They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  BETWEEN THE RADIO STATION, school, and my internships I didn’t have much spare time. What little I did I spent at the Roosevelt Field mall. There was a great head shop there, with black lights and Pink Floyd T-shirts. And it also happened to be home to the greatest record store in the history of the world. Or at least Hempstead.

  Record World was where my brothers bought all my Christmas gifts. It’s where I bought all the albums that filled the orange crates Steven left behind. In my junior year at college, a girlfriend gave me a two-hundred-dollar Record World gift certificate—an unheard-of amount of money. To the people that worked there I became the guy who had the gift certificate. I never spent it all at once; I slowly chipped away at it, being very selective about my choices. I didn’t want to waste a penny on stuff I’d listen to once and scrap. I bought Hall and Oates’s Private Eyes and the Cars’ first album. I was spending a lot of time there.

  By my senior year, my internships had ended and I was rich with experience. I was also broke. My buddy Steve’s older brother worked at Record World and I asked if he could get me a part-time job there. Really, I just wanted to make a few more bucks to buy beer and even more records. A gig at Record World would let me do that while feeding my musical jones. None of my boys cared about music the way I did. But everyone who worked at Record World had that bug. They loved listening, talking, debating, and learning about records and musicians and sound. They were just like me. It was one more group of surrogates I could count on. Plus I got a 30 percent employee discount.

  We were the quintessential record snobs, or nerds, depending on which side of the counter you stood. Think of the movie High Fidelity and that was my life at Record World. There was Ken, who only cared about the Beatles. As far as he was concerned, they were the greatest group of all time and any group that wasn’t them was automatically inferior. If you started talking about Earth, Wind & Fire you couldn’t finish a sentence before Ken would come sprinting across the store to say, “They recorded a version of ‘Got to Get You into My Life,’ you know?”

  There was a woman named Mary McCann, but we used to call her Mary McTapes, because she worked in the tapes department. There was a cute girl, a quintessential JAP, who loved all the dance music.

  Rob was a buddy of mine who was a little bit younger. We tried to be less judgmental of music and instead acknowledge the brilliance in all of it. Our philosophy—and we had one—was that a good song was a good song, whether it was rock or pop. He’s remained a great friend and we still have debates about music.

  Karen Rait, who worked there, is still a close friend. She became a bigwig at Interscope, dealing with artists like Eminem. When she brings guests to the show we’ll sit in the greenroom saying to each other, “Can you believe we get to do the shit we dreamed about doing all those years ago?” We joke about how when we were at Record World, we used to think that the people who had the coolest jobs were the guys who worked for record companies putting together in-store displays.

  Then there was Leslie, whose brother Elliot Easton was the lead guitarist in the Cars. Leslie talked about the Cars all the time, dropping the fact that his brother was in the band at every opportunity. Most of us working there were college students making a little extra cash, but Leslie was older, so we gave him a hard time. One day we got so sick of him talking about the Cars that someone said to him, “Leslie, can’t your brother get you a job sharpening pencils for the Cars?”

  Believe me, it hurt at the time.

  We all had our specialties. Mine was that I was a wiz at ’70s pop music, especially the singles. It became like a game show in the store. Somebody, a grandmother, would come in asking for a record and she’d give you nothing, no hints at all. “My son said there’s a band …” Or somebody would come in tunelessly humming a song and having only a few lyrics, like, “Free, on my own is the way I used to be.” Inevitably, the other staff would call me over, repeat the lyrics or hum a bit of the tune, and I’d identify the song and artist. (“Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Elvin Bishop, by the way.) There was no Internet; you didn’t go to play.it. There was a big book in the back of the store that listed every song ever made by title and artist. We were constantly adding pages, and replacing the ones that fell out because we thumbed through it so much.

  We felt like we owned the place. And customers weren’t immune from our snark, either. People would come in and stare at me because they thought I was John Oates. I wore a blue vest and had a name tag with “Gary” written on it clearly. But once a guy came up to me, looked me up down and side to side, and said, “Are you John Oates?” I said, “Yeah, that’s why I work at a record store making minimum wage.”

  The store was long and narrow, with a cash register on either side of the aisle. The walls were lined with album covers, seventy to eighty on each side. Up front on the right were the 45s, in the back left was classical, which no one ever bought, and in the way back were cassettes. Down in the basement was the stockroom where we had lunch every day. We went to Woolworth’s and bought chicken salad sandwiches.

  The front of the store was where all the action happened. That’s where the “boat” with the bestselling records was set up. If a new record came out and no one had heard of it then we’d get sent three copies from the label. If a band was well-known you might get twenty-five copies. With really well-known bands we got fifty. And with a supergroup like Bruce we were sent a hundred. I wasn’t there when Barbra Streisand released Guilty in 1980, but I’m told the response was insane. That had gone down as the single most harried day in the history of Record World.

  Until December 12, 1983: the day Thriller was released.

