Except that my mom didn’t take anything at face value. She saw conspiracies everywhere, even in the most mundane things. There were no accidents. Part of this was her illness finding its way to the surface even during her balanced moments. But I also think it was a function of her being Italian. A wrong number wasn’t just a wrong number. It was a plot. I always knew when it happened, just by listening to my mom’s side of the conversation.
“Hello,” she’d say. Then, “Umm, Bob who? … How do you know Bob? … What’s your business with Bob?” Then finally, “There’s no Bob here, sorry.”
Long before we ever had Jim Florentine on the show terrorizing telemarketers, I heard my mom doing the same thing to unsuspecting salespeople who called our house. They would be begging to get off the phone after she grilled them about what they were selling and why. I knew these calls could be mined for comedy just by sitting in my kitchen and listening to my mom destroy people on Long Island.
By the time I was in tenth grade, for the first time in my life I felt stable. I was out of the house so often—at Frank’s, or Vinny’s, or at practice for one team or another—that I was around my mom’s mood swings less and less. Mostly I saw her act out during the holidays, when she was having family over.
She’d start shopping and cooking days in advance and always insisted on cooking large. Half the stuff, like stuffed artichokes and stuffed mushrooms, never made it to the dining room table. It was relegated to a folding table set up especially for the holidays where appetizers sat and were ignored. It was like the kids’ table for food. On Thanksgiving the menu was always the same: manicotti with sauce and meatballs, followed by turkey, sweet potatoes with marshmallow sauce, and green beans with bread crumb topping. And, of course, stuffing. Years later, when it was just me, my parents, and Mary, we’d ask her if she wanted to go out to dinner, which to an Italian is an insult, and she’d still cook for eighteen people.
When I was growing up, one by one—my dad, my brothers, me—would go into the kitchen and ask if we could help and she’d just yell at us, “Get out of my kitchen!” We knew what was coming next. You could set your watch by her blowups. Soon she’d be screaming, “No one helps me!” Then she’d go into the bedroom and sulk for half an hour before coming out to finish cooking. No one dared ask what time we were eating.
But who doesn’t get stressed during the holidays?
Meanwhile, my dad’s work was steady. Anthony, impetuous and rebellious, married a local girl he met in Eisenhower Park when he was twenty. He’s still married to the same girl. They lived nearby. If things got tense I could sneak off to their apartment and thumb through his massive record collection. Steven lived in the city and let me visit any weekend I wanted. And me and the guys were attached at the hip, spending most of our free time at one another’s houses. Now Frank, Vinny, Paul, and Steve were my brothers. Especially Frank. At his house I didn’t even bother asking for food anymore. I just walked in the back door, opened the fridge, and took what I wanted.
Here’s how good Frank was to me: When I was a junior in high school I quit the wrestling team. The coach, who also happened to be my offensive line coach on the football team, had taken all the fun out of it. He was nothing like the guy I loved when I first started wrestling in junior high. Instead I joined the bowling team. No joke. Bowling was something my dad and Steven did well together. They played in a league on Sunday mornings and sometimes I went with them. I was pretty good. I once heard my biology teacher, who was also the bowling coach, talking about the team. I liked him, so I decided to join. From then on, whenever my wrestling coach saw me in the hallway, he mocked me by walking behind me and pretending to roll a bowling ball. Honestly, I was a little embarrassed. I left my ball in the trunk of Frank’s Bonneville so I didn’t have to carry it around school on days we had tournaments. Frank, who never said no to anyone who needed a ride, would drop me off at the bus that was taking us to the meet. I’d jump out of the front seat, scramble to the back, pull my bag out, and get onto the bus as fast as I could. I didn’t want anyone to see me getting on that bus. I always felt like it was one of those things you have to defend, but you know what? Fuck it. I enjoyed it. And I had Frank and his car to keep me from looking like an idiot.
Years later, on the show, Howard asked me, “You come home one day and there’s a dead body on the floor of your apartment. Who’s the first guy you call?”
