They Call Me Baba Booey
Read They Call Me Baba Booey Online
Authors: Gary Dell'Abate
They Call Me Baba Booey
is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2010 by Gary Dell’Abate
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dell’Abate, Gary.
They call me Baba Booey / Gary Dell’Abate with Chad Millman.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60443-3
1. Dell’Abate, Gary. Radio producers and directors—United States—Biography.
I. Millman, Chad. II. Title.
PN1991.4.D46A3 2010
791.4402′33092—dc22 2010035302
[B]
v3.1
To my beautiful wife, Mary:
I couldn’t do it without you.
Thanks for your love and support
.
To Jackson and Lucas:
You are not just my kids, you are my best friends
.
To Mom and Dad:
I wouldn’t be who I am without you
.
God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of
.
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “BRILLIANT DISGUISE”
1997“Why are you talking to me like this?”
Oh shit
, I thought. I had just cracked open the back door of my house one afternoon in early March 1997 and heard my wife, Mary, asking that question. She sounded pissed and confused. She never sounded pissed and confused.
Mary is blond, kind, demure, and quiet. She is steady. I liked her when we first met because we didn’t argue; we had conversations. I didn’t do that with anyone else I knew. Ever. My entire life, from the time I was born to the first and only professional job I’ve ever had, producing
The Howard Stern Show
, has been built around chaos and confrontation. But Mary’s world was full of happy, respectful people who treated her well. It had never occurred to her to ask, “Why are you talking to me like this?” because no one ever did. (I never asked because that’s all
anyone
did.) Someone on the phone was yelling at her. And she was confused. Genuinely very confused,
as if she didn’t know the person on the other end of the line.
The truth was, she didn’t, at least not really. But I did.
I knew who Mary was talking to the second I opened the door. It was my mom. My beautiful, warm, fierce, absolutely 100 percent certifiably crazy mom, Ellen.
You know that movie
Misery
with Kathy Bates, where she plays the nut job who kidnaps James Caan and breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer? There is a scene where it is raining and Kathy Bates’s character looks uncommonly sad. “Sometimes when it rains I get really blue,” she says. Well,
blue
was my mom’s favorite word when I was growing up. Feeling blue. Having the blues. Bad weather, an argument with one of her six brothers and sisters, or a perceived slight from a neighbor could trigger it. When she felt fine she could gab all day long in a voice that sounded like Mary Tyler Moore with a Brooklyn accent. But if I asked her a question and her answers were short and curt or just a simple yes or no, that meant trouble. I knew a storm was brewing. It would lead to days and days of feeling blue, causing her to sleep in all morning because she had spent most of the night pacing. Or screaming. Or both.
She was clinically depressed, only no one knew to call it that at the time.
Early on, when Mary and I started dating and then got married, I did a good job of hiding my mom’s instability. It wasn’t too hard. She could be as tender as she was unhinged. When I was growing up she’d buy random gifts to keep around the house and pass out to my friends when the mood struck her. But those friends had also seen her end phone calls she didn’t like by slamming the receiver down five or six times—
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
—and then walk into her room, throw the door closed, and let out a holy, ear-piercing scream. They all understood how hot and cold she could run.
In high school my friend Frank said to me, “You know your mom’s crazy, right?” I said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “But she’s your mom.” He knew what the score was. My dad was an ice cream salesman, normal as can be. My mom was … not exactly normal. Frank and I laughed about it. I just shrugged my shoulders, as if I were raised in a ’70s sitcom.
After Mary and I were married and then especially after we had our first son, Jackson, shielding her from my mom became pretty much impossible. Sometimes I would take the phone in my room and hide so Mary wouldn’t hear me talking my mom down. It started to create a little trouble between us, in a way that wasn’t at all like living in a sitcom.
And it came to a head that day in March, nearly five years after we were married. As Mom yelled at Mary for God knows what, I knew there was no more hiding it. That call was followed by one from my older brother Anthony, which ended in the two of us having a fight. And then came a call from my dad, which also ended in a fight. And finally there was one more call from my mom, which, yep, ended in a fight.