I Didn't Ask to Be Born

by Bill Cosby

  “Daddy, I like him.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Next thing you know, your wife is telling you:

  “Listen, you have to stop sitting in the living room bothering people.”

  That’s when you get another room. Buried someplace down in the basement. People coming and going but you don’t know who anybody is. When someone asks me, “Who came over to your house?” the only way I can answer is to say, “I have no idea who anybody was. They wouldn’t let me see anyone.”

  See, fathers know nothing. Because a father has been taught by his wife, the mother of the children, You keep out of this!

  And if you’re a father, and you stay in the house long enough, you will hear her tell the children:

  Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of him.

  And the “him” she’s talking about? That would be you.

  MY SINGLE DAUGHTER

  I have a daughter who is single. We were sitting and talking when a name came up. It was a professional basketball player. When I told her that he was a multimillionaire, she said she’d like to meet him. But when I said he was married, she said, “I really didn’t want to meet him anyway. I was just joking.”

  And I said, “I would love for you to meet a basketball player who is making around four million, one hundred thousand dollars a year. And if he had his head together and was putting money away, you and me, we could put the money thing aside.”

  She said, “Dad! Please!”

  I said, “I’m just talking, you know, like, information. I’m not pushing you anywhere. I don’t see why you can’t discuss this. I mean, it’s not like I’m asking you to get married. I’m just saying, from my viewpoint—”

  She cut me off and said, “You just seem to be interested in the money aspect.”

  I said, “Well the money is big.”

  “Dad!”

  “But the money is huge because of the way you like to live. I know you and I know how you’ve been living.”

  “Oh, Dad! Please stop! This is so depressing.”

  And I said, “Yes, for both of us. I want you to understand that I feel I should be able to answer questions as opposed to being cut off. So, to answer your question—”

  She said, “I’ve forgotten the question.”

  And I said, “Of course you have, because it’s not on your tab. I just want you to realize that when you meet people, friends or whatever, you should consider what the monetary participation would be, would have to be, because of what you’re accustomed to.”

  What I didn’t say was And how you don’t participate in chipping in on monetary things, you know, like, to get a job. I didn’t say that. I said this:

  “All I’m saying is, it would be nice if this fellow, whoever you meet, had some money. But then I would want you, of course, to be happy. Which means an awful lot of things. His behavior, his manners, his obedience toward you, which husbands need to learn, and they have to be taught like you train a dog or a parakeet. And eventually, if the female figures he’s worth it, she’ll keep him and keep training him. And, if he loves her, then he will comply and accept all of these rules and regulations and become a very quiet person who smiles and listens to his wife and doesn’t mind getting up and moving to another room so that drapes can be changed and different pieces of furniture can be moved because it’s that time of year.”

  When I looked up she was gone.

  MY SON’S FIRST BAD WORD

  When my son Ennis was about seven years old he came into my office looking somewhat unhappy. I say “somewhat” because seven-year-old people don’t really have a sustained expression of anything except mood changes. In other words, they’re either running, jumping, rushing, yelling, or defending themselves with a look of defense on their face.

  So Ennis came in seeming to be a shade confused and he said, “Dad?”

  “Dad” with a question mark.

  Before I could respond he raised his hand to shoulder height, turned the back of it to me, and lifted his middle finger. He then asked, “Is this a bad word?”

  I told him yes it was. He took his right hand—he’s left-handed—moved it to the hand with the raised finger, then folded the finger down and walked away.

  RAISE YOUR TAIL!

  I have a five-year-old grandson. And the child somehow, through his mother, has gotten into a form of violence—the violence of the tai chi. It seems his mother has put him in a tai chi class. When he comes home from the class, he has on the white outfit with the white belt. He puts his hands together like coming in peace, two palms meeting. He bows. And then he kicks and punches the air, making this sound—haah! His opponent is invisible, so I assume tai chi means “to beat up an invisible person.” I don’t know who the person is that he’s fighting—I never bothered to ask. Kick—haah! Punch—haah! You’re looking at this child—haah, haah, haah—with no reality in sight. Just fighting someone invisible. Then, all of a sudden, it’s haah, haah, haah—all over me. He knows that in our home, the home of the grandparents, he is not to hit any furniture or glass or anything, even wood. Nothing. Pillows? No, you don’t hit the pillows.

