Blow

Behold the perfect white orb. Grasp it by its tender stem, hold it to your eye; see the world in the spaces between its stars. Now. Transform the orb—transform yourself—into a microcosm of power. Purse your sweet thick lips and do as you did with the flicker of fire that marked your second year. Blow.

“Mano, mano” says my son, balancing on his tiptoes and reaching for my hand. He has just turned two and will not be carried. Together we stroll through the pre-school parking lot, past the playground’s chain link fence, up the narrow sidewalk toward our car. The journey is fraught with small dangers. Cement that lies uneasily on the ground, chunks of it rise, then fall, following the slope of soil. Cracks emerge where weeds have pushed through looking for light.

My son breaks loose and runs. I yell his name, hold my breath as I watch his feet skim the uneven pavers, any one of which could rise to catch his toes and hurl his growing cranium toward cement; a potentially fatal blow. But he does not fall, not today. He stops at a tree and peers down. I catch up and see what he has bent over to examine: a small grove of wintered dandelions bobbing seductively in the breeze.

Behold the tightly-wrapped brick. A perfect unit, near symmetrical on all sides, shiny like a child’s birthday gift. Slit taut plastic and slip white onto the corner of an impeccable blade. Bitter. Which you taste as sweet just before your tongue turns numb. Patch the slit with duct tape and the brick is back in play. Blow.

“Your dog ate my fucking burrito!” David growled. He was always on edge, and it was always him against the world. But David wasn’t a bad guy, not really. Just shady. Slippery. Explosive. And a link in the California cocaine chain—though which was cause and which was effect was debatable.

We stumbled upon his apartment one day, while walking around the Mission searching for a place to live. My boyfriend Josue and our friend Ruben saw an open door to an empty place and walked right in.

The apartment smelled like fresh paint; there was fine wood dust on the kitchen floor and a caulking gun left on the counter. David, who lived upstairs, must have seen us from his window; he appeared in the doorway with a gruff “can I help you?” and I don’t know exactly what Josue and Ruben said to him, but soon they were all talking like old friends.

In a matter of minutes Ruben and Josue had closed a deal with David on renting the apartment, and we moved in two weeks later. Such a score, I thought. An affordable place, newly renovated, in the Mission. What a reward for our good Karma. This was long before I had a son, before I thought much about complicity.

Behold the modern day bomb. Fat Man is a plump movie prop, Little Boy a poster-child missile. They are harmless shining steel with fine fins. But. Release Little Boy and watch Hiroshima melt to the ground; release Fat Man and see Nagasaki burn to the skies. Blow.

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was done with the atomic bomb.”

At the apex of his career, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, reckoned with the blood he saw on his hands. During his three years of fervent experimentation with fission and implosion and controlled releases of nuclear energy, “Oppie” was largely untroubled by the ethical implications of his creation. The task at hand was to solve a “technically sweet” problem, and to beat the Nazis to the bomb.

But his reckoning began when he saw the very first bomb explode. The Trinity Test: an earth-shattering success. And in its afterlife, just three weeks before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer famously uttered...