I Didn't Ask to Be Born

by Bill Cosby

  There was an area where we played softball, which was around back and was called “Around Back” because it was… around back. Around the back of a row of housing-project-type apartments that started at the end of Ninth Street, near the Ninth Street Bridge. Parallel to these buildings was another row of apartments. The backs of these two apartment buildings formed a large rectangular area between them: “Around Back.” I think when they built the projects, somebody said, Let’s create a field where kids can play.

  The area we played on wasn’t loose gravel, but it was very rough, so the ball didn’t last long. The surface was like what you see on roads with the tar and the white specks. I later found out that the specks were something called pea stone. They would take hot tar and then pour pea stone on top of it, and then a steamroller weighing twenty tons and operated by a professional steamroller operator, who at the time was making six dollars an hour, mashed the pea stone into the tar.

  I will now give you a description of the surface that we played on “Around Back” in the same manner a waiter at a gourmet restaurant would tell you about what’s on the menu.

  The chef has taken hot tar from the mountains of Ethiopia and added decorative, six-millimeter golden pea shingle with block edging, which has been carefully crafted from the purest Indian sandstone.

  We just called it “the ground.”

  After the tar dries, it stays sort of gray and it’s more or less smooth but still rough on skin that travels over it at six miles an hour. When you’re traveling six miles an hour, you come up skinned. Strawberry comes to mind. Streaks and scrapes of brown and white and red soon to become a long scab.

  When I was at Central High School I made the football team. The freshman practice field was in a park. Plenty of grass and trees. At the first practice a guy threw a ball to me. I bent over while running, but it was out of my reach even running bent over with my arms extended.

  The coach yelled at me, “You dive for those!”

  I can’t say he challenged my manhood—I was just a kid—but he made it sound like I was afraid to dive.

  “Dive for that ball, son! Dive!”

  What? Dive? I never dove for anything in my life. I don’t even know what it’s like to dive. When you’re brought up playing on tar and pea stone, which is unforgiving, there is no diving. Dirt and grass, sure, you can dive. But we didn’t have dirt and grass. We had tar and pea stone and broken glass. There was no diving. No sliding into second base or third base. Certainly no headfirst into first. You did not slide.

  When you played football, you didn’t dive either, because it was not dirt—it was tar and pea stone. This kind of surface is not for diving to catch a pass. You just let it go and it was understood. Coming from a surface of tar and pea stone, there are no arms stretched out in the air parallel to the ground to catch a newspaper rolled up with rubber bands for a gain of seven yards. Dive?

  I don’t think so.

  We didn’t have real bases when we played softball. We drew the bases with crayons or colored chalk—first base, second base, third, and home. We drew home plate so that the batter’s back was parallel to the first row of apartments, and right field was the second parallel row. There was a drain about twenty feet to the right of second base, a grated drain three feet by three feet. Don’t step on that, because the front part of your Cat’s Paw rubber sole might get caught under one of the bars and you will have it pulled off and run around with a flapping sole.

  At some point they put in monkey bars, the famous monkey bars, and they sat somewhere out in center field behind second base, maybe thirty feet past second base. Before the monkey bars nobody got hurt. Children fell, were cut by glass and things like that, but they were minor injuries that a Band-Aid could cover. No stitches. Then they put in monkey bars, this steel structure, and kids wound up in the hospital. I think someone who did not like children invented the monkey bars and said, Look, this will get rid of a lot of them.

  There was a fence on Ninth Street that ends the block. (Yes, we had fences too in those days.) And behind that fence was the famous Fat Albert Ninth Street Bridge. A ball hit over that fence was a home run. There was also an area that was sandy dirt, and obviously this was for kids to draw circles and shoot marbles or maybe somebody said they could play and make sand castles or mud castles or something.

  We were very serious when we played softball. Especially when we pitched. We’d throw the ball as fast as we could. It wasn’t a looping throw six feet in the air, which is second only to T-ball placement, where you hit a ball off a stationary tee. No, what we threw was a hard pitch—with spin.

