They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  “Hello,” I answered.

  “Gary?” said the voice on the other end. It sounded familiar. Then I realized it was the woman from WNBC.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve decided to rethink the process and we are going to interview. Can you come in tomorrow?”

  I had gone from being dead to getting a lifeline. I called Steve to say thanks and told him I’d be going in the next day. He mentioned that one of his best friends, Nell Bassett, worked as the public affairs director on the floor where my interview was. If I saw her, I should say hi. The next morning I got on the elevator at the WNBC offices at the same time as another woman. Someone next to me greeted her, “Hi, Nell.” So I asked, “Are you Nell Bassett?” We started talking and then she walked me to my interview, introduced me, and said if Steve North sent me I must be great.

  My interview was with Meredith Hollis, who ran the news desk. She explained to me that the position was just a part-time gig as assistant to the traffic reporter, Roz Frank, who flew around the city in a helicopter giving reports every ten minutes. There was a morning spot open and an afternoon spot. The job entailed sitting in a cubicle all day and feeding information to Roz.

  Meredith didn’t ask questions. She made statements, such as “We have a large news department here.” Then she stared at me and leaned in real close, just waiting for a response. She also presented me with some strange hypotheticals: If you are working on deadline and someone yells at you, how do you handle that? If you get something right but are yelled at for being wrong, what’s your response? The whole process struck me as odd.

  But it worked out okay, because when it was over she told me to come back the next day. I had to meet Roz. And she warned me: I better know my stuff. That meant understanding every highway, byway, roadway, bridge, and tunnel that connected all five boroughs and the rest of the tri-state area—New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

  When my dad drove us around the city I paid attention. I knew the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway and the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. But I knew nothing about New Jersey. All of New Jersey—and all the ways to get to New Jersey—was an enigma to me. I needed to study up.

  On the way home I bought a map of the tri-state area, memorized all the highways going north, south, east, and west and circled all the bridges and tunnels. For hours that afternoon, I memorized them, starting with the northernmost Hudson River crossings, moving around the tip of lower Manhattan, and coming back up the East River: George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Queens–Midtown Tunnel, 59th Street Bridge, and Triboro Bridge. By the time my dad got home from work, I had them down.

  As soon as I sat down the next morning Roz barely said hello. She just hit me with a question: Name the Hudson River crossings. I rattled them off. Then she wanted the five East River crossings. I hit those, too, almost. From south to north, I said the Williamsburg Bridge came before the Manhattan Bridge. When she was done she looked at Meredith, looked at me, and, without smiling, said, “All right. You’re hired. Start tomorrow.”

  My first day at WNBC was March 5, 1984. Nine days before I turned twenty-three. I was working the morning shift.

  1992

  A month after Steven went into the hospital, I was still struggling to make sense of it all. I had tremendous support from Howard, Robin, Fred, and everyone on the show. And the outpouring from my Long Island guys made me wonder why I was ever afraid to tell them Steven was gay.

  But I wasn’t going out much. After work I’d usually come home, watch Jeopardy!, and go to sleep. I wasn’t depressed, or blue, as my mom had always put it. I could function. I was just sad all the time.

  One night a publicist friend was having a party in Manhattan to celebrate the opening of his firm. I had asked my friend Patty to join me, but when she was busy I contemplated blowing it off. “Just go by yourself,” Patty urged me. “You need to get out.”

  I took her advice. I was strolling through the scene when I met these two girls. One of them was tall and cute and blond. The other one started talking to me.

  “Hey, I recognize you,” she said.

  “Hi, I’m Gary.”

  “I know. My brother listens to your show. I hate it. I think it’s disgusting.”

  I heard this a lot. And normally it would send me running. But I wanted to talk to the cute chick so I stuck around and tried to charm them. The good news was that the one I liked, whose name was Mary, almost never listened to the show. The one time she had heard it she was in the car and happened to hear a bit where Howard was talking about the size of some guy’s penis, so she changed the channel. Mary was a graphic designer at an investment bank on Wall Street and had no idea who I was. After a while, we all decided to leave the party and grab a drink nearby. It turned out to be a really fun night and, when it was time to go, we all exchanged numbers and said we should do it again sometime.

