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

We come to our first, at Houston and Elizabeth. Plastic flowers are in the spokes; this, or wound around the handlebars, is common, I will see. The whiteness of the bike makes the flowers vibrant, no matter how sun-bleached, like a black-and-white movie where one thing was selectively colorized. It almost looks edible, like a pretzel dipped in white chocolate.


There’s some presumption in this, that the dead seek immortality in some quasi-public art installation. If this were the norm, I don’t how I would meaningfully designate Andy’s death at ColonyScape. His Tommy Bahama shirt, sewn onto a girder? Mercedes Benz ornamentation? I voice this wariness.


“Some people do hate them,” Jarod agrees, yelling back at me from ahead. “And others see them as an anti-biking scare tactic.”


Chapter 77