They Call Me Baba Booey (10 page)

AS I SAID, MY
parents briefly followed the Cortoneo tradition when they married: They moved into one of the apartments in my grandparents’ building in Bensonhurst, close to the rest of my mom’s family. That arrangement lasted for a little over two years, until the night Steven was born. That’s when my grandfather kicked them out.

Everything was going smoothly when the night began. My mom had an easy delivery while my dad stood vigil in the waiting room, passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his second son. Once my dad had seen his new baby boy and made sure my mom was comfortable, he headed back to the apartment to get a good night’s sleep. As he lay in bed smoking a cigarette and reflecting on the day, he started to get tired. So he rolled over, snubbed the butt out in an ashtray on the nightstand, and fell asleep. Problem was, he didn’t put the cigarette out completely. And he was a restless sleeper. At some point during the
night he knocked the ashtray off the nightstand, and the smoldering cigarette rolled under the bed and lit the rug. Smoke started to fill the room and seep into the apartment upstairs, where my uncle lived with his wife. I told you, the Cotroneos were tight.

The smoke woke up my dad and he frantically tried to put out the fire. Meanwhile my aunt ran down and started banging on the door. She was screaming for my dad to get out and when he didn’t answer she started yelling, “Oh my God, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”

“But I wasn’t dead,” my dad told me. “I was just too busy trying to put out the fire to answer her. When I finally did, there was smoke damage all over the room and in apartments above. And your grandparents never bothered insuring anything. So, well, they were mad and we had to move.”

For the next several years my mom, dad, and brothers bounced around Bensonhurst, never straying too far from my mom’s family. But in 1963, a couple of years after I was born, my mom and dad decided it was time to decamp for the suburbs. We settled in Uniondale, because my mom had a sister living there and it wasn’t too far from the city for my dad to commute.

Now, there are plenty of really fancy, upscale places in Long Island, but Uniondale was a blue-collar town. Lots of my friends’ dads wore uniforms to work with their names stitched on the front. I would say the town was about 60 percent Italian, German, and Irish, and 40 percent black.

There was a lot of white flight in the early 1970s. Our houses were on tiny lots and everyone’s backyard fence touched to form four corners. I remember one time a black family moved into one of the houses that shared our four-corner zone. A few weeks later, another neighbor left town in the middle of the night. My mom got up at two in the morning to get a drink and saw the moving truck. Then she started panicking and
launched into the whole “our house is going to go down in value” rap. But my father didn’t want to move. That was another big bone of contention between them. She wound up living there for thirty-six years, until she moved to Florida in 1997.

Racial tension was a constant issue. Before I started Lawrence Road Junior High kids would say, “Watch your back,” because the black kids were going to come after me. But those first few weeks I didn’t notice anything unusual. Then, around the last week of September, I heard there was going to be a fight between the black kids and the white kids on the front lawn of the school after the final bell. I didn’t know what was going on, but I went to the front lawn and there were about twenty-five white kids and twenty-five black kids facing off, yelling at one another. Then one kid from each group stepped out and started swinging, while everyone else screamed and cheered them on. Suddenly a car came screeching around the corner and two white kids jumped out swinging chains and tire irons. That’s about when the cops showed up and everyone scattered. That scene went on every year until I graduated from high school.

The white guys in the middle of it were part of a group known as the Park Boys. They hung out at Uniondale Park, the site of my short-lived but magical journey to Woodstock with Anthony. He took me down there a lot when we were growing up, but he was always getting high while he was supposed to be watching me. Eventually, after Anthony moved out and I was in junior high, my parents let me walk down to the park by myself. If you went over there on a Saturday or a Sunday morning you’d take a seat on a bench and wait for someone to show up. Pretty soon there’d be two or three of you hanging out. By 10
A.M
. around twenty-five kids would be loitering near this bench getting yelled at by the guy who worked for the town and managed the park. I started smoking cigarettes there. The
guys known as the Park Boys were tough by suburban standards. And, the truth was, I wasn’t a tough guy, but I didn’t know where else to go. Hanging with them was kind of like our version of hanging with Joe Pesci in
Goodfellas:
One second he’d be laughing with you and the next he’d want to kill you for no reason at all. In Queens they probably would have gotten the crap kicked out of them, but in Uniondale they qualified as badasses.

One of the guys, at sixteen, was already drinking a case of beer a day. The older kids in the gang were getting into weird shit like robbing houses. At first it was juvenile stuff—lawn mowers and bicycles from someone’s garage. Then it became breaking into people’s homes and stealing prescription pills like Valium and Seconal.

One Saturday I got to the park early and one of these guys was already there. He didn’t like me and I was always too scared to talk to him. But since no one else was around he asked me if I wanted to go for a joyride. Someone who was playing tennis at the park had left the keys in their convertible, which was parked right by our bench, just out of sight of the courts. Being an idiot, I just shrugged. I didn’t want to look like a pussy. I really just wanted to be accepted. So we got in and drove the car around a bunch of local side streets for fifteen minutes. He kept mouthing the words, “Be cool, be cool.” He may have been talking to himself. Other than that, we didn’t speak. We were both too scared.

The whole time I was thinking how stupid this was. The dickhead didn’t even let me drive. Plus, if we got caught and my father found out he’d snap me in half. It would be much worse than when I was thirteen and he and my mom caught me sneaking a sip of a beer during a Jay and the Americans concert in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, which was Long Island’s version of Central Park. I wasn’t even a drinker. A buddy of mine was just about finished with his beer and asked if I
wanted to kill it. It wasn’t even beer at that point, it was backwash. As I put the bottle to my lips I saw my parents, staring right at me. They grounded me for two weeks on the spot. But since it was summer and I was always around, my mom let me loose after a week. She got sick of me. That was the only time I had ever been grounded. But stealing a car? The physical punishment I imagined was terrible, but the fact that my father would think I was beyond stupid was horrifying. I wasn’t even stealing something that I could keep, or would make my life better, or would help me buy more records. He’d think his son was a moron and a bad thief. Thank God we were both shitting our pants, so the ride didn’t last very long.