  I shared a cab home with the girl who said she hated the show. I didn’t know if she was into me, but I was into Mary, and I didn’t want it to be awkward when the cab dropped us off. So when we pulled away from the bar I asked the friend, “Does Mary date guys that are shorter than her?” Mary is five ten; I am five eight—just tall enough not to be short. I got the green light.

  The next morning I called Mary at nine. Mary still jokes that she was amazed I called so early. She didn’t know that nine o’clock was my lunchtime.

  The truth was, we were two people in our late twenties who dated a lot and none of whose relationships had worked out. Her previous boyfriends were usually tall investment bankers. My type was short girls with dark hair. We probably both saw each other as a change-of-pace date.

  Before our first date I asked Patty for advice. I could get tickets to a concert or go to a Broadway show. Patty told me, “Don’t try to impress her with stuff like that. Just go to dinner. Have a conversation.” A great idea! So we went to a restaurant called Ernie’s. After dinner we went to shoot pool. The date was over by 8:30 because of my work schedule. Mary thought I didn’t like her because I sent her home at the time when most people headed out.

  I did most of the talking that night. And I said enough of the right things that we went out again the next weekend. And the weekend after that. We were getting together at least once on a Saturday or Sunday, just for a few hours, so we weren’t in each other’s face constantly. It was casual and comfortable. But things were going well enough that I thought it was a good time to put her to the test.

  I happened to have an appearance at Madison Square Garden just a couple of months after we started dating. It was a truck show, and I invited Mary to come with me. Before we left I told her, “It’s a white-trashy event but it will be done by nine and then we’ll get a bite to eat.”

  It wasn’t just a truck show, though. It was a mud bog truck show, in which they filled the middle of the arena with dirt and then used industrial fire hoses to spray it down until it was a muddy mess. And I wasn’t the only one making an appearance. I was sharing the stage with four Penthouse Pets, two of whom I knew from the show.

  These types of appearances never have a grand plan. You just show up and hang around until someone tells you what you’re doing. On this night, I happened to be having a nice conversation with Mary backstage when they called my name. I was handed one of the fire hoses and dragged to the center of the bog. In front of me were the four Pets, ready to be hosed down. I did what any man would do: I hosed them down. When it was over I dropped the hose and, as casually as possible, asked Mary if she wanted to go get something to eat.

  I could tell she was kind of freaked out. Even though she had begun to listen to the show since we started dating, she wasn’t prepared for this. I tried to ease the tension. “Look,” I said, “I know it’s goofy but I get paid a lot of money to do stupid stuff like this.” That made her feel better. For the moment.

  We continued seeing each other every weeke
nd, but we still hadn’t declared ourselves as boyfriend and girlfriend. I loved that it was low-key, no pressure. But I also knew we were starting to dig each other, so I decided to take her to Uniondale. It was time for her to meet my family.

  We went out there on a Sunday afternoon, classic Italian dinner day at my house. My mom knew I liked this girl; I had warned her that Mary could be someone special. But I didn’t tell her to be nice. I knew it didn’t work like that. She was who she was when she woke up. There was no telling her how to act.

  I never told Mary that my mom had had mental health issues. I told her she was a little quirky and funny and that sometimes she got mad at people—far from full disclosure. I said, “My mom can be a little nutty.” Those were the exact words. I didn’t want to scare her off.

  We walked into the house and we could smell the manicotti and sauce cooking on the stove. My parents were sitting in folding chairs at an aluminum table that was awkwardly placed in the middle of a small path from our living room to our den. Mary thought the table was there because my parents had a lot of guests coming through on their way to see Steven in the hospital. Eventually I told her the table had been there my entire life. I had no idea why. Maybe it was a blockade, since no one was allowed to sit on the living room couch.