“It’s Frank,” I said. “It’s a no-brainer.”
“What would Frank say?” Howard asked.
“Every solution for Frank always starts with ‘I’ll be over in the van in five minutes.’ ”
That’s how I’ll always think of him.
My buddies and I prided ourselves on being able to hang with any other group of kids, avoiding the petty rivalries that come with different cliques. I got us in with the Park Boys. Then there were the black leather boys, who all wore black leather jackets; and the guys on Maple Street. I know, it sounds like something out of West Side Story, but it was the 1970s. Everyone knew us as the guys who drove around in Frank’s tank.
The one thing we always needed—especially to fill up Frank’s gas guzzler—was cash. None of us was rich. Our parents gave us the basics; everything extra was on us. One night Frank pulled up to my house holding a stack of fifty New York Nets tickets. This was the old ABA team starring Julius Erving that played at the Nassau Coliseum, right by our house. I asked him, “How did you get those tickets?”
“A friend of my brother’s took them out of the back of a neighbor’s convertible,” he said. “Let’s go scalp them.”
“Great,” I answered.
That night we went to the Coliseum and hustled like never before. Every time I sold some tickets I’d run around the arena looking for Frank. I’d give him the money; he’d give me more tickets. When we were sold out we hopped in his car and went to a secluded place, where we laid out all the money and divvied it up.
We made forty dollars each. Not a bad score. But I always needed more. Records were an expensive habit.
By high school I’d given up my paper route and mowing lawns and moved up to more glamorous employment opportunities: Roy Rogers. Practically everyone I knew worked there, at the franchise across the street from the Coliseum. That’s where Frank met his wife. It’s also where my buddy Tom (who’d become a member of our group) first met his eventual wife. Maybe there was something in the secret fried chicken recipe. Before I actually got the job I was always hanging out there because that’s where all my friends were. I had no one to go out with until their shifts were over. I still crave Roy Rogers fried chicken.
I got a job flipping burgers. The rush on the counter always came after events at the Coliseum ended. Grateful Dead fans were the worst. They wouldn’t order anything; they’d just come in and start picking the lettuce and tomato from the fixings bar. Eventually we wised up and stationed someone at the fixings bar whenever the Dead were in town and the shows let out. They also stole anything that wasn’t nailed down—toilet paper, paper towels, and sugar packets.
I’ve always been hyperproductive. And while I worked at Roy Rogers, I also juggled a few other jobs. During one summer in high school I worked from 7 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. as a custodian for the school district—thanks to Paul’s super-achieving mom, who worked on the school board. Then, on the days I didn’t work at Roy Rogers, I worked at Fortunoff near the Roosevelt Field mall. Vinny worked there, and so did my mom, so they put me in the stockroom. I still have dreams of being overrun by luggage. It came into the store all zipped one into the other, like Russian nesting dolls, and I had to take out each piece and set it up on the floor.
My poultry experience was parlayed into a job delivering Chicken Delicious on Friday and Saturday nights to parts of Long Island like Roosevelt, where Dr. J and Howard were from, and Hempstead, the slum where Anthony lived after he moved out. Dumbest job ever. I was a small white kid driving around the worst parts of town with bags of chicken and cash. At two in the morning.
I’m lucky I was never mugged.
I even worked as a stock boy at a women’s clothing store called Ups and Downs. I was the token man. I had to run out to buy the ladies their lunch, carry stuff to their cars, walk them out to the parking lot at night, and even buy their tampons. Really, it was like being on the bottom wrung of some Hollywood agency, only without the scenery, the stars, or the weather. All I had was middle-aged women on Long Island. But it wasn’t the tampons that made me quit. One day the manager sent me to Woolworth’s to buy a paint scraper. When I got back she wanted me to scrape gum off the floor. I thought, Fuck this. I know I haven’t done shit in life yet, but I ain’t doing this.
