Do you think there’s any chance of fixing things with Mom and Dad? I ask Connor when I see him next. I mean, not as if we were ever the Waltons or anything, but this feels…

Like we’re the spawn of a homophobic jackass? Connor fills in.

Really, have you totally given up hope?

Wake up, Michael, he says. If I ever had hope, I gave it up when Dad threw my suitcase off the fire escape.

It’s the Fourth of July and I’m pissed because I wanted to go watch the fireworks over the East River, but it’s in the mid-nineties again, and it’s too hot to breathe much less stand for four hours, crushed up against hundreds of people.

My father is pissed because someone from work promised him Yankees tickets and then reneged, and now Dave Righetti is pitching a no-hitter against the Red Sox.

My mother is probably pissed about something too, only she’s too polite or too afraid of my dad to say so.

When my father finally gets around to looking at Saturday’s mail, he launches his own fireworks, big enough to rival Macy’s.

That’s what you get, my father says, throwing my mom’s Time magazine down on the table. “Disease Detectives,” the headline reads. Under that, proving its own point is the only part my father is paying attention to: “AIDS Hysteria.”

I pick up the magazine when my father goes back to watching the game. Flip through it. Predictions are that a cure will be found in a couple of years. I wonder if that means we’re all safe. Or if the fear that lives inside my father is like a cancer, and that will kill us if nothing else does.

Before I go to bed, the sound of fireworks ringing through the air, I examine my skin, pink and unmarked, and wonder what I need to give up to keep it that way.

There’s a brownout and the voice on Dad’s battery-operated transistor radio tells us to ration power.

Outside, the kids from the building across the street have opened some sprinklers and are running through the spray to keep cool. The cops sail by without doing anything; they get that no one wants to run their air conditioner and be the cause of a neighborhood power failure, and it’s seriously a furnace inside.

I’m antsy to get out of the apartment and away from my parents, who are bickering about the heat (It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, my mom says. I don’t give a shit what it is, it’s fucking uncomfortable, my dad replies) and the electric bill and some pots and pans that my mom wants to give to Connor, but that my dad wants to throw out.

I tell my mom I’m going to get a Good Humor bar from the bodega and then slip out the door before she can make me a list of things to bring back.

I grab a Coke instead and walk to Riverside Park, and then keep going all the way to the Joan of Arc statue at 93rd, and up to Grant’s tomb on 122nd, which is covered in garbage and graffiti and stuff I don’t want to examine closely enough to identify.