The mid-40s are that time in a gay man's life when his major paradigm shifts from sexy to Sansabelts. But when Barry Grooms's partner of twenty years is killed on Barry's forty-fifth birthday, his world doesn't so much evolve as it does explode.<br><br>After navigating through the surreal conveyor belt of friends and family, he can't eat another casserole or swallow much more advice on what constitutes grief. Still numb, he leaves his homestore and design business in the care of others as he escapes to Key West, then New York. There he gets a thankless new job working for a crazy lady in a poncho, then has too many drinks with a narcissistic Broadway actor. Next it's a nude exercise class that redefines flop sweat, and from there he's on to a relationship with a man twenty years his junior.<br><br>Yet no matter how great the retreat from the man he used to be, life's gravity spins Barry back to the small town where he grew up for one more ironic twist that teaches him how to say goodbye with grace.

The Cool Part of His Pillow

And did you know, he recited as he flopped on the bed, that a Category 5 hurricane forced the evolution of Henry Flagler’s railroad into the Overseas Highway and that the highway, now known as US 1, opened in 1938?


“Why don’t you go to work for The History Channel?” I advised.


“Why don’t you go to work on my cock?” he said, spreading his legs.


He powered his iPad and gathered more minutiae from newspaper archives and blogs. Local legends like house hauntings, prayer grottos, secret underground smuggling tunnels, where part-time resident Divine used to eat Cuban press sandwiches. He affected some incomprehensible scalawag brogue as he told me all about the island’s violent piracy beginnings.


“You’re kinda crusty, too, come to think of it,” I noted.


Chapter 41