233: Starting From Scratch

Ira Glass

Things are just starting to look up for Jorge, when the thing with the TV happened. He had just moved to a new town, started his life over, found some work, got a place. Years of searching around in vagueness were ending.

Ira Glass

He'd moved to New York City, which was scary. And walked into an apartment that real New Yorkers told him was a find-- a little studio in the East Village. One room. Good location. Cheap. And then one night he's sitting at his table, watching The Bachelorette on TV. And it's the episode where the bachelorette has whittled it down to four guys that she's going to pick one from, eventually. And she's in New York City visiting one of the potentials.

Ira Glass

He watches them take the elevator up to the fourth floor. Jorge lives on the fifth. They walk down the hallway door. And then Jorge realizes something else.

Ira Glass

And at that moment Jorge gets this flash. He is not really doing all that well. His apartment is a kind of dump, compared to this guy who's on TV. Plus he's watching Trista Rehn, the bachelorette, on TV, looking uncomfortable in his apartment on national TV. In fact, she bails on the guy.

Over the next few days it all sort of goes to hell for Jorge. He's depressed. His new life does not seem so shiny. His New York friends console him. Look, they say, the bachelorette had never seen a New York apartment before. She does not know how people here live. This means nothing. Which helps him for a while, until one day Jorge picks up the New York Post, and right there is an article about his neighbor, Todtman-- the guy from The Bachelorette-- getting busted for cocaine.

Ira Glass

Somehow, without ever meaning to, Jorge had the experience that a person would have if he actually went onto one of the reality shows, and then got booted off the show. National television came into his apartment, and then kicked him off the island, by proxy. He was like collateral damage to a reality show.

Ira Glass

Jorge says that if he hadn't just moved to New York City, if he hadn't just started this whole life, it would not have been the kick in the stomach that it was, which brings us to today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, starting from scratch. Stories of people in that period of their lives when everything is up for grabs. They're starting over. Everything is tenuous.

Act One, Puppy Love, the Business Model. Act Two. Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way. In that act, the story of a man-- a limo driver, in fact-- who begins each day from scratch with just a few bucks, and builds it to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands by the end of the day. Act Three. The First Starting From Scratch. In that act, Jonathan Goldstein revisits a possibly familiar tale of a man, a woman, a garden, and a snake. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Puppy Love, the Business Model. OK. You know there are mom and pop grocery stores, mom and pop newspapers. But could you throw everything away, change your life, start your life over, and create a mom and pop cable network? Molly FitzSimons' own father tried. And she has the answer.

Molly Fitzsimons

Some people's fathers quit their jobs and become teachers. Some maybe retire early and start a new hobby, like model building. My father, after turning over the reins of the business he'd owned and operated for 25 years, started a cable channel. From scratch.

It was February 1995, and he was looking for something new to do, but he didn't know what. Then came the O.J. trial. He had just had back surgery, and the day they sent him home for bedrest happened to be the day that the trial began. During the long breaks in the action he would flip through the channels.

Molly Fitzsimons

What it was was mostly soap operas, talk shows, reruns, game shows. Things that my father had no interest in. My father is a problem solver, and this was a problem.

Molly Fitzsimons

For my father, like for a lot of people, simply turning off the television isn't an option. So he's stuck flipping through a bunch of shows that he hates waiting for the O.J. trial to come back on, when a little light bulb goes off in his head.

Molly Fitzsimons

My father's home office in Clearwater, Florida, is all decked out with family photos, artifacts from his years in the ad business. And an entire wall of file cabinets, which has the complete Puppy Channel archive.

Molly Fitzsimons

He shows me a banker's box filled with videotapes, and pulls out the one-hour pilot he made early on in the Puppy Channel development. It's professionally packaged. There's a closeup of a puppy on the cover with the word "Woof." And two exclamation points.

Molly Fitzsimons

You may recognize this voice. It's my dad. He also wrote the lyrics.

Molly Fitzsimons

The scene fades up to a family of old English sheepdog puppies playing and barking in a wood-paneled suburban den somewhere, with mellow guitar music in the background. After a couple of minutes the scene changes to a corgi puppy running in circles on a snow-covered lawn. Soon border collies are fighting over a sock on somebody's linoleum kitchen floor. It's exactly what you'd expect from my dad's description of the Puppy Channel.

And what's so surprising is that it really is nothing more than that. Throughout the hour-long pilot, puppies waddle around and sniff things. Puppies wrestle and nuzzle each other adorably. It's a soft focus world of indescribable cuteness. Occasionally, my dad's singing interrupts the relaxing instrumental soundtrack.

