They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  I HAD MY NBC ID and I was psyched. I may have only been working three hours a day, I may have been a traffic boy instead of an assistant on the news desk, but I had my fucking NBC ID. And every single day I was going to work in that building.

  On my first day, the producer for Imus—the show that aired while Roz was doing her traffic reports—opened the door for me. His opening line when he saw me: “What do you want?”

  “I’m Gary,” I said. “I’m the new traffic assistant.”

  He didn’t say another word. He just turned his back. So I followed him, and he led me to a shitty cubicle that faced a wall. To my right was an aisle that led to the studio and to my left was a window into the studio, where Don Imus did his show every day. The producer could barely bring himself to acknowledge me as he took me through the tools on my desk. “There is your two-way radio, that is your ticker, and that is your phone. Good luck.” Then, as he was walking away, he told me, “Oh yeah, don’t make eye contact with Imus. Ever.”

  Well, that wasn’t going to be easy. If I moved my head to the left even a little, I could stare right at him as he did his show. I made a note of this and recognized that it might be a challenge.

  I had to be at my desk every day at 6:15. Other than not looking at Imus, this was the hardest part of the job. I am my mother’s son in that I like to do everything at night. In college I wrote all my papers after midnight. I’d clean my room or do my laundry or just listen to music in my room long after the rest of the world was sleeping. I’m a night crawler, and at that point in my life, a year out of college and having just come from the T.G.I.F. party patrol, I was used to going to bed at 4:20 in the morning. Now that was when my alarm went off so I could make the 5:11 train into the city. I had to be in bed by 8:30 p.m.

  Five minutes after I sat down at my desk every morning, Roz got in the chopper. I knew she was in there when I heard her clear her throat. It was a series of hacks, like she was coughing up quarts of oil. It never seemed like she got everything out. Then, if she was in a good mood, she would say, “Good morning, Gary,” in a southern accent that was sweeter than butterscotch candy. But usually she was pretty ornery and just said, “You there?” Then she was off, into the air, an accent yelling at me over twirling blades.

  My responsibilities were pretty simple. As Roz flew over the tri-state area, she reported back to me when there were accidents. For example, if she hovered over the Grand Central Parkway and saw a tractor-trailer stalled in the left lane at Francis Lewis Boulevard, she’d radio to me over the two-way, “Got a tractor-trailer stopped on the GCP at Frankie Lewis.”

  At the time, each mile-long stretch of highway in the New York area was patrolled by different towing companies. And I had a list of all of them, as well as the area they controlled, hanging on the wall of my cubicle. When Roz told me of a breakdown, I called the tow truck company responsible for that part of the road to let the drivers know something needed clearing.

  I wasn’t just being a Good Samaritan. Once Roz flew over the Grand Central Parkway, she was on to other spots in Staten Island, then New Jersey and into Manhattan. It was going to be forty-five minutes before she got back to that scene, but we had traffic reports every ten minutes. It was my job to let her know if the accident had been cleared. And the only way to know for sure was by keeping in touch with the towing companies.

  Problem was, towing companies aren’t exactly known for customer service. Depending on the day and who picked up the phone, getting an answer was a crapshoot. Some days they told me, “Yeah, we got that one.” Then I’d find out a few minutes later, usually at the next traffic report, that they hadn’t. Other times they just said to me, “Fuck off, we’re busy.” Occasionally I’d get a sympathetic ear and they’d give me the real scoop.

  Not that it mattered. Roz was a petite woman with curly black hair and huge, round glasses. But her voice could boom like thunder. She used it practically every time I gave her a report. That’s just the way she was, even though I worked hard to connect with her. A week after I started she asked me to go in the helicopter with her so I could see what she was seeing and have a different perspective on the job. It was a good idea; who doesn’t want to go on a chopper ride?

  The helicopter cab was as small as a roller-coaster car. The radio between the two seats had to be removed so I’d have someplace to sit. It was a gorgeous spring day and I brought a camera to take pictures. Roz asked the pilot to fly near the Statue of Liberty, which was covered in scaffolding. We flew so close I thought we were going to hit it. Not once during the flight did Roz yell at me.