When we got back we parked the car a block away. For good measure he stole the tennis rackets in the backseat.

I knew that wasn’t my scene. I wasn’t a goody two-shoes, but I was never comfortable there. I’d see a kid shoplift something like a baseball glove, and then I’d have to go back with him to his house, where his mom would look at him, look at the glove with the tag still on it, and then ask him where he got it. “I found it,” he’d say. Then his mom would roll her eyes and ignore it. I could never get away with that. If my mom saw me show up at home with a new baseball glove she’d grill me as if I’d shot Bobby Kennedy.

One afternoon we were hanging out at the park, playing a stupid game designed to hurt somebody. It goes like this: When a guy is standing up, someone sneaks up behind him on his hands and knees. Then someone else pushes the guy, who falls backward over the kid on his hands and knees. Well, I was the guy on my hands and knees, behind a heavy kid. When he fell he landed on my head, which smacked the concrete. I stood up and was acting spacey and weird and asking people strange questions, so they pointed me in the direction of my house and told me to go home.

When I stumbled through the front door and told my mom
what happened she freaked out and took me to the doctor, who diagnosed me with a mild concussion. That should be the end of the story. All I had to do was rest on our sheet-covered couches while my mom nursed me back to health.

But while I was half asleep on the couch, still woozy and feeling like I might puke, my mom bolted out of the house. I didn’t have time to stop her, and couldn’t have if I had managed to catch her. Her son had been injured; she wanted answers. Even if it meant leaving me disoriented with a concussion and alone.

When she got to Uniondale Park, instead of explaining who she was and asking what happened, she stormed into the middle of this street gang and raised hell. Of course she was right to want some answers. But she only provoked the park punks. They told her to fuck off. So she started yelling back even louder. “Fuck off” was her warm-up. She cleared her throat with “fuck off.” These boys were amateurs. This wasn’t her being depressed and acting out; this was her being Ellen, of the Fighting Cotroneos. It devolved into a shouting match, my petite mom and her dictionary of swears versus a bunch of hoods. I have no idea who won. When my mom got home she did what she always did: acted like nothing happened and made dinner.

But of course, I feared the worst. Every time my mom left the house I thought I’d end up having to explain her actions. A broken heel on top of the Empire State Building; using shrubs as weapons; firing Chuck Taylors at sales clerks. If my brain hadn’t been scrambled maybe I could have stopped her. But I didn’t.

The next day I quickly realized she had made an impression. People I didn’t even know came up to me and said, “Man, your mom is nuts.” It became a running gag for a while. If someone acted crazy some wise guy would always add, “Yeah, like Gary’s mother.”

I retreated when I heard the jokes, which were impossible to stop or to top. I thought,
If I don’t say anything, people will get bored and let it go
. I wasn’t being overly mature or intelligent; I was genuinely scared any response I had would result in a fight. I basically curled up in a ball and waited for it all to end. Eventually it would, and I could come back out of my shell.

Of course, my mom’s instinct to protect me at all costs never changed. That was obvious to me once I was older, and it became obvious to the rest of the world on June 2, 1987.

I’d started working on
The Howard Stern Show
in 1984 on WNBC in New York. From the very first day, I had been a regular on the air and was often the butt of Howard’s harshest jokes. I loved it. I had been taking abuse my entire life, so taking it on the show was no different. The gift of growing up in my house was learning to understand that someone could attack you and still love you. I knew how to separate the two. Sick, I know, but it’s a skill that’s served me well. It’s when people ignore you that you have to start worrying. When the guys made fun of me it always felt like I was one of the gang.

While the show is on the air, I am usually in my office, doing several things at once. Nowadays I am checking email or confirming schedules or managing the staff. Back then I would have been opening actual letters in envelopes and cataloging tapes. But the constant is that I always have one ear on the show, in case I’m needed. No matter where we broadcast from, my office is just a few steps from the studio.

That June afternoon, Howard had called me in just before he started a segment about how he had recently been to the dentist. I didn’t know where he was going with it and I wasn’t particularly concerned. This was just another day at the office.

He said the dental assistant there had taught him how to brush his teeth—turns out he had been doing it wrong all these
years. “A lot of people don’t know how to brush,” he said. “Gary, get in here.” When I entered the studio he looked at me and said, “I look in Gary’s mouth and see a disaster going on. Let me ask you something, when you eat spicy food does it bother your tongue?”

“My tongue?”

“Yeah, your gums, your tongue?”

“No,” I answered.

“That’s because he’s burned everything out,” Robin chimed in.

I smoked back then. A lot.

“But your gums don’t ever burn and you don’t get infections in your gums?” Howard asked.

“I haven’t had that problem in a while.”

“What happens is you get food caught in there and you start to smell,” he continued.

“I’ve kissed women and never had anyone complain,” I said.

“She must be in a coma, your girlfriend. She’s unconscious from breathing in all those fumes. I don’t mean to embarrass you or anything but you have to do something about those gums. Let me turn you on to my dentist.”

“They are going to have to put on one of those astronaut suits to go in there,” Robin said. Then she pretended to sound like an astronaut reporting over a static radio to earth, “We are going in now.”