They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  When I finally got into seventh grade, I was absolutely the worst wrestler on the team. The older guys relished twisting me, pinning me, and just plain beating the shit out of me. I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. But I loved practice; I loved trying to get better and seeing the smallest hints of improvement, even if I was the only one who noticed them.

  I was so committed I went to a weeklong wrestling camp at Hofstra University, in Uniondale, between seventh and eighth grades. I got better. I even allowed myself to think I was getting good. I wrestled at 136 pounds. There were two wrestlers in each weight class on our team. But local meets only allowed schools to enter one wrestler from each class. So my team had wrestle-offs, where the guys in each weight class went one-on-one to see who got the tourney spot. I didn’t win a single wrestle-off in seventh grade. But in eighth I did. Again and again. Then I started to win matches, too. The coach loved me and I was seen as a rising star on the team.

  Until, of course, I fucked up.

  I was hanging out on the tennis courts at school one day toward the end of eighth grade when a teacher strolling by saw me smoking a cigarette. She told the wrestling coach.

  The coach, Mr. Calabretta, was such a good, young, supportive guy. We could relate to him; we loved him. So it was crushing when he kicked me off the team with only two weeks left in the season. I couldn’t bear to tell my parents. Instead I spent time hanging at a friend’s whose mom was never home. I stayed there until dinner. When I got home I’d tell my parents, “Wow, practice was exhausting today.”

  My mom probably had no idea, until now. Sorry, Ma.

  It wasn’t a particularly good time for me to be fucking up. While her moods became less erratic over the years, my mom was never cured. Even when she wasn’t depressed she was always ready for a fight.

  One Saturday morning my buddy Steve was over and, as usual, she was railing at me. As I got older, I gave it right back. And on this particular morning the fight ended with me at the bottom of the stairs in our basement and her at the top of them, heaving an Electrolux vacuum cleaner at me. It landed with a thud in the middle of the steps and rolled down, stopping at my feet. Steve said, “What was that about?”

  “Nothing. It’s just Saturday morning,” I answered.

  The tension level in the house when I was in middle school was unusually high, because my father was out of work. My dad was stubborn and, well, he was the Mott Street Gambler, so he wasn’t afraid to play a game of chicken. He was very good at selling ice cream. So good that, when his boss started his own company making a high-end premium brand of ice cream, my dad was recruited as one of the first salesmen. The company was called Häagen-Dazs, which looked nice but meant nothing. The guy who started the company, Reuben Mattus, grew up in the Bronx.

  My father once explained the company’s philosophy to me: Most other ice cream was selling for sixty-five cents a gallon. “But we sold it for a dollar twenty-five a pint. The idea was that if it sounded exotic and it was expensive, it must be good.” And it was. There were nights my dad came home and his trunk was loaded with Häagen-Dazs. The pints used to come in sleeves of eight and his car would be weighed down with ice cream packed in dry ice. We had an extra freezer in our basement dedicated to rum raisin, strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate, my favorite. We had so much of it we didn’t even use bowls. Instead we’d put the first letter of our first name in Magic Marker on the bottom of a pint, eat a little bit, and then put it away.

  Häagen-Dazs started to do really well and the company was growing, but my dad thought Reuben wasn’t delivering on some of the compensation promises he’d made when the company first started. So my dad just quit. He felt betrayed and for a while the Mattus name was a dirty word around our house. The real problem was that my father didn’t have another job lined up. And he wasn’t making all that much to begin with. The only savings I knew about were in an old water cooler jug in my parents’ closet that was filled with coins, mostly pennies.

  My family struggled for three years after my father quit his job, throughout my time in junior high. But he handled it the same way he did everything else: with old-school stoicism. He’d never say that he felt scared or ashamed. But I knew it was killing him, because no one I knew worked harder than my father. He could be puking on the side of the road on the way to work and not turn around to come home.

  He refused to go on the dole. Instead, to make ends meet, he hustled to scrape together a few dollars, just like he had when my parents were first married. Only this time the stakes were higher. He got involved with a guy who had a start-up pantyhose business. Then he tried selling ladies’ clothing and handbags at flea markets. We were barely paying the bills. My mom did the food demonstrations at department stores, but she could never keep a job for very long.

  Before he quit, I knew we weren’t rich, but if I wanted to go to Nathan’s or if I asked my dad for a couple of bucks to go hang with my friends, it was never a big deal. Now when I asked, he couldn’t give it to me. The man had never been out of work in his life, and I could feel the pressure mounting. I quickly learned not to ask for stuff.

  I knew things were getting bad when, the summer before eighth grade, I didn’t make that annual trek to the department store for new school clothes. My father was working in the clothing business at this point and all I wanted was a new pair of Levi’s, but there was no way we could afford them. Instead my father had a box of a brand called Cheap Jeans at the warehouse. He brought those home and that’s what I wore when school started. Of course I got made fun of; there was a big label on the back of the pants that read CHEAP JEANS. It was humiliating. But I never told my father, because I knew it was worse for him.