  Anyway, we were in the middle of a softball game when Peanut Armhouse’s mother came, and she stood in the center of the sandy dirt place. She had an apron on. (Most of the mothers had aprons.) And she called Peanut, the way parents called in those days, using vowels because vowels carried farther than consonants.

  “Peeee-nut!”

  She hit hard on the p and stretched out the e. The “nut” was very short. You could hardly hear the “nut.” But everybody knew she was calling Peanut. It was the sound.

  One of the most difficult names for parents who hadn’t planned ahead was Ronald. You can’t get off a loud Ronald. Everything dies—Raaaaan-aaaald. That’s about as close as you can get. You can’t hit an a as high as an e or an i. The name Ronald kind of dies, so you get the nickname Ronnie.

  Bobby Wiggins’ mother could whistle. She’d put two fingers in her mouth, and man, that sound shrilled. Everybody knew that was Bobby Wiggins’ call. Bobby Wiggins’ mother would whistle from the apartment; she never came down. She just opened the window and whistled. And Bobby never said anything; he always left without a word. He didn’t even say, “Got to go.” He just ran and went down through the clothes yard.

  The clothes yard was an area about fifty-five feet by sixty feet, where every Monday people in Apartments B and C and higher letters took their wash and, because there were no clothes dryers, hung their clothes out to be dried by the sun on the clothesline in the clothes yard (which says something about honesty in those days). They used wooden clothespins only. No clamps.

  People in an A apartment didn’t have to go to the clothes yard because all A apartments had a backyard with grass where they hung their clothes out. Although it wasn’t big enough to dive for anything, it was just large enough so that there was a point in time when we grew tomatoes and collard greens, but that turned out to be mostly for the enjoyment of the uninvited bugs.

  We lived at 919, Apartment A, Parrish Place. So we didn’t have to go to the clothes yard. To get to my house from Tenth Street—where the number 23 trolley ran going south—you got off the trolley car, waited for it to pass, crossed Tenth Street, went to the right into the complex onto Hutchinson Place, which is perpendicular to Parrish Place, where I lived. When we first moved there, I thought that the sound of the green wooden trolley would keep me awake. But it never did.

  After crossing Tenth Street, you walked past the Trash House, which was to the right, the place where, obviously, we put the trash—that’s why it’s called the Trash House. To the left was the Garbage House, which was attached to our building and was called the Garbage House for the same reason: People put garbage in the Garbage House. Sometimes people got lazy and put the trash in the Garbage House. But they never caught anybody doing it.

  Even if you were unsighted, you could tell the Garbage House from the Trash House because the Garbage House had a buzzing hum from the eighteen billion flies having an indoor, trash-can buffet. Flies of all species: metallic green and blue colors, dangerous looking. Flies with attitudes. They just landed on you and stayed there and dared you to hit them. That’s okay, though. I paid them back in October when they were slow. I didn’t even have to be fast. Just a nice little gentle tap. Then I’d put them outside.

  The Trash House and Garbage House were about ten feet high. They were brick, had windows, and had grass around them. There was grass everywhere in those days (ex
cept “Around Back,” which was tar and pea stone). There were trees, but they were only as wide as my wrist, as the wrist of an eight-year-old boy. Following the path of the fence, you arrived at my apartment—919-A Parrish Place.

  By the way, this description is no longer any good, so do not look for what I’ve been describing. Do not Wikipedia it or Google it or anything. And please do not go on any social network searching for a picture of this. It isn’t there anymore, because like anything in anybody’s life, if you live long enough, you will eventually say, “Wait a minute! It used to be here but they tore it all down.”

  As you get older, even if you’re thirty now, in another thirty years you’re going to be telling somebody, “This used to be Philadelphia, but it isn’t any longer because now it’s Elmwood.”

