They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  To be honest, if you asked me whether or not it was worth it, my first answer used to be yes. It helped pay for my kitchen. But now I’d immediately change my answer to no. I just didn’t know there would ever be such a thing as YouTube and this tape would live in perpetuity. Even today, people still react to it. It’s the brawniest guys who usually stop and whisper under their breath to tell me they did something just like that once. But it’s the women’s reaction that is most surprising. A lot of them are like the callers that day, telling me I’m a pussy and that I should have manned the fuck up.

  At the time that twenty-two thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money. Now, it’s been played so much on the show and on YouTube, I feel it’s down to a nickel a play.

  AFTER THE DREADFUL DAY of executive assistant interviews, I had to regroup. I didn’t have a job. And I wasn’t going to the city to look for jobs, because I couldn’t type. I needed a plan, so I decided the plan was going to be: Don’t have a plan.

  Instead of moping on the couch, I went back to work at Record World. Summer was a great time to work there. The mall was always buzzing and hot girls were always in the store looking for records. I liked the action. I put in thirty hours a week, listened to great new music every day, hung with Frank, Vinny, and the boys or friends from the store at night, got in some good beach time. I decided to give myself the rest of the summer to relax and then, come September, I was going to figure out my life. My parents weren’t bothering me to get out of the house and most of my friends hadn’t lit it up in the job market yet, so I didn’t feel too bad hanging around. Then, right before the summer ended, the manager at Record World asked me if I had a job lined up for the fall. When I said my calendar was wide open, she offered me a full-time job there. Fantastic, I thought. I’d make money while I looked for a career.

  That first Monday in September I showed up for work at 10 A.M. I had never been there that early during the week. My shifts had always been nights and weekends. It was strangely quiet, in the store and in the mall. Everyone I was used to seeing had gone back to school. And the people working at the store were actually people who didn’t have any other options. They were adults, pushing thirty, and this was how they paid rent and bought food and filled their gas tanks. It dawned on me that my future was being shoved in my face like a shaving cream pie, and I didn’t even see it coming. It’s one thing to be hanging at the store on the weekends and fighting with your friends about which records to play. But it’s another to be there early in the morning during the week, with no chicks looking for music and a feather duster in your hand to clean the tops of the cabinets.

  I freaked a little bit. I didn’t want to be a Record World lifer. I had to find a job.

  First I called Steve North, my old boss at WLIR. He had moved on and was now working at WNBC radio in New York. He said he’d keep his eyes open for me. Then I reached out to fellow communications majors from Adelphi and kids I had done internships with. I quickly found out that a lot of these people didn’t have the passion for working in radio that I did. They had spent a few months looking for those kinds of jobs, had struck out, and started getting real work. They had given up and gone into retail, or became travel agents, or did pharmaceutical sales. This was discouraging. Once you do that, that’s what you do. Forever.

  Here was the rub: I was working at the record store during the day. And that was the only time to interview for jobs that could lead to a real career. I was in a dead-end job that was keeping me from getting a new job. I had to quit the store.

  Believe it or not, the best option I could find for work was as a host at T.G.I. Friday’s. An ex-girlfriend hooked me up. It was the perfect scenario, in theory. I worked as a host from five in the afternoon until eleven at night. On Saturdays it was packed, with people bribing me to get them to the front of the line so they could sit down and order overstuffed potato skins as soon as possible. And then I had all day to hunt for my dream job.

  Except T.G.I.F. was like entering the abyss. It offered employees a free drink and half off food after work. When I clocked out at eleven I went over to the bar and joined the rest of the people whose shifts had just ended to have our free beer. While we were sitting there we thought, Let’s get some food, it’s half off. Then we got more to drink. Then more to eat. Pretty soon it was closing time and everyone would decide to head somewhere else. Then when that place closed we went to someone’s house to hang out. Suddenly I was getting home at six in the morning. Not only could I not get up for any interviews, I could barely get up in time for my 5 P.M. shift.

  Not that it mattered how available I was during the day. I couldn’t even find jobs to interview for. In fact, between September and Christmas, I had one job interview. That was in October. Steve North called me and said that the NBA needed someone with entry-level TV production experience. If I wanted to interview, he could get me in.

  I drove from Long Island to the NBA production office in Secaucus, New Jersey, and I was exactly what they needed: a sports-crazed kid who knew how to work professional TV equipment, log tapes, and cut promos. I killed it. The guy I interviewed with told me he was working on a piece about George Mikan, the NBA’s original superstar back in the 1940s. I shook my head up and down like it was a great idea, but I had no clue who George Mikan was. I was a sports nut, still am, but I was a Mets/Jets/Islanders guy. The NBA wasn’t ever my thing. Clearly I fooled him because he asked me to come back the next day to discuss it with some more people.

  That night I went to the library and looked through every book I could find about basketball, writing it all down on a fact sheet. Then I went home and studied. Overnight I became a George Mikan expert, to the point that at the interview the next morning I was spewing stats that even he didn’t know. “You are perfect for the job,” he told me. “Now you have to go to the corporate office on Park Avenue in Manhattan and meet my bosses.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. I could see T.G.I.F. in the rearview mirror.