At some point while we're watching, my dad's wife, Carol-- who's been listening quietly to our conversation from the other side of the room-- comes over and starts cooing at the television. Carol went with my father on most of the Puppy Channel shoots, and actually had the idea for what became the big climactic final scene of the pilot.

Molly Fitzsimons

It's not just cute. It's also suspenseful. Most of the puppies immediately jump or tumble off the couch onto the carpeted floor. But a couple of them stay up there looking sort of confused. It's a pretty long sequence. I glance around the room during it, and realize that all of us are smiling. And we're watching with rapt attention to see if the two cowardly puppies will ever find their way down off the couch. One of the two finally does, leaving only one puppy left. And to give you an idea of the drama of the moment, let me put it this way. We all find ourselves talking to the TV.

Molly Fitzsimons

Finally, after a good three or four minutes, the last puppy sort of half jumps, half falls off the couch. And all of us cheer.

The whole time my dad was doing the Puppy Channel, I could never decide if I thought the idea was genius or totally insane. And the thing that made it seem super smart was the same thing that made it seem kind of crazy-- namely, puppies. Suddenly my businessman dad was talking so much and so fervently about puppies it was kind of weird. And my question was always how would the Puppy Channel possibly make any money.

When I asked my father this question, he was so convincing that I started to wonder why it's not on television right now. Here's how it would work. There'd be fees from cable operators, and there'd be product placements and sponsorships. You'd see a bunch of puppies tearing into a bag of puppy chow, for example. Or a scroll across the bottom of the screen saying, this hour of the Puppy Channel brought to you by Milk Bone. In focus groups it did well-- 37% preferred it to TBS. 41% to CNBC. And remember, my dad didn't need a huge audience to succeed.

Molly Fitzsimons

But even a small cable channel was a huge venture compared to anything my father had done before. By his reckoning, he needed to raise $17 million to get on the air. Or he needed a big cable company to buy his idea.

And so he and Carol started hustling. And after 25 years of being at the center of their own small familiar world, they suddenly found themselves in middle age, on the fringes of a much larger and stranger one. There were cable conventions.

Molly Fitzsimons

Fortune magazine published a photo of Carol in her dog suit. The media loved the Puppy Channel. There was an article about it on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter. There were favorable blurbs in Entertainment Weekly and USA Today. Everybody loved it. Everybody except the ones who, at this stage, mattered most. People like Ted Turner, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch all got the Puppy Channel pitch. But my father couldn't make the sale.

Molly Fitzsimons

One person my father talked to characterized the Puppy Channel as the antidote to television. And in the end, I think that's probably why it never worked out. My dad hadn't just imagined a new cable network. He'd imagined a new way to think about what television can be.

What you'd get from watching the Puppy Channel would be very different than what you get watching the Food Network or QVC. Or Law and Order, for that matter. In his business plan, along with all the spreadsheets and financial outlines, under the section titled "Vision," it says only "to make television more helpful." And under "Mission," "to help people relax and feel better."

My father conceived of the Puppy Channel as a refuge from regular TV. But implicit in this notion is the idea that regular TV is something you need a refuge from. And that's a tough sell to the people who make it. After five years of hard work, my father decided to pull the plug. I'm just going to put it out there and say I think the world wasn't ready for the Puppy Channel.

Molly Fitzsimons

When we find out what that number is I'll be there with my dad. And we'll be singing this song. Take us out, Dad.

Ira Glass

Molly FitzSimons and her dad.

Since we first broadcast this story back in 2003 we have obviously seen the incredible demand for cute puppy videos on YouTube. There's the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. There is Dog TV, a channel intended to be watched by dogs. Molly's dad, Dan FitzSimons, died in 2016, but obviously was far ahead of his time. Molly says that he delighted in the fact that his idea, a cozy corner of the world for watching puppies, caught in the act of being cute, flourished in all these other forms.

[MUSIC - "NOTHING FROM NOTHING BY BILLY PRESTON]

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something if you wanna be with me. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You gotta have something if you're gonna be with me.

