They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  Well, Gretzky happened to read this article. And when he and the Edmonton Oilers came to the Nassau Coliseum and beat up on the Isles, he was named Star of the Game by Stan. It was my job to get him to the interview booth. I walked in shaking at the prospect of having to bother him. When I asked him he said, “Fuck that guy. He wrote an article trashing me.”

  I moved down the line to Stan’s second choice for Star of the Game. But as I was asking for an interview Gretzky overheard me and said, “Hold on. Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  When Gretzky sat down, Stan said, “So Wayne, another brilliant performance; congrats on being the Star of the Game.” Then he pushed the microphone toward Gretzky’s mouth. The Great One responded: “I’m just glad to get it, since you told everyone I was no good.” Stan hemmed and hawed and stuttered until Gretzky finally smiled. He was a young Canadian kid. He didn’t have it in him to go for the kill.

  Gretzky was about my age and he was one of those guys who, because I saw him up close a couple of times, made me think I was just standing around picking my nose, even though I was working so hard. He was as thin as a hockey stick, had shaggy hair, and a boyish face. The way he skated was inspiring. I was once hanging near the players’ locker rooms another time he was in town. Not too far from me was a board for a game that fans played between periods called ScoreO. This was a huge piece of wood with a mousehole-size opening at the bottom. During intermissions fans came onto the ice and tried to shoot the puck into the hole to win a car. Players on the road had—and still have—a lot of time to kill before games. They usually wound up at the locker room, playing cards and goofing around. Gretzky wandered out into the hallway, saw the board, saw me loitering, and asked me to prop it up. Then I just watched him practice getting it into that tiny hole. There was no one else around, just me and the greatest hockey player ever. He never made it, but he didn’t care. He was just fucking around and had a great time trying.

  I have one more memory of the Nassau Coliseum, and it might be the greatest athletic achievement of my entire life.

  Back in 1989, Howard and I once got into a discussion on the show about how he believed he was a better athlete than me. He had a tennis court at his house and every once in a while he’d invite me out there and we’d play. He always beat me, but he was taking lessons every week while I played once every three or four years. Truly, I thought we were pretty evenly matched.

  Still he kept saying on the air that he was a much better player and that he could actually kick my ass. He laid down the challenge, so we decided we were going to play one more time, once and for all, to settle the matter.

  This conversation took place first thing in the morning, as soon as the show went on the air. By seven o’clock someone had called in and said, “I’d like to see you play.”

  Good idea, we decided. So then we talked about going to a public court where people could watch. But it continued to evolve. Another listener called and said, “I live in Jersey and there’s a public court out here that has bleachers.” Fantastic, we thought, let’s go there. Next a guy who worked for the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City offered to let us use his four-thousand-seat arena. We could sell tickets! It had morphed from Howard giving me shit to a for-pay exhibition in less than two hours. Then it got so much bigger.

  My buddy Ross was working for Ron Delsener, a concert promoter. He said he could get us the Nassau Coliseum, a sixteen-thousand-seat arena, if we were interested. It took a day for the deal to come together. The next morning we announced that the match would be held there. Within four hours the entire joint was sold out. We called it the “U.S. Open Sores” tournament.

  This was a place that meant the world to me. I had had my internships there and had gone to Islanders and Nets games there. I’d seen every concert of importance there. Now I was going to be the main event.

  When we arrived at the Coliseum the day of the tournament we wanted to warm up. I had on a bright pink warm-up jacket and jeans; Howard wore a bright turquoise shirt and never took off his sunglasses. We hit the ball for a few minutes, then Grandpa from The Munsters, Al Lewis, showed up, chomping on a cigar and wearing a fedora. Al, Robin, and Fred the Elephant Boy, one of the original Wack Packers, were going to be the announcers. While having his makeup applied, Howard piled it on again, telling the camera, “I’m going to kick his ass.” Then they cut to me in my bright pink warm-up jacket and blue tennis shorts.

