They Call Me Baba Booey (25 page)

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 something 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.

“Hello,” I answered.

“Gary?” said the voice on the other end. It sounded familiar. Then I realized it was the woman from WNBC.

“Yes.”

“We’ve decided to rethink the process and we are going to interview. Can you come in tomorrow?”

I had gone from being dead to getting a lifeline. I called Steve to say thanks and told him I’d be going in the next day. He mentioned that one of his best friends, Nell Bassett, worked as the public affairs director on the floor where my interview was. If I saw her, I should say hi. The next morning I got on the elevator at the WNBC offices at the same time as another woman. Someone next to me greeted her, “Hi, Nell.” So I asked, “Are you Nell Bassett?” We started talking and then she walked me to my interview, introduced me, and said if Steve North sent me I must be great.

My interview was with Meredith Hollis, who ran the news desk. She explained to me that the position was just a part-time gig as assistant to the traffic reporter, Roz Frank, who flew around the city in a helicopter giving reports every ten minutes. There was a morning spot open and an afternoon spot. The job entailed sitting in a cubicle all day and feeding information to Roz.

Meredith didn’t ask questions. She made statements, such as “We have a large news department here.” Then she stared at
me and leaned in real close, just waiting for a response. She also presented me with some strange hypotheticals: If you are working on deadline and someone yells at you, how do you handle that? If you get something right but are yelled at for being wrong, what’s your response? The whole process struck me as odd.

But it worked out okay, because when it was over she told me to come back the next day. I had to meet Roz. And she warned me: I better know my stuff. That meant understanding every highway, byway, roadway, bridge, and tunnel that connected all five boroughs and the rest of the tri-state area—New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

When my dad drove us around the city I paid attention. I knew the Long Island Expressway and Grand Central Parkway and the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. But I knew nothing about New Jersey. All of New Jersey—and all the ways to get to New Jersey—was an enigma to me. I needed to study up.

On the way home I bought a map of the tri-state area, memorized all the highways going north, south, east, and west and circled all the bridges and tunnels. For hours that afternoon, I memorized them, starting with the northernmost Hudson River crossings, moving around the tip of lower Manhattan, and coming back up the East River: George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Queens–Midtown Tunnel, 59th Street Bridge, and Triboro Bridge. By the time my dad got home from work, I had them down.