I Didn't Ask to Be Born

by Bill Cosby

  And then they hear the voice of God:

  God: Where are you?

  God already knows where they are. This is the parallel of parenting because like any parent, God already knows the answer to every question. God never asks a question without knowing the answer. Like my mother. We didn’t have a telephone, so nobody could’ve told her what I had done. She would ask a question: Where were you? But she already knew the answer. She already knew I had gone someplace I was not supposed to go. And how did she know all this? She blamed it on a little bird. And I’ve always been confused about that little bird. But then, after talking to other people who used to be, at one time in their lives, children, it seems this little bird had relatives or it was a big business where mothers all chipped in to pay little birds. And these birds are everywhere in any language you want.

  So Adam answers God’s question—Where are you?

  Adam: I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

  If he was naked, what happened to the leaves? When he said this, I can only assume his leaves had fallen off, maybe while he was running to hide. After all, this was the first time Eve ever sewed anything, so maybe she didn’t do a good job with the needle and thread.

  Adam, whom I can picture crouching behind a bush, stood and said he was afraid because he was naked. To which God replied:

  God: Who told you that you were naked?

  I can see right there that the writers of Genesis had no comedy instinct, because the direct answer should have been:

  Adam: My leaf fell off.

  But God probably would’ve ignored Adam’s punch line anyway because Genesis is not Neil Simon.

  According to the writers, God then said:

  Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.

  Us? Here again, who are these other people God is talking to? The writers never tell us.

  Missing pages!

  Adam, seeing that God is putting everything on him, immediately comes clean and makes an honest statement:

  Adam: The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gavest me fruit of the tree, and I ate.

  In other words, Adam is telling God he thought it was all right to eat the fruit. Okay, here she comes, he names her woman, she becomes Eve because of so forth and so on, and then she goes off and eats the fruit. What is a man supposed to do when this is the woman God has given to him? When Adam eats the fruit, there is no snake to tell him, Thoust will be this or thoust will be that. Plus there weren’t yet warning signs like heavy rain and a flood, so Adam figured everything was wonderful and it must be okay to eat the fruit. There are a lot of pages missing here, but that’s my guess about what Adam was thinking.

  In defense of Adam eating the fruit, I was very proud of Adam when he stood up and said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gavest me fruit of the tree, and I ate. That line clarified for me the relationship between Adam and God. Adam was able to say to God he was ashamed and explain why he ate the fruit. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the great moments in the Bible. But the writers didn’t report the whole conversation, which I would imagine went on from there:

  God: What are you wearing?

  Adam: Leaves.

  God: Didn’t I tell you not to—

  Adam: Now, wait a minute…

  Of course, there was no word called “minute” or any word that signified time or anything, but if there were I think Adam would have said, Wait a minute!

  Adam: Now, wait a minute! This is the woman you sent me. You brought her to me, and when I woke up she was there with you. This is the woman you said was my mate, and you were with her and you made her. I figured since you made her and then I saw her eat and I didn’t see any change in her and she said have some of this and I ate it because I thought it was okay. Now it’s too late and we’ve eaten of the fruit. Look, I know what you said, but then you went and made this woman. You brought her here and I thought you already had a talk with her about the fruit. Did you have a conversation with her about the fruit?

  God: Yes.

  Adam: Okay. But she didn’t listen, because when she came back from a walk in the garden, behold, she was eating the fruit.

  God: What did she say?

  Adam: She said: Eat this. And being a good husband and knowing that if I didn’t eat it there would be trouble from her, I ate it.

  God: So you just ate it?

  Adam: At first I said no, but then she said: Don’t you trust me? So I thought it must be okay to eat it.

  God turned toward Eve.

  God: What is this that you have done?

  Eve: The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to understand, this is woman. And I can see her getting off her knees and crawling out from behind the bush and standing up, whether her leaf is falling off or not, I don’t know, and she looks at these two males—don’t forget there’s God and Adam, who is in God’s image, so there are two males—and she will not have any more of this. And here we have the first woman going up against two males. The only two males. (We don’t know what the snake was.) And if I know women, when God tried talking over Eve, she said:

  Eve: No, you listen to me!

  And that’s when God piled all that stuff on her:

  God: Because you do not play well with others, you shall bear the fruit and you shall have great pains when you bear the fruit.

  And Adam got hit with:

  God: You shall toil in the fields and come home and say where’s my dinner?

  You don’t mess with God. If you do, God will put something on you.

  Man: I don’t feel like doing that.

  God: Locusts!

  Man: But I don’t want to do it.

  God: Famine!

  Next, God cursed the serpent:

  The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

  Which brings up another thing the writers left out: What did the serpent look like before God turned it into a crawling-on-the-belly thing? The serpent had to have looked different before God cursed it. Maybe it was a tripod with a head. I don’t know. And what kind of serpent was it? Was it a python? Was it a rattler? Was it a cobra?