  My five-year-old grandson is absolutely delirious about Godzilla. He’s always saying to me: “I have a new Godzilla, Grandpoppy! Do you want to watch it with me?”

  I’m not a fan of Godzilla. It isn’t that I don’t like Godzilla, but for me, there is a genuine disconnect, at age seventy-three, to a large green lizard. My heroes, when it came to scaring me to death, were Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney. Lon Chaney had facial hair and wore a Brooks Brothers suit that was too small and a shirt where the cuffs were too long. He had an overbite. Horrible overbite. I also remember the eeriness of Dracula standing on the lawn of Lord So-and-So in front of an old castle.

  And then there was King Kong. Not Mighty Joe Young, because they played “Beautiful Dreamer,” and that was the end of that. You can’t get scared when you hear “Beautiful Dreamer.” It’s like singing cowboys. Nor do I want my monsters to be calmed by soothing music. Frankenstein lost me when he started smoking cigars and listening to violins. I want to make it clear that I didn’t enjoy him when he killed the little girl, but he was scary, and to this day, as of this writing, I am still frightened while laughing at the same time when seeing Frankenstein. I did not know that a human being was capable of being scared, frightened, and still able to laugh, not in hysteria, but laugh at comedy. When Lou Costello sat on Frankenstein’s lap, not knowing it was Frankenstein, I have never had such an epiphany. Nowhere have I seen anything that equaled that.

  The first time I heard about King Kong, the movie, it was playing in the Booker movie house. We didn’t have money in our home for me to go to a first-run showing, so I wound up going to the ten-cent edited-down version. Actually, King Kong was made in 1933, four years before I was born, in 1937. But at the time it came to the Booker, everybody was talking about it like it was the first time it ever was shown. We just didn’t know any better.

  I think for me the scene that almost had me up and running out of the theater—which people used to do in those days, they’d run out of the theater, and some people didn’t use the aisles—was when he tore down that elevated train. That was the one that almost got me up from my seat and all the way out of the theater. Now, when I think back, I remember that you could, as you got older, eventually tell that the quote-unquote “pygmies” in the King Kong movie were actually white short people with black makeup all over and black legs. After that, it wasn’t so frightening because those white short people with black makeup drew my attention away from the scariness.

  Before you caught on about the pygmies, it was, in fact, a scary movie, and you went home with that movie in your head and you couldn’t sleep. I would even hear grown people talking about a sleepless night because of King Kong. Or a sleepless night because of Frankenstein, a sleepless night because of Wolf Man. So those were my scare heroes.

  I don’t even know how word came to the projects, but at some point
I heard about a movie called Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. And we, at the age of nine or ten or eleven, began arguing over who was the strongest, Frankenstein or Wolf Man. There were guys, boys that I was playing with—for example, Fat Albert, Rudy, and the gang—who said that Frank and Wolf Man were going to have this fight. This was before Ali and Frazier, so Frankenstein versus Wolf Man was all we had. And word was that this fight was definitely going to happen.

  Everybody was rooting for Frank because Frank was bigger. But there was one guy who thought that Wolf Man, with his sharp teeth, could win because Frank’s equilibrium wasn’t that great. The guy kept saying that Wolf Man could move, he could feint, he could jump around, he was a wolf, he could go in and come out before Frank could close his hands around him. Still, everybody agreed that if Frank ever got his hands on Wolf Man, being a monster that couldn’t feel pain, it wouldn’t make any difference what Wolf Man bit off—Frank would continue.