  “But I’m warning you,” he added. “You are the tenth person I’m sending over there. They haven’t hired anyone yet.”

  Whatever, I thought. Those guys don’t have what I have. I won the Clemo. They don’t want it like I want it.

  I woke up the next morning, put on my best (and only) pin-striped suit, and rode the LIRR into the city. I had my résumé packed in my black briefcase. My internships were lined up on the page like well-behaved kids, each one announcing what I had accomplished as a dutiful employee. I sat down with a man and woman in a fancy office on Park Avenue and they started asking me about my experience. I explained how I kept a log of highlights and learned how to cut promos and highlights at SportsChannel. Then one of them stopped me and asked, “Are all the jobs listed on here internships?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  Then they just looked at each other and nodded. That was the end of the interview. I didn’t get the job.

  My dad had dropped me off at the train that morning and wished me good luck. He was on his way to New Jersey for some ice cream sales calls and then headed to the office. If I was done early, he said, I should call him. He’d swing through the city and pick me up.

  “You’ll meet me in the neighborhood,” he said. That’s what he called the area where he grew up, on the corner of Mott and Hester streets in Little Italy. He never said we were going to the city on Sundays; we were going to the neighborhood. I liked it down there, right on the border of Chinatown. Turn one way and you’d walk onto a street lined with Italian restaurants with cannoli displayed in the front window. Turn the other way and you were face-to-face with roasted ducks hanging from hooks.

  The two parts of town were so intertwined, Dad’s buddies had nicknamed him Sally Foo because it sounded Chinese. Even my mom called him that. After my mom and dad were first married and living with her parents, someone came to the door and asked for Sal Dell’Abate. My grandfather had no idea who that was. He thought his son-in-law’s name was Sally Foo.

  Wheneve
r we visited the neighborhood we stopped by a place on Hester called Mo’s, a hole in the wall that wasn’t open to the public. It was a social club, one that wasn’t all that friendly if you didn’t belong. Inside you’d find a bunch of old Italian guys drinking, with one jukebox in the corner. It actually always freaked me out whenever we stopped by there. The old-timers sort of smirked when they saw me, then patted me on the head and slipped me money or Hershey bars. Once, I told my dad I had to go to the bathroom and he pointed to a long hallway and said it was the door on the right.

  But I was little and scared and by the time I got to the end of the hallway I couldn’t remember if it was right or left, so I picked the door on the left. When I opened it I saw a bunch of guys sitting around a table with stacks and stacks of money on it. One of them screamed at me, “Shut the fucking door, kid!”

  What? No candy?

  Clearly something weird was going on here. As I got older and realized this I asked my dad how come he never joined the mafia. He was a gambler. He was tough and he lived in the right neighborhood. He told me he always had chances, but it just wasn’t the way he wanted to go. Not that he didn’t know people who did. He and my mom used to talk about this one guy he grew up with who had a cockeyed look about him. He scared her. In fact, they thought, it was the look that may have gotten him killed.

  Once, after my dad had lost his job, we were at one of the big flea markets in Oakdale, Long Island, where he was selling crap to make ends meet. This was out in the middle of nowhere, a real rural area. We were sitting together and it was pretty busy, but my dad suddenly stopped talking and just stared at someone, an older guy, who was walking around the racks of clothes. Wherever the guy went, my dad’s eyes tracked him, until he had to get up and follow him to keep him in his sights. When my dad confronted him, the guy turned white and quickly walked away.

  “Who was that?” I asked my dad when he came back.

  “I thought it was a guy from the neighborhood,” my dad said. “But he said I had the wrong fella.”

  A couple of years later my dad showed me the guy’s picture in the paper. He’d been killed. The mob had been looking for him for years.

  After I was rejected by the NBA, I went down to the neighborhood, found a pay phone, and called my dad. He told me to meet him at Mo’s.

  I walked into the bar looking like some kind of FBI agent. I was carrying my black leather briefcase and had on my gray pin-striped suit, a starched white shirt, and a tie. As I walked through the door a bartender dropped his rag and jumped over the bar. He stood in front of me and said, “This is a private club.” Before I could say anything, he was pushing me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to meet my dad!” I screamed. “Sal Dell’Abate.”

  “Never heard of him,” the guy yelled back, pushing me harder.

  “Sal Dell’Abate, Sal Dell’Abate, he used to live on Mott Street, he comes here all the time.”

  “I don’t know him,” the guy answered back.

  I really thought the guy was going to kill me. He was angry and pushing hard. As I was about to fall ass backward onto Hester Street I yelled, “Sally Foo.”

  “Hold it!” a voice in the dark yelled out. “What did you say?”

  “Sally Foo,” I answered. “That’s my dad.”

  Then he looked at me and said, “You Sally Foo’s kid?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Then he looked at the bartender, said, “He’s okay,” and bought me a club soda. I sat at a table by myself, sweating through my suit, until my dad finally showed up. He laughed at that story all the way back to Long Island.

