Love, Sex, Lies in the (Hi-Rise)

The warning on the pamphlet states, “If you experience an erection for more than four hours, contact your doctor.” Many old men have died with smiles on their faces. Love, Sex, Lies in the High-Rise is a gusty, explicit, sexual story of seniors and the lifestyles they carried over to their late sixties, seventies, and some eighties. Most of the seniors in Franklin Mews chose not to sit back and live a life of self-pity and loneliness but to embrace the opportunity to have another chance at love, lust, eroticism, and passion in their final years. In Franklin Mews, a senior high-rise apartment building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, two tenants—Duke Wilson, seventy-eight, who has an extensive collection of jazz vinyls from Satchmo to Brownie, and Cebee Walker, seventy-three—find romance and love after some forty-odd years. “Kill it, kill it, kill it, Duke,” Cebee cried, making reference to his strokes as he thrust harder and harder, bringing her to an exhausting climax. In the community room, some of Duke’s friends and other men sit and fabricate stories of days gone by. They were pimps, preachers, and alcoholics. Some never change; one of his friends still lives the thug life, and the other has an obsession for porno movies and freaky sex. We find a bit of amusement when Cebee’s best friend, Sug, asks her for the second time to accompany her to the emergency room at the hospital for them to remove the vibrator that got stuck in her vagina. There are many stories in Franklin Mews about the tenants that would shock you. Maybe not. But Love, Sex, Lies in the High-Rise adds a new meaning to “growing old gracefully. Baby boomers, now the real spice of life begins. No inhibitions, no rules, no guilt, just a whirlwind of erotic pleasure waiting for you.