They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  Here we go again, I thought. Ever since Nancy dumped me and the guys went after me on the show for it, people still called in to talk about it. They’d call me a pussy or make fun of me for having been so heartbroken. That segment aired on the Best of Stern shows we reran every few years, so a lot of people were just discovering it for the first time.

  But by 1999, eleven years after Nancy and I broke up, even Howard was getting tired of the story. He quickly lost interest in these calls because it meant explaining the situation to everyone all over again. And he was just about to drop this douche bag on the phone—he had his finger on the button to cut him off—when the guy pulled this comment out of his bag: “Howard, there’s a tape.”

  I gasped at my desk. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I thought back to the days after Nancy dumped me. I was desperate. And when that happens your mind takes off in new directions. You find clarity that wasn’t possible when more logical options were still available. And in that state of mind, I came up with a brilliant idea: I’d make Nancy a videotape.

  It was the summer of ’88. I had just bought a video camera. I thought I would film myself and show Nancy how much I missed her. It would explain everything, with a lot more impact than a letter. If she could see the pain in my face and hear the regret in my voice she would take me back. For sure.

  I lived with a roommate in an apartment at 105th and Amsterdam. I came home early one afternoon. My roommate wasn’t home. I set up the tripod and the camera in the kitchen, jotted down a few points I wanted to make, and threw on my Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert T-shirt. I had the sleeves rolled up tightly around my arms. Even wearing the T-shirt was a strategic move: The concert had taken place just a month earlier. Since we were both so into music, if she saw it she’d think it was cool I was there, and maybe even subliminally, she’d regret that she wasn’t with a guy like me.

  “What do you mean there’s a tape?” Howard asked the caller.

  “There’s a tape of Gary begging Nancy to take him back,” he said.

  Howard called me into the studio.

  “Is this true?” he asked me.

  I am not a good liar. I can’t think the five steps ahead to successfully dodge the truth. I love the show Survivor, but I know I would be the second one voted off because I’m not conniving enough.

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t even think about saying no.

  “We gotta see that tape,” Howard said. “Do you have a copy of it?”

  “I think so,” I answered. “I’m not sure. I’d have to look. But let me tell you something. There is not enough money in the world for me to show you that tape even if I find it.”

  “I’ll give you five grand,” Howard said.

  “So will I,” Robin followed up.

  Jackie and Fred chimed in with offers of one thousand dollars apiece.

  And that’s when things spiraled out of control. Howard offered to do a screening for fans. Anyone who wanted to pay could come to the studio and watch the tape on the air. Highest bidder would win. A guy from Miami offered ten thousand dollars if he could bring two friends.

  Suddenly, there was a lot of money on the table. We were sitting at twenty-two thousand dollars. And here’s the truth: I was in the middle of finishing a remodel of the kitchen in my house. That money would come in handy and help me breathe a little bit. I decided to do it.

  But first, I had to do some explaining. Now, my wife is a very understanding woman. It’s practically a requirement for anyone who gets involved with a guy on the show. They perfect the shrug and the eye roll. When I work the Sybian machine, Mary doesn’t say a word. “Well,” she says to me, “it’s not like you’re touching anyone.” She’s immune to these things and knows they are harmless. Besides, she’d much rather I be doing this job than working one hundred hours a week at a law firm or trying to close M&A deals. She always tells me that she appreciates that I am different and have a sense of humor.

  In fact, only twice in the early days of our marriage did she get annoyed by my antics. The first time, we were playing Butt Bongo Fiesta on the show, and well, for a second I guess I forgot I was married, because I got into the act. I didn’t think twice about it. Until I got home and Mary reminded me that we were married, so maybe I better knock it off with the slapping of girls’ asses.

  The second time was after the videotape conversation on the show. As I sat down at my desk I decided I should call her and make sure everything was cool. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. That was it. An abrupt hi.

  “What’s going on? Did you hear the show today?”

  “Yeah.” Hmm, that was a short answer.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What should I think? Do you think I should be happy about this?”

  “I didn’t think you would mind. In the grand scheme of things it’s pretty harmless.”

  “Oh, you think so?”

  “What are we talking about here?”

  “The tape.”

  “What kind of tape do you think this is?”

  She paused for a very long time. “A sex tape.”

  Turns out a friend who had heard only snippets of the show called her and said they were discussing my sex tape.

  I laughed and said, “Do you think I would call you up so calmly if we were talking about a sex tape on the air?”

  She was relieved. Later that night saw me digging through a box of videotapes I had hauled out to Connecticut when we moved. To this day, people still ask me why I saved that tape. I had dubbed a lot of stuff from that video camera onto VHS, and it happened that some of the last footage I had of my brother was on the same tape as my ode to Nancy. That’s why I saved it, and that’s why it was so easy to find.

  As I held the tape in my hand, I told myself, I made this a long time ago. It is now worth a lot of money. Then I popped it into the VCR and watched a couple minutes of it. It was really embarrassing. I asked Mary to come in and take a look. She said, “Oh, who cares? It’s no big deal.” I thought that Mary wouldn’t want the world to think she was married to an idiot, so how bad could it be? Right?