Ira Glass

Act two. Making money the old-fashioned way. Well, now we bring you the story of someone who starts from scratch every single day with next to nothing, and tries to build it up to something. Mary Beth Kirchner tells the story.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Every day Joe plays this game. He starts with enough small bills to make change-- lots of fives and ones-- then the clock starts. It's 1:30 in the morning.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: By 6:00 AM, he means. Joe, who doesn't want me to use his last name, drives a super stretch limousine in Las Vegas. Joe says he prefers starting in the middle of the night. Doesn't like crowds or traffic. Here's how his game works. By driving his limo to and from the airport mostly, Joe slowly earns enough-- a few hundred dollars-- to play blackjack in the casino. And then pretty much the sky's the limit.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe is a bit of a legend in Las Vegas gambling circles. I'd heard about him from a pawnbroker south of the strip who said Joe was a regular customer who came every month for about a year. Among the stories he told me, which led me to Joe, that he'd never worked a day in his life. That he lived only on a trust fund until he was 50, controlled by his father who despised his love of gambling.

On his 50th birthday, the legend went, Joe inherited six million. He instantly spent the first million on a house. The remaining five he gambled away. It took him five hours. Joe says not true, but based on the truth. He did inherit millions of dollars from his family, and did lose a big piece of it gambling. But over years. Not hours.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe has a long history of winning big at the casinos. So much so, and this is clearly true, about a dozen of them in Las Vegas have kicked him out. He says most of them think he cheats. Nobody could be that lucky, they say. Among the places where he's still allowed to play, none wanted their names mentioned, or would allow me to record in their casinos today. So we were limited to taping outdoors, where most of Joe's game happens anyway.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: First stop. His favorite nameless hotel and casino, where the doorman lets him approach potential customers from the circular driveway out front. Joe tips the doorman for each ride he gets, so he gives Joe first dibs on every person who walks out the door.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: With the approval of the doorman, lots of people say yes.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's 2:00 AM, with our first $15 coming in. Joe says he started waking up at these hours when he worked in New York operating vending machines and coffee carts, gambling in Atlantic City on weekends. There, too, he says most of the casinos kicked him out.

By the time he came to Vegas 14 years ago, he says he was ready to retire, but he gambled full-time for the first eight years he was here.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: George-- please don't mention my full name, either, or where I work-- is a casino manager in one of the few places where Joe now plays. We met in an empty hotel ballroom, far from the casino floor.

Molly Fitzsimons

Well, maybe not. Joe walks away with his winnings, but then he always comes back for more play. And that combination, George says, does to Joe what it does to everyone.

Molly Fitzsimons

And that's one reason why Joe is driving a limo.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: 5:00 AM, and we've got $180.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe has his eye on a group of guys who've clearly been out on the town for most of the night.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe's hoping these four are looking to go to a strip club, because he gets a kickback of $20 a person.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe tells me he also takes guys to the brothels a half hour drive from Las Vegas, and collects even more. [men singing]

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Now, what do you mean, "for the holidays?"

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: As we drive, the stories keep coming. There was the day Joe won big at the race track and flew to London on the Concorde just for dinner. Or the two-day stretch he was playing $20,000 a hand at the Hilton, and walked away with over a million dollars. These kinds of stories can't be confirmed, but I wanted to believe them. So he offered to show me what's in his trunk.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe hands me a three-inch stack of receipts from casinos all over town totaling about a half million dollars. Evidence, he says, he wants me to see that these can't all be lies.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Later when I look into it that story checks out, as does the one about his aunt, who Joe says sits on the board of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He says she's the one who bails him out when he gets over his head in debt. Joe admits he's the black sheep in the family.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's 7:30 AM and we're up to $350 from the run to the strip club, and five trips to the airport.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Of course they're not.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe sits in front of a woman dealer with an empty table. And he's got that look, almost like a drinker who bellies up to a bar every night. Like he belongs there. He signals the woman for cards and chips in quick short-cut hand signals. Each hand takes less than a minute. He plays a few, and easily wins his $60 in 10 minutes or less. Before I know it we're out again. 8 AM with $410. He says it's getting to be peak time for airport runs.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe's daughter knew what she was doing. She's studying to be a doctor in medical school in the Middle East. I talked with her via her cell phone while she was working at a hospital in some remote spot in Israel. She asked that I not use her name. Not even her first name.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: When Joe moved to Las Vegas, his daughter was just entering high school. He raised her practically as a single parent, starting from the time she was born, when his ex-wife had a breakdown. It wasn't until they moved to Las Vegas that she says she really understood just how much her father gambled.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: But as much as she knows her dad's wins, she remembers the times when they were broke. Really broke.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's noon, and Joe has $1,100. The limo business has been steady for hours. It's a good time for business, but Joe wants to take a break to call his daughter.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's late night in Israel. He just wants to hear about her day.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's 1:30 PM and we're up to $1,300. We've just dropped off yet another ride at the airport. And for a little variety, Joe says he's going to show me how he also sells hotel rooms. These are hotel rooms the casinos give him for free because he gambles so much.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe's carefully checking out a middle-aged couple in shorts and tennis shoes. Just as he's about to approach them-- [phone ringing]-- we're interrupted.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: A lucrative job has come up. He says some high roller wants to charter his limo for three hours. For three hours? Did you tell him it's $75 an hour, though?