  Finally, we played. Howard was introduced as the mentally fit, empty-jocked radio god. I was the oafish and dim-witted Gary “Beaver Teeth” Dell’Abate. The ball girls, dressed in G-strings, pasties, and sneakers, were lined up along the baseline and at the net. We had screened them in the studio on the air one day, all of them topless and seated around Howard’s desk in the studio. As backup to the ball girls we hired a guy in a wheelchair, who was ready to roll into action if the girls were too slow. I ripped off my pink warm-up jacket—carefully, so I didn’t dislodge the headband I had on to keep my hair out of my face—and revealed a sky-bright turquoise top.

  I was ready. The match was best out of seven games, like the World Series. Immediately I took a lead off Howard’s serve. He hit one into the net, the next one out, and soon I was up 1 game to nothing. But the next two games, I struggled and suddenly found myself down 2–1. That’s when fate—and Fred the Elephant Boy—stepped in.

  In the fourth game, Howard and I were tied 15 all. Howard won the next point, but Elephant Boy wasn’t paying attention or had become confused by all the crowd noise, and so awarded it to me. He announced that I was now up 30–15. I quickly won the next two as well, before anyone realized what was happening. Not Grandpa Al or Robin or Howard tried correcting him. Now we were tied 2–2. And I was shuffling on the court and pumping my fists like I was a real athlete.

  When I won the next game, the crowd started chanting, “Gary sucks! Gary sucks!” They had no idea how little I cared. That weekend was my moment. The night before was my ten-year high school reunion. Now I was on Long Island, five minutes from my house, winning an athletic event in front of sixteen thousand people. I was so psyched I started pointing my finger at the crowd and yelling back at them. I felt like I was back in my living room.

  Midway through the sixth game, with me ahead 30–15, it got even wilder. The half-naked girls were running back and forth whether there were balls to grab or not. The guy in the wheelchair was spinning around. There was a stadium full of people taunting me and I couldn’t stop giving it back to the crowd whenever I won a point. Somewhere in the audience my mom and dad were watching, perhaps the only two people cheering me on. Finally I served the ball and Howard hit a forehand that nearly landed in the stands. It was wide. I won the match, 4–2. I was so excited I sprinted to the other side of the court, shook Howard’s hand, and then threw my arms into the air. Everyone booed. Pretty soon I was surrounded by all the ball girls in their G-strings and pasties. I also won three thousand dollars.

  After I accepted the trophy, Howard and I sat down at the broadcasting tables we had set up before the match. I said, “You played a good game. You are not a sports wimp and you probably can beat me. But this week I am going to buy a full-length leather coat with your fucking money.”

  I was obsessed with owning a full-length black leather coat that I had seen in a store on Eighth Street in the Village. It had big buttons and a giant leather belt. I had seen Sam Kinison wearing one. Rockers like Dee Snider wore them, too. I thought they were cool. It cost four hundred dollars and I never could have afforded it without that prize money. One day after the show, I took a subway down to Eighth Street, plunked down the money, and walked out with that coat. I looked like an idiot. I wasn’t a rocker. I wasn’t even Kinison. I wore it twice and put it in my closet.

  It’s still there. It might work for a costume party one day.

  I COULDN’T STOP with the internships, actually. One summer I worked at a recording studio in the city. It was a jingle house and I was the token gentile. They h
ad no idea how to handle an intern, which is to assign them the crappy work and then show them how to do cool stuff. All I did for them was empty garbage; none of the bosses talked to me. But it did teach me about making your own opportunities and building skills as you go.

