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

I took a sopping bar rag and twisted it into his mug. “There. That ought to thin it out. Now your beer’s fucking light.”


At close to eleven, I met Piers at Birdland on 44th. He was enthusiastic about a late booking of an Italian jazz quartet. Piers and his weak chin moved recently to America from the UK. No surprise, since I don’t know anyone born in America named Piers. Or Sinead. He spoke in Euromumble, like some Brighton ventriloquist. I tried not to pick up his accent. After Steel MagnoliasI became Olympia Dukakis for three days and everything was a cuppacuppacuppa.


Piers’s goal was to delineate for me the vast differences between the two countries, with the United States inevitably shite. After he was done natting about his inability to find a proper English breakfast in Manhattan—a man who considers each and every part of a slaughtered pig edible—he started in on America’s obsession with teeth.


Chapter 63