  Records came in boxes of a hundred. Before we could put them on the floor we had to unpack them all, make sure we received the right amount of copies, and then label them with the sticker price. We must have gotten a thousand copies of Thriller that day. I remember coming up one afternoon carrying a box full of albums—a hundred albums are heavy—and there was a crowd waiting for me at the entrance to the basement. They’d heard I was down there with new Thrillers. People started pulling them off the pile before I could get to the boat. By the time I got there I had two albums left. This was a narrow fucking store. I didn’t know it could hold a mob a hundred people wide. When the day ended, out of the thousand Thriller albums we started with, we had just six left, enough to last the first hour or so of the next morning, until we got the next shipment.

  When the new music came out we were all over it, loving something when no more than three other people in the country were into it. That was part of why we liked it so much. No one else knew as much as we did. But as soon as a group became popular, we dropped them. European New Wave was big back then and I was responsible for ordering all those records. I was the guy who imported “99 Luftballons” to Record World.

  We fought about what record would get played over the in-store loudspeakers (we’d let the album play through full length). This is back when albums told stories, as movies do. Pete Townshend’s All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes. Joe Jackson’s Night and Day. Rush’s Signals. We didn’t skimp on a single track. Then we’d have to play some Top 40 hits—store policy—before the fight started all over again about who had next. Some nights we put on the strangest records we could find, hoping to entice browsing customers into buying it. When they did, we’d say to one another, “Chalk it up to in-store play.” And when we closed the store at the end of the day we drove around Long Island to see the local bands we loved.

  The great thing about Record World was that if you worked there and you owned an album that was in good condition, you could trade it in for one of equal value. When I started working there I had two full orange crates of records. But a lot of them were Steven’s that I wanted to get rid of. I was constantly trading out funky crap for classics. It took eighteen months before I ran out of records to trade in and got my collection to a state of perfection.

  I was on my way to graduating with a 3.79 grade-point
average. And because I was always hanging around the Adelphi communications department, I won the award for most outstanding student in my class. They called it the Richard C. Clemo Award. I actually had no idea what it meant until years later when Steve Langford, one of our Howard 100 News reporters, did some digging. Turns out this guy Clemo founded our department. If not for him, I’d be a photographer.

  Naturally, with the internships, a high GPA, and the Clemo Award in my arsenal, I was thinking I’d kill it in the real world. But I wasn’t quite ready to get a real job. I’d spent so much time working in college. When I was a junior I took a class called The Italian-American Experience, taught by Sal Primeggia. Honestly, I don’t remember a thing about the course, but Sal was a very animated speaker, always waving his arms and doling out grand pieces of advice during his lessons. The one thing he said that stuck with me: “After you graduate, go do what you always wanted to do. Go to Europe. Because when you get that first job you will be working for the rest of your life.”

  A real pick-me-up. But it had a profound effect on me. My senior year, when I saw an offer on one of the bulletin boards at Adelphi for an all-inclusive, monthlong trip to Italy after graduation, at a cost of eight hundred dollars, I jumped at it. My parents gave it to me as a graduation present and then threw me a party, too, where relatives handed me envelopes stuffed with cash to take on my trip. So Italian. (It took me years to get someone a real gift for their wedding or graduation, rather than just handing them a wad of cash.)

  These parties were always tough on my mom. She’d spend a month cleaning and getting ready. You couldn’t go near her or offer any help, just like when she was cooking a holiday dinner. It was real manic behavior. Then when it was over, she would feel blue for days, as if coming down from the event was hard. In this case, it probably didn’t help that her baby was graduating from college and heading off to Italy.

  I saw Perugia. I saw Rome. Halfway through the tour, a few of us decided to ditch the program and travel on our own. We spent a couple of days in Bologna, then we hit Venice, and went on to Switzerland. We stayed in cheap hostels and pensiones and partied. The trip was exactly what I wanted it to be. And then it was time to go home. On the plane back I was thinking about my future. I wasn’t arrogant, but I told myself I had more work experience than most kids my age, I had great grades, and, while it might be hard to get a great job, I thought I’d be able to land a decent one before the summer was over. I figured I’d hit the beach for a few days and then throw myself into the search.

  While I was in college I had bought a cheap, beaten-up Firebird that did exactly what it needed to do: shuttle me from job to job. Before I left for Italy, Frank told me he and Vinny would clean it up a little bit while I was away. On the day I got home, the two of them picked me up at the airport and, as we walked out to the curb, Frank headed for this souped-up Firebird. It had a fin and an emblem and fancy seats. When he stopped in front of it, I said to him, “Why are you stopping here? Where’s the car?”

  “You don’t recognize it?” he said.

  “Recognize what? Where’s my car?”

  He tossed me the keys. “This is it. I told you we’d clean it up. Happy graduation.”

  It was the nicest gift anyone got me. Now I had my kick-ass car—and nothing but my adult life ahead.