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: Joe says these guys are seldom big tippers, but it's worth the gamble. This customer-- a handsome, mid-thirties Middle Easterner-- says no recording, please. So Joe tells me to take a break, and he'll catch up with me when he's done.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: It's 5:00 PM, and I have no idea how much money Joe has. When we reconnect he looks exhausted, but hyped up. Since I left him he's finished with the charter, been to the casino to gamble, where he won $500. But there's more. He's anxious to tell me about how he's ended the day.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: What Joe didn't tell the guy is that he's Jewish.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: As we take off, Joe's still hanging on to today's winnings in a wad of bills, folded up like it's a double cheeseburger in one of his hands on the steering wheel.

Mary Beth Kirchner

(HOST) MARY BETH KIRCHNER: But think of it. If Joe just worked five days a week, making $2,000 a day, and never lost it back, that'd be a half million dollars a year.

Ira Glass

Mary Beth Kirchner lives in Washington, DC. Coming up, when the creator of the universe starts from scratch. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program-- Starting from Scratch. Stories of people starting over, with all the vulnerability and rawness that comes with starting from nothing.

We've arrived at Act Three. The first starting from scratch. Well, before there was money, or gambling, or TV, or puppies, or even the idea of before, there was this story about when everything started from scratch. Here's Jonathan Goldstein.

Jonathan Goldstein

In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass. He picked his ear until it bled. Tried to fit his fist in his mouth. And yanked out tufts of his own hair. At one point, he tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them. And God had to step in.

Looking down at Adam, God must have felt a bit weird about the whole thing. It must have been something like eating at a cafeteria table all by yourself, when a stranger suddenly sits down opposite you. But it's a stranger who you have created. And he is eating a macaroni salad that you've also created. And you have been sitting at the table all by yourself for over 100 billion years. And yet still, you have nothing to talk about.

It was pitiful the way Adam looked up into the sky and squinted. Before he created Adam, God must have been lonely. Now he was still lonely. And so was Adam.

Then came Eve. Since the Garden of Eden was the very first village, and since every village needs a mayor as well as a village idiot, it broke down in this way. Eve. Mayor. Adam. Village idiot. And that is the way it was from the very beginning. Sometimes when Adam would start to speak Eve would get all hopeful that he was about to impart something important and smart. But he would only say stuff like, little things are really great, because you can put them in your hand as well as in your mouth.

Eve would ponder how one minute she was not there or anywhere, and now she was. Adam would ponder nothing. In her dreams Eve danced in the tops of trees. Her beautiful thoughts flew out of her ears and lit up the sky like fireflies. And there were all kinds of people to talk to and hug. And then she would hear snoring. She would wake up and there would be Adam, his yokel face pressed right against hers. His dog food breath blowing right up her nostrils.

Eve stared up at the sky. Adam draped his arm across her chest, and brought his knee up onto her stomach. God, watching in heaven, feared for Adam's broken heart as though the whole universe depended on it. Adam was close to the animals and spent all day talking to them. Except for God, Eve had no one. She would complain to the Lord any chance she got.

Adam is a nimrod, she would say. And the Lord would remain silent. God was the best and all that, and she loved the hell out of him. But when it came to trash talk, he was of no use. Adam was constantly trying to impress her. Look what I have made, he said one bright morning, his hands cupped together. Eve looked into his hands. She pulled away and shrieked. Adam was holding giraffe feces. I've sculpted it, said Adam. It is for the Lord. He opened his hands wide to reveal to her a tiny little giraffe with a crooked neck.

On some days Adam galloped about exploring. His hair was wiry, and when it got sweaty it hung down in his eyes. Adam was cute this way. On one such day he saw a snake. Adam made the snake's acquaintance by accidentally stepping on his back. Wow, that's smart, said the snake through gritted teeth.