Working in radio wasn’t even on my radar when I was in high school. To me, music was still a hobby. I checked the album charts in Rolling Stone. I still tuned in to Casey’s American Top 40. And, on the way to school, if Frank was giving me a ride, I’d make him listen to WPLJ, which catered to high school kids like us.
I thought that when I grew up I might own a kennel supply store. Really. When I was a junior in high school I got a job selling dog food, pet toys, and anything else people needed for furry friends at a store near my house. The place was owned by two brothers who really liked me. Those guys were making a lot of money. They always talked about opening a second store somewhere else on Long Island. One brother had two daughters who were never going to go into the business, so he said to me, “If you want to open our second store, I will stake you.” I always had that in the back of my mind.
My dream career choice, though, was to be a photographer. We had a subscription to Life magazine and I remember being moved by the pictures. I can still see those images of soldiers in Vietnam and of the fatal shooting of a protester at Kent State. My dad bought me an Instamatic camera with the flashbulbs that attached to the top of it. I took pictures of all our vacations and I was sure I would be a photojournalist. I wanted to work for Life.
In fact, I was so committed to that idea I went to a vocational school. BOCES, which stands for the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, is a Long Island trade school. It had a rep as being the idiot school because it was mostly for people who weren’t headed to college. It was where you unloaded kids. I did well in high school and my guidance counselor begged me not to go there. Howard actually still makes fun of me on the show for going there. It offered refrigeration, HVAC, auto body, graphic arts, cosmetology, and photography courses. Most of the guys were in auto body and most of the girls were in cosmetology. In eleventh and twelfth grades I did a half day at my high school and, along with Steve, who also took photography, a half day at BOCES. I loved it.
That’s what I planned on doing with my life. Frank’s father ran a camera store and photo processing shop in Rockefeller Center and he would lend me cameras. When I graduated from high school my dad bought me a used Nikon FM from the Associated Press sports photographer for Long Island, who was a friend of his. I still have it in my closet.
During my senior year in high school, Anthony and his wife moved to Austin. They decided to settle there after passing through on a road trip to Central America. I applied to the University of Texas because it had a great photography program and I got in. I bought a plane ticket to visit that Easter and even had a check ready to hand over for a deposit. If I liked it, I was going.
But the weekend I was supposed to visit, Anthony’s father-in-law got sick and died suddenly. Anthony and his wife came home and decided they had to stay in New York for a while; they couldn’t leave her mother alone. I panicked. My plan was to go to Austin, move in with my brother, and by my sophomore year, get in-state tuition. Now that I didn’t know when he’d be back, I canceled that trip and changed my plans.
It was April of my senior year and I had nowhere to go. I was scrambling big-time. My dad had seen Anthony blow off college and Steven simply decide it wasn’t for him. He wasn’t going to let me do the same thing. So he said to me, “Just go someplace locally for a semester or two and figure out your next move.”
Growing up on Long Island, there were three universities and one junior college, Nassau Community College. Everyone called it the University of Uniondale or the thirteenth grade. No way I was going to go there. It was literally walking distance from my house. It was a longer walk for me to go to high school than to go to Nassau CC. Then there was Hofstra University, across the street from Nassau Community College, and a great school. My buddy Gary Bennett’s father was the dean of admissions and I knew I could get in there no problem. But still, I couldn’t go to college where I went to high school; I had to move a little bit. C.W. Post was another local option. But I just didn’t like it. And then there was Adelphi, which was about twenty minutes away.
My father and I went to an open house at Adelphi. And we got so taken to the cleaners. I wanted to study photography. Adelphi had photography classes, but no photography major. We walked around the displays set up for potential students and I met the guy who eventually became the chairman of the communications department. We started talking and he told me, “Communications is just like photography. They have cameras, they have lights. It’s the same thing.” Umm, okay. That’s how I became a communications major at Adelphi. I was going to live at home, take a few photography classes, and then figure out my next move. That plan changed before I even started school.