  The answer: really, really bad. Mary’s fatal flaw is that she is too sweet to have recognized the opportunity for money in the tape. I’m not. I had to bring the tape in early so the TV people could dub it into the right format for the show. As they were watching it I immediately was sorry I found it. I could tell by their reaction that it was bad.

  Then one of our supervising producers gave it a look. Her reaction was sobering. “It was all about you,” she said. “You never say you’re sorry or how you will make it up to her. It’s all about you and what you expect and what you want.”

  This had never occurred to me. I felt like a dick. But it was too late to turn back. The guys from Miami were already in the studio, waiting for the 7 A.M. screening. Howard said into the microphone, “You guys ready in the audience?” Then he hit Play.

  Hello, hello, guess who? Umm, I think you’re a little surprised by this, and you’ll have to excuse me because I lost my voice on Friday. It is Tuesday at 12:28 in the afternoon, and I came home from work early because I wasn’t feeling that good. I wanted to get this out to you.

  First of all, as you might have noticed I bought a new video camera, and I wanted to try it out. So that is what this is all about. I have had a lot of things I wanted to say to you, which I think I should be saying in person, but getting an audience with you seems to be difficult. I could have wrote this to you in a letter, but these are things I don’t want to say to you over the telephone because I think you need to hear my voice and you need to see me to understand some of these things.

  This may get a little bit boring because when you don’t have someone to talk to you kind of have to do it all by yourself, which is why I am sending you this videotape. But, hey, guess what? You haven’t seen me in seven months, and this is what I look like now. I’ve got my Atlantic Records T-shirt, my hair is a lot longer, but I just
came in out of the rain.

  I took some notes down. I had a lot of things I wanted to say, and like I said when you don’t have someone to talk to on the telephone to remind you stuff, so don’t think I am cheating, but I had a lot of things I wanted to say and wanted to get them all in.

  Let’s start with the thing that prompted this whole thing. Last Friday night I felt like the biggest idiot in the history of the world and I was pretty hurt. I was pretty hurt. I’m sure that wasn’t your intention. If you don’t know what I’m talking about let me tell you what I am talking about. I came home from the city and Frank drove me over to his house and he told me to sit in the car while you were upstairs. And I felt like a schmuck, Nance. I felt like a real dick. Frank was like, “I will drop you off at Vinny’s because Nancy really doesn’t want to see you, and Maryanne said it’s not a good idea if I bring you back here. She really doesn’t want to see you.”

  We’re civilized here, don’t you think? What is this all about? It kind of hurt a lot. You know I told Frank the whole way there how I missed you and spoke to you early in the week. There have been a lot of opportunities where I could have seen you and set something up and I didn’t. I respect your wishes that you don’t want to see me. And I haven’t been doing it, and this was one of those purely coincidental things and I would have been nice to you. I would have said hello. So I gotta tell you I was really hurt by that.

  But in a way it makes me feel good because it tells me something: If you didn’t still care about me you’d see me, and I think you still do care about me. You care about me a lot. And I was telling Frank how the last seven months have been and how I knew I was wrong, and I started to tell him a lot of things and he said, “Do you think she knows that?” and I said, “Yeah, I think she knows it.” And he said, “Are you sure she knows it?” And I said, “I don’t know.”

  So I am going to try and put them down on videotape for you. These are forever, man. You’ll always have these to hold against me one way or the other.

  Let me start out, I feel like I’m asking your father for permission to marry you. I want to lay out my intentions. I want to lay out what I want, what I want from you. Obviously, I want to go back out with you again, that goes without saying, but I want more than that. The first thing that I want is I want a commitment. I want to give a commitment and I want to get a commitment. I want to be your boyfriend and I want you to be my girlfriend. I would dump everyone I was going out with in a second if it meant you’d be back with me. And it would be just me and you. I want to be clear. I want to do things for you. I know I was kind of insensitive before, and ah, there is not much I can do about it. I can say I’m sorry, but I am not going to sit here and make excuses. What’s done is done. I can’t change what’s behind me; there are a lot of excuses why I acted that way, but there are no reasons and that is behind me.

  I want to do a lot of the things we said we were going to do but never got to do. I wrote so much stuff down, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was afraid of commitment. I know you think I was insensitive. I was afraid that anything I did for you, any kind of love I showed you or any kind of stuff like that, would lead you more down the way that I didn’t feel at the time. Let me try to explain. Let’s say I gave you roses for no reason at all. I felt in my mind how could I do that if I didn’t love her because in your mind you were going to think that I did.

  But I’m romantic. A lot of people find that hard to believe. I could be if I was up for a commitment, but I wasn’t at that time so that’s that. The other part of the intention here is that I’ve been saying I’m a marriage martyr for a long time. And I am not asking you to marry me on videotape and certainly not tomorrow, either, but I would like to think if we got back together and became a couple again and it was working, somewhere off in the distance would be the possibility of mmmmmmm. I’m trying to make light of a serious subject. I don’t want to be running around anymore. I do want to get married, and yeah, I could see myself marrying you, especially if you were interested in marrying me back.

