They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  There was only one problem: Her date was a no-show. I had to give her the news. I walked up to her and said, “Hi, I’m Gary.”

  “Where’s my date?” she asked.

  “I don’t think he’s coming.”

  The look on her face was devastating. I thought she was going to cry. It was as if she had never been stood up before. She wheeled around and walked toward the front door, but I felt bad so I chased after her.

  “Listen,” I said. “This guy is an asshole and you look beautiful and dinner is free. Why don’t you at least sit and hang out for a while.”

  I honestly had never seen anyone that upset about a busted blind date. But she agreed to come back to sit with me. And since we were the only two people who weren’t matched up, we spent a lot of time talking to each other. I told her about my job and how excited I was. She mentioned to me that she spent a lot of time in Long Island but was staying in Manhattan at her grandfather’s that night. When she told me his name and his job on Wall Street, I think she expected me to recognize him. But I was clueless.

  At the end of the night Ski Bunny asked me to walk her to her grandfather’s place, a gorgeous building on Park Avenue. The guy was clearly loaded. But I didn’t get a stick-around vibe, so I shook her gloved hand, said thanks for staying, and caught the train back to Long Island. I didn’t think I’d ever talk to her again.

  Which is why I was so surprised when, at noon the next day, I got a call from the WNBC receptionist. There were a dozen purple roses waiting for me at the front desk. When I picked them up, there was a card attached that read, “It’s okay for a lady to give flowers to a gentleman.” I called Ski Bunny to say thanks. This was a Friday afternoon; we decided to go out on Saturday night.

  Later that Friday I went to the club where I DJ’d on Long Island and had a drink. I was telling a buddy at the bar about Ski Bunny and mentioned her grandfather’s name. My friend said, “Do you know who that is?”

  “No, I have no idea.”

  “He’s one of the richest guys in New York.”

  Her grandfather, it turned out, was a Wall Street tycoon. And when I picked her up on Saturday night, I realized how rich she really was. She lived on the North Shore of Long Island, about an hour from Uniondale, in a really rural area. The house was a bona fide mansion, with a circular driveway and a front hallway as big as the entry at Rockefeller Center. She was the only one home.

  We got into my pimped-out Firebird and I took Ski Bunny to the club I worked at, where the admission and the drinks were free. As we were driving I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she said, “Nope. I was dating someone but we broke up.”

  We stayed late at the club. And then we headed to a bar not too far from her house, a real dive. Soon she asked me to drive her back home and when we got there she mentioned that she was alone for the weekend. I was in!

  I spent the night and was feeling pretty good. Until eight o’clock the next morning, when I heard someone pounding on the door and ringing the doorbell. “Open the fucking door! Open the fucking door!” the guy was yelling.

  I got up to go to the window but Ski Bunny grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t, I’ll handle it.” Then I realized: It was the ex-boyfriend. When she went downstairs I looked out the window and saw that he was holding a tire iron and looked like he wanted to take out the headlights of my Firebird. I heard Ski Bunny say, “It’s over, leave me alone, it’s over.” For some reason, as she repeated that, it clicked with him, because he dropped the tire iron, got into his car, and peeled out of the driveway. I didn’t see much reason to stick around after that.

  The roads leading away from her house were winding ones cut out of a dense forest. When I turned on to the main road I heard a noise coming from the woods. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a car parked behind the bushes. It was the boyfriend, and he was peeling out behind me. Within seconds he was practically on my bumper. He was trying to run me off the road!

  Holy shit! There were no driveways for me to pull into and I couldn’t exactly pull over. I drove as fast as I could, the whole time thinking I was going to get into an accident. I was sweating my balls off. To any farmer plowing his fields that morning it must have looked like we were drag racing.

  Then I remembered: One of the landmarks I passed on the way to Ski Bunny’s house was a police station. As I rounded a bend in the road, I saw it, and made a sharp turn into the parking lot. The boyfriend whizzed by, glaring at me. I never got out of my car. I just sat in that lot, panting, my heart pounding. I waited a half hour before getting back on the road, and I checked my mirrors every couple of seconds until I pulled into my parents’ driveway in Uniondale.