  So, back then, when you got to 919-A Parrish Place, it was one step up to a big maroon door with—excuse me!—real glass windows. And then another step after you pulled the maroon door open using brass knobs, no key needed, which put you in the hallway. There was a bell in the center that went kriiing when you turned the handle.

  Apartment A was on the first floor. Apartments B and C were on the second floor. To the left, on the wall, were three mailboxes: A, B, and C.

  The only time I ever got mail was when I was twelve and I believed a Charles Atlas ad. I was skinny, and even though I had never been on the beach and even though nobody had ever kicked sand in my face, I liked his body and I wanted one just like it. And it said “free.”

  So I sent away and I thought I was going to get all these dumbbells and everything. But then a letter came back from Charles Atlas and it said something about sending them some money first. I don’t remember how much; I just know it scared me. I mean, it really scared me when that letter came and they were asking for money. I am not lying. It’s the absolute truth. I never, ever had to think about money outside of going to the store or shining shoes on the corner. I had never dealt with the huge corporate powers of the world. When they wrote that letter to me, my first-ever piece of mail, and said to me they wanted some money, I couldn’t believe it. The ad said “free”! It was the first time I ever experienced a free that was not free. And this was before credit cards and identity theft. Although I had no identity to steal.

  Besides the letter asking for money, there were these papers that I had to sign. I was scared because they wanted money and I really didn’t know how to answer them. So I wrote them back:

  Dear Mr. Atlas: This is William’s mother. My son is crazy so please leave him alone.

  And they did.

  To this day, I have never paid any attention to any magazines offering anything. I said then, at the age of twelve, from now on, the word “free”—I’m not going for it.

  Next door to us, at 917-A Parrish Place, was an elderly woman who was “of the church,” and everybody called her Mother Harold. They called her Mother Harold because of her religion, which was… I don’t know. Anyway, she chased the children for skateboarding in front of her house or riding a bike fast or loud talking. She was always chasing anyone ten years or younger. So we put “old” in front of her name and we called her “Old Mother Harold.”

  When you’re children, “old” is a problem. Old people always telling you something. I just thought that I was put on this earth so old people could call me over for something. Or send me to the store for something.

  All of us seven-, eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds thought Old Mother Harold had nothing better to do than sit in her house, perhaps with the door of the apartment open so she could get out faster, waiting to chase us. She never touched anybody. Even if you fell, she would just come out there and stand over you and say:

  I told you about skating in front of this house.

  You would get up and grab your wooden skateboard, walk away, then put it down and skate hard to make noise. But you never yelled at her. You never yelled out, “Old Mother Harold!”

  Unless you were far away.

  Just to let you know, these were not your modern skateboards. They were made from roller skates, street roller skates, which had clamps that went into the front sole of your shoe. You’d tighten the clamps with a skate key, but this was not good for your shoes because it pulled on your sole and then you’d see your toes coming out. So you’d get a piece of wood, say, three feet long. Then you’d take the piece of rubber out of the front of the skates—which would let the wheels move left and right. Next, you clamped the skate to the wood, plus you nailed the skate down. And you had a skateboard.

  Old Mother Harold wore white all the time. Even her stockings were white and her shoes were white. Her hair was natural and platted, neatly, though, but never pressed or straightened.

  Since Old Mother Harold’s apartment was an A apartment on the first floor, you could look in through her front window. It seemed she never had any lights on that anybody could see, and when she did turn on lights, they were blue, so it was always dark in her apartment.

  On Halloween, Old Mother Harold’s door was the one door you didn’t knock on. You never even went in the hall to go upstairs to the B and C apartments and beg. (We called it begging—other people called it trick or treat.) Most of us dressed up with pillowcases—we didn’t have any money for masks—and we put a little lipstick on and went around with a brown paper bag.

