They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  “About what?” he said, kind of confused.

  “About me,” I said. “You guys told me I was being hired on a temporary basis for a month. Well, it’s been a month. Am I hired?”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. “What are you talking about? You got the job.”

  IN 1996, AFTER THREE KIDS and forty-five years of marriage, my parents should have been getting a place in Florida and settling into their twilight years.

  Instead, they got divorced.

  All those years while I was growing up, when my dad came home from work and my mom laced into him, he had threatened to walk out. But he never did it. Even after we were all out of the house, I kept waiting for him to call me and say, “I’m done.” Once Steven died, though, I assumed the trauma from that would keep them together forever.

  So when my dad told me over the phone that he was leaving my mom, I thought he was bluffing.

  But he wasn’t. She had had a complete mental breakdown—I can’t even tell you what it was about—and he had had enough. The fact that it took forty-five years was actually impressive.

  When I called my mom she was in a rage. She wanted revenge, the way she did when she felt wronged by a neighbor or one of her sisters. “I want to call Dominic Barbara,” she said. Dominic is one of the most powerful divorce attorneys in New York, famous for representing Mary Jo Buttafuoco, and a regular on the show.

  “Don’t call Dominic,” I said. “He handles really high-profile divorces for people who have a lot of money. You guys don’t have any money at all.”

  She ignored me, looked up his number herself, and called him. Dominic called me and said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take really good care of your mother.”

  “I wish you had told her you were too busy,” I said.

  For some reason I thought this would be easy. My father had decided to give my mom the house and whatever money he had in his savings account. He told me, “No matter what happens, she is still your mother. I spent most of my life with her and I’ll always care about her.”

  How he found the strength, I have no idea. Because my mom was out for blood. She wanted to go to court and get even more. As much as I tried to tell her there was nothing left to get, she didn’t want to listen. When I was a kid her rages would subside, eventually. But this was different; for the first month after my dad moved out of the house, she was in a constant pique. It was as though she were banging pots 24/7. Only now I was an adult, not a six-year-old kid at the kitchen table afraid to speak up. I could see that she was being irrational and I could tell her what I thought, because I could escape. “Mom,” I said, “you’re going to go to court and have to give a lawyer a third of whatever you get, which is nothing, because there is nothing left.”

  My father really had given her whatever he had. He was living in an apartment on Long Island with four other guys. He wouldn’t even let me come see it. He had just wanted out.

  When my mom realized she wasn’t going to go to court she began accusing Dominic of screwing her over. At one of their meetings he pulled out a tape recorder and turned it on, just to capture her tirades. But he did eventually get her to sign the papers. With the stroke of a pen, I was a child of divorce.

  That was a serious pain in the ass. Even if you’re thirty-five years old and have your own family, dealing with parents who are no longer together is complicated. Especially when they aren’t talking to each other. For Jackson’s second birthday we had two parties—one with my dad on Saturday and one with my mom on Sunday. We celebrated Easter on Saturday and Sunday, too. And Christmas became a two-day event. It was insanity. Finally, after almost a year of this, I told them I couldn’t take it anymore. They needed a thaw, if for no other reason than that it was making my life very difficult. They agreed to try.

  It helped that, in 1997, my mom moved to Lantana, Florida, right near West Palm Beach. Except it wasn’t anything like West Palm Beach. She had bought a prefabricated house that arrived on a truck and was planted on top of a concrete slab. Mary made fun of me. “Your mom is moving into a mobile home,” she said. I’d get defensive. And then one day, shortly after settling in, my mom and I were on the phone and she rushed me off. She had to get to the local motor vehicles department before it closed—her house needed a registration sticker.

  You’d think having her in Florida would have made my life easier. No such luck. We were on the phone four nights a week—she didn’t know who to pay for the gas or the mortgage or the phone. And I couldn’t leave her hanging out to dry. Look, our relationship wasn’t black-and-white; no one’s is with their mother. She was still my mom. Someone had to help her. Besides, if I didn’t, they would have kicked her out of her mobile home. Then she’d have to move in with me.

