They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  Somehow, though, she always pulled herself together for dinner. Our kitchen was tiny and decorated in avocado green to match the carpet. The avocado upholstery on our chairs matched the avocado fridge, which complemented the faux-oak table in the center of the room that seated six. I was always stuck at the end of the table right in front of the oven, and the door couldn’t be opened if I was sitting at the table. When my mom had food to get out, I had to move.

  Every night I and my brothers and my mom ate dinner together at six. I sat in front of the oven, Anthony sat next to my mom, and Steven sat by himself across from them. My dad sat at the opposite end from me. But he usually came home too late for dinner. We were not a family who ate out, except for the occasional Sunday trip to Borrelli’s—the only place we deemed good enough to replace a proper Italian meal—or pizza at a place called Anthony’s. But mostly, my mom cooked, and she was a great cook. Chicken cutlets. Broiled steak. She occasionally worked as a food demonstrator—meaning she was the lady in the mall with a microphone around her neck who made something in a wok and then handed out samples. I remember being in ninth grade when she did the wok demo. We ate Chinese three days a week. In tenth grade it was the pasta maker, which looked like a toaster with a hand crank.

  Once we sat down, dinner lasted about five minutes and was almost always eaten in front of the Zenith. We watched the news, the Vietnam War unfolding on our screen as we shoveled food into our mouths.

  It was actually television, more than food, that brought us together. None of us could believe it when The Sound of Music—Best Picture in 1965!—appeared on TV just a year later. We couldn’t wait to watch it. It was an event! Saturday nights in our house were ruled by Carol Burnett and All in the Family; Sundays belonged to Ed Sullivan. And then during commercials we talked about the musical acts, with my dad usually joking, “You call that music? That’s not music!” Then he’d break into a Frank Sinatra song from the 1940s.

  We all laughed, especially my mom.

  When she was in a good mood and balanced, she was all love. She was very physical, and she would grab my friends and kiss them on the head and say, for no reason at all, “Oh your mother must be so proud.” She’d be so warm, telling all the neighbors and my friends to come over, that her kitchen was never closed. The problem was, you never knew when that mood was going to change. She would spend three days being as warm and loving as anyone you’d ever seen. And then three days of being a normal mom. And then on the seventh day she’d wake up saying she was feeling blue.

  Most people in their lives have “an incident” involving their parents, the moment when their mom or dad just loses it and rage trumps being rational. Well, we had “incidents.”

  Sometimes my mom would plop food down at dinner and then angrily bang some pots and pans while she washed them, before dropping them altogether in a loud clang. We never knew what had set her off. She’d walk into her room screaming and slam the door. You couldn’t believe the words that came out of her mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. A sailor would have blushed. She’d come out, we’d think it was over, and then she would dial a number, usually one of her sisters, and fight with whoever could provoke her into a rage. Then she’d slam the phone down five or six times and go back into her room and scream some more. “These people think they live on an island,” she liked to say. “Like you live all by yourself and can do whatever you want. They think they can pull one over on me, they think I don’t know, they think I don’t see. I see, I see what’s going on.”

  The episodes didn’t frighten me in a way that made me cower under the table or flinch if my mom came near me. I always loved her. But they affected me in other ways. How could they not? I had a bedwetting problem until I was in second grade. And I felt horrible about it. Not because my parents got angry with me or because my brothers made fun of me. Neither happened actually. I was too young for my brothers to think of me as a rival worthy of their torment. I just felt bad because I didn’t know why it was happening. I was peeing in my sleep so often that my mom went to the drugstore and bought an expensive machine that connected to the bed. It had an alarm that went off whenever liquid hit the mattress. We never even connected it. That night my dad got home and said, “What good is that? If the alarm goes off when liquid hits the mattress, it’s too late.” My mom said she was going to return it and that’s when Steven chimed in, pretending to be our mom calling the pharmacy. “Hi, this is Mrs. Dell’Abate, I’d like to return the piss machine.”

  One morning, showing a little frustration, my mom said to me, “You have to stop doing this.” I said back, “I know. I want to.” If I had known then what I know now, I would have said, “Stop screaming like a banshee and maybe I will stop peeing in my bed.”

  Mostly, when my mom lost it, Anthony, Steven, and I never said a word to one another. If she morphed at dinner, we just kept eating, giving one another looks. But we didn’t want to talk because whoever spoke would draw attention to himself and become the target of her rant. Other than my mom yelling, no one said a word.

  Blind rages like that only have to happen seven or eight times before you adapt and get used to it. Every explosion, we’d all just wonder how long the episode would last. Their length was never something you could gauge. My dad would get home, hear what was going on, and say, “Okay, this is what we get today.”