  Then, of course, when they showed the movie, there was the wonderful ending of the two of them just fighting and then collapsing, and I think they both fell into something. They fell into an ice thing and they froze to death. Well, they were both dead anyway, but they froze so that the sequel comes and they thaw them out. Or it could have been a flood that killed them. Whatever. Those things are just a part of one’s memories. Like a song that you couldn’t get five people to buy today: “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

  Since the grandchildren can watch this Godzilla thing stomp Japanese people to death, I decided to play Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man for the grandchildren. This was after I put on an Abbott and Costello and they were bombing badly. The granddaughter and the grandson saw nothing funny in them. When they saw the monsters, it just did not register. So I played Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I think they had an attitude like: And you say this is supposed to be scary? Knowing that I had an audience that was just trying to be nice to their grandfather, I turned it off and released them. They were very quick to leave.

  By the same token, Godzilla is just not doing it for me. I also understand that Godzilla is female because this is what I’m told by my grandson. My wife and my daughter, the mother of the five-year-old, have also declared that Godzilla is female, but they also say this about God, so I’m not too sure.

  One day we all went shopping. Actually, I was not shopping. The women, they went someplace and they put me with the grandson. We’re in a store, a huge warehouse, which I cannot name. All I can say is that you can find everything in the world there except antiaircraft guns.

  I, as a usual male, am looking for the furniture department so I can go over and pretend I’m going to buy an armchair. My grandson and I are walking along when he points to a DVD area. Not just an area, but a football field–sized part of the store with DVDs going all the way up to the ceiling. Now, out of a thousand million DVDs he spots the Godzilla rack. And on his own, without a great deal of excitement, he just runs and pulls the Godzilla DVD out and shows it to me and says:

  Oh, Grandpoppy, a new Godzilla DVD!

  And he says this clearly when other times he knows only words that have one syllable. Yes. No. Please. But now a sentence. And then more whole sentences:

  Grandpoppy, I got a new one! Come on, you can watch it with me! It’s Godzilla.

  He holds up the Godzilla DVD, and I say, “Son, let me take a look.” I’m thinking maybe they made a new Godzilla movie. On the front of the packaging is a drawing of Godzilla walking. And there are buildings, always lining a main street somewhere. The people are running toward the viewer—they’re in the forefront, and Godzilla is behind, chasing them.

  Just looking at the DVD cover, I couldn’t understand what the story was about. From what I can see, people are running and they’re all scared. So I read the back of the cover, and the story is very, very familiar to me. And after I read the story on the back, it appears to me that this is the same Godzilla movie he already has. Only the picture on the front is different. So I say to him, my five-year-old grandson, “You already have this one.”

  Whereupon he shakes his head and looks up at me:

  “No, no, no! No, no, no, Grandpoppy! I don’t have this one!”

  “Yes, you do, you already have this one.”

  “No, no, no, look, the people on the front, I don’t have the people.”

  And now he starts to “no, no, no” over me and he’s working on tears and a little bit of loudness and a lot of talking over Grandpoppy.

  “Buy it, please, Grandpoppy! I don’t have this one! Please, Grandpoppy!”

  So I do what I used to do when raising his mother and that is to say, “Look at me,” at least seventeen times in a row, just back to back. Look at me, look at me, look at me, rapidly following each other. After a while it kind of strings together, goes into the child’s brain area and begins to freeze them. You can see them trying not to look. But it’s freezing them.

  Now I’m saying “look at me” over and over to my grandson. I can tell it’s freezing him because it pulls him around to where he’s actually looking at me but he can’t understand what I’m saying because now it’s like:

  Lookatmelookatmelookatme!

  I’m jamming his thought waves, have frozen his little brain. It’s a wonderful technique I’ve developed:

  Lookatmelookatmelookatme!

  And then I go:

  Listentomelistentomelistentome!