  The move did improve her relationship with my father. When she came to visit for the holidays or one of the kids’ birthdays, the two of them got along much better. The distance seemed to mellow them both. More and more, when she was back in Florida, he was the one she called to explain how to pay a bill or navigate tricky issues with the car or the house. One day in 1999, a week before Mary, the kids, and I were scheduled to go to Lantana for Easter, my father was visiting us in Connecticut. We were driving around town, running errands.

  “I was talking to your mother,” he said. “She wants me to come down.”

  “To do what?” I asked.

  “To live.”

  There was a very long pause between us.

  “As a couple?” I finally asked. “Or just to live in the same house?”

  My father broke out laughing. “I don’t know.”

  By the time I got down there the next week, he had moved into the mobile home. It was as if the divorce had never happened. They were back together, unmarried and living happily ever after.

  “I think there is something wrong with your father.” It was my mother, calling me from Florida. “He fell.”

  This was in November 2005. My dad was eighty-one.

  “Well,” I said, “he’s getting old.”

  “No,” she said. “There is something going on.”

  My mom is an alarmist, but she also has a sixth sense for knowing when something is seriously wrong with her loved ones. Like the day Steven passed away.

  Thanksgiving was just a few weeks away and my parents were scheduled to visit us in Connecticut. I decided not to push for answers. If my mom was right, I’d see for myself. After they arrived, I kept my antennae up for anything strange. My dad looked alert and strong. I chalked it up to my mom overreacting.

  At Christmas they went to visit Anthony in Texas. “There is something wrong with Dad,” Anthony said when he called me.

  “He fell.”

  It wasn’t just that he fell, he was thin. It had only been a month since I’d seen him and now Anthony thought he looked sickly. We were worried. But getting my dad to the doctor was nearly impossible. He thought doctors were unnecessary. I couldn’t recall him seeing a doctor once while I was growing up. I hadn’t even seen him take a day off. When he was out of work he still woke up early every day, put on a coat and tie, and went to hustle at flea markets. Once he moved down to Florida, rather than live off social security, he took a job as a concierge at a luxury building in West Palm Beach. He sat at a desk every day letting very rich people know when their packages arrived. The man did not stop. That’s how you survive World War II.

  For several weeks Anthony and I tag-teamed him, really beating him up about seeing someone. “If it were the other way around,” I told him, “you’d be all over me to go.” I think he knew he was sick. He didn’t want to have it confirmed.

  But he couldn’t ignore his own kids, especially when I flew down there and escorted him to an appointment. He was asked about his symptoms and if he had been a smoker. When you’re that age and have been smoking as long as my dad had, doctors are inevitably looking for answers that lead to one diagnosis: cancer. They found what they were looking for after a chest X-ray, which revealed a small whit
e spot on his lungs.

  It’s hard to think of your parents as frail and dying. And possibly scared. My dad had been a rock my entire life, someone we clung to when my mom was swirling out of control. He had almost always kept his sense of humor no matter what kind of abuse was being heaped on him. When she was especially unhinged he could give me a look or make a sly comment that made me realize we were in this together. I wanted him to know that if he was sick, that was still the case.

  In March, a few weeks later, we met with an oncologist, a very sweet Indian man. First he drew two circles on a piece of paper, which he told us represented my dad’s lungs. Then he started drawing smaller circles inside the two lungs, until they were completely filled. Our mind-set since the initial diagnosis had been, Expect the worst, hope for the best. Now we were getting the truth. “Those are cancer,” he said, pointing to the small circles. “And it is bad.”

  The doctor was very matter-of-fact, which I could tell my father appreciated. My father never sugarcoated the truth and he didn’t want it done for him. The doctor continued: “You could do chemotherapy. And you could do radiation. But, honestly, they won’t help much.” In other words, my dad had been given a death sentence. The challenge wouldn’t be healing and living; it would be comforting while dying.