  But the drama wasn’t over.

  Later that night I was watching a game on TV with my dad when the phone rang. I heard him say, “What? Huh? No, you’ve got the wrong number.” A few minutes later the phone rang again. My dad got up to answer it again and told the caller, “Nope, you’ve still got the wrong number.” Then it happened again and this time my dad said, “Look, there is no [Ski Bunny’s name] here.”

  It was the boyfriend, calling my parents’ house, looking for Ski Bunny. After my dad hung up on him, the boyfriend called again. This time, though, my mom answered. And I was psyched. A prank caller who wouldn’t stop? This was her specialty. This was the conspiracy she had been waiting her whole life to unravel.

  “Ski Bunny who?” she asked.

  “And what do you want with her?” she continued.

  “And how do you know this girl?”

  I had no idea what the guy was saying back, but my mom was unfazed. She never raised her voice; she was too curious to get hysterical. Her only goal was to get to the bottom of this mystery and find out who this girl was, why this man kept calling for her, and how it was going to spell the end for all of us. The rapid-fire questions kept coming until, finally, I heard my mother say, “Hello, hello?” The boyfriend had hung up. He crumpled under my mom’s interrogation.

  2009

  I love the Mets. That comes from my father. He grew up a Dodgers fan and when the Bums left Brooklyn for Los Angeles he just waited, like so many New Yorkers, for the town to get a new National League team. Rooting for the American League Yankees wasn’t an option. Even when the Mets debuted in 1962 and lost 120 games, fans loved them because they had waited for them for so long.

  Every year, my dad would take me and my brothers to Shea for the old-timers game. Just the boys. Since the Mets didn’t have any old-timers they invited old Dodgers and New York Giants. We saw guys like Duke Snider. My first game is still so vivid to me. We walked through the gate, out of the darkness of the concourse and into the light of the field. The grass was greener and the dirt browner than it ever looked on television. Then a great thing happened to me: It was 1969. I was eight years old, just learning about the intricacies of baseball and really appreciating it, and the Mets won the World Series. That will make you a fan for life.

  When the Mets played the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series I got a single ticket to the first game. I went by myself with a flask of vodka because it was freezing. I got hooked up with two more tickets for Game Six, so I took my dad. He parked at my apartment on 105th Street and then we walked to the subway from there. “How much is a subway these days?” he asked.

  “When’s the last time you took a subway, Dad?”

  “Nineteen fifty-six.”

  “How much was it then?”

  “A nickel.”

  At K-Rock our promotions people were always pestering the Mets folks to let one of us from the show throw out a first pitch. For years this went on. And when I got to know some people there I started nagging, too. Finally, late in 2004, they decided to give me a shot. The situation was perfect: The Mets were out of it, it was late in the season, and so Shea wasn’t too crowded. My parents, who had moved to Florida, flew up for the game. I even got this great picture of my mom hugging Mr. Met on the field. I wasn’t nervous at all. But when I stood on the mound the dis
tance to the plate seemed pretty far. So I moved off the pitching rubber at the top of the mound to the front edge of the dirt, where it meets the grass. I threw a strike to the catcher that was just a little high. It was a great day, everything I wanted it to be.

  On the show that Monday we barely even talked about it. Howard wasn’t interested and the only person who made a comment was Artie. He had seen a picture of it, and noticed that I wasn’t standing on the mound, so he gave me a hard time about moving closer to the plate. But it was a blip on the radar. No one cared, except for me.

  Cut to the winter of 2009. I was contacted by the folks who run Autism Awareness Day. They were hoping to bring attention to the cause by sponsoring the first pitch at a Mets game on May 9. They asked me to do it, since I would talk about it on the show. I said absolutely. I love the Mets. I love throwing out the first pitch. I love a good cause. This was going to be great.

