They Call Me Baba Booey (4 page)

No one can pinpoint the day she started to change. No one in her family ever talked about her having a history of mental illness—despite all the intense arguing. Anthony says she was pretty with-it until he was about nine or ten. He says it was after I was born and when we moved to Long Island that she snapped.

Her stay in Syosset Hospital didn’t change things. When she came home she was always sleepy and could barely get out of bed. The doctors had given her pills to take, but they didn’t seem to be helping. I never felt angry with her. I never stopped believing my dad when he told me it wasn’t her fault. It just seemed like the more that doctors tried to help her, the worse it got. I’d have grown up angry if she had been an alcoholic who never quit. But you can’t tell someone to stop being crazy.

So we all learned to deal with it.

Some days I came home from school and before I could put my book bag down she had her coat on and was frantically looking for the car keys, practically buzzing around the house. Then she’d push me out the door, saying, “I’ve been waiting for you; we have to go, a lot of stuff to do.” We’d drive to the Macy’s in the Roosevelt Field mall or return a book to the library or drop something off at the Cancer Society, where she worked as a volunteer. Other days I’d walk in and she’d be at an ironing board in the kitchen, happily watching Mike Douglas on the Zenith she rolled in on the TV stand from the living room. Those were the good days, the enjoyable days.

Then there were the days when I’d get home and the house would be silent. By the time I was in school full-time, Anthony was in high school and Steven was in junior high. They had already been through my mom’s up-and-down cycles and found ways to stay out of the house until dinner. I wasn’t old enough yet. When I walked through the door it was just my mom and me. I knew the silence meant she was sleeping, or had spent most of the day sleeping and was resting. She’d slowly walk down the hall from her room to the living room, wearing her robe and looking tired. This is what happened when she was blue. She would tell me she was sick and tightly clutch her collar around her neck, complaining of a sore throat. Those days I had to play quietly by myself. I remember thinking to myself,
She is sick a lot
. Now I wonder if the physical symptoms were a
part of her mental illness or the side effect of all the pills she was taking.

Somehow, though, she always pulled herself together for dinner. Our kitchen was tiny and decorated in avocado green to match the carpet. The avocado upholstery on our chairs matched the avocado fridge, which complemented the faux-oak table in the center of the room that seated six. I was always stuck at the end of the table right in front of the oven, and the door couldn’t be opened if I was sitting at the table. When my mom had food to get out, I had to move.

Every night I and my brothers and my mom ate dinner together at six. I sat in front of the oven, Anthony sat next to my mom, and Steven sat by himself across from them. My dad sat at the opposite end from me. But he usually came home too late for dinner. We were not a family who ate out, except for the occasional Sunday trip to Borrelli’s—the only place we deemed good enough to replace a proper Italian meal—or pizza at a place called Anthony’s. But mostly, my mom cooked, and she was a great cook. Chicken cutlets. Broiled steak. She occasionally worked as a food demonstrator—meaning she was the lady in the mall with a microphone around her neck who made something in a wok and then handed out samples. I remember being in ninth grade when she did the wok demo. We ate Chinese three days a week. In tenth grade it was the pasta maker, which looked like a toaster with a hand crank.

Once we sat down, dinner lasted about five minutes and was almost always eaten in front of the Zenith. We watched the news, the Vietnam War unfolding on our screen as we shoveled food into our mouths.

It was actually television, more than food, that brought us together. None of us could believe it when
The Sound of Music
—Best Picture in 1965!—appeared on TV just a year later. We couldn’t wait to watch it. It was an event! Saturday nights in our house were ruled by Carol Burnett and
All in the
Family;
Sundays belonged to Ed Sullivan. And then during commercials we talked about the musical acts, with my dad usually joking, “You call that music? That’s not music!” Then he’d break into a Frank Sinatra song from the 1940s.

We all laughed, especially my mom.

When she was in a good mood and balanced, she was all love. She was very physical, and she would grab my friends and kiss them on the head and say, for no reason at all, “Oh your mother must be so proud.” She’d be so warm, telling all the neighbors and my friends to come over, that her kitchen was never closed. The problem was, you never knew when that mood was going to change. She would spend three days being as warm and loving as anyone you’d ever seen. And then three days of being a normal mom. And then on the seventh day she’d wake up saying she was feeling blue.

Most people in their lives have “an incident” involving their parents, the moment when their mom or dad just loses it and rage trumps being rational. Well, we had “incidents.”

Sometimes my mom would plop food down at dinner and then angrily bang some pots and pans while she washed them, before dropping them altogether in a loud clang. We never knew what had set her off. She’d walk into her room screaming and slam the door. You couldn’t believe the words that came out of her mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. A sailor would have blushed. She’d come out, we’d think it was over, and then she would dial a number, usually one of her sisters, and fight with whoever could provoke her into a rage. Then she’d slam the phone down five or six times and go back into her room and scream some more. “These people think they live on an island,” she liked to say. “Like you live all by yourself and can do whatever you want. They think they can pull one over on me, they think I don’t know, they think I don’t see. I see, I see what’s going on.”

The episodes didn’t frighten me in a way that made me cower under the table or flinch if my mom came near me. I always
loved her. But they affected me in other ways. How could they not? I had a bedwetting problem until I was in second grade. And I felt horrible about it. Not because my parents got angry with me or because my brothers made fun of me. Neither happened actually. I was too young for my brothers to think of me as a rival worthy of their torment. I just felt bad because I didn’t know why it was happening. I was peeing in my sleep so often that my mom went to the drugstore and bought an expensive machine that connected to the bed. It had an alarm that went off whenever liquid hit the mattress. We never even connected it. That night my dad got home and said, “What good is that? If the alarm goes off when liquid hits the mattress, it’s too late.” My mom said she was going to return it and that’s when Steven chimed in, pretending to be our mom calling the pharmacy. “Hi, this is Mrs. Dell’Abate, I’d like to return the piss machine.”