  And it did help me do my job better. But I thought that after some good one-on-one time we would have bonded. Not happening. Never happened. It was strange, because one of the things a lifetime spent with my mom taught me was how to handle volatile personalities. It made me someone who understands people. It’s a valuable skill. At the time, it might have been my only skill.

  But Roz wasn’t swayed by my charm. And at times she was just plain unreasonable. Once, she was doing the 6:40 update and after she was off the air I jumped on the two-way to give her some accident reports, giving her plenty of time to put it all together. I pushed the radio button and said, “Roz.” Then there was silence. So I pushed it again a couple of seconds later and said, “Roz.” Nothing. I tried one more time. Finally, she screamed, in her southern accent, “Stop calling my name! I am not deaf! I can hear you perfectly fine. If I don’t respond right away just wait before calling me again because I am getting ready for a report!” But the next report was ten freaking minutes away!

  After that, whenever I called her I had to time it. “Roz?” Then I’d wait a full minute before saying it again if she didn’t respond. “Roz?” I waited. That was fine if we had plenty of time between traffic updates. But sometimes info came in late between our segments and I had to get it to her right away. We’d have a minute before she went back on the air and I’d have vital accident updates that the listeners of WNBC needed to hear so they could get to work on time. This was traffic, goddammit. I’d hit the two-way. “Roz?” Nothing. So now I had to ask myself: Do I risk getting yelled at by Roz for asking her to respond before enough time has elapsed? Or do I risk not getting her the accurate information so she sounds like she’s with it on the air? It was like Sophie’s Choice.

  Usually I’d let her do the report. And then she’d yell at me because she didn’t have what she needed. “Gary! I want to tell you right now that there is an accident on the GCP and I asked for this info and I have none of it.”

  It was a difficult position but I didn’t want to fuck it up. I soon realized why my interview with Meredith was so weird. She was asking me all these questions about how I handled myself when getting screamed at because Roz was always screaming. Eventually I learned that the two people who had the job before me were women who’d left the building in tears. But this was the other benefit of growing up in my house: If I couldn’t get Roz to chill, I at least knew enough about ignoring yellers to turn my back and do my job.

  Still, I couldn’t stand her. She was a big star at the station and had this patter with Imus whenever she went on the air. He’d say something clever about traffic and then she’d say, “Oh, Imus, you are so funny.” He’d follow that with, “Roz, you are crazy.” It was so phony, because as soon as she snapped the microphone off she got back on the two-way and started yelling at me.

  Her tirades, however, started getting out of control. Shadow Traffic had volunteers all over the area who called in with reports. These were just people with two-way radios who figured out our frequency and tapped into it. There was a guy with a thick Jamaican accent who loved to check in every day, whether there was an accident or not. “All right, mon, I’m on the GCP passing Frankie Lewis and all clear, mon. Out.” I think he just liked saying the code words. One day I was at my desk and Imus’s producer told me I had a call on line three. My first thought was, How did Mom get this number? I hadn’t given it out to anyone. I was don
e with work before most of the people I knew woke up. Besides, I didn’t even have a phone at my desk. Then I freaked, worried that maybe something had happened to her, that she was having an episode or had been hurt. This all came to me in a flash, just a few seconds. I picked up the receiver. A man said, “Gary?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Why do you let that bitch talk to you like that?”

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “You don’t know me,” he said. “But why do you let that bitch talk to you like that?”

  “Who?” I asked. I had no idea who this was.

  “Roz,” he answered. “I hear her screaming at you every morning and it is fucking ridiculous.”

  Then he hung up. I realized he was one of those random guys listening on the two-way radio. And he was right. One morning after she had finished yelling at me over the two-way radio I just started muttering under my breath. “Fuck you, bitch, I can’t stand you.” I gave the two-way radio the finger. Then I turned around and standing behind me was Imus. He just started cracking up. I don’t think he ever said a word to her about it.