  I listened but it felt surreal, like I was watching it from above. My dad sat stoically, as he did when he was at his happiest or saddest. My mom fainted. That became the scene.

  After she came to we went home and my father walked outside. He lit up a cigarette. At this point what did it matter? I followed him out and tried to have a conversation with him. “I am really sorry this is happening,” I said.

  He took a deep drag, looked at me, shrugged, and said, “What are you gonna do?”

  It wasn’t flip. It didn’t sound like someone saying, “I don’t give a shit.” It was more like, this is happening, and running around the house screaming won’t help because at the end of the day, we are going to be in the same position. But I did want to scream. Before I could he said to me, “Listen, I want your mother taken care of. I have put some money aside for her.”

  “How much is it?” I asked.

  “Fifteen thousand dollars.” It was all the money he had saved working as a concierge.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “It’s in a shoe box in the house.”

  I couldn’t believe it. That mobile home was made of paper. The first thing I did was go into the house, grab the money, and put it in the bank.

  Mary, the kids, and I visited in late April while school was out. My dad was showing signs of the disease, breathing through a mask connected to an oxygen tank, needing a walker. I had to leave before the others to get back to work and when Mary drove me to the airport I just broke down, sobbing hysterically. I believed I was never going to see my father again. I couldn’t stop crying. When I got back to New York I called his primary care doctor. I said, “I know you guys aren’t God and you can’t predict the future. But how long do you think he has left? How long are we talking?”

  “Two to twelve weeks,” he answered.

  This was insane. Two weeks! I started making more visits, hoping he’d last until the next one. I went down the last week in May and we had perfect Florida weather. He convinced me to take him to the place he loved more than anywhere else: the track. It wasn’t the horses, we bet the dogs that day, but the rush was the same.

  This was where all the old-school degenerates were, retirees from New York who grew up playing the ponies at Aqueduct. My dad, shuffling behind his walker, breathing through a mask, fit right in. He even had a track-issued, preloaded cash card, his own betting debit card, so he didn’t have to walk to a window. He could just slip it into a machine, like an ATM, and punch in his bets.

  The track had grandstands set up all around the edge where bettors could sit in the sun. But he and I sat inside, where it was air-conditioned, right next to one of the betting ATMs. He’d pull himself up by his walker, shaking from the effort, put his card into the slot, and make his bet. Then he’d walk to the bathroom, come back, and watch the race. That was his pattern, just like any bettor.

  When we talked, it wasn’t about his condition or anything heavy, but about the races. It was a relief to forget for an afternoon. I had no interest in being at the track—this was one habit we never shared—and yet I wasn’t in a hurry for the day to end. When it did he said, “Thank you for coming. I know this must have been boring for you.”

  He held on through the summer. My mom cared for him just as she had my brother. After the initial diagnosis, her strength was remarkable, like a worker bee. She dragged him to appointments, made him comfortable, and took care of paying the bills. I always marveled at how a phantom slight from a neighbor could set her off but in moments of true crisis, when someone in our family was physically suffering, she found composure.

  In August my father entered the hospital. We all knew he wouldn’t be coming home. One afternoon I answered the phone and it was my mom. “Hold on, I’m with your father,” she said. “He wants to tell you something.” I could hear her put the phone down to his ear. His breathing was shallow and weak. Then he whispered to me, “I love you.”

  This was completely unlike my father. I don’t know that he had ever said that to me before. I knew it was true; he had shown it a hundred different ways during my life. He didn’t need to say it. But he must have felt compelled to do it. Which made it even scarier. I thought, Those are the last words I’ll ever hear my father say.

  After my mom hung up the phone she said to him, “It’s okay, Sal, you can let go. You can let go.” With all the strength he could muster he lifted his frail arm and waved her in. He wanted her close, right next to his mouth, so she could hear what he had to say. When her ear was inches from his face he whispered, “Shut up.”

