Ridgewood Interlude

He asked me, “so what kind of literature do you like?”

We were sitting on the deck overlooking the yard, where a bonfire was going. We had been drinking wine and eating oysters. It was a birthday party for someone I didn’t know before I got there.

I told him that I had been fixated on James Joyce for a really long time, but I felt like I consciously needed to move on from him. Joyce was too all-consuming and I felt like he occupied too much real estate in my head. Bloomsday was coming up and I figured I’d make that my last moment with Joyce and then move on. I told him that I used to be really into William S. Burroughs, when I was a bit younger.

“He was one of the beats right? Didn’t he write On the Road?”

“That was Kerouac. But he, Allen Ginsberg, and Burroughs are considered like the canonical Beat authors. They all met in New York when they were young and stayed in touch and sort of boosted each other’s work over the years.”

“Wasn’t Burroughs a bit older though?”

“Yeah, he was like eight years older than Kerouac and twelve years older than Ginsberg. Kerouac and Ginsberg went to Columbia together, but Burroughs didn’t.”

“So he was like this dark, older gay guy who moved to New York and kind of lurked around the lit scene at the time?”

Somebody came out and joined the conversation and we changed the subject. I moved down by the fire and picked up a raw oyster. It had presumably been sitting there since the beginning of the party. I wasn’t sure whether it was still safe to eat. I asked, should I eat this oyster? Everyone told me it was fine, so I decided to take the risk and swallowed it whole. The next day I caught the J train to the Lower East Side to attend the Spectra Poets release party with my boyfriend.