The New Yorker:

At thirteen, I went to sleepaway camp, consumed by crushes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and my father’s worsening battle with AIDS.

By Emily Ziff Griffin

My first memory in life is of my father moving out. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a carriage house on a quiet, dead-end lane in Brooklyn Heights. It was 1980, and he was leaving because he’d finally admitted to my mother that he was gay. I watched from the doorway of my room as my dad and a friend of his carried a wide wooden dresser down the stairs. I was two years old, and that moment etched itself in my mind, along with the texture of the apartment’s kitchen floor—white linoleum with little black specks.

My dad eventually settled in the upper half of a brownstone a few blocks away, in a three-story apartment that became the headquarters of an advertising agency my parents started together soon after they separated. I spent Wednesday nights there, along with every other weekend.

After work, my father would come downstairs and prepare a small bowl of Lay’s potato chips, and we would watch “CBS Evening News” with Dan Rather. A story about the hijacking of T.W.A. Flight 847, in which passengers with Jewish-sounding names were isolated and threatened, left me concerned. My father wasn’t religious, but he was Jewish, and so was our last name. “They usually let the women and children go,” my mother assured me later when I suggested I use her German name if I ever got a passport.

 

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