  Missing pages!

  The pictures I’ve always seen have the serpent hanging from a tree with Eve holding the fruit. To me, a person who has for years dealt with filming and telling the story in movies, it’s a better shot for the camera operator to put the serpent in a tree as opposed to Eve standing and talking to this thing on the ground. If it’s crawling on its belly, it could not rise for the close-up. Unless it was a cobra, which could come up about a foot and a half, then span itself out. That’s why John Huston and Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock put it in a tree. It’s a better close-up. But it’s a better curse to have it crawling on the ground.

  Looking at the anatomy of a snake, it’s like when a puppeteer puts his hand in the back of a puppet, the mouth just goes up and down, so if you have no sound it seems like the thing is saying mop, mop, mop, mop, mop. How did the snake talk? With its forked tongue? If the snake’s mouth goes up and down and that’s all, how did Eve understand it? Even the eyes of the snake—there’s no expression in the eyes of a snake.

  I have a feeling that this was not the first time the snake had done something wrong. Because it just seems to me that after the snake had the conversation with Eve and then God came and cursed the snake, it doesn’t sound like the first time the snake had been in trouble with God. For the snake to be already slithering around and for God to double it up and say now it has to crawl on it’s belly, it seems to me, to me, that the snake had done something very bad before. Maybe this was the fourth time God cursed the snake. At least it is my belief, my belief, that this is at least the fourth time the serpent has been cursed. But I do think it learned its lesson and never
did anything bad again, because God’s next curse probably would have been: You will crawl on your back.

  And let me say that I believe this is not the only animal that God may have cursed. But these other curses have been left out of Genesis.

  Missing pages!

  What other animals did God curse? If you go to a zoo, for instance, and see a baboon, the first thing baboons do is turn themselves around and show you a certain inflamed area of their body. One can imagine that God could have said to the baboon:

  From now on you shalt haveth an exposed and inflamed part of your body that you will show to people.

  The penguin? Whatever the penguin was before it got in trouble with God, I don’t know. I can imagine God saying to the penguin:

  And thou shalt go through life with no knees and your behind very low to the ground.

  At least God was very merciful, putting a penguin’s behind low to the ground so that when it fell it didn’t fall too far. On the other hand, it doesn’t have a real bark and it can’t attack. Nor can it run away fast. On land. It has wings and it can’t fly. It really is disturbing. Poor penguin. Though I don’t know if we can call it poor or not because we don’t know what the penguin did that annoyed God so much. But whatever it was, God did these things to the penguin. And God cursed the penguin even more:

  And thou shalt have duck feet and look like you’re wearing a tux but be rejected by gourmet restaurants and expensive hotels because you have no bow tie. And thou shalt have your image used in advertising for a menthol cigarette which gives human beings cancer.

  After God cursed Adam and Eve and the snake, the next thing that happened, according to the writers, was this:

  And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

  Cherubim? Who named that thing? Cherubim. There’s no description of cherubim in Genesis, so I had to call a minister I know and ask him, what are cherubim? The minister told me cherubim have four faces: a lion, an ox, a vulture, and a man. They have the hands of a man, the feet of a calf, and four wings. Not a creature you’d want to fool around with. If you went to visit a neighbor’s house and they had some of those things in the yard, there is no way you’re going to open that gate. Even if the cherubim are quiet and not making a noise, you don’t want to bother these things. They’ve got wings, so you don’t even make the approach. If you’re the mailman or UPS or FedEx—whoever’s delivering sort of tosses the package over the fence and keeps going. As a matter of fact, you don’t even get out of the truck. And nothing that says “Dear Occupant” ever gets delivered.

  If you’ve been thrown out of a place that has a flaming sword and cherubim at the front gate, there’s no way you’re going to want to come back home. (I have no idea what the flaming sword can do to you, but it will keep you busy watching it.)

  At least God gave Adam and Eve something to wear besides leaves before he put them out:

  And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.

  Skins from what? But then again, God could make skins and it didn’t have to come off of anything.

  It seems to me, Adam and Eve marked the beginning of parenting. After that there were Moses, Noah, and a plethora of people whom God chose to go forth and do things, and they were not afraid to say to God: This is not working. To be chosen by God is not necessarily a great deal of fun. Chosen by God, judged by humans. Not fun. When God lights a bush and the flames spew out, that’s not fun to explain to somebody. It’s not fun. God says, Go do so forth or so on. And since you’re chosen, you have to do it. You’re not supposed to ask God, Why am I doing this? You just do it. Like Moses, telling people, Go ahead. The water’s going to part. Or Noah building an ark. Or David, who must have heard how big Goliath was and that he was coming. Didn’t matter. God told David to go up against Goliath. And this is way before the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

  The fact that God, the first parent, threw Adam and Eve out of the garden is proof he didn’t have a wife. And the fact that they never came back into the garden is further proof that God didn’t have a wife because the mother of the children would have made God bring them back. And the conversation would’ve gone something like this:

  God’s wife: What did you do with the children?