  Mary took a seat next to my mom in one of the aluminum chairs and my mom took Mary’s hand and held it in her lap. She looked her up and down and then looked in her eyes. Finally, in a thick accent born in Brooklyn and cured in Long Island, she said, “Alllriiight.” None of us knew if that was good or bad. But I was the baby of a fiercely protective, confrontational woman, so she was especially sensitive to any other female relationships in my life. It was your typical, dysfunctional mother-son stuff. But it wasn’t easy for Mary in the early days of our courtship.

  Since Mary and I wanted to spend as much time together as possible, she’d come with me to Long Island on the days I visited Steven in the hospital. She knew he had AIDS and that he was gravely ill. But I didn’t share the details of his disintegration, and I didn’t want her to see Steven the way he was. She actually never met him. Normally I’d drop her at Frank and Maryanne’s for an hour or two, which was awkward for her. Or she’d get stuck at my house, sitting with my parents. Which was even more awkward.

  On their first visit alone, my mom broke down crying in the kitchen. Thinking she was distraught about Steven, Mary put her arm around her and tried to comfort her. But my mom recoiled, telling her it had nothing to do with Steven. It happened again a few weeks later but this time Mary asked my mother, from a safe distance, if she was okay. After another couple of weekends she realized that sort of thing happened all the time. If Steven were healthy and sitting on an aluminum chair in the living room, my mom would still be crying.

  In small ways, my mom tried to assert her superiority over Mary. At holidays she’d tell Mary to bring a salad, even though she knew no one would eat it. The random gifts she’d give Mary were usually a size too big or a size too small. When they had conversations my mom talked about her family in a possessive way, as if to say, “Not so fast …”

  If Mary tried to discuss the little slights she felt from my mother, I’d get defensive and we’d argue. A lot of the fights we had, right up until the one that led me to Alan, could have been avoided if I had told Mary how nuts my mom was from the beginning. Instead I kept it to myself as long as I could.

  Mary had to deal with my other family, too. I hadn’t told anyone on the show I was dating someone. That September, Mary and I scheduled a trip to Puerto Rico, when the show was going to be on break. But at the last minute there was a change of plans and the show stayed on the air. I had already bought plane tickets and Howard told me not to change my plans, so we went. It’s one of the rare times the show has been broadcast and I wasn’t there.

  One night in Puerto Rico, Mary and I went out drinking and we were really skunk drunk. The next morning, at 6:30, the phone rang. I could barely find it because my head was still spinning. When I finally picked it up I heard someone saying, in a heavy Puerto Rican accent, “Hello, this is Manuel.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Um, yes, this is Manuel.”

  “Who?”

  Finally I realized it was Howard, calling me while the show was live.

  “So who are you there with?” he asked.

  “A friend,” I answered.

  “Is it a girl? Put her on the phone.”

  “She doesn’t want to be on the phone.”

  “How’s it going with her?” he asked.

  “It’s good,” I said. I was trying to be coy so Mary didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Are you in love?”

  “No,” I yelled. Then I whispered, “But we really like each other. I have to go.” Mercifully, he hung up.

  By the time I got back from the trip, everyone was asking about Mary. She had a long Italian last name and they all wanted to know if she was a gorilla girl with lots of hair. I tried to tell them she was everything I was not: classy, demure, polite.

  I spent that Thanksgiving at Mary’s. By then I knew I was in love with her. And I think she loved me. But I hadn’t won her father over yet. He hated every tall, good-looking, perfect-for-her banker that he had ever met. He was Italian, ready to intimidate. I had long hair and three earrings. Mary begged her dad to keep an open mind when he first met me months earlier.