During orientation I went on a tour of the communications department and took a walk by the radio station. It was like seeing wrestling for the first time in junior high. There was a guy sitting at a radio console and the ON AIR sign was lit. He looked so cool, so fucking cool, and I just lost it. I thought to myself, I am getting in there.
My feelings were confirmed that first day of school. I took an elementary radio class and the professor brought in a boom box—this was 1979. It was the teacher’s first year, too. She was a gay woman who lived in the Village. She was young and cutting-edge and carrying a boom box, and I was into it. Then she said, “We are going to do an exercise. I am going to turn on different stations and based on what you hear, tell me what you are listening to.”
Are you kidding me? This was a college class?! I was nailing every station, every kind of music. I had a natural aptitude for this.
That first week I signed up to work with the radio station. There wasn’t a lot of competition and it wasn’t long before I was doing a newscast on the school’s channel, which was broadcast by something called a carrier current. That meant only people on the Adelphi campus could hear it. So basically, no one. I didn’t give a shit. A girl and I were co-anchors. We had to be in the studio by 4:30 in the afternoon to get ready for a 6 P.M. broadcast. We’d read through newswires, rip up stories, decide who was going to say what, and then flip the switch. God, it was awful, I mean really horrible. I don’t know if a single person was listening. But I was on the radio, hanging with other people who liked doing exactly what I liked to do.
The next semester I got a gig working for 90.3 FM, which was still a school station, but at least it was one you could find on the local radio dial. One afternoon Vinny heard me reading the news and called to ask me, “How come you sound like Ronald McDonald?” I made my voice rise and fall while I did the broadcast because I thought it sounded professional. No one was teaching us to be ourselves. The point was to be in front of a microphone and get comfortable. Which I did, eventually.
I could tell my parents dug hearing me on the air. One Sunday night all my relatives were over for one of our weekly dinners. Even for occasions as casual as those, my mom spent the entire day cooking. We also broke out the appetizer table. I left to do a show when the Cotroneo ladies were in full-throated debate about life and sauce. I figured things would have quieted down by the time I got home. Instead, as I walked through the door, I heard an unfamiliar sound: clapping. My dad had made everyone stay and listen to me on the radio. He was psyched, just totally loved it. And he loved that I loved it.
Halfway through my first semester I was looking to sell my photo equipment. That
was it for me. I was having a good time in radio and I knew I could be good at it. I was making plans in my head. I thought I was going to get into radio and be the next muckraking superstar.
ONCE YOU GRADUATED FROM POP MUSIC—and high school—the coolest New York radio station to listen to was WLIR-FM. It was progressive, playing the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, but also new acts like Steve Forbert. It was the laid-back, hippie spot on the dial. The whole vibe seemed to say, “We don’t care about making money, we just care about the people.” All the best concerts for music snobs were sponsored by WLIR.
LIR also had a left-leaning, aggressive news department. On air, the reporters didn’t act like talking heads reading copy: They projected opinions, liberal ones, into every story they broadcast. They also had this great segment called News Blimps, where they mashed up a real news sound bite with bits of music and comedy. Today that stuff is commonplace, but back then it was cutting-edge.
The studio was located in the shittiest part of Hempstead. It was crap, really. But because it was WLIR, every kid studying radio on Long Island wanted an internship there, including me. I knew that when I was a junior and eligible for the program, I’d try to get it.
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait that long.
Just before freshman year ended, my radio teacher—the woman who brought the boom box to class that first day of school—asked me to dub a TV program for her. It was a fifteen-hour special series about the history of rock and roll that she wanted to use in a class the following year. To her the job seemed like a pain in the ass. There’s no way to speed up dubbing. You need to let the tape roll and keep an eye on it so you stop when one episode ends and you don’t run out of tape in the middle of the next one. It was definitely tedious stuff. But I saw it as being asked to watch a TV show about the history of music. That was right up my alley. I didn’t mind doing it at all. And when it was over she was so grateful she asked, “What can I do for you?”
They Call Me Baba Booey Page 11