  God: I put ’em out.

  God’s wife: You did what?

  God: I told you, I threw them out.

  God’s wife: For what?

  God: They ate of the tree.

  God’s wife: I told you, ask me first. Now, go get those children and bring them back in.

  I don’t know much about cockatoos, but I’m guessing that by the time God was casting Adam and Eve out of the garden, the cockatoo was probably losing it trying to remember fifty thousand species. I can picture the cockatoo’s head bobbing up and down and the cockatoo repeating the same animal names over and over and even some names that didn’t exist. And God, seeing this, would’ve said to Adam, Don’t forget, you’ve got to write down the names of all these animals. Get your helpmate to help you with that.

  And being a married man all of my life, I can only imagine that on the way through the gate, Eve turned to Adam and said, I don’t care what happens, I’m going to get you. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get you.

  Obviously, to be continued…

  VOICE MAIL

  I have a friend. A singer. When I decided to call him the other day, I got his voice mail. First I heard the recording of a woman:

  Good morning, you’ve reached the office of…

  And suddenly my friend started singing:

  Stevie’s private number!

  And then the woman came back and said:

  Please say your full name.

  “Bill Cosby.”

  After that, her voice came back:

  He left a note saying…

  Then my friend was back singing his phone number and singing a message, which was:

  I’m not available to take your call at this time. But if you leave your name, and number of telephone, I promise to call you back… you back… you back… you back… you baaaack…

  Then the woman’s voice again:

  He told me to cover the phone for him. Is it urgent? Yes or no?

  “No.”

  Would you like to leave a message? Yes or no?

  “Yes.”

  Okay. First I need your area code and phone number. Please enter it using touchtone, followed by the pound key.

  I wasn’t fast enough.

  First I need your area code and phone number. Say the digits one by one. Or use touchtone and end with the pound key.

  I said my number slowly.

  Now you can leave your message and hang up or press pound. Go ahead.

  “Yes. This is George Washington Carver and I’m wondering if I can get a phone number for Bill Cosby.”

  Got it! Hang up or press pound to send it. Otherwise, to hear your message, press one. To rerecord it, press two.

  I pressed the wrong button, and she said:

  Okay, I’ll mark it urgent. Hang up or press pound to send it. Otherwise, to hear your message, press one.

  I pressed pound.

  I’ll get this to him as soon as possible. Thanks for calling. Good-bye.

  You see, that’s the problem with technology. You can have a conversation with a person who isn’t a person. And be interviewed by a friend of yours who isn’t there.

  IF ONLY NATIVE AMERICANS KNEW THEN WHAT THEY KNOW NOW

  Most of what I know about how the West was won is because of actors like Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Joel McCrea, Gary Cooper, Ward Bond, George “Gabby” Hayes, and Fuzzy Knight. And directors John Ford and Howard Hawks. Stories about real-lif
e characters Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley. It seems that back in the days of the Wild West, there was a lot of fighting—Native Americans riding down from the hills and attacking covered wagons.

  At least that’s what you see in the movies. And when I watched those movies, I often wondered why the Native Americans couldn’t be quieter as opposed to the loud yelping sounds that they were making. After a thorough investigation within my own mind, I think that with no saddle, just a blanket, and no jockstrap, that if one is bouncing up and down on the spine, the hard, broad bone of a horse, up and down, maybe three or four inches at a time, there is a tendency for one to land on the two very important parts of the male anatomy, which—I don’t care how strong you are, how brave—would bring a yelp. So you have hundreds of males, Native American males, yelping as they ride toward the wagons. They were called “braves,” but I don’t think the yelping had anything to do with a great spirit. These guys are getting killed bouncing on themselves. And so they come yelping, and by the time they get to the wagons, they are very, very upset, and so they start to shoot. Then they have to go around the wagons a couple times and there is more bouncing and yelping.

  If only Native Americans knew then what they know now…

  So this is what I saw sitting in the Booker Movie, which was a neighborhood movie house, and the Astor and Jumbo on Girard Avenue. Sitting there in the theater for ten cents. To this day I will not have any of the black Jujyfruit because I don’t know what flavor the black Jujyfruit is supposed to be. All I know is when somebody bought a box of Jujyfruit, you could find the black ones all over the floor. And people threw them at the screen too. When they didn’t like the character, the black Jujyfruit started flying. If someone could please text or tweet what flavor I’m supposed to be tasting, I’d appreciate it. And please don’t tell me I’m supposed to be tasting black. I don’t know what flavor that is.