  RECORD WORLD PLAYLIST,

  CIRCA 1982–83

  “Only Time Will Tell,” Asia

  “Every Breath You Take,” Police

  “Billie Jean,” Michael Jackson

  “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” Irene Cara

  “Down Under,” Men at Work

  “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Eurythmics

  “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” Culture Club

  “Come On Eileen,” Dexys Midnight Runners

  “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Duran Duran

  “Let’s Dance,” David Bowie

  “Electric Avenue,” Eddy Grant

  “She Blinded Me with Science,” Thomas Dolby

  “Africa,” Toto

  “Der Kommissar,” After the Fire

  “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” Taco

  “The Safety Dance,” Men Without Hats

  “Mickey,” Toni Basil

  “Rock This Town,” Stray Cats

  “Our House,” Madness

  “Rock the Casbah,” Clash

  “Photograph,” Def Leppard

  “Pass the Dutchie,” Musical Youth

  “Don’t You Want Me,” Human League

  “Abracadabra,” Steve Miller Band

  “867-5309 (Jenny),” Tommy Tutone

  “We Got the Beat,” Go-Go’s

  “Caught Up in You,” .38 Special

  “I Ran,” A Flock of Seagulls

  “Kids in America,” Kim Wilde

  “Edge of Seventeen,” Stevie Nicks

  “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” U2

  “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Cyndi Lauper

  “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Yes

  “Steppin’ Out,” Joe Jackson

  “Uptown Girl,” Billy Joel

  “Family Man,” Hall and Oates

  “Cum On Feel the Noise,” Quiet Riot

  “Harden My Heart,” Quarterflash

  “Burning Down the House,” Talking Heads

  A WEEK AFTER I GOT HOME from Italy, I typed up my résumé.

  All the important stuff was on there, with a line or two about my responsibilities: the WLIR internships, reporting from D.C., covering the Islanders and Rick Cerone, and sledding newspaper articles. The SportsChannel gig where I hauled banners and hustled interviews for Stan Fischler, the recording studio where I set up microphones, my job as a production assistant on Intimate Companions, and running the distribution center for the Adelphi Film School PSA movies. I had a 3.79 and the Clemo Award.

  It was a fine-looking résumé. I congratulated myself on being so well-rounded.

  The next morning I woke up early and opened up The New York Times to the classifieds. I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and circled all the help-wanteds that read RADIO AND TV EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT. That sounded professional, like it would pay well, and since I had so much success with internships, it might be the kind of job I could learn from. I’d be assisting an executive, and executives know a lot of shit.

  After breakfast I took a shower and threw on my gray pin-striped suit. It was the middle of July, a little hot for wool. But it’s all I had, and I wanted to look professional. No one hires assistants that look like John Oates. I put my résumé in a folder and put that in a leather briefcase one of my relatives had given me for graduation. Then I hopped in my tricked-out Firebird and drove to the Long Island Rail Road station. Everyone else on the platform looked like a more grown-up version of me: briefcase, suit, empty stare, not sure what the day was going to bring. Professor Primeggia was right about getting away before getting a job. The rest of our lives was going to last a long time. Is this what it looked like?

  On the train I prepared, writing down the addresses of the offices I wanted to hit and the interview times, and then mapping out my path. I was methodical.

  I arrived at my first interview, already starting to sweat in my suit, and began to pull my impressive résumé from my new leather briefcase for the woman behind the front desk. She wasn’t interested. Instead she pointed to an empty chair in the waiting room, the only one available in a space packed with aspiring executive assistants. Pretty soon they called my name and sent me to another room filled with even more people and rows and rows of typewriters. Everyone was clanging away.

  I had to take a typing test. I didn’t learn typing at the Adelphi School of Communications! None of my internships focused on that, either. In fact, I was and still am a terrible typist (one more thing I get mocked for on the show) who uses the hunt-and-peck method. They weren’t looking for Clemo Award winners; they wanted 80–100-words-per-minute typists who didn’t make any mistakes. Everywhere I went, it was the same story. All the executi
ve assistant jobs were for people with experience and skills I didn’t have. What the hell was I learning in college? Clearly, despite my brilliant planning, I was looking in all the wrong places and circling all the wrong jobs.

  It was the middle of July and it was sweltering as I trudged across Midtown, from one glass skyscraper to another, waiting in the same rooms to fail the same typing tests. My wool suit was getting heavier every time I stepped outside.

  Finally, toward the end of the day, I had had enough. I found myself walking by the New York Public Library, where people were lounging all over the steps out front. It was late, after five in the afternoon. They all looked like they were taking a break at the end of their workday, undoing their ties, loosening their collars. Who knows if they were successful or just shlubs like me, looking for work. I assumed it was the former, and that I was the only loser in town at that particular moment.

  I sat down in an empty spot on the steps, slung my jacket over my shoulder, and loosened my tie. Then I rested my elbows on my knees and dropped my head to my chest. That’s when I saw them: pit stains under each of my arms big enough to block out the sun.

  It was the perfect way to end the day.

  1988/1999

  The workday was almost over. We were done with guests. No more breaks. A couple of minutes and I’d be on the way back to Connecticut to spend a beautiful summer afternoon with Mary and the boys. It was 1999. Jackson was a little more than three. Lucas was still a baby. It would have been a great day, a sweet spot in life.

  Until that call came in.

  “Hey, Howard,” the caller said. I was half listening while returning emails and planning out the next day’s show. But I noticed the guy had an accent, a thick Long Island one, like he could have grown up in or spent time in Nassau County. “I’m the guy Gary’s old girlfriend dumped him for.”