They Call Me Baba Booey (24 page)

“And so ends our journey,” Howard said when it was all over. “You guys didn’t pay enough. Our audience is stunned and can’t really speak.”

“Did it live up to the hype?” I asked.

“Better than a Barbara Walters special,” said one of the audience members.

What killed me was that, at the time, I couldn’t convince Nancy to come on the show and tell everyone how she felt when she actually got the tape. The truth was, she didn’t think I was a stalker and she didn’t call 911 after watching it. In fact, when I decided to do this book I reached out to her again—we’ve kept in touch over the years—and this time she was ready to share what she was thinking. Finally, here’s what Nancy has to say about the tape, twenty-two years later:

“People I know who listen to the show say to me, ‘Did you listen today? They mentioned it again.’ It’s like infamy.

“But no one had done that for me before. I was living at home at that time, on Long Island, and I watched it by myself, although I did tell my best girlfriend about it. And I told the guy I was dating, too.

“To be honest, I thought the tape was a romantic gesture. If you asked any woman what she thought of something like that she would be like, ‘Wow, I wish a guy would sit down and do that for me.’

“We were in our twenties at that point and I had just gotten out of college and we had a pretty tight relationship. After I watched it, I was crushed and cried. I showed it to my friend, and she was like, ‘So what are you going to do?’ But there was
nothing to do. That’s one reason why it was hard to see it, because everything that was said about being together came too late, after I had decided to break up and move on. We had a close relationship and I did lose my best friend. I remember not wanting to get together after we broke up because I knew you were not going to let me off the hook. You were going to do what it took to get me back; there was no doubting what you wanted. You were saying, ‘I realized I was a jerk and want to do the right thing.’

“But it was also upsetting, hearing it on the show all those years later, because it was like someone ripped a page out of my diary from ten years earlier and then played it over and over.

“I don’t know which emotion came first: I felt embarrassed, angry, mortified, and extremely apologetic. That tape was buried in a box somewhere with letters that go with it. I just watched it for the first time in twenty-two years. And I am sorry for ever sharing its existence with anyone. I will say this though: I didn’t even notice you were wearing the Atlantic Records T-shirt. It didn’t make a single lasting impression on me.”

To be honest, if you asked me whether or not it was worth it, my first answer used to be yes. It helped pay for my kitchen. But now I’d immediately change my answer to no. I just didn’t know there would ever be such a thing as YouTube and this tape would live in perpetuity. Even today, people still react to it. It’s the brawniest guys who usually stop and whisper under their breath to tell me they did something just like that once. But it’s the women’s reaction that is most surprising. A lot of them are like the callers that day, telling me I’m a pussy and that I should have manned the fuck up.

At the time that twenty-two thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money. Now, it’s been played so much on the show and on YouTube, I feel it’s down to a nickel a play.

AFTER THE DREADFUL DAY
of executive assistant interviews, I had to regroup. I didn’t have a job. And I wasn’t going to the city to look for jobs, because I couldn’t type. I needed a plan, so I decided the plan was going to be: Don’t have a plan.

Instead of moping on the couch, I went back to work at Record World. Summer was a great time to work there. The mall was always buzzing and hot girls were always in the store looking for records. I liked the action. I put in thirty hours a week, listened to great new music every day, hung with Frank, Vinny, and the boys or friends from the store at night, got in some good beach time. I decided to give myself the rest of the summer to relax and then, come September, I was going to figure out my life. My parents weren’t bothering me to get out of the house and most of my friends hadn’t lit it up in the job market yet, so I didn’t feel too bad hanging around. Then, right before the summer ended, the manager at Record World asked
me if I had a job lined up for the fall. When I said my calendar was wide open, she offered me a full-time job there. Fantastic, I thought. I’d make money while I looked for a career.

That first Monday in September I showed up for work at 10
A.M
. I had never been there that early during the week. My shifts had always been nights and weekends. It was strangely quiet, in the store and in the mall. Everyone I was used to seeing had gone back to school. And the people working at the store were actually people who didn’t have any other options. They were adults, pushing thirty, and this was how they paid rent and bought food and filled their gas tanks. It dawned on me that my future was being shoved in my face like a shaving cream pie, and I didn’t even see it coming. It’s one thing to be hanging at the store on the weekends and fighting with your friends about which records to play. But it’s another to be there early in the morning during the week, with no chicks looking for music and a feather duster in your hand to clean the tops of the cabinets.

I freaked a little bit. I didn’t want to be a Record World lifer. I had to find a job.

First I called Steve North, my old boss at WLIR. He had moved on and was now working at WNBC radio in New York. He said he’d keep his eyes open for me. Then I reached out to fellow communications majors from Adelphi and kids I had done internships with. I quickly found out that a lot of these people didn’t have the passion for working in radio that I did. They had spent a few months looking for those kinds of jobs, had struck out, and started getting real work. They had given up and gone into retail, or became travel agents, or did pharmaceutical sales. This was discouraging. Once you do that, that’s what you do. Forever.

Here was the rub: I was working at the record store during the day. And that was the only time to interview for jobs that could lead to a real career. I was in a dead-end job that was keeping me from getting a new job. I had to quit the store.

Believe it or not, the best option I could find for work was as a host at T.G.I. Friday’s. An ex-girlfriend hooked me up. It was the perfect scenario, in theory. I worked as a host from five in the afternoon until eleven at night. On Saturdays it was packed, with people bribing me to get them to the front of the line so they could sit down and order overstuffed potato skins as soon as possible. And then I had all day to hunt for my dream job.