  Once, our phone was turned off. That wasn’t something that happened to people we knew. I remember a buddy telling me at school that he had tried calling me but he kept getting a strange message from the phone company and couldn’t get through. I just told him I didn’t know what was going on, even though I knew exactly why he couldn’t reach me.

  Another afternoon I came home from school and there was a man in a suit sitting in our living room. The sheets were off the couch. That meant someone important was over. The man in the suit was talking to my father, in the middle of the day, and as soon as I walked in I could see this wasn’t a conversation for me, so I went straight to my room. The man left a few minutes later and I heard my father screaming, “I’ve been paying this mortgage for ten years and you come after me because we’re a month late?” Then he swore like an army medic under fire.

  It’s not like I hadn’t seen financial stress in the house. But before this it seemed like something out of an I Love Lucy episode. Once a month my dad would break out the checkbook to pay bills and he’d notice one was missing.

  “Ellen! Ellen!” he’d shout. She would pretend not to hear him. “Ellen, there is a check missing.”

  “Yeah?” she’d say. She was half asking, as though she was surprised, and half telling him, “So what.”

  “What did you do with it?” He knew, she knew, even I knew, that she would take the check, spend it, and forget what she spent it on. She did it to me, too. I used to keep my money in an old Tropicana orange juice jar under my bed, and she’d borrow it but often forget to replace it. Plenty of times she just preemptively gave me money in the morning because she had no idea if she had taken any from me or not.

  “Ellen,” my dad would continue, getting angry. “How can I balance the checkbook if I don’t know what you wrote a check for?”

  Then she’d start to cry.

  When my dad was out of work, though, there was actually less screaming, less crying. That’s how much tension there was. It permeated every day. Nothing was being released. It was so bad that, when I asked for twenty dollars to go on a school ski trip, my dad told me, “I am really sorry, but we don’t have the money.” For him to say that out loud was a big deal. I knew it broke his heart.

  But a couple of nights later my dad handed me a twenty-
dollar bill and said I could go. I was ecstatic and didn’t think about the money until a week later, when I was looking for some change in my parents’ water cooler full of coins. It was missing all the silver. Pennies were all that remained.

  All those years that my dad hustled flea markets he kept getting calls from other ice cream companies. He hated the industry, felt burned by it, and had so much pride he didn’t want anything to do with it. But he was a great ice cream salesman. And nothing else was working. So he finally answered one of those calls and said yes. After that we didn’t really worry about money again.

  Here’s why I loved my wrestling coach: After kicking me off the team in eighth grade, he welcomed me back in ninth. He acted like nothing had ever happened. In fact, he made me a team captain. And I went undefeated! And I played on the football team! And I was voted Most Popular! Seriously! Three years earlier I had been in grammar school and kids made fun of me for having yellow teeth. Now I was one of the school’s more accomplished athletes and most popular kids. I know it’s hard to believe this when Tracey the office manager is going after me or Howard is ripping me for playing solitaire on the wrap-up show. But it was true.

  In fact, it taught me a great lesson about being a minor celebrity. I didn’t campaign to be most popular; it was a random vote. I was chatty and played sports, so people knew me. Afterward my closest friends were like, How cool, congratulations. Other people who had never spoken to me suddenly wanted to be friends with me. And then there were the kids who were nasty. They said, “Oooh, there goes Mr. Popular,” whenever I walked by and mocked me for everything. The reaction was completely surprising to me. Being picked on—at home, at school, in the park—I understood. Being picked on because too many people liked me? That was new to me.

  When I started on the Stern show it was the same thing. The first time it happened was when we were working at NBC and I went to a party at an apartment in the city. Now, I knew guys who truly showed off what they did. There was a producer for Don Imus who wore a black and silver NBC jacket with the peacock on the back that he bought at the gift shop. He had it embroidered with “Producer, Imus in the Morning” in big letters. That has never been my style.

  At this party I was talking to a girl who was really excited that I worked for the show. She grabbed her friend, who was really cute, and said, “Do you know who this is?” The friend wheeled around, gave me the once-over, and sneered, “You think you’re a big shot?” It was like she was looking for a fight. I don’t think I am anybody. I’m not looking to be the big wheel. Occasionally I’d walk into a bar in New York City and people would automatically say, “Oh, Mr. Big Shot.” That anyone could think I’d get a big head after a day getting destroyed on the show is remarkable.

  Here’s the thing about that year in junior high: I still never felt like I belonged. Maybe it’s because I was afraid we were going to lose our house. But I was always sure someone was going to say to me, “Okay, we caught you. You are a fake and phony. Get out.” I hung with the jocks but I didn’t really think I deserved to. I felt like a poser and assumed that eventually someone else would see that, too.

  I’VE GOT SO MANY great pictures in my office.

  There’s a framed ten-by-twelve shot Howard gave me as a birthday present, showing all of us from the show dressed up in drag at a photo shoot for his second book, Miss America. There’s my younger son, Lucas, doing the Tricky Dick Nixon pose on his campaign poster when he ran for fifth grade class president. I’ve got a framed, limited-edition etching of Jay Leno sent to me by Helen Kushnick, his old agent, who was played by Kathy Bates in the movie The Late Shift. She mailed it to me one September as an early Christmas present because she knew she was about to get fired. Hanging above it is a letter from her, dated two days before she got canned.