  He had, but we still hadn’t found much common ground. Then, that Thanksgiving, we realized we were both Knicks fans. The conversation swung around to the jobs he’d had over the years and he mentioned he worked for RCA. This was another bond for us, since RCA had owned NBC when I was working there. I told him about the battles the show had with management and censors and how, eventually, the chairman of RCA, a guy named Thornton Bradshaw, ordered that Howard be fired after hearing a raunchy Dial-a-Date.

  “Thornton Bradshaw, huh?” Mary’s dad asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I hate that guy. He fired me from RCA, too.”

  We had both been canned by the same guy. After that we became fast friends.

  When I was ready to propose I decided to do it at the ‘21’ Club. It had such a romantic, old-time New York flavor. I should have known, after living in the city for so long, that it had seen better days. I also didn’t know, until we got there, that the tables inside were placed in a horseshoe pattern around the room. It didn’t feel like you were eating just with your date, but with everyone in the restaurant. When I proposed, everyone in the place would be able to see it.

  At this point, though, there was nothing I could do. This was the night. I had spent twelve thousand dollars on the ring—a ridiculous amount of money for me—and had become a nervous wreck about it. I was terrified of losing it. When Mary got up from the table to use the bathroom I gave the ring to the waiter and asked him to bring it out on a silver tray covered by a silver top. Classy. I was so anxious I felt like dry heaving the entire time she was in the ladies’ room.

  When she came out the waiters were on her in a flash, setting the tray down on the table and lifting the top with a flourish. Mary looked down and said, “Oh my God!” I was smiling nervously and everyone around the horseshoe was now looking at us. All I could say was, “So?”

  “Well,” she answered. “Ask me.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes!”

  All our new friends in the restaurant applauded.

  “I’m getting married,” I announced to the gang during a commercial for the jewelers who sold me the ring. Everyone was excited about it. They had all met Mary by then, and I had been the single guy on the show for so long, it felt a little bit like the end of an era.

  Then Howard started giving me the business. “Why are you marrying her?”

  “I love her,” I said.

  “But you’re in such a good spot; there are so many women out there. Can’t you just live with her? Tell me exactly why you love her.”

 
; “Elegance and class. That is what I love about her.”

  Then he looked me in the eye and with great seriousness said, “That is exactly what you are going to come to hate about her.”

  I laughed. It was a risk I was willing to take.

  We chose a catering hall in Glen Cove, Long Island, for the wedding. Scott the engineer, who also owned a DJ company and DJ’d himself on the weekends, offered to give us a DJ for the wedding as his gift. We thought this was totally generous. Then, a month before the wedding, Mike Gange had a graduation party at which Scott was the DJ. We were horrified. He did everything we didn’t want at our wedding: throwing sunglasses to the crowd, displaying a scrolling electronic ad for his company on the DJ table, organizing a cha-cha line. Mary and I were freaking out. The music was horrible. “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang, “The Electric Slide,” and, worst of all, the cheesy Club Med song, “Hands Up.”

  Of course, I mentioned this to Howard on Monday. The show is a great way to face up to uncomfortable conversations you’d otherwise never have the balls to have. Howard brought Scott into the studio and explained the problem I was having, on the air. Scott calmed me down, telling me that whatever Mary and I wanted—or not—is what he would do. Great. I requested that he not play cheesy songs like “Celebration” or “Hands Up.” “No problem,” he said. “You will not hear those songs.”

  Midway through the wedding, everything was going great. The music was fantastic. Everyone was drinking and eating and having a good time. All the practical jokes I was afraid the guys were going to play on me—yelling “Baba Booey” during the ceremony, for example—didn’t happen. Until … I heard the opening riffs to “Hands Up.” Jackie, always the master prankster, told Scott I had changed my mind and really wanted to hear it. Scott shrugged and figured, Okay. Before the song was half over, Fred and Jackie were standing on the bar dancing. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get mad at Scott. I jumped on the bar and started dancing, too.

  I still have a picture of the three of us up there, laughing and dancing and having a great time. I know it sounds corny but that was a fantastic day in my life, because my two families—the Stern show and the Dell’Abates—celebrated together.