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

General stretching commences to music. The class uniformly affects a downward-facing dog yoga pose.


Most can’t achieve the stance, so I am faced with a stupefying backstage vantage point. One especially long scrotum is like a stalactite. It’s like I’ve been slipped a hallucinogen and can view everyone’s tonsils from the opposite end. First grapple, now dodgeballs. I am sonot good with a roomful of strangers. Whatever I’d expected, this isn’t it. Nudercise was supposed to be my Phys. Ed. locker room, where I wouldn’t be shoved around, but my Phys. Ed. locker room did not include gray pubes, genitals lassoed with leather, and at least one Prince Albert.


The instructor exhorts us with motivational phrases.


I try to duplicate the unflattering poses. I stand on my tippy-toes, as Jarod does. I hop on one foot. I hop on the other foot. Everything is slapping. I am poaching in my own fluids and I hope no one slips in it as it washes over my ankle bones like broken downspouts.


Chapter 73