  I got so bad with Roz that it reminded me of when I was in grammar school. I’d come home with knots in my stomach, unsure of the mom I’d get when I walked through the door. Was it the yeller? The woman who was depressed? The one who was buzzing? I didn’t know which Roz was getting onto the helicopter each day, either. I ended my shift thinking, A day not getting yelled at by Roz is a good day.

  The best part about my job was that I worked at WNBC. I had my fucking ID and when I strolled to my desk I passed the bulletin board with all the job listings at the station. I began to live for those listings. Once you were in the door you had the inside track on all the other open gigs. Being the traffic boy wasn’t what I was meant to do with my life.

  THERE WERE A LOT of fresh-faced college grads working at WNBC in the ’80s. We all thought we were too hip for the place, but we loved radio and couldn’t believe that we were working at a 50,000-watt station. In a lot of ways, it was just like the record store; we all became friends. I met my future roommate, Greg, there. He was a quiet, red-headed kid who worked in the engineering department. He had a high voice and later became a regular on the Stern show at NBC, filling in when our usual engineer would go on vacation. We lived together for four years and are still great friends.

  My buddy Bernard, a promotions intern who eventually became Imus’s producer, married the hot chick from accounting. We hung out at night and shared a house in the Hamptons for a couple of summers.

  It didn’t matter that we weren’t getting paid shit. My fifteen hours barely covered the cost of my monthly pass on the Long Island Rail Road. I still humped it back on the 9:15 A.M. most days to go work at the kennel supply store. I even kept that crappy overnight shift at the automated station WCTO through the summer, four months after I took the WNBC job, although partly that was to prove to the jerks that I could last there longer than three months.

  When I wasn’t rushing back to Long Island, I hung at WNBC long after my shifts were over. I wanted to meet people and I needed to know everything about what happened there. There wasn’t an aspect of working in radio I didn’t find interesting. I became friendly with the prop master for NBC-TV, an old guy who had been there since it was the Blue and the Red networks. I spent some afternoons in the basement of the building talking to him, listening to his stories from the early days of radio and TV. Every trunk stacked in his storage room held a million different stories.

  I was around so often that even Imus grew comfortable with me. Back then he had agreed to do a PSA for the American Cancer Society about quitting smoking. He tried stopping for a while. But eventually he picked up the habit again and still had to do these PSAs. So he did them while he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. That’s part of the beauty of radio.

  I was a smoker, too. Back then you could light up in your cubicle without breaking the law. I had an ashtray on top of my desk, and I kept my cigarettes perched next to it. One day Imus came out of the studio and, as he walked by my desk, I heard him mumble something. Then he turned back and grabbed one of my cigarettes. He did that every day for a week, just mumbling and taking my cigarettes. One morning when he picked up my pack I looked at him and said, “Did you quit smoking or just quit buying?”

  “Fuck you,” he said in the nicest way anyone could possibly say it. Later that day his producer handed me three packs of cigarettes without a word. I felt like I was in the club after that.

  The best part about working the morning shift was being done by 9:15. It meant I could volunteer for just about any other job at the station that needed free labor. When my shifts were over I hung out with my friend Lori in the promotions department. She always had a task no one else wanted to do.

  Every summer NBC did a big promotion where you put a bumper sticker on your car and then drove around hoping to be spotted by the station’s “N” car. At the time it was for Stroh’s beer. Listeners went to convenience stores like 7-Eleven and picked up a Stroh’s/WNBC bumper sticker. Then the station sent out the N car, searching for people that had the bumper stickers on their cars. During the day, Imus or the DJs or whoever was hosting a show would say, “Okay, the N car is going to be driving around Livingston, New Jersey, between three and seven this afternoon, so be listening.” Then, if the guy in the N car saw the bumper sticker, he’d call in to the show, give the license plate number of the car he saw with the bumper sticker, and, if the driver was listening and waved when his license plate was read on the air, he got paid some cash. Lori needed drivers for the N car, so I did that a few days a week. I earned minimum wage, and was happy to get it.