  From where I sat, it always seemed like my mom was the one looking to pick a fight. One day she accused my father of cheating. I was at home when she called his office and started screaming at his assistant and the boss’s assistant. When he got home he told her she couldn’t call his office and yell like that. She screamed back, “I don’t care!”

  Mostly, though, when my father walked through the door and my mom started with him he’d say, “You know what? I am not going to fight with you tonight.” Then he would sit in his chair and read the newspaper. She’d still try to pick a fight with him. Sometimes she would grab me and say we were leaving and moving back to Brooklyn. The first time this happened, it freaked me out. I remember crying. I wondered if I’d ever see my dad or brothers again. And where were we going to live when we got to Brooklyn? But I couldn’t ask her any of these questions because she was ranting nonstop. Ranting and driving. We would be in the car on the Long Island Expressway. Then just as quickly as we had left the house, she’d get off the LIE, turn around, and take us home. We’d wake up the next morning and she’d act like everything was normal.

  I learned to act like everything was normal, too. When I was a little older, my mom would scream and yell from the time I went to school in the morning until my dad got home at night. I would go to sleep and she’d still be screaming. She was manic. I wasn’t sure if she ever slept. I’d curl up in the fetal position in my bed and scream into the pillow out of frustration. But then the next day, I had to get up. I had to forge ahead. What was I supposed to do? Wake up in the morning and fall apart? That was a survival skill. Maybe I thought if I got up and acted like it didn’t happen—and she kept acting like nothing happened—then it wouldn’t happen again. If everything was back to normal I preferred we go with that idea and hope it stayed that way.

  Hope can be a powerful thing.

  ONE COLD AND CLOUDY AFTERNOON in late fall, some time after my mom had been hospitalized, I came home from first grade and found her hurrying to get out of the house. Today was going to be that kind of a day, I thought. She put me in the car and drove me to a doctor’s office. I had never been there before. I didn’t know it was a psychiatrist.

  She sat in the waiting room with me, sobbing hysterically, and when she was called in she just left me sitting there. She didn’t think twice about that. But back then mothers smoked while they were pregnant and let kids ride without car seats. They didn’t always think about their child’s welfare. I waited, wondering if this doctor was going to make her feel better, but when she came out she was crying even harder. The doctor stood behind her. His name was Dr. Peck, and he looked like someone out of a textbook
: heavyset with a tweed jacket, a Sigmund Freud beard, and glasses. I wondered, Is this my mom feeling better?

  She cried all the way home, a twenty-minute drive. I didn’t know what was going on or what kind of doctor she had been seeing. I wondered if they had hurt her or used scary instruments on her. At home the crying got even worse, and as she often did, she walked into her room and slammed the door. I heard her screaming, “Papa, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” But she didn’t sound mad. She wasn’t yelling at anyone. And this was strange to me. Normally when she acted like that she came back out screaming. But she wasn’t mad, not at me or her sisters or my dad or anyone. I was confused, so I waited, until the light faded away and it turned dark. Then my brothers came home. And at 5:30 my mom came out and made us dinner. It was as if nothing had happened.

  This kind of crying happened more after she got out of the hospital. This was also when she started to self-medicate. Her philosophy was, if the doctor told her one pill would make her feel less blue, then maybe she should take two.

  She’d go to one doctor and get a prescription, then go to a different doctor and get a different prescription. Then she’d go to a third doctor for a third. She collected pills. Because she wouldn’t level with any of the doctors, and because none of them knew about her other medications, it was impossible for them to diagnose her. That added to her downward spiral. When she moved out of the house years later, her medicine cabinet was full of pills. My brother Anthony, who packed her up, told me she had harder stuff in there than anything he’d ever found on the street when he was younger.

  Because of what was happening at home, I was the kind of kid who wanted to evaporate in public. I never wanted any trouble, never wanted to draw attention to myself. I became very good at compensating so friends who came over couldn’t tell what was happening with my mom. On the days she was feeling well, my friends and I hung out at the house. But if a buddy came over after school and it was one of her off days, I’d quickly say, “Hey, why don’t we go to the park?”

  But sometimes circumstances made that difficult.

  My mother insisted on being the class mother for my field trips. This was incredibly anxiety-producing for me; she could have a meltdown at any moment. Plus, she was almost always late, which meant there was ample opportunity for a dramatic entrance. That alone would draw the kind of attention I wanted to avoid. The first few years I was in school, I had been safe. Then came my fourth-grade trip to the Empire State Building.

  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.