  As soon as I mentioned it on the air, Artie said to me, “Throw it from the rubber this time. Don’t be a pussy.” I laughed. And I didn’t think about it again.

  Cut to the first week of April. I would be throwing out the pitch in five weeks and I wanted to practice. I took Jackson out to the front yard, marked off sixty feet, six inches, the official distance from the mound to home plate, and started to throw. I was doing great. Some were a little high, some were a little low, but mostly they were on target. Jackson barely had to move. But after about ten minutes of warming up, I remembered Artie’s words. Throw it from the rubber this time. Don’t be a pussy. The very next pitch was way high. Hmm, strange. I thought about what he said again and the pitch was way too low, bouncing off the dirt to Jackson.

  As I wound up again, I could hear people saying that George W. Bush might have lost the 2004 election if he had thrown a bad first pitch while campaigning. Then I started thinking about the roar of the crowd. The Mets had just opened Citi Field. And it was early in the season. Unlike last time at Shea, where I had practically grown up, I’d be pitching in an unfamiliar environment, in front of a packed stadium. My next throw was twenty feet to the right.

  The beauty of being on the show is that it’s a great forum for working out your issues. So I figured if I talked about how nervous I was becoming it would help me calm down. Well, that was silly. As soon as Howard mentioned it, a couple of weeks before the pitch, Artie just piled on. He said, “Mets fans are the worst. You’ll get booed no matter what.… Be a man.… It doesn’t matter, you’ll choke anyway.” I didn’t feel any better. I felt much, much worse. Every time I went out to practice, my throws became progressively less accurate. I was like Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham who beans the mascot in the head. I might throw four of five decent pitches. But as soon as I thought about Artie or the crowd or that moment, it was like I was driving blind. I was just all over the place.

  The more nervous I got, the more it became a bit on the show and the more Artie came after me. The people from the Autism Society were psyched because we were talking about it on the air so much. But it got so bad, the woman who ran the program called me and said, “I don’t want this to be a source of stress for you. If you want you can bring your kid out, I’ll bring my kid out, and we can have them throw the pitches.”

  When I mentioned this to Artie he said, “You can’t give it to your kid. Don’t be a pussy.”

  Why did I keep talking about it on the show? And why did I keep listening to Artie? I don’t know, but at this point I knew I couldn’t get out of it. And I needed professional help.

  Jackson was playing baseball at Bobby Valentine’s Sports Academy in Stamford, Connecticut. Bobby Valentine had once been the Mets’ manager. Mitch, the guy who ran the place, listened to the show, heard how nervous I was, and offered to work with me. I went over there one afternoon and, at first, I was wild. None of my pitches went anywhere near the target. But after a few minutes I settled down and threw five strikes in a row. Mitch told me my form was fine, I was in good shape, and that I shouldn’t psych myself out, because I’d have no problem doing this.

  Then I went home to practice some more and I couldn’t have hit my house with a ball standing two feet in front of it. I was freaking out.

  A week before the pitch, the Mets invited me to come to a game. We were going to have a press conference about Autism Awareness Day and then I was going to go onto the field so the local news could shoot me practicing. I wasn’t worried about the cameras. I was just anxious to get on the mound. Just having that moment and getting comfortable in those surroundings would put my mind at ease. I brought Jon Hein with me. On The Wrap-Up Show he too had been telling me I had to calm down, that I was just psyching myself out, that I could do this. That actually became the mantra everyone I knew repeated to me. Hein, Mary, Jackson—they all thought I was allowing it to get to me. “It was just the stupidest thing ever,” Mary still says.

  It would all be better once I had those practice pitches, I told myself. And then they canceled the practice pitches. It had rained the night before. The field was still a little wet and the grounds crew was working on it. Hein could see my body slump when they gave us the news.