  It was a great job. I got to drive around, listen to the radio, and occasionally I got on the air. I called in to the station from a car phone that took up the entire middle console between the two front seats. It was fucking enormous. The first thing the manager of the N car told me was that I couldn’t call my friends while I was driving around, because it cost about $150 an hour to use that thing.

  Usually I was in the N car after my shift, for WNBC’s midday show, which was hosted by Captain Frank. He was a real religious guy. Every call began and ended with him saying, “God bless you, Gary, God bless you.” Then it went something like this:

  “How you doing in the N car today?”

  “I’m great today, Frank.”

  “Are you following a car?”

  “I am, Frank.”

  “Okay, driver, wave to Gary to win your sixty-six dollars. Are they waving, Gary?”

  “They sure are, Frank.”

  Then they’d win sixty-six dollars (WNBC was at 660 on the AM dial). Once a month, the station gave away $660 and at the end of the year it offered up $6,600.

  Pretty soon people around the building got to know me. They may not have known my name, but they knew I was that kid at Roz’s desk or the guy who drove the N car.

  Every once in a while, I got to drive the N car during Howard’s afternoon show. Howard Stern was the guy everyone at WNBC talked about. Imus was the legend, a big star in New York. My dad listened to him in the mornings on a transistor radio in his bathroom while he was shaving. But Howard was the guy who was off-the-map crazy. To be honest, I didn’t listen to him that much because I was still a radio snob. I listened to music or one of the rock stations. I didn’t listen to talk radio.

  But so many people kept talking about him that I grew a little jealous of this guy Lonnie, who interviewed for a traffic assistant position at the same time I did, and got to work the afternoon shift, while I was stuck on the morning show. Then, one day, Lonnie asked me if we could switch. He had a doctor’s appointment. I said of course. And when I went in that afternoon the first thing that struck me was how different the vibe was with Howard than with Imus. It was relaxed and fun. No one told me not to look at Howard.

  Working that shift happened to be the first time I heard the show. Howard did a bit about wondering why people al
ways check out the Kleenex after they blow their nose, and then throw it away. The whole thing was just great, observational humor. When he walked out of the studio to go to the bathroom, he had to walk right by my desk. I told him I thought it was really funny. He didn’t blow me off or just say thanks and keep walking. He stopped and started talking to me. “It’s crazy, right? Everyone looks. What do they expect to find?”

  Not too long after that, I happened to be driving the N car during Howard’s show. He hated going to the N car. He wanted to do what he wanted to do and he saw the whole giveaway as a pain in the ass. I’d drive around for three hours and Fred would keep telling me, “We are coming to you soon, real soon.” Then he’d finally call me to say, “Looks like we are not getting to you today.”

  When he did get to me, it sure didn’t end with a “God bless you, you’ve won sixty-six dollars!” Once I was following a woman who had the bumper sticker on her car and I called in to the show with her license plate number. Howard picked up and said, “If you’re driving this car, wave and win.” But the woman didn’t wave. Howard kept asking her, but she clearly wasn’t listening. Now he was pissed—and smelled opportunity. “What kind of moron would get the bumper sticker, put it on her car, and then not listen to the radio station when she’s driving around? Who would do such a thing? That is just idiotic. What a moron!”

  I just kept following, waiting for my instructions. “Gary,” he said. “I want you to keep following her until she pulls over. We’ll check back with you. But let us know when she does. Then hand her the phone so I can yell at her.”

  Every few minutes they would come back to me, hoping she would pull over before they went off the air at seven. They were nearly doing the sign-off when the woman finally pulled over. I swerved across traffic, got to the side of the road, and practically jumped her. I have no idea why she didn’t run away from me, but when I asked her to come to my car and take a phone call, she agreed. Then Howard blasted her. “What kind of moron are you? We’ve been asking you to wave for three hours. You blew your chance to win a lot of money. We’ve been asking you to wave for hours.”