  I befriended a young sound engineer who taught me how to set up microphones in the studio. I saw how to deal with clients. I learned how talent can fix anything. We were once doing an ad for Champale, a lowbrow alcoholic drink, and the corporate suits kept poking their heads in, complaining that the jingle wasn’t working. Our engineer reassured them, saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine when Grady gets here. He’ll bring it to life.” I didn’t know who Grady was, but I knew the jingle sounded like crap. Finally, at four in the afternoon, after we had been there seven hours, Grady Tate showed up. He was an old black guy, a well-known club jazz singer, who swaggered in looking as cool as could be. He had a gravelly voice, but it turned the jingle from ridiculous to radio-worthy.

  I also learned how talent controlled a room, no matter how minuscule the talent. At night the jingle shop transformed into a second-rate recording studio for would-be artists. Once, they handed the keys to a guy named Meco, who recorded a million-selling disco remix of the Star Wars theme. When he came around everyone kissed his ass and I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, he wore nice wide collars and kept his shirt unbuttoned, but with his side part, high forehead, and oversize wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like an accountant doing karaoke. Besides, all he did was put a disco beat to someone else’s song. But it made the studio some money, so he was the big shot.

  Even the last internship I had, in the Adelphi film department, proved invaluable. The film teachers there had started a business shooting educational movies and used the students as free labor. One of the movies, commissioned by the ASPCA in New York, was called Sam. It was fifteen minutes of point-of-view shots in which you never see the subject of the film, just the world from his perspective. Here’s Sam being abandoned on Fire Island. Here is Sam finding his way to the mainland. And here he is walking the streets, looking for food. The way it’s written you’d think Sam was a boy, then comes the big reveal: Sam is a dog.

  I worked on another film called Intimate Companions, which was about the human/animal bond. We interviewed this tough truck driver who was a real fuck-you kind of guy with the voice of someone who spent his life smoking cigarettes in the cab of his truck. Then we handed him his dog, a tiny toy poodle, and he started cooing, in his gruff voice, “Baby, hey baby, how you doing?”

  The teachers tried selling all these films to schools around the country, so I was put in charge of the distribution department at Adelphi. That meant writing letters to schools, asking if they wanted to rent the film and, if they did, instructing them to send me a check. I realized that you can make the best movie in the world, but if no one distributes it you are screwed. When the check came in I sent out the movie and kept track of where it went. It sounds boring on the surface, but it showed me a different aspect of the business.

  Being on the air wasn’t the only option.

  1991

  Over Christmas of 1988 my roommate Greg and I decided to have a blowout of a party at my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. The place was packed all night. I don’t think the last person left until about five in the morning. I went to bed wasted and, when the phone rang around nine the next morning, I was still pretty drunk.

  It was Anthony. Before I could yell at him for calling so early he said, “Listen, I have something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Steven has AIDS.”

  Anthony knew a lot more about the way Steven lived than I did. He had heard from mutual friends that Steven liked to party a lot, and he worried about him. We all understood that AIDS existed and that it was decimating the gay population. A guy I worked with at WNBC told everyone he had AIDS at Halloween and by Thanksgiving he was dead. In my heart I knew Steven was at risk, but like everyone else I was in complete denial. It certainly didn’t cross my parents’ minds. That’s not how it was with Anthony, though; he’s too smart. Anthony harped on Steven to get tested every month and call him with the results.

  It started to feel like a game of Russian roulette. Anthony would beg Steven to get tested, then he’d wait for Steven’s call. When Anthony heard Steven was negative, he would breathe easy for a few weeks, then he’d wait for the call again the next month. This went on for several years. I had no idea. Until I got that call.

  There was no preamble. Anthony didn’t tell me to take a seat or that he had bad news. It was just, “Steven has AIDS.” So matter-of-fact. When Steven called him to deliver the same news there was nothing ceremonial about it, either. Steven just said, “I’m positive.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t speak. The conversation didn’t last more than a minute after he told me. I just hung up and spent the next several hours trying to absorb the news. I didn’t know if I should call Steven. Instead I called Anthony back and tried to talk through the shock. “I don’t understand,” I said. “He looks healthy. How could he possibly be sick?”