One morning, showing a little frustration, my mom said to me, “You have to stop doing this.” I said back, “I know. I want to.” If I had known then what I know now, I would have said, “Stop screaming like a banshee and maybe I will stop peeing in my bed.”

Mostly, when my mom lost it, Anthony, Steven, and I never said a word to one another. If she morphed at dinner, we just kept eating, giving one another looks. But we didn’t want to talk because whoever spoke would draw attention to himself and become the target of her rant. Other than my mom yelling, no one said a word.

Blind rages like that only have to happen seven or eight times before you adapt and get used to it. Every explosion, we’d all just wonder how long the episode would last. Their length was never something you could gauge. My dad would get home, hear what was going on, and say, “Okay, this is what we get today.”

From where I sat, it always seemed like my mom was the
one looking to pick a fight. One day she accused my father of cheating. I was at home when she called his office and started screaming at his assistant and the boss’s assistant. When he got home he told her she couldn’t call his office and yell like that. She screamed back, “I don’t care!”

Mostly, though, when my father walked through the door and my mom started with him he’d say, “You know what? I am not going to fight with you tonight.” Then he would sit in his chair and read the newspaper. She’d still try to pick a fight with him. Sometimes she would grab me and say we were leaving and moving back to Brooklyn. The first time this happened, it freaked me out. I remember crying. I wondered if I’d ever see my dad or brothers again. And where were we going to live when we got to Brooklyn? But I couldn’t ask her any of these questions because she was ranting nonstop. Ranting and driving. We would be in the car on the Long Island Expressway. Then just as quickly as we had left the house, she’d get off the LIE, turn around, and take us home. We’d wake up the next morning and she’d act like everything was normal.

I learned to act like everything was normal, too. When I was a little older, my mom would scream and yell from the time I went to school in the morning until my dad got home at night. I would go to sleep and she’d still be screaming. She was manic. I wasn’t sure if she ever slept. I’d curl up in the fetal position in my bed and scream into the pillow out of frustration. But then the next day, I had to get up. I had to forge ahead. What was I supposed to do? Wake up in the morning and fall apart? That was a survival skill. Maybe I thought if I got up and acted like it didn’t happen—and she kept acting like nothing happened—then it wouldn’t happen again. If everything was back to normal I preferred we go with that idea and hope it stayed that way.

Hope can be a powerful thing.

ONE COLD AND CLOUDY AFTERNOON
in late fall, some time after my mom had been hospitalized, I came home from first grade and found her hurrying to get out of the house. Today was going to be that kind of a day, I thought. She put me in the car and drove me to a doctor’s office. I had never been there before. I didn’t know it was a psychiatrist.

She sat in the waiting room with me, sobbing hysterically, and when she was called in she just left me sitting there. She didn’t think twice about that. But back then mothers smoked while they were pregnant and let kids ride without car seats. They didn’t always think about their child’s welfare. I waited, wondering if this doctor was going to make her feel better, but when she came out she was crying even harder. The doctor stood behind her. His name was Dr. Peck, and he looked like someone out of a textbook: heavyset with a tweed jacket, a Sigmund
Freud beard, and glasses. I wondered,
Is this my mom feeling better?

She cried all the way home, a twenty-minute drive. I didn’t know what was going on or what kind of doctor she had been seeing. I wondered if they had hurt her or used scary instruments on her. At home the crying got even worse, and as she often did, she walked into her room and slammed the door. I heard her screaming, “Papa, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” But she didn’t sound mad. She wasn’t yelling at anyone. And this was strange to me. Normally when she acted like that she came back out screaming. But she wasn’t mad, not at me or her sisters or my dad or anyone. I was confused, so I waited, until the light faded away and it turned dark. Then my brothers came home. And at 5:30 my mom came out and made us dinner. It was as if nothing had happened.

This kind of crying happened more after she got out of the hospital. This was also when she started to self-medicate. Her philosophy was, if the doctor told her one pill would make her feel less blue, then maybe she should take two.

She’d go to one doctor and get a prescription, then go to a different doctor and get a different prescription. Then she’d go to a third doctor for a third. She collected pills. Because she wouldn’t level with any of the doctors, and because none of them knew about her other medications, it was impossible for them to diagnose her. That added to her downward spiral. When she moved out of the house years later, her medicine cabinet was full of pills. My brother Anthony, who packed her up, told me she had harder stuff in there than anything he’d ever found on the street when he was younger.

Because of what was happening at home, I was the kind of kid who wanted to evaporate in public. I never wanted any trouble, never wanted to draw attention to myself. I became very good at compensating so friends who came over couldn’t tell what was happening with my mom. On the days she was
feeling well, my friends and I hung out at the house. But if a buddy came over after school and it was one of her off days, I’d quickly say, “Hey, why don’t we go to the park?”

But sometimes circumstances made that difficult.

My mother insisted on being the class mother for my field trips. This was incredibly anxiety-producing for me; she could have a meltdown at any moment. Plus, she was almost always late, which meant there was ample opportunity for a dramatic entrance. That alone would draw the kind of attention I wanted to avoid. The first few years I was in school, I had been safe. Then came my fourth-grade trip to the Empire State Building.