suddenness of its being over, the lack that had itself arrived in her two-year-old body - another embedding, the first of her arrivals - when she’d survived in that crumpled car with her dead and bloodied and broken parents in the front seat, the latter thud of what had come crashing down in the belly of those woods but an echo of that initial lack trapped inside her.

When the thud-heavy Dibs had fled, a low-to-the-ground teenager, to Manhattan all those years ago, she had focused on the possible, had forced herself to do so, because that’s what her grandmother had told her to do when they were saying their goodbyes at this same old train station looming now before her and she was crying in her grandmother’s bountiful arms. “Wipe your tears, Deborah, wipe them with the possible,” her grandmother had whispered in her ear that day, lapping more words into it. “Let the possible be your tissue.” Dibs wasn’t crying now as she disembarked - tears themselves seemed something from long ago - but she was feeling that honed speck of home inside her opening up to what was possible now that she was actually back. Yes, a sense of vastness was the only way she could understand it, that “possible” that her grandmother had once advised her to use as a tissue now the tissue through which she stepped as her feet tried to find the ground down below the train’s steps as she felt for the Amtrak conductor’s arm who was helping all the other passengers off the train. She checked the sky. The clouds. Her grandmother’s forming face. No rain yet. Just the grumbling grandness of a bit of thunder rolling from her grandmother’s mouth up there that nudged her on her way.

Anna, who like Dibs’s grandmother had never left their hometown, awaited her today in Dibs’s grandmother’s old home, the front rooms of which they were turning into a vintage clothing store. Dibs had been a stylist down in Manhattan until the work began to slow and she turned, the granddaughter of a dry goods proprietress, to selling her curated closets full of vintage finds at flea markets. She specialized in the fashions that were in-vogue around the year her parents died, the late 1960s/early 1970s era, and called her flea market booth First Dibs because that was how she had gotten her nickname. She’d heard her grandmother once claim “first dibs” when they were about to taste a batch of cooling fudge and, from then on, Dibs, using the term she thought of as one of her grandmother’s incantations, had insisted on being first in line or first to play with a toy or first to try a french fry at some hamburger joint over in Athens or Catskill or Chatam (as she always misspelled it) or, later, the first to date a favored boy when she and Anna would eye them all in the cafeteria during lunch or linger on the outskirts of the football field after school eyeing the backfield during a practice until they began to eye each other. Since the whole thing, the vintage clothing store, had a by-the-seat-of-their-bell-bottom-pants feel to it and was located in the old parlor and dining room where Dibs’s de-booted sock-footed grandmother would ride out the storm of Jim Morrison’s voice until tea and cookies were served, Dibs had wanted to call their shop, which was really just a bunch of stored plastic-covered clothes in a couple of rooms, Unfinished Business because so much of her returning finally to such a place was about just that. But Anna had convinced her to keep the name First Dibs so First Dibs it was still to be.

Dibs had just made it to her old front porch before the rain erupted, the thunderous rolling advent of it sounding like that which accompanied the opening trudging shake-the-mud-of-this-world-off guitar chords and drum beats and keyboard calls of “Riders on the Storm” until, when Dibs drifted on inside, she realized that the sound of the song itself was echoing in the rooms filled with her collection of plastic-covered clothes and some of her grandmother’s old merchandise that had been stored in the attic. Anna must have put The Doors record on as a welcome to her as she came through her own again after all this time. But where was she in this mess, this mass of clothes and shoes and scarves and jewelry Dibs had earlier shipped upstate which they still needed to inventory and organize?

Where the fuck was Anna?

Dibs felt the first stab of panic at having arrived.

But then she spotted her old friend huddled unmoving in a chair over in a corner having donned some of the clothes and looking for all this world like Janis Joplin. Dibs at first thought, in fact, she was seeing Joplin then remembered this was just how Anna used to dress when they were teenagers, another little thoughtful trick of welcome on her part. Yes, there she was - Anna - beneath a feather boa reconfigured as a hat. Big round sunglasses. A velvet lavender tunic. Red bell bottoms. Even some love beads. But Anna, so antic back then, was never this still. There was something eery about it. Was she passed out? Asleep? Had she overdosed - Anna did like her drugs back-in-the-day - like Joplin had?

“Anna!” Dibs called, making her way through the racks of crackling plastic-covered clothes.

Her friend still wasn’t moving.

“Anna!” she called again - the pulsation of panic was wafting through her now - before she saw Anna finally, groggily - then fiercely - stir.

“Oh, hi, Dibs,” she said, lowering her sunglasses to get a better look at her. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“You scared me, Anna,” said Dibs. “Girl, I’m not ready for you to be dead.”

The old friends smiled at each other.

“I’m here,” said Anna. “We’re here. Dibs-and-Anna-All-Alone, huh. We’ve snuck back in one more time.”

“Is this possible?” asked Dibs, looking at the racks of clothes all about them under all their plastic. “Is this even possible?” She then felt something in the air like a tear, a leak from somewhere above them. She wiped it away.

Anna rose to meet her.

“Riders on the storm … ” she and Dibs sang along with the mostly dead Doors, “… Riders on the storm … into this house, we’re born …”

They danced.

####

*This first chapter is open to all Subscribers, but moving forward this series of a novel written in installments here at SES/SUMS IT UP will be for Paid Subscribers only. I am nervous about it because so much of writing is about re-writing - so you will be privy to a writer’s first draft as I work out the idea of this novel that keeps telling itself to me even though I have no idea of the plot (in all its details) it has in mind. I will be reading it in some way along with you as I write it for all writing is a kind of channeling. I am the conduit. (This is in addition to my regular weekly column open to all subscribers and not a replacement for it.)

I hope this first chapter interests you enough to join others who are paying only $5 a month or $50 a year. I am going to try to put up a chapter a week, or every ten days. Even if my paid subscribers stay at the present number, I am committed to doing this.

A friend said he was honestly touched that I still believed there was a market for serious readers. I told him on some level I am doing this for myself as much as for my readers. It gives me an even deeper sense of purpose and deepens, in turn, my commitment to being a writer. It is really all I am, all I have left in the world.

Thanks for joining me.

But I will admit this: it is scary.

I am scared.

Onward.