They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  Anthony’s drama was out in the open and in your face, but Steven’s was bubbling inside. He didn’t have screaming matches with my parents. He studied hard, made the honor roll, and was a member of the National Honor Society. He had orange crates full of records—there were hundreds in there—and he’d listen to them for hours by himself on the record player in our living room.

  One day, seemingly out of nowhere, he proved my mom’s intuition right. When he was a junior in high school he came home and announced that he had gotten a girl pregnant. This almost killed my folks. Their firstborn was a hippie who moved out of the house at seventeen. And now their second born knocked up a girl. To this day I can’t say for certain what happened after that announcement. I’m pretty sure the girl must have had an abortion. Every family has secrets, and in mine they were always kept from me because I was the youngest. But there is no way my family could keep quiet if there were a grandchild out there in the world who had been put up for adoption.

  One night in Steven’s senior year he snuck out of the house and went into the city with his friends. He never came home. When my parents woke up the next morning and he wasn’t there they called the police. They were frantic, pacing the rug, praying Steven would walk through the door.

  When the cop arrived he didn’t seem too concerned. This was Long Island—teenagers blew off curfew for a night in the city every weekend. But he still opened his pad and took notes on what Steven was wearing, what his frame of mind was, and the last time my parents saw him. Then, as the cop started to tell them that he’d probably show up any minute, Steven walked right through the door. He was wearing the clothes he had on the day before and looked like he hadn’t slept.

  My mom ran to him, hugged him, and then shouted, “Where the hell have you been?”

  Steven was vague. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some Colombian’s house.”

  “I can’t believe you were at Columbia House!” my mom screamed.

  “No, Mom,” Steven said, faking exasperation. “Columbia House is a record club. I stayed at a Colombian’s house.”

  We didn’t know it at the time, but there was a reason he was being deliberately vague about where he had been. Steven was gay.

  Who knows? Maybe that’s why he was always so quiet and a little more aloof than the rest of us. Maybe that’s why he liked to disappear while the rest of us swirled in the tornado. We all centered our lives around managing my mom and learned how to do that in a way that allowed us to function normally. Steven was not only learning to cope with her breakdowns, he was also trying to figure out who he was—and not in the way that most teenagers discover themselves, like Anthony’s rebellion.

  Being gay wasn’t a phase Steven could grow out of or a lifestyle choice he could reject. It was as much a part of him as the heart in his chest. And at that time, as a senior in high school, I don’t think he had come to grips with it yet himself. How could he? He wasn’t that far removed from getting a girl pregnant. And it was the 1970s; people weren’t out and comfortable the way they are today.

  While he was living at home, Steven didn’t tell us anything. After he graduated from high school he moved out of the house—no drama, no fight, he just walked across the stage, shook the principal’s hand, and moved into Manhattan. I’d visit him at his apartment about once a month. He was driving a cab then and, one afternoon, while I was waiting for him to come home after his shift, I decided to snoop around his place. I get antsy just sitting. I like to stand up and walk around and go places. As I rifled through some stuff in the bathroom I noticed a bunch of gay men’s magazines in the cabinet. I was shocked, and a little scared. I worried that at that moment someone was going to come walking through the door. I quickly shoved them back in the cabinet and walked out of the bathroom. At the time, it never occurred to me they were Steven’s. I assumed they belonged to his roommate.

  For a long time, the only person who knew the truth in my family was Anthony. Steven had told Anthony he was gay when he moved into the city after high school. For years, Anthony kept pushing him to share the news with the rest of us, but that wasn’t Steven’s style. I’m sure he was afraid of how my parents would react. He also hated the idea of making a scene. He’d been watching drama unfold his entire life and had worked hard to sidestep it. It just wasn’t his way.

  But when I was a freshman in college, Steven decided it was time to tell us—or maybe he just got tired of Anthony pestering him. He called Anthony and said, “Okay, I’m ready for them to know.” Then he said, “You tell them.” So Anthony did.