Except T.G.I.F. was like entering the abyss. It offered employees a free drink and half off food after work. When I clocked out at eleven I went over to the bar and joined the rest of the people whose shifts had just ended to have our free beer. While we were sitting there we thought,
Let’s get some food, it’s half off
. Then we got more to drink. Then more to eat. Pretty soon it was closing time and everyone would decide to head somewhere else. Then when that place closed we went to someone’s house to hang out. Suddenly I was getting home at six in the morning. Not only could I not get up for any interviews, I could barely get up in time for my 5
P.M
. shift.

Not that it mattered how available I was during the day. I couldn’t even find jobs to interview for. In fact, between September and Christmas, I had one job interview. That was in October. Steve North called me and said that the NBA needed someone with entry-level TV production experience. If I wanted to interview, he could get me in.

I drove from Long Island to the NBA production office in Secaucus, New Jersey, and I was exactly what they needed: a sports-crazed kid who knew how to work professional TV equipment, log tapes, and cut promos. I killed it. The guy I interviewed with told me he was working on a piece about George Mikan, the NBA’s original superstar back in the 1940s. I shook my head up and down like it was a great idea, but I had no clue who George Mikan was. I was a sports nut, still am, but I was a Mets/Jets/Islanders guy. The NBA wasn’t ever my
thing. Clearly I fooled him because he asked me to come back the next day to discuss it with some more people.

That night I went to the library and looked through every book I could find about basketball, writing it all down on a fact sheet. Then I went home and studied. Overnight I became a George Mikan expert, to the point that at the interview the next morning I was spewing stats that even he didn’t know. “You are perfect for the job,” he told me. “Now you have to go to the corporate office on Park Avenue in Manhattan and meet my bosses.”

“Fantastic,” I said. I could see T.G.I.F. in the rearview mirror.

“But I’m warning you,” he added. “You are the tenth person I’m sending over there. They haven’t hired anyone yet.”

Whatever
, I thought.
Those guys don’t have what I have. I won the Clemo
. They
don’t want it like I want it
.

I woke up the next morning, put on my best (and only) pin-striped suit, and rode the LIRR into the city. I had my résumé packed in my black briefcase. My internships were lined up on the page like well-behaved kids, each one announcing what I had accomplished as a dutiful employee. I sat down with a man and woman in a fancy office on Park Avenue and they started asking me about my experience. I explained how I kept a log of highlights and learned how to cut promos and highlights at SportsChannel. Then one of them stopped me and asked, “Are all the jobs listed on here internships?”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

Then they just looked at each other and nodded. That was the end of the interview. I didn’t get the job.

My dad had dropped me off at the train that morning and wished me good luck. He was on his way to New Jersey for some ice cream sales calls and then headed to the office. If I was
done early, he said, I should call him. He’d swing through the city and pick me up.

“You’ll meet me in the neighborhood,” he said. That’s what he called the area where he grew up, on the corner of Mott and Hester streets in Little Italy. He never said we were going to the city on Sundays; we were going to the neighborhood. I liked it down there, right on the border of Chinatown. Turn one way and you’d walk onto a street lined with Italian restaurants with cannoli displayed in the front window. Turn the other way and you were face-to-face with roasted ducks hanging from hooks.

The two parts of town were so intertwined, Dad’s buddies had nicknamed him Sally Foo because it sounded Chinese. Even my mom called him that. After my mom and dad were first married and living with her parents, someone came to the door and asked for Sal Dell’Abate. My grandfather had no idea who that was. He thought his son-in-law’s name was Sally Foo.

Whenever we visited the neighborhood we stopped by a place on Hester called Mo’s, a hole in the wall that wasn’t open to the public. It was a social club, one that wasn’t all that friendly if you didn’t belong. Inside you’d find a bunch of old Italian guys drinking, with one jukebox in the corner. It actually always freaked me out whenever we stopped by there. The old-timers sort of smirked when they saw me, then patted me on the head and slipped me money or Hershey bars. Once, I told my dad I had to go to the bathroom and he pointed to a long hallway and said it was the door on the right.

But I was little and scared and by the time I got to the end of the hallway I couldn’t remember if it was right or left, so I picked the door on the left. When I opened it I saw a bunch of guys sitting around a table with stacks and stacks of money on it. One of them screamed at me, “Shut the fucking door, kid!”

What? No candy?

Clearly something weird was going on here. As I got older and realized this I asked my dad how come he never joined the mafia. He was a gambler. He was tough and he lived in the right neighborhood. He told me he always had chances, but it just wasn’t the way he wanted to go. Not that he didn’t know people who did. He and my mom used to talk about this one guy he grew up with who had a cockeyed look about him. He scared her. In fact, they thought, it was the look that may have gotten him killed.

Once, after my dad had lost his job, we were at one of the big flea markets in Oakdale, Long Island, where he was selling crap to make ends meet. This was out in the middle of nowhere, a real rural area. We were sitting together and it was pretty busy, but my dad suddenly stopped talking and just stared at someone, an older guy, who was walking around the racks of clothes. Wherever the guy went, my dad’s eyes tracked him, until he had to get up and follow him to keep him in his sights. When my dad confronted him, the guy turned white and quickly walked away.

“Who was that?” I asked my dad when he came back.

“I thought it was a guy from the neighborhood,” my dad said. “But he said I had the wrong fella.”

A couple of years later my dad showed me the guy’s picture in the paper. He’d been killed. The mob had been looking for him for years.

After I was rejected by the NBA, I went down to the neighborhood, found a pay phone, and called my dad. He told me to meet him at Mo’s.