  You just had a feeling, man, if you rang that doorbell and Old Mother Harold came to the door, she might be bigger than she really is and she would get you for Halloween! Standing there about seven feet tall with hands bigger than a bushel basket to scoop you up. You would never come out of that hallway alive! All people would find would be a little pillowcase that you had used for a cape. And a piece of cardboard pumpkin that you brought home from school because the next day the school wouldn’t need Halloween stuff.

  Back to the softball game and the morphamization of Peanut Armhouse.

  I was the pitcher. While I waited for the next batter to come to the plate, Peanut’s mother called him a second time:

  “Peeee-nut!”

  And this wasn’t just anybody calling Peanut; it was a mother.

  Usually it was the mother who, besides working, would fix you breakfast and send you off to school. If she didn’t work, you walked home on your break and your mother made you lunch. Then when you got out of school at three o’clock, you went back home and your mother had a snack waiting for you. Then she cooked dinner. There was no fast food. She cooked. Mothers had quite a job to do.

  I went to Mary Channing Wister Elementary School. I just walked from my house straight down to Ninth Street—underneath the famous Fat Albert Ninth Street Bridge—and then up to Eighth and Parrish. After school I’d walk back home, put my books down—no studying here. No homework either.

  “Any homework?” my mother would ask.

  My reply: “No homework.”

  “I thought you had homework.”

  “Already did it.”

  And then, bam! I’d change from my school clothes to my play clothes and head “Around Back.”

  Somewhere around four, everybody was out. I don’t know where the bat came from; I never had a bat of my own. I never had a glove of my own either. And I don’t know where the softball came from, but it didn’t come from my apartment because my apartment had no money. There was no money for contributing to any purchase of a softball, to any purchase of an orange soda. Nothing. The money was just not there. Therefore, I do not remember clearly how anything, especially a brand-new softball, wound up “Around Back.” I guess some kid’s father bought it. A quality softball in those days might have cost seventy-five cents. So somebody’s father bought a ball. It didn’t come from the people in the projects; it was the father of one of the boys who lived somewhere else.

  Bobby Stevenson really hit the ball hard. So did Hubert McClinton, who was the first one to go into the service. When he came back from basic training wearing a uniform, Hubert got us together and taught us all to march. Don’t forget, we were little kids, eight,
nine years old. And he was wearing a uniform. So there we were, lined up and marching, really for no reason. After a while nobody showed up for Hubert’s marches.

  Bobby and Hubert were the only people who ever knocked the ball onto the Ninth Street Bridge, which was quite a wallop, and that was another reason the ball didn’t last long. First the stitches would come apart and pretty soon you’re hitting an egg with dirt and stuff falling out of it. Then the cover would come off and then there was all this string. Those were the good balls. The bad balls looked good in the beginning but didn’t even last long enough for the cover to come off. They were like piñatas. They just exploded.

  So the cover would come off and, once again, I had no money for a new ball and neither did anybody else. So somebody would stop the game, and one of the older guys—by older I mean somebody around age eleven—would say:

  Okay, we’ve got to get some tape.

  And somebody, I don’t remember who, somebody went and came back with black tape, electrical tape, and Bobby Stevenson said: This is not good tape. And it wasn’t. The black electrical tape, even though we wrapped it around the ball really well, picked up glass and pebbles. Somebody would hit a ground ball and it would bounce, bounce, bounce, and you’d catch it—we played with bare hands; I don’t remember too many guys with gloves—and you wound up with that ball spinning and all that stuff it had picked up went around in your hands. Pebbles, pieces of glass, cutting into your hands. Plus, the tape was sticky and it wasn’t fun to play with it.

  A much better tape—we’re talking quality—was the white Red Cross tape from the pharmacy. The white Red Cross tape was the best because it wasn’t sticky and it didn’t pick up the glass, the stones, the pebbles. Not only was it not sticky; it was white. Which was also the color of the cover of the ball. And we played with that sometimes. Of course, after a while, the tape would start to go and you’d have to retape it.