  We took our seats for the game and I was anxious to see the first pitch. If someone else went out there and flubbed it or bounced, I’d relax a little. The guy who got the call that day had caught Gary Sheffield’s five hundredth home run. He sauntered out to the field in his jersey and his hat and I thought to myself, Okay, this is just some Joe Blow, he won’t be any good. Then he went into a full windup, as if he were facing a real batter. In that moment I was thinking, What a freaking tool, this is going to be great.

  He threw a perfect strike. Fuck me!

  I went home that afternoon and threw ten pitches with Jackson and Lucas. Five were right on target. And five looked like a guy throwing back a grenade that just landed at his feet.

  With less than a week to go it was time for the heavy guns. First I spoke with a sports psychologist. Seriously. He asked me what my fears were. When I told him I didn’t want to embarrass myself he said, “Okay. You are a husband and you are a father and a good brother to your brother who passed away. Look at why you are at this event. You’re doing it for charity. Who cares what happens. It will be just one small part of your life.” I thought that was a good philosophy. I felt a little better.

  Next, I planned one more warm-up with Mitch at the Bobby V. academy the Friday before the game. I happened to have been in Toronto that Thursday night to see Springsteen and, after an early morning flight, I’m pretty sure I was still hungover when I went to practice with Mitch. But I threw okay. And he repeated the mantra to me: “Calm yourself down, you can do this, don’t be crazy, don’t psych yourself out.”

  I was starting to believe. But, just to be safe, I wanted to throw from an actual mound at least once before the game. That afternoon Jackson and I went to the local high school. We couldn’t get on the field because there was a game. But Bobby Bonilla, who had played for the Mets, was there because his kid was on the high school team. We talked about the pitch for a few minutes and seeing a former Met felt like good luck.

  But I knew it would take more than luck to get the ball across the plate. We were scheduled to leave for the game at eleven. I made Jackson go out to the front lawn one more time. He squatted down, I wound up … and threw a perfect strike. My son gave me a huge thumbs-up.

  “We are done,” I said.

  “Just one?” Jackson asked. “No more?”

  “Why mess with it?”

  We went home and piled the whole tribe into the car: Mary, Jackson, Jackson’s friends, Lucas, and Lucas’s friends. Jon Hein bought tickets to the game; he was going to meet us there. I was ready.

  We walked into the press room and who was there, waiting to support me? Artie. He was not being a dick, but his mere presence was unnerving. The guy who had been my biggest detractor, the ultimate Yankee fan, was going to be sitting in a front-row seat. I seriously started to freak out. And no one was all that interested in calming my ner
ves.

  Next to Artie was John Franco, the former Mets reliever, the quintessential Italian ballbuster. He could tell I was losing it and left the press room with me for the walk through the tunnel toward the field. He draped his arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear, “Don’t fuck this up. You can’t fuck this up.” Then he stood behind me and pretended to massage the knots out of my shoulders, “Release the tension. And don’t fuck this up,” he said. He was killing me.

  When we got on the field it was just a pig fuck. José Reyes, the Mets shortstop, was in center field, and David Wright, the third baseman, was near second as they played a long-distance game of catch. Sebastian Bach of the ’80s hair band Skid Row was walking around getting ready to sing the national anthem. Rob Smigel, the guy who voices Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, was there because he has a kid with autism. And fucking Artie was just walking around home plate. Triumph, Sebastian Bach, Artie, John Franco, all my kids’ friends. It was like a goddamn Fellini movie. The whole thing was swirling around me and I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate. I was desperate for a paper bag to breathe into.

  One of the Mets reps handed me a ball and told me to go stand by the Mets dugout. But all the action was by the visitors’ dugout. That’s where everyone was hanging out. It was much worse being alone, with nothing to concentrate on but me and the pitch. This was where it got really bad. When I get nervous, I dry heave. Standing there by myself, I started to retch. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like I was coughing. But Hein, who was in the stands nearby, knew what was happening. By the time they called my name to go to the mound my body was like rubber and I was so nervous my legs were shaking. I asked myself, For what?