Their eyes locked. And in that very moment the snake concluded that, indeed, Adam was a lummox. And that as king of the Earth, his reign would very soon end. There was a new sheriff in town, and it was he. It was no longer the story of Adam, but the story of the snake. He could tell all of this just by simply looking into his idiot eyes.

I've seen you around with another one like you, he said to Adam. But instead of the dead legless snake between the legs she has chaos there. That's Eve, said Adam, all animated. I named her that myself. God made her from out of my rib. He showed the snake the scar on his side.

The snake looked at him in silence. The idea of Adam-- Adam the shlemiel, Adam the fool-- being God's favorite was enough to give the snake a migraine. You weren't at all like I imagined, the snake said. I thought you'd be closer to the ground. More pliant. Greener. I tried to explain to God that to make you balanced up on your hind legs was architecturally unsound. I don't know why I bother.

Adam sat and listened wide-eyed. Eve hadn't the patience to sit and chat like this. So when the snake suggested they get into the habit of meeting every once in a while to talk Adam was very excited to do so. As they lazed on their backs staring up at the sky the snake would brag about how he was older than the whole world, and that he used to pal around with God in the dark back before creation.

He said that in the darkness, it was a truer, freer air time. That in the darkness was the good old days. He told Adam that back in the very beginning he had all kinds of thoughts on how to make the Garden of Eden a better place, but that God was just too stubborn to listen to reason. Make the earth out of sugar, I told him. Instead of stingers, give bees lips they can kiss you with.

Adam didn't always agree with the snake. In fact, a lot of what the snake said went straight over his head. But there was still something about him that made him get into a very particular mood. He made the world feel bigger. Sometimes when Adam was with Eve, sitting there in icy silence, he would think to himself, I sure could go for a good dose of snake.

You would think that after all the time they spent together the snake would finally find it within himself to start liking Adam just a little bit. But instead, he only grew to hate him more. He took to comforting himself with thoughts of Adam's wife, Eve. From what he heard from Adam, she was hot and smart. Often he would imagine running into her, and the instant synergy they would have. Adam neglected to tell me how leggy you are, he would say, wrapping himself around her calf.

The snake had no idea what he looked like. He was hairless, bucktoothed, four inches tall, and he spoke with a lisp. Adam had the IQ of a coconut husk, but he was still human. The snake, in his arrogance, was unable to grasp this, and so he daydreamed. Sometimes I think you were watching me, the snake imagine saying to Eve, because I felt like there were ribbons wrapped around me. Ribbons made of raw pork intestines. I would turn around to catch you sneaking a peek at me from behind a tree, but all I'd see were the hedgehogs which mocked me. Come my dear. Let us eat from the tree of knowledge.

On Eve's very first day Adam explained to her the rules of the garden just the way God had explained them to him. He had lifted his head up and had made his back stiff. He had spoken the way a radio broadcaster from the 1940s would. Another kind of woman-- someone softer than Eve-- might have found this charming. He explained that except for the tree of knowledge every tree in the garden was theirs to eat from.

I am a fan of the pear, Adam said. It is not unlike an apple whose head craves God. Tell me more about this tree of knowledge, said Eve. She enjoyed the sound of it-- the tree of knowledge. It sounded very poetic. There's not much to tell, said Adam. If we eat from it we will die.

From then on Eve talked about the tree of knowledge all the time. It was tree of knowledge this, and tree of knowledge that. It's like it wasn't a tree at all, but a movie star. Sometimes she would just stand by the tree and stare at it. It was on such an occasion that she met the snake.

When Eve first caught sight of him she brought her hand to her mouth and gasped. She had seen some repulsive animals in her day. A booby that percolated her vomit to just beneath her tonsils. A dingo that instilled in her a sublime sense of nature's cruelty. And a deathwatch beetle that filled her with existential dread. But still, there was something about the snake that made her realize in a flash that the world was anywhere from 60% to 80% oilier than she would have ever imagined.

Hi, said the snake. In the mood for some fruit of knowledge? It's fruity. We were told not to eat from that tree or else we would die, said Eve. Die? What an ignorant thing to say, said the snake, all chewing on a blade of grass on the side of his mouth. If there is an escape hatch from paradise then it isn't really paradise, is it? The snake made interesting points. That appealed to Eve. He could see he was making an impression.

All I'm saying is to give it a try. Many things will be made immediately clear to you once you partake. I could talk about it all day and you still won't get it. You have a right to at least try it, right? I'm not saying go out and eat an entire fruit. Have a nibble. A nibble isn't really eating, is it?