  I have something like that in mind, and I am not just bullshitting. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I am not even trying to hide that. None of my other relationships have worked because of you. I am not even trying to hide that. I miss you, man, don’t know how else to say it. I lost my lover and I lost my best friend. And you lost your lover and you lost your best friend. You gained a lover and a best friend: I gained a couple lovers, I mean one lover, but I gained no friends. There is no one there to come home to call or tell all the great stuff. Right now I feel like my professional life is at a nine and my personal life is at a two. Now I feel great about the way work is going and the curse with that is that I have no one to share it with. That sucks.

  I can tell you that going back out with me would solve a lot of problems. Because your friends are my friends and mine are yours, and I have to sometimes feel uncomfortable around my friends when it comes to you and it sometimes feels weird. I don’t know if you are happy where you are right now. I mean I hear stuff through the grapevine. I gotta tell you the people I hear from think that you are happy and that you are content, but they don’t know if you are really, really happy. And I think I can make you that happy. I thought you and I were really happy when we were happy. I want to do all the things we said we were going to do and never did like going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philharmonic. Things that I promised we would do and never did because I was afraid of the c-word, the commitment word.

  Here’s my final statement. I know that sending you this tape is very unfair. I realize that. But I don’t give a shit because all is fair in love and war. I’m playing a little dirty and quite frankly I am trying to get any edge I can to get you to listen to me. If you want me to leave you alone, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll stop with the phone calls. I’ll stop sending you T-shirts in the mail and, you know, this videotape. I’ll put it all to an end.

  But I am not going to let you off the hook that easy if you want me gone. I want to take about ten minutes of your time. If you want me gone you have to tell me face-to-face: you have to look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t care about me anymore. I think you owe that to me. Well quite frankly you don’t owe me anything, but for the time we spent together I think you do owe me that and if you could do that you would really make me believe it. I don’t know if you can do that.

  I am trying to figure out if I made some sense. I am in a very confused state. I miss you. I not only miss the things we did I miss the shit that we should have been doing and never got to do. I just want to be part of your life again, and I want you to be part of my life again. And, um, you know, I don’t know what else to say. Think about it please. I am not begging now. I am not the begging type, but I am close to begging as I can get. I really want you to think about this whole tape, and the great thing about videotape is you can rewind it and watch it all over again, make sure you didn’t miss any important parts.

  I think we could be good together. Please think about it. Thanks.

  When I was done making the tape that day I took it out of the camera and dubbed it onto a VHS tape. Then I wrote a short note that read, “Watch this tape. Everything I need to say is on here.” After mailing it off I felt good. I felt successful, actually. I knew I had made the tape that would make Nancy break up with her boyfriend and come running back to me.

  Eleven years later, I didn’t feel quite so successful. I sat there during the showing with a yellow legal pad over my face the entire time so the camera couldn’t see me. I felt exposed and naked. This was something that I never expected anyone to see except the person I made it for. I was brutally honest and the world got to see that. Even the interns looked at me funny. I was supposed to be their boss, and it turned out I was an embarrassing, sniveling dick.

  “And so ends our journey,” Howard said when it was all over. “You guys didn’t pay enough. Our audience is stunned and can’t really speak.”

  “Did it live up to the hype?�
� I asked.

  “Better than a Barbara Walters special,” said one of the audience members.

  What killed me was that, at the time, I couldn’t convince Nancy to come on the show and tell everyone how she felt when she actually got the tape. The truth was, she didn’t think I was a stalker and she didn’t call 911 after watching it. In fact, when I decided to do this book I reached out to her again—we’ve kept in touch over the years—and this time she was ready to share what she was thinking. Finally, here’s what Nancy has to say about the tape, twenty-two years later:

  “People I know who listen to the show say to me, ‘Did you listen today? They mentioned it again.’ It’s like infamy.

  “But no one had done that for me before. I was living at home at that time, on Long Island, and I watched it by myself, although I did tell my best girlfriend about it. And I told the guy I was dating, too.

  “To be honest, I thought the tape was a romantic gesture. If you asked any woman what she thought of something like that she would be like, ‘Wow, I wish a guy would sit down and do that for me.’

  “We were in our twenties at that point and I had just gotten out of college and we had a pretty tight relationship. After I watched it, I was crushed and cried. I showed it to my friend, and she was like, ‘So what are you going to do?’ But there was nothing to do. That’s one reason why it was hard to see it, because everything that was said about being together came too late, after I had decided to break up and move on. We had a close relationship and I did lose my best friend. I remember not wanting to get together after we broke up because I knew you were not going to let me off the hook. You were going to do what it took to get me back; there was no doubting what you wanted. You were saying, ‘I realized I was a jerk and want to do the right thing.’

  “But it was also upsetting, hearing it on the show all those years later, because it was like someone ripped a page out of my diary from ten years earlier and then played it over and over.

  “I don’t know which emotion came first: I felt embarrassed, angry, mortified, and extremely apologetic. That tape was buried in a box somewhere with letters that go with it. I just watched it for the first time in twenty-two years. And I am sorry for ever sharing its existence with anyone. I will say this though: I didn’t even notice you were wearing the Atlantic Records T-shirt. It didn’t make a single lasting impression on me.”