They Call Me Baba Booey (5 page)

My class was leaving for the city on a bus a few hours after the schoolday had begun, which meant my mom would have to meet us at school. When it was time to leave, all the kids were sitting in their seats on the bus and our teacher stood in the front, checking his watch. There was no sign of my mother. My leg bounced up and down with nerves as we waited and waited and waited for my mom to show up. Finally the teacher said to me, “We’re going to have to leave in two minutes.”

Then my mom came screeching up in her car, threw it in park, jumped out, and ran onto the bus. She was panting as she said, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I’m late.” Already I was not invisible. I remember it being excruciatingly embarrassing. I didn’t think it could get worse. Until we got to the top of the Empire State Building.

I was looking out over the city on the observation deck when I heard screaming. I turned around and saw my mom—with one high heel on and the other in her hand, gripping it as if it were a weapon—chasing some of my classmates. She was yelling at them to stop misbehaving and start listening. They were half laughing, half wondering why this woman, Gary’s mom, was coming after them. At one point the heel on the shoe she was wearing broke and she started screaming at the
kids for making her break her shoe. I wanted to go into a corner of the building and die. Or better yet throw myself off the observation deck. For the rest of that year kids asked me what was wrong with my mother. I was the kid in class with the crazy mom. My mom was oblivious to how that incident could scar a fourth grader for life. Instead, she’d bring it up and say, “Can you believe how badly those kids were behaving?”

But for the most part, no one outside of our house and immediate family knew the extent of what was happening with my mom. My dad didn’t call the school when she was in the hospital to let my teacher know. And it’s not like she walked around the neighborhood trading pills with other housewives or muttering to herself in her housecoat. Her manic incidents were isolated enough—once a week some months and none during others—that if you heard screaming from my house you’d just think someone was having an argument. Uniondale was blue-collar and Italian. Screaming was commonplace.

My mom’s issues stemmed as much from her temper as they did from any mental instability. There was a line she crossed where one gave way to the other, like she couldn’t find an off switch. One day we went to the A&S department store in Hempstead to buy me new school clothes. My mom tried to pay with a credit card that was in my father’s name, but the saleslady wouldn’t accept it. Naturally, my mom flew into a rage. She started throwing my clothes—which were sitting in a pile on the counter—at the lady. Those were followed by the black Chuck Taylor high-tops I had picked out. One of the Chucks hit the saleslady in the head while she was on the phone with security. That’s when we sprinted out of the store to avoid getting arrested.

The temper problems meant that, even when my mom was in the right, she could occasionally wind up in the wrong. In our part of town she had a lot of friends, but she also had a lot
of people she perceived to be enemies. That’s how it was with her: Everything was black-and-white. You were her friend or you were her enemy.

Our next-door neighbors happened to be enemies. The houses on my street were practically on top of one another, separated by just a thin driveway. The older son next door was just a grade ahead of me and, for some reason, he had it in for me. He constantly beat the crap out of me. It became a regular topic of conversation in my house: What are we going to do about Gary getting beaten up? I was in third grade. Finally, one warm spring afternoon, my mom decided she was going to go next door and have a chat with the guy’s mom. It was just like out of
The Brady Bunch
, when Peter was getting picked on and Mike and Carol went over to the bully’s house expecting everyone to be reasonable. Except in my case they weren’t.

With me on her heels, my mom walked over and knocked on our neighbor’s door. I noticed a lot of kids playing ball in the street. I stopped by myself at the very edge of our property line, on the driveway, which meant I was still plenty close to listen to the conversation. I had never been in their house and was really anxious about being as close as I was.

Our neighbor opened her screen door but, instead of inviting my mom in, she stepped out onto the top step of the three-step stoop. My mom said, “I want your son to leave my son alone.” So far so good, a perfectly reasonable request. Carol Brady would have been proud. Then our neighbor answered in a flip and casual tone: “Maybe your son can defend himself.”

Uh-oh.

I can’t remember who dropped the first F-bomb, but in a matter of seconds they were flying. The neighbor was yelling, “Fuck you!” My mom yelled it back. And then … my mom pushed her. My first thought was,
Let’s get out of here now, Mom. This isn’t working. We should walk away right now!
I knew that
my mom would get herself worked up and it would be impossible to stop this thing from escalating. There would be no turning back.

Our neighbor couldn’t believe she had been pushed. She stood there, her mouth open, like she was watching a scary movie. Only she was in it. Now people were starting to gather around. The kids who had been playing ball on the street dropped their bats and stared. Then my mom took it to another level. There were shrubs and a flower bed just to the side of our neighbors’ stoop, underneath a big bay window. As the woman stood there, my mom reached down and pulled up some shrubs. She must have caught a glimpse of the roots, because she decided that they might make a good weapon. Then she started bashing our neighbor with the shrubs. Dirt was flying everywhere. By now the neighborhood parents were in the street watching, too. They were fascinated, amazed, horrified, and stunned. I was petrified and embarrassed.
This is not what we came here to do
, I thought. My mom had started out in the right, and now she was beating our neighbor with her shrubbery.

Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing we knew, a squad car pulled up with the lights flashing.
Really? The cops?
Now I was freaking out. My dad wasn’t home. My brothers weren’t home. I figured the cops were going to haul her off. I didn’t cry—I wasn’t a yeller; that would just draw more attention to me—I was just kind of frozen, waiting to see where it all went. My stomach ached.

One of the cops put my mom in the back of the cruiser. The other one had a talk with our neighbor. After several minutes the two cops got together and conferred. Then they released my mom. What were they going to do? Arrest two housewives?