  GREATEST BAD STORYTELLING

  SONGS OF THE ’70S

  “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” Vicki Lawrence

  “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods

  “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves,” Cher

  “Seasons in the Sun,” Terry Jacks

  “I Shot the Sheriff,” Eric Clapton

  “Angie,” Helen Reddy

  “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” Looking Glass

  “Me and Mrs. Jones,” Billy Paul

  “Patches,” Clarence Carter

  “Ride Captain Ride,” Blues Image

  “Run Joey Run,” David Geddes

  “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast,” Wayne Newton

  “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Gordon Lightfoot

  “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” Jim Croce

  “Cat’s in the Cradle,” Harry Chapin

  FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS following the NBA fiasco, I fell headlong into the T.G.I.F. abyss. I was partying nonstop, letting that one free beer and a plate of half-price skins turn into full-on benders. It got so bad that one night, one of the bartenders yelled at me for treating the job and the restaurant with such casual disregard. “I know a lot of you are using this to get through college or as a job till you get the one you really want,” he said. “But for some of us this is our livelihood.” I felt like an ass.

  Finally, around Christmas, I got a real job in radio. Kind of. I took a once-a-week midnight to 8 A.M. shift at an all-automated station called WCTO that played an easy-listening format. I did this on one of my off nights from Fridays. WCTO played elevator music. Every fifth song had vocals. In the radio business the demographic for this format is called sixty-five to dead. It turned out to be the worst job I ever had, including cleaning the grease traps at my cousin’s pork store.

  I would start my shift by going to the deli across from the station—which was in Farmingdale, about twenty-five minutes from my house—and buying anything that would keep me up all night. Iced tea, cupcakes, Hershey bars. I’d have a snack and a drink whenever I felt myself nodding off. Which happened often. Because the station was automated it had no DJs. The music, the teases, the commercials—all of it ran on reels and tapes. My job was to make sure the right reels and right tapes went on at the right time. Each reel was fifteen minutes, and when it ended, I needed to shove a tape into the deck and play an intro or a commercial. It was mind-numbing work that went on for eight hours. And if you were late changing a reel, leaving dead air, an alarm started beeping after fifteen seconds. I never understood why it mattered. Anyone who listened to us was either dead or asleep after midnight.

  At least that’s what I thought. One morning at around 4 A.M., the phone started ringing. It startled me, because I had fallen fast asleep. When I picked it up an old man at the other end started yelling, “You’re off the air! You’re off the air!” I had passed out and left the station silent for twenty-five minutes.

  When I first interviewed for the gig they asked me if I was committed to staying longer than three months. I said of course. After three months I realized why they asked. No one could stick it out longer than that.

  I was so depressed about my plight, I made a pact with myself: If I didn’t get a real job in radio by my birthday in March, just a couple of months away, I was going to bag it. I had decided I would become a pharmaceutical salesman. That’s what I was suited for and I kept seeing those jobs available in The New York Times classifieds. I was a convincing talker, had my own car, and it seemed like you could make a lot of money. Best of all, I didn’t need to type.

  The pact was a stupid idea. What difference did it make if I had a career path at twenty-three or not? Obviously I know that now. But back then I just got more and more upset as it drew closer and loomed larger. I worked at T.G.I.F. four nights a week, and every time I walked through those doors I realized I was headed nowhere. By February, six weeks before my birthday, I had gone four months without an interview, had no leads, and was working the graveyard shift at an automated station for minimum wage. I was in a sorry state.

  That’s when Steve North saved me again. It was a slow night at Friday’s. I had my chin propped in my hands and my elbows on the host stand when the phone rang. “Hello, T.G.I. Friday’s, how can I help you?” I said.

  “Hey Gary, it’s Steve. I think I have somet
hing for you.”

  He had seen a posting at WNBC for a desk assistant in the news department. It was part-time, he told me, but he said he could help get my résumé to the people who were doing the hiring. I sent in my résumé with a cover letter in which Steve’s name was featured prominently, and then started planning for my first day. Of course they were going to hire me.

  But after a couple of days, I hadn’t had a callback. So I called. They said I was on their list but they hadn’t gotten to me yet. A week went by, still no interview. So I called again. Still on the list. The next week I called a few times, trying to be persistent without being a stalker. I wanted to show how interested I was in the job but didn’t want to seem so annoying they’d never want to hire me. It got to the point where I just called at 2 P.M. every few days for a couple of weeks, but the answer was always the same: They hadn’t forgotten about me, they wanted to interview me, they hadn’t gotten to me yet. My hopes evaporated.

  On March 1, two weeks before my birthday, I called at my usual time and spoke to the same woman. “Oh hi,” she said. “I am so sorry, but we are filling the position from within.”

  “Okay, sorry for bothering you, thanks for telling me,” I said. It was soul-crushing news. I wanted to cry. I felt like I had run out of options. My birthday was just up ahead and if I kept this stupid pact with myself I’d have to get a real job. I worried that whatever I did next would be what I did for the rest of my life. I lay down on the couch in my parents’ living room and stared at the ceiling.

  Twenty minutes later the phone rang.