Eve found arguing semantics exhilarating. She looked at the tree. The way the sun shined through its leaves was beautiful. Everything seemed to point to nibble the fruit. Then the snake said, think about it. Does God want companions who can think for themselves, or does he want a bunch of lackeys and yes men? Wouldn't God want a few surprises?

It would seem to me that God's telling you not to eat the fruit was just a test to see if you could think for yourselves, to see if you could exist as equals to God. The day you taste the fruit is the day God will no longer be lonely. At least give it a lick. Eve looked at the fruit, then she looked at the snake. Then, slowly, she parted her lips and pushed out her tongue-- all wet, and warm, and uncertain.

She ran its tip along the smooth flesh of the fruit. The snake smiled. Has anyone died? he asked. Now take a tiny little nibble. Just a speck. Just to see. The fruit was squishy and tart. She smushed it around in her mouth. She squinted her eyes. It was a bit like trying on new glasses. It was a bit like an amylnitrate popper. It was a bit like a big wet kiss on the lips, right at first when you weren't sure if you wanted to be kissed or not. She felt 1,000 little feet kicking at her uterus.

The idea of her own nudity, as well as Adam's, had always felt more like a Nordic coed health spa thing. Now, with the fruit of knowledge, it felt more like a Rio de Janeiro carnival thing. Her breasts felt like water balloons filled with blueberry jam and birds. Her nipples were like lit matchsticks. Her thighs, the way they squished against each other, were like scissors cutting through velour.

With her lips still glistening in tree of knowledge fruit juice, she ran off to find Adam. The snake watched her as he chewed on his slimy blade of grass. And as she receded into the distance, he thought something along the lines of, now that's what I'm talking about.

Kiss me Adam, said Eve. Taste my lips. Adam, like any lummox truly worth his salt, could smell the minutest trace of knowledge coming his way. And thus, he knew how to avoid it like the plague. But yet, there was also this. Eve had never sought him out in the middle of the day before just to kiss him. It felt like a very lucky thing. When he took her in his arms he told her that he loved her with his whole entire heart. He closed his eyes tightly and brought his lips to hers. Then he squinted. Then it started to rain, and Eve began to cry.

During the darkest days ahead, with the fratricides and whatnot, Adam would often think back to his brief time in Eden. As he became an old man, he would talk about the garden more and more. A couple of times he had even tried to find his way back there, but he very soon became lost. He didn't try too hard anyway. He didn't want to bother God any more than he already had. When Adam met someone that he really liked, he would say, I so wish you could have been there. It didn't seem fair to him that he was the one that got to be in Eden.

This sunset isn't bad, he'd say. But the sunsets in Eden, they burned your nose hairs. They made your ears bleed. He couldn't even explain it right. When you ate the fruit in Eden it was like eating God, he would say. And God was delicious. When you wanted him you just grabbed him. Now when he ate fruit he can only taste what was not there.

But it wasn't all bad. After Eden Eve became much gentler with Adam. After getting them both cast out she decided to try as hard as she could to give Adam her love. She knew it was the very least she could do. She sometimes even wondered if that was why God had sent the snake to her in the first place. Adam would tell his grandkids, his great-grandkids, and his great-great-grandkids about how he and Nana Eve had spent their early days in a beautiful garden naked and frolicking. And the kids would say, eww.

The children would swarm into the house like a carpet of ants. The youngest ones would head straight for Adam, lifting his shirt to examine his belly for the umpteenth time. They smoothed their hands across his flesh and marveled. Where is grandpa's belly button? they all asked. He stared at the children. They were all his children. And as they slid their little hands across his blank stomach, he wondered what it was like to be a kid.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein. This story appears in his book where he rewrites bible stories, called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible. Jonathan is also the writer and host of the really wonderful podcast Heavyweight.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Wendy Dorr and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, David Kestenbaum, and Starlee Kine. Production help for today's show from Todd Bachmann, Jane Marie, Aaron Scott, and Alvin Melathe. Mixing help today from Katherine Rae Mondo. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Mr. George [? Lara. ?] Thanks also to Kevin Scully, Dave [INAUDIBLE], and Tony Mancini. Some of the funding for Mary Beth Kirchner's story about the gambler came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's radio fund.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to any of our over 600 shows for absolutely free. Or if you want to download those shows you can get our app. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who got all angry this week when I told him that we were going to be putting a story about puppies onto the Public Radio satellite.

Ira Glass

Well, yeah. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.