  And he’s completely frozen. He’s looking at me and his mouth is open. It’s not that he’s hypnotized; it’s just that I’ve got his brain locked and he can’t go to the begging part of his brain, or to the part where he’s not listening. And I say:

  You already have this. Youalreadyhaveit! Youalreadyhaveit! Youalreadyhaveit! Youalreadyhaveit!

  And I can see him trying to say something, his head starting to go into a “no,” but I kept jamming him:

  Youhaveityouhaveityouhaveityouhaveit!

  Now that he’s frozen, I try to explain:

  “All they did was put a different picture on the same one.”

  And then it broke—I lost him. And he’s “no, no, no,” and he’s crying and he’s very sad. Whereupon I say to him very loud, “Listen to me! This is a different drawing. The people know what they’re doing by putting a different picture on the box. They’re tricking you. You’re only five years old. You’ve only been on this earth five years and you don’t know how to read.”

  And I turn it over and I say, “See these words? If you could read, you’d know that these words say: You’ve already seen this movie before. We just have a different front for you.”

  He still didn’t get it.

  So now it’s Halloween; the grandchildren have come to our home in Massachusetts to go trick-or-treating. When I was a child living in the Richard Allen projects with my parents, low-income parents, we had no money for costumes. The only costume I remember was putting lipstick on and then putting a pillowcase or sheet over the coat or something and going as… I don’t know what I was going as. Costumes for kids whose parents have no money always involved a pillowcase or a sheet. But you couldn’t cut holes in it because the sheet had to come back and be put on that bed again. So you take the sheet and it is tied around you and fixed in such a way according to how creative your mother and father happen to be. So maybe I went trick-or-treating as a sheet. What you can do with a sheet without putting holes in it: You can make a cape. And you can be a ghost. But you can’t see through it. So you put the sheet over your head. You go up to somebody’s door and you knock and then you put the sheet over yourself. And you say ooooh. And people smile. Then you take a handful of candy. You have your own bag, a brown paper bag. And I remember the candy got all mixed up, the salt with sweet or whatever was in the bag.

  Today a kid gets a Godzilla costume on the Internet for fifty dollars. And the grandson has a Godzilla outfit, obviously. The Godzilla claws are like gloves, and the same for the feet. Then there’s the body and the head. And there’s this tail, which you have
to tie around the child’s waist. The only flaw in all of it is if, while in the suit, he has to bend over, you can see his street clothing. Which, to my grandson, is embarrassing. He just did not want to show that. He was adamant about being Godzilla—not a kid in a Godzilla suit—but the real Godzilla. And with that costume on, he made the exact sound of Godzilla.

  In a way, sort of, I just felt sorry for the kid, because this is all he has in his five-year-old life—just walking around with this thing on, this Godzilla costume. But as we walked, people actually stopped to take a picture of him. But he wouldn’t make the sound, the Godzilla sound, even when people asked him to make it. I guess he wanted to make that sound only when he wanted to, not when grown people asked him to. Meanwhile, I didn’t stand in the picture. I didn’t want to be a part of it. Here I am walking with the grandson, and he’s Godzilla. Everything he is, that looks like him, is covered up with this rubber green and silver color. And I’m looking at the rubber feet and the rubber hands of Godzilla and thinking: This is my grandson?

  We walk up to this door and we knock on it and people open it and he starts with this noise. Authentically scary and scaly. Now, because his outfit is so complete, they didn’t give him anything to put the candy in, so I was the person they gave the candy to. I held the bag, he made the noise again, and then they closed the door, acting real scared.

  As we walked around, there were some people who didn’t realize it, but they stepped on his tail by mistake. This would pull him down and make him very, very upset. So I said to him, “Yes, son, you are a scary monster but there are some problems with being Godzilla. People step on your tail.”

  CABBAGE PATCH

  In the early 1980s, they came out with a thing called the Cabbage Patch doll. It was, to me, with its distorted face, one of the ugliest things I have ever seen, ever. A horrible, gruesome-looking thing. But that didn’t matter. In the minds of millions of children in America and around the world, the “I want” part of their brain went off.