As we walked into the house, my mom didn’t say a word. It was almost dinner, so she went into the kitchen and started to cook. She was moving on. But it wasn’t that easy for me. The
next morning at school a bunch of kids came up to me and said, “I heard about what your mom did. She’s crazy.”

They weren’t cruel. I wasn’t teased about it or ignored on the playground. And weirdly I wasn’t
that
embarrassed. It ran so much deeper than that. I just wished someone could fix things. I wondered:
How do we get it to stop now and forever? Can’t someone do something?

When I was older, around eight or nine, my mom went back into the hospital. This time her stay was shorter—I don’t even remember visiting her—and Anthony was old enough that he was put in charge of me and my brother until my dad got home from work. But when she got home, the pattern was similar to the first time she went away: She was lethargic. She slept a lot. She self-medicated. She still had mood swings, fits of anger, and moments when she couldn’t stop crying.

Nothing the doctors tried seemed to work. And I know now they tried everything.

I was in ninth grade when I began to understand what my mom went through, what those visits to the hospital were all about. The movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
had just been released and my aunts and uncles were talking about it. They wondered how realistic the electroshock therapy scenes were, and then I heard one of them say, “I wonder if that’s what it was like for Ellen.”

What the fuck! Electroshock therapy! On my mom! Twice! I went to see the movie right after that conversation. In one scene, hospital workers grab Jack Nicholson and strap him down to a gurney with giant leather belts. They rub Vaseline on the side of his head and attach what look like a pair of headphones to his temples. When they flip the switch, he buckles
and gyrates. I realized he would have flown across the room if he hadn’t been strapped in. My mom was half his size. If this grown man was shaking and convulsing, what must this have done to my mother’s body? Holy shit. I was seriously scared for my mother. I wasn’t surprised the treatment didn’t help her; I wondered if it made things worse. At this point Anthony and Steven were long gone from the house. They didn’t talk about my mom’s treatment when they were around and, even if they knew what was happening, there was no way they would discuss it with me. So I just tried to process everything as well as I could. It didn’t make me any less frustrated when she was struggling, but it did make me more sympathetic. Years later, when I saw
Changeling
with Angelina Jolie, I cried. The ECT scene in this movie was even more graphic. The orderlies took their time buckling her in. And the fact that the character was a woman—and a mother—going through it made it harder for me. If
Cuckoo’s Nest
was a discovery,
Changeling
was reality.

I guess I buried those memories for a long time—it all feels like it happened a hundred years ago—and I hadn’t really shared them with anyone, other than my shrink, as an adult. But one day at work early in 2010, I was hanging with Jason Kaplan and Jon Hein in an area we call the bullpen, which is just rows of cubicles. We were talking about our mothers and I said to Jason, “You can’t believe the shit that I went through.”

Jason said, “Yeah, I’ve heard you and Howard talk about it on the air. What is it about your mom that was so crazy?”

In a flip way, I told him the story about visiting my mom in the hospital the very first time—as if to say, look at what I went through and I am fine. Suddenly I got choked up and abruptly ended the story. I was embarrassed. I thought,
Maybe I’m actually not fine about it
.

Or maybe it’s just that I still can’t believe what my mom went through.

MOST MORNINGS WHEN I WAS A KID
, I’d wake up, roll out of bed, walk into the kitchen, and find my mom sitting at our faux-oak table. She’d be smoking a cigarette, drinking some coffee, and watching the news on TV. Then she’d fix me breakfast. Cheerios and milk, my favorite. As long as I had that, I was happy. But by the time I was in fourth grade, my mother slept in more and more. By the time I was in junior high, she didn’t bother getting up at all. Part of it was the depression and part of it was that I was the third child and she decided I could take care of myself in the mornings. She’d make me my lunch the night before and leave it in the fridge. I never even thought it was strange until one morning, before school, a friend stopped by to walk with me. I was rummaging through the refrigerator looking for cream cheese and he said, “Where’s your mom?”

“Sleeping,” I said.

Then he asked, more curious than accusatory, “Why isn’t she making breakfast for you?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She sleeps in.”

In my house, mornings were the quietest times of the day. Everyone, it seemed, found a reason to get out of there as quickly as possible. My dad was off to sell ice cream before sunrise. And my brothers, well, when we were all living under the same roof, I can’t remember many times we had breakfast together. They always left early and came home late, just before dinner. “It was traumatic living in a house like that,” Anthony said.

I couldn’t blame either of them for wanting to escape the chaos. Especially Anthony. Steven was a bit of a golden child, very smart and very quiet. But Anthony was trouble. For a long time—before and after my mom went into the hospital—she accused him of making her sick, yelling, “It’s your fault I am crazy, you’re making me crazy because you are so out of control!” She wasn’t wrong: Anthony kind of
was
out of control. In eighth grade he stayed out all night without calling home. When he was thirteen he used to hang with a buddy whose older brother was in a motorcycle gang called the Pagans. Anthony and his pal went to the gang’s parties and acted as mascots/waiters, bringing everyone beers until the sun came up. They thought they were the coolest kids in the world.

When he was sixteen Anthony asked my parents if he could go to Woodstock. All his buddies were going. Naturally my parents said no. That day they left him to babysit me—Steven was old enough to be out doing his own thing during the summer—so there was no way Anthony could sneak out. At least that’s what they thought. It was early in the morning and, while he watched the Woodstock coverage on TV, Anthony got so riled up he said, “I’m going. Gary, go pack your bag.” I was eight years old. So I wrapped a bunch of toys in a rag and tied it around a stick, like a hobo. Anthony helped me. We
walked out of the house and headed to Uniondale Park, where Anthony and his friends hung out a lot. The place was nothing special—some baseball fields, some tennis courts, and a lot of benches for the teenagers in town to sit at and figure out how to get into trouble.