  Anthony was convinced my mom would lose it and my dad would sit at the kitchen table and stoically accept it. But it was the other way around. In that moment, my dad seemed stunned and in a state of disbelief, while my mom was totally accepting. I’m not surprised. As long as my mom could focus her worry, she was strong. It’s when things were good and she looked at her own life that she started to lose it.

  A couple of nights later I went to Anthony’s place on Long Island and he told me, too. He was as blunt as Steven was reluctant. As I sat down in his living room he blurted out, “You know Steven’s gay, right?” I just said, as casually as I could, “Oh yeah, of course, I know.” But I had no idea. I was blindsided. I remember leaving Anthony’s and walking to my car feeling numb. It was just so shocking. It didn’t help that Anthony had said it so matter-of-factly. For a day or two I desperately wanted to call Steven and tell him that I knew and that I loved him and that no matter what, he was my brother. But he would have hated that. I would have been doing it for me, not for him.

  I realized that he tried to come out to me once, in his own way, a few months earlier. He’d invited me to a Sylvester concert at the Felt Forum, the arena attached to Madison Square Garden. Sylvester had a couple of big disco hits, like “Disco Heat” and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

  When we arrived I didn’t pay much attention to the crowd. Then Sylvester made his entrance, like a black Liberace. He was super gay. He wore a full-length mink coat, was accompanied by a twenty-five-piece orchestra, and opened with an orchestral version of “Disco Heat.” Suddenly, I was surrounded by the Gay Pride Parade. Everyone started jumping up and down, blowing police whistles. I thought I must be the only straight guy in the room besides my brother.

  The truth was, as much as I loved Steven and accepted that he was gay, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with homosexuality. This was 1980; none of us had heard of AIDS yet. No one in our lives was gay. Gay people lived … somewhere else. So the idea that my own brother was gay was something I struggled with at first. I couldn’t call my friends and discuss Steven’s situation with them. They’re good guys, but we were a bunch of Italian guys from Long Island. We called each other fags as an insult. I didn’t see the upside of telling them. After a while, though, I started to feel like the closeted gay guy in the locker room who joins in the jokes because he doesn’t want anyone to know his secret.

  My mom, as strong as she was the day Anthony told her, had a hard time with it, too. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her one night shortly after finding out and she asked me, “Do you know about Steven?” I nodded and she just started crying. Then she said, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?” I told her she didn’t do anything. She raised three boys; two were straight, and one was not. She hadn’t done anything different with Steven than she had with me and Anthony. “How could it be your fault?” I asked her. She seemed comforted by that.

  Steven and I never did have a conversation about it. The fact that he was gay always went unspoken. Instead he’d just talk about his life in ways that let me know he wasn’t trying to hide anything anymore.

  While I was in college and still living at home Steven usually came back to Long Island once a month or so to visit. He’d arrive on a Sunday morning with his friend Howard. They never stayed overnight, probably to avoid having to answer questions about sleeping arrangements. We all assumed Howard was his boyfriend, but Steven never made
a declaration and we never asked. Looking back, it seems crazy. My mom had no problem hiding in Anthony’s closet to catch him smoking dope, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask my brother if he had a boyfriend.

  Howard was ten years older than Steven and looked exactly like the Marlboro Man, with a chiseled, weathered face. My family loved when he came over, especially my mom. He was such a good cook she even let him help her in the kitchen. I know this is going to make me sound like a dick, but the two of them were the ungayest gay guys I had ever seen. There was nothing flamboyant about either one of them. When Howard and my brother stopped seeing each other a couple of years later and my brother brought someone else home, the dynamic was the same: Anyone who came into the house with him was loved and accepted; nothing about it was ever awkward.

  What I enjoyed most about Steven’s visits was watching him play with Anthony’s son. I always remember thinking to myself, This is going to be awesome when I get older, have kids, and move to the suburbs. Steven is going to be that fantastic, magical uncle who comes to visit every weekend.

  I thought we had time for all that.