  Anthony and I didn’t really know what to do with the information, or even how to process it. And worse, we were sad for our parents, who had no idea. When Steven told Anthony he was sick, Anthony’s first response was “You have to tell Mom and Dad.” But Steven couldn’t do it. At least not yet. He didn’t know how.

  It was a couple of days before Steven and I spoke. I had decided not to call him, probably because he was a private person and had always let me know when he was ready to talk about stuff. When we finally did connect it wasn’t one of those Hallmark moments, full of emotion, where everything that had always been left unsaid is finally shared. He never actually told me he was sick. He just said, “You spoke to Anthony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to say any more than was necessary.

  “Then I need your advice,” he said. “How should I tell Mom and Dad?”

  The first thing that came out of my mouth was “I don’t think you should. I don’t think you should tell them until you have absolutely no choice.”

  To this day, when I tell that story, some people jump all over me. They think I was wrong and that my parents had a right to know their son was dying. But my reasoning was that there was nothing they could do. Steven didn’t look sick. He wasn’t showing any symptoms. He was living his life. Their only option was to freak out and worry. That would not make Steven better; it would only make them more miserable. Why should they have an extra year of that kind of pain? Their son had been given a death sentence, but they didn’t need to spend the rest of his life thinking about when he was going to die. I also worried about how my mom would take it. She was fragile when life was going well. Just thinking about Steven telling her conjured visions of her falling to the ground in agony, kicking and screaming and crying. It would have been the most natural reaction for her to have.

  Steven agreed with me. No one else would know he was sick until it was obvious. Anthony and I told Steven we would help him decide when it was time.

  Before Steven was sick we’d occasionally get together for a steak dinner or to go to a Knicks game. But I was young, working hard and then partying on weekends. When I had free time, I went back to Long Island to see my parents and hang out with my guys. Steven was driving a cab on the overnight shift, from 4 P.M. to 4 A.M. We were just living two very different lives. But after I learned he had AIDS, I made an effort to see him regularly. That turned out to be pretty weird.

  When someone is terminally ill, the last thing they want is for you to change your behavior and pity them or act differently around them. The more I made an effort to see Steven, the more obviously my behavior changed.

  I tried not to ask him how he was feeling. He didn’t talk about it much, either, other than to tell me he was going to different doctors and trying different things. One had him on an all-vegetable diet for a wh
ile. But in those early days, even doctors weren’t sure how to make people better; they were trying solutions and tonics and cocktails. When my grandmother was dying of cancer in the 1950s, she paid a lot of money to a doctor who put her on an all-steamed-vegetables diet. People get desperate for miracles.

  That first year Steven didn’t look any different. He had always been trim and athletic-looking, and he still maintained his weight. I wanted so badly to believe he had figured out a way to beat the disease. If he avoided talking about how he felt it was because he was feeling fine. If I checked him out and he didn’t look any worse, maybe he’d been cured. The whole year went by like that. I guess I was in denial.

  Soon enough I became painfully aware of reality. Over Christmas of 1989 we were all at my parents’ house on Long Island. I broke out my video camera and was getting shots of the whole family doing their thing. At one point I went over to Steven and started interviewing him. I knew I was doing it because he was going to die and I wanted to remember him, what he looked like and sounded like. I wanted to be able to see him twenty years from now, so that when I told my kids about their uncle Steven they’d know who I was talking about. He knew why I was videotaping him, too. Which is why he told me to get the camera out of his face.

  That spring, though, we could see that the disease was progressing. Steven didn’t look healthy and fit anymore; he started looking sickly. By Easter he looked especially hollow. I wasn’t sure if my parents noticed—they didn’t mention anything—but Anthony and I both told Steven it was time to tell them. A week went by, and he didn’t do it. Another week went by. He still hadn’t done it. Finally Steven admitted he couldn’t tell our parents. He asked Anthony to do it, just as he had asked Anthony to tell them he was gay.