  Across from that is a framed cover of the free local Connecticut magazine, County Kids, of me, Mary, and Jackson when he was just a toddler. It was taken right before Private Parts came out and we were doing any kind of promotion that came along. On my filing cabinet is a picture from a Saturday Night Live newscast with Tina Fey. She’s pointing to a picture of me as the punchline for a joke about the new president of Iraq. She said the guys who ran were Mahmoud Aliabi, Muhammed Abibbi, and Baba Booey. One day she was on our show and signed it, “Gary, Congrats on becoming President of Iraq. Tina Fey.”

  In a red frame on my wraparound desk is a picture of Frances Bean Cobain when she was around four. Courtney Love gave it to me and I call it the Four-Hundred-Dollar Picture. One morning we called Courtney for an interview when she happened to be in New York. Howard asked her to come in and she said, “No, I’m in pajamas. I’m a mess.” He told her we’d send a car for her and, next thing you know, she was in the studio in her nightgown, doing a segment. When it was over I was trying to get her back in the car, which wasn’t easy, and she finally stopped me and said, “Gary, I am sending you a picture of Frances Bean. I want you to put it on Howard’s console in the studio so he knows, whenever he talks badly about me or Kurt, he is hurting her.” I said okay and sent her home.

  A couple of hours later someone dropped off a package at my desk. It was a picture of Frances Bean. Later that week we got a bill for four hundred dollars from the car service. Turns out Courtney had asked the driver to wait when he dropped her off, then she went up to her apartment, found a picture, and sent him back with it. Now I look at it every day.

  Frances Bean’s photo is right in front of a picture of me and Mary walking the red carpet for Private Parts. Next to that is a picture of the sign outside a Burger King in southern New Jersey. To get there you had to exit the New Jersey Turnpike at exit 7, drive thirty minutes, and then scan the horizon. It was easy to spot—there was nothing else around for miles. Here’s the picture:

  But my favorite is a candid shot of Fred, Artie, Howard, Robin, and me on set while doing the show in Las Vegas. It’s rare that we have photographers shooting the show and even rarer for us to be in a picture that isn’t posed. It’s just us, working, doing what we love, what we’re pretty good at, with people we like hanging out with. I hung it right above my computer, in my line of sight whenever I am staring at my screen. These are my guys, my family.

  They’re the reasons I’ve spent more than twenty-five years doing the show. We were all just a bunch of radio nerds who found a gig that felt like we were hanging with our friends every day.

  I knew how special it was early on, after Howard left NBC for K-Rock and I was just a year into working for him. When K-Rock hired him, Howard wasn’t able to take me along. There wasn’t a spot in the budget for more than one producer and that job title was technically Fred’s. I was still working at NBC—all the people that worked for Howard were—and we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives as the execs who fired Howard put us on random shows. It kind of sucked. The day Howard had his press conference for K-Rock I went to it, just to say hello and wish him luck. But when it was over he pulled me aside and said, “I’m really sorry we can’t bring you along. The folks at K-Rock don’t really get how the show works. But I am working on them and I feel good that I can get you back with us in six months. I know it’s a long time and you might have to find a new gig before then. I get it, I understand. But I’m trying and if within the next six months it works out and you’re around, it’d be great if you could be with us.”

  Man, I was surprised. I was dying to be back with those guys and was crushed when I had to stay behind at NBC. The fact that Howard was working to get me back made me feel pretty good.

  The day of his first show—this was back when he was on in the afternoons—it felt like my floor of NBC shut down. We weren’t supposed to be listening to him, but as soon as he came on the air every office door closed. I had my radio on and it hurt not being there. A lot. Then, at the first break, my phone rang.

  “Hello, is Gary there?” It was a nasal, high-pitched voice. I didn’t recognize it at all.

  “This is Gary,” I answered.
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br />   “Gary, it’s me, Howard.”

  I was shocked. He was in the middle of his first break on his first show and was calling me. Using a really bad voice in case I didn’t answer my phone.

  “Listen,” he continued. “I got a spot for you. It won’t take six months. I can get you in here tomorrow. Can you do it?”

  I was there early. I knew I’d found a home.

  Every kid needs his guys, the group he bonds with. These are the guys who do as much to keep him out of jail and teach him how to behave as his parents. These are the ones who, thirty years later, he can sit in a room with and rip about personality tics only they understand.

  For me, my guys were Vinny, Frank, Steve, and Paul, who I finally found toward the end of ninth grade. Now stick with me, because this may get confusing.

  Vinny was a co-captain of the wrestling team with me. He and I became buddies toward the end of that ninth-grade season. Paul was on the wrestling team, too, and hung with us every once in a while. Steve was the one guy I stayed tight with from playing football, who also happened to wrestle. And Frank, well, Frank was with Vinny. Frank looked like a man when he was fifteen, bigger than everybody in ninth grade and a year older. He was the only kid I knew who wore nice slacks and dress shoes to school every day. But that’s because he had gone to Catholic school and never dropped the dress code. Even after he was kicked out for fist fighting with a nun.