  MUSIC WAS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT in my family. It was always blaring in the house, even at the most insane moments. Often it seemed like the only thing that actually put us all on the same page.

  We had one record player and it was housed in a cabinet that was as big as a piece of furniture, like something you’d keep in the kitchen to store all your really good china. It was waist high, had four sliding doors, was stained a light brown, and nearly covered an entire wall of the living room. It would have fit perfectly on the set of Mad Men. At opposite ends of the piece were the speakers, also built into the cabinet. These were killer speakers; you could see them vibrate if you turned the music up too loud. The receiver and the tuner sat in the middle compartment on a shelf. Below them was the turntable. You could pile a stack of records at the top of the spindle and, as the one on the bottom finished playing, another would drop down. If the bottom stack became too big, the music sounded like it was being played at half speed. A few years ago I saw the same system in an antiques store. The owners called it an “art deco” piece and were selling it for seven thousand dollars.

  My parents and my brothers each had their own pile of albums. My dad was a sucker for the Columbia House record deals and he’d send away for opera and big-band stuff. He loved Tommy Dorsey and Harry James, and would try to teach me the differences between musicians. My mom played Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Billie Holiday, her favorite. Everything she sang brought me down. Years later I learned that Billie Holiday suffered from depression, too.

  Anthony was on the edge of what was radical. I remember he came home with the Frank Zappa record Freak Out!, which had some psychedelic images of Zappa surrounded by other washed-out-looking musicians. To me it looked scary and dangerous. When my dad listened to it he went into his “What the hell is this?” routine. He’d say that about anyone whose voice wasn’t smooth as glass. The first time he heard Bruce Springsteen he said to me, “This guy can’t sing.” And he’s right. Springsteen is a stylist; my dad was used to crooners.

  When I was in grammar school, I started to track the Top 40 as intensely as I did Mets box scores. In fact, the Mets might have been the only thing that mattered to me as much as music. They had won the World Series in 1969 when I was eight years old, the exact moment my fandom was cemented. The players on that team—Bud Harrelson, Tom Seaver, Tommie Agee—were my idols. But the difference between music and baseball was that I only cared about the Mets, not any other major-league team, and my opinions were limited to being mad when they lost and happy when they won. I did not think about how Ed Kranepool could raise his batting average. But with music I cared about everything. Knowing all about it made me a part of the conversation in my house whenever my family watched Ed Sullivan or took a ride in the car or teased Anthony about his Frank Zappa obsession.

  When I was around ten years old I had a paper route delivering the local Long Island Newsday. I had sixty houses on my route and I couldn’t carry all the newspapers on my bike, so I “borrowed” a grocery cart from the local supermarket and stored it in my backyard. A lot of the other paperboys got rides when it rained, but I was out of luck. My dad was always gone before I was up and my mom … well, you know.

  Anyway, the Sunday Newsday came in two sections. One I had to pick up on Saturday and the other was dropped off at my house before dawn on Sundays. It was my job, in the early morning hours, to put the two sections together before I delivered them. But first I had to check out the Billboard Top 20, which was printed in the Sunday entertainment section. I’d sit on the living room floor surrounded by stacks of newspapers and spend five or ten minutes studying the chart. There weren’t a lot of changes from week to week, but it felt like following a horse race to me. The chart always listed the songs with their current rank and the previous week’s ranking. I liked to see which songs were dropping and which ones were climbing the chart. The ones with a dash in the “last week’s rank” column were the ones I got excited about, because it meant new music was on the way. Before I left for my route I made sure to cut the list out of my copy of the paper so I could follow along when Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 came on later that day.

  I mowed lawns for money then, too. (I really liked to work. I’d go to the ice cream packing plant in the Bronx with my dad and help guys stack cartons of ice cream for a dollar. To me, work looked like fun and it put me in the center of the action, or at least what that looked like to a ten-year-old kid.) After delivering the Sunday papers I’d get my lawn mower and my radio and hit up the neighbors. I’d put the radio on top of the mower handlebar and tune in. At 9 A.M. the American Top 40 with Kasem came on.

