They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  Well, I wasn’t. I was asleep, next to my pregnant wife, completely ignoring the chase because I was pissed no one would show the Knicks game. But when a loyal and genius fan decided to call Peter Jennings, I instantly became a part of the biggest story of the decade. Here’s how it went down:

  “We have with us now Mr. Robert Higgins, who can see inside O.J.’s car. Mr. Higgins, Can you see him doing anything specific?” Jennings asked.

  “He is just sitting there looking nervous.”

  “Can you hear anything?”

  “There is too much commotion. But I can still see O.J. and he looks scared.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Higgins.”

  “And Baba Booey to y’all.”

  Jennings pulled a Larry King: confused silence. He had no idea what had just been said. If not for an explanation from Al Michaels, a fan of the show who happened to call in to Jennings after hearing the magic words, the anchor would have remained in the dark.

  “Peter,” Michaels began, “just for the record that was a totally farcical call. He said something in code at the end that is indicative of the name of a certain radio talk show host. So he was not there.”

  “Okay, Al,” Jennings said. “Thank you very much. Not the first time or the last time we’ll have been had.”

  We live by a rule on the show: Don’t dissect the comedy. Do that and it’s no longer funny. So we have never tried to break down why Baba Booey sticks with people. But we did analyze that prank call as much as possible. We wanted to make a Broadway musical about it. We even re-created the entire scene and had Al Michaels on to reenact his role. You could tell he had a hard time explaining to Jennings what had happened. He didn’t really want to admit he had a foot in our world; it’s like being at a party and admitting you know the slob who just walked through the door.

  After that, it became so much more than just a catchphrase for fans. Mary and I have had this conversation a lot. It doesn’t really mean what it meant anymore. It has morphed into something entirely different. Howard will sometimes say to me, “Can you believe it’s lasted this long?” But it’s not about me. It’s just something said to make other people laugh, whether in sitcoms, songs, or in someone’s living room.

  Or airports. When Jackson was three years old we visited my brother Anthony, who had moved to Austin, Texas. The two of us were sitting at our gate waiting to go home when a man walked by and said, “Hey, Baby Booey.” Jackson couldn’t stop laughing. I asked him, “What’s so funny?”

  He looked at me with a big smile and said, “He thinks you are a Baba Booey.”

  Truth is, I am.

  GREATEST ALL-TIME

  BABA BOOEY SHOUT-OUTS

  10. David Letterman, Top 10 List: Every once in a while, Letterman will randomly insert Baba Booey into his Top 10 lists. It’s always 10 percent funnier when he says it.

  9. Dan Patrick on ESPN SportsCenter: In 2003 the Cubs were five outs from going to the World Series when a fan named Steve Bartman interfered with a foul ball that would have been caught. They went on to lose the game, extending their World Series drought. On SportsCenter, anchor Dan Patrick takes a call he thinks is from Bartman. Instead it’s Captain Janks, who screams, “Baba Booey!” just before he hangs up.

  8. Larry King: In 1992, billionaire Ross Perot was running for president. During an appearance on Larry King Live, “Bob from Bowie” calls in and asks Perot if he can “mind meld with Howard Stern’s penis.”

  7. 30 Rock: Tina Fey tells Tracy Morgan that she’s worried she may have said something inappropriate to a guy. Tracy replies, “I yelled out ‘Baba Booey’ at Cronkite’s funeral.”

  6. King of Queens: Kevin James’s wife comes home from work and finds him still in bed with a phone to his ear. He says, “I’ve been on hold with Baba Booey since six-thirty.”

  5. Conan O’Brien: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, covering the 2008 presidential debates at Hofstra, says, “Long Island is buzzing. I haven’t seen this many people since a Baba Booey in-store appearance.”

  4. Family Guy: Peter is testifying before Congress. When he is at a loss for what to say, he yells, “Howard Stern’s penis! Baba Booey, Baba Booey!” and then runs out.

  3. Survivor: Five seasons ago the last challenge of the year was called Bob-on-a-Booey.

  2. Saturday Night Live: The day after we left K-Rock, Tina Fey did a bit on “Weekend Update” about Iraq’s presidential election. She mentioned Mahmoud Aliabi and Muhammed Abibbi, and then said, “The winner was Baba Booey.”

  1. Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight: “Baba Booey to y’all!”

  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.”

  “Yeah, they are going to have to put on a space suit to get in Gary’s mouth,” Howard continued. “I mean everyone gets bad breath, but yours is unbelievable.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, meekly. I thought, Why are they busting my balls? I get that it’s for the good of the show but isn’t it going pretty far?