  Fucking brilliant. That was their relationship.

  The next morning, during a break for the now-defunct Friday Show, my mom called. I picked it up in my office and closed my door. “Your father passed,” she told me. I went into producer mode and spent several minutes making funeral arrangements. Then I took a deep breath and went back out. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Howard. I just finished the show. What was I going to do? It wasn’t a shock. He was still going to be dead in an hour when we were off the air. Besides, my father wouldn’t have walked out in the middle of work.

  We had the funeral on a bright and sunny August day in Uniondale. Members of the U.S. Army played taps and handed my mom the flag that draped his coffin. I eulogized him, talking about how he had been our rock at home, how I always appreciated that he spoke to me like an adult, even when I was a kid. I told the story about him throwing the radio off the roof of his building after losing a bet in the Bobby Thomson game. He had been so admired and respected, especially by my mom’s side of the family.

  A relative told me a story I had heard about my dad years earlier. A cousin of mine had married a bad guy and it went south quickly. They got divorced, but the ex-husband wouldn’t leave her alone. The guy worked in a flower shop in the city, and one day my dad walked in and quietly asked if he could talk to him outside. My father was known for being mild-mannered, so the guy agreed. As soon as they hit the sidewalk my dad threw him against the wall and said, “If you ever bother my niece again, I will fucking kill you.” Then he walked away. Problem solved.

  Two of my cousins, who had served in Vietnam, talked with reverence about what a hero he had been. They meant in World War II. They didn’t know how much more true that was at home.

  My father was the second person I was close to who passed away, the first being Steven. Steven was so young when he died, and the wake was full of sadness and talk of what could have been. But my dad’s wake was truly a celebration of his life. I missed him, but I wasn’t consumed by grief. There were so many people around in the days after he passed recalling his greatness, I was filled with pride, not sadness.

  It wasn’t until weeks la
ter, as the baseball season waned and the football season began, that I realized how much I would miss him. As I got older I didn’t call my dad for advice: I called him to talk and shoot the shit, the way you would call a friend. He was unconditionally on my side. No matter how much crap I took at work or what was happening at home, he was always proud of me. I never had to be on the defensive with him, which made the conversations so comfortable and light. Mostly we loved catching up about the Mets and Jets and how they were both perpetual disappointments.

  The first time I wanted to call him—following another Mets collapse—I remembered something I had heard on the radio after Tiger Woods’s dad had died. A show host said, “You are not a man until your dad dies.” At the time I thought it was such bullshit. Just something stupid someone says to lend gravity to a moment.

  But after my father died I believed it. If your dad is around you can always call him if you need to, no matter how grown-up or successful you are. But now I had no safety net. I was my own man.

  I just hoped I was the man he wanted me to be.

  Almost a year later, in June 2007, I was sitting at home on a Wednesday night when my cellphone rang.

  “Hi,” said a voice at the other end. “I am calling from the hospital. We just wanted to let you know that your mother is improving and—”

  So many times during my life I had expected a call telling me that something had happened to my mother. Maybe it came with her volatility. I worried she’d hurt herself—or make someone so mad they’d hurt her. But as she got older the fear subsided. She was around fewer and fewer people to piss off. I had relaxed. I shouldn’t have. Or so it seemed.

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.”

  “No one told you?”

  “Told me what?!”

  Earlier that day my mom had been in a serious car accident in Boynton Beach. She pulled out of a strip mall parking lot into a busy road, tried to make a left, and never looked to see if another car was coming. She got hit. Hard. The injuries she sustained were so serious she needed to be helicoptered to a major trauma center. She had a broken leg, a broken wrist, and severe head injuries. The administrators handling her case mistakenly thought I had been called right away. “She is out of danger,” I was told. “But she will need to be here for several more weeks.”