  I calculated that four strips on a typical Uniondale lawn was a song. If I liked a song, I’d stop to quiet the motor and listen. If I didn’t, I’d keep going. Four strips later I’d stop the lawn mower to see what the next song was. I always wanted to hear what Casey was going to say about each song. I dug the long-distance dedications. Though I wasn’t raised in a corny and sentimental household, I love Norman Rockwell, I love Frank Capra, and I loved the sappy stories behind the long-distance dedications. (Alan the shrink would point out years later that at these moments I was yearning for a life I knew I was never going to have.)

  Later on, I would report to my dad on everything I learned about each song from Casey. “Dad, did you know that Dionne Warwick and the Spinners got together to make a record?” I don’t know if he cared or not, but he always pretended to listen.

  To this day, when I know something about a song, Howard will say to me, “Who are you, Casey Kasem?” They make fun of Casey on the show a lot. One year a tape leaked out of Casey in the studio, recording his dedications. This one was about a listener’s dog dying and, in the middle of reading the fan’s letter, Casey screwed up and got really pissed. “You come out of these up-tempo numbers and it’s impossible to make those transitions. Fucking up-tempo record every time I do a death dedication! Someone use their fucking brain and not come out of an up-tempo record when I gotta talk about a dog dying.” The first time I heard those tapes I was shocked. I had bought into Casey’s sincerity, hook, line, and sinker. I thought that clip must have been a fake that had been edited together, because Casey wouldn’t talk like that about a dedication. Those things were sacred to him. Still, whenever Howard calls me Casey Kasem and he thinks he’s ripping me, I take it as a compliment. One time Corey Feldman came on the show and brought along his girlfriend at the time, Casey’s daughter. She was pretty good-looking. When she was in the greenroom I snuck in to tell her how much I loved her dad. I was kind of embarrassed and didn’t want anyone on the show to catch me fawning. I still think it would be cool to meet him.

  Anyway, I used all the money I earned mowing lawns and delivering newspapers to buy records. It was an obsession that began when I was five years old. Anthony was ordering some albums from Columbia House record clu
b and my mom said to him, “You gotta let your brother pick one.” I had seen Gary Lewis and the Playboys on Ed Sullivan, and since his first name was Gary and mine was Gary, I decided I liked him. The record came to our house as part of a big package; everyone in the family got something from Columbia House. Since Anthony was the one who placed the order he handed the record to me. It was shrink-wrapped and I tore the plastic off and just stared at the cover, which was green and had the name of the band written in pink letters across it. I couldn’t wait to play their big song, “Everybody Loves a Clown,” but I had to wait; Anthony got to the record player first.

  Gary Lewis was my first record, but the first 45 I bought was “Valeri” by the Monkees. It was during the summer of ’68 and I was at my cousin Pat’s in Bensonhurst. We went up to the big record store on Kings Highway and they were having a special: six 45s for one dollar. Pat told me I could choose one. So I did. The B-side of “Valeri” was “Tapioca Tundra.” The stupid shit we remember …

  I did my music scouting at Tom’s Coffee Shop in Uniondale, a decrepit, decaying place. Tom was a miserable old fuck who had no business being in a service industry. Over the magazine rack hung a sign: Free reading material can be obtained at the library. But we kids never bought anything, magazines or otherwise. It was so dirty you wouldn’t even want a doughnut. We went there because Tom had a killer pinball machine and a jukebox loaded with new music. That’s where I first heard the song “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, which even then I could tell was as close to a perfect pop song as possible.

  I’d play Bally’s Eight Ball on the pinball machine and listen to the jukebox, then go out to Korvette’s and buy the 45s I liked best for ninety-nine cents a piece. When I came home I stacked all my 45s on a shelf in my room, right next to my bed, in alphabetical order. If I had two 45s by the same artist, they were placed chronologically.