They Call Me Baba Booey (12 page)

We did a Lesbian Dial-a-Date segment and had Dweezil and Moon Unit Zappa on as guests. Vinnie Mazzeo lit his underwear on fire and then cooked an egg. And they filmed me at the dentist getting my teeth capped. Unfortunately, the show ran long, so most of Vinnie’s bit and all of mine got cut from the special. That’s when Howard had a brilliant idea: Let’s sell a videotape of the show and include the stuff that
was cut out, including my dental visit. Only instead of just slapping the segment onto the end of the show, Howard and I added a running play-by-play of my procedure. Basically it was the equivalent of the bonus commentary on a DVD, a decade before anyone was doing that.

Honestly, it’s pretty gross to watch. I’m not sure how either of us made it through the analysis. In fact, while I’m sitting in the chair, I look into the camera and say, “You have no idea how disgusting this is going to get.”

First there was a shot of Dr. Randolph sticking a needle several inches long into my gums, right above my two front teeth. Then he took a drill and sliced open my caps, a straight line down the middle. “There goes twelve hundred dollars’ worth of caps,” I said on the tape.

“Oh man, oh man!” Howard was screaming.

It was actually an excruciating experience all around. There was a camera inches from my mouth as Dr. Randolph took a pair of dental pliers and started tugging and pulling on my caps, jimmying them back and forth as if each one was a wedding ring that was on too tight. First you see the cap, which is split in two, moving my gum line and then all of a sudden, crack, it comes loose. What’s beneath it is a yellow tooth that looks as small as a baby’s because it had been shaved the very first time I had caps put in.

“Hey look,” Howard said in the voice-over. “It’s Eddie Munster.”

After that, Randolph took a tiny drill the size of a pin and started creating a space at my gumline so the new cap could slide in easily. Blood was squirting out, making my already yellow, shaved teeth look even more discolored and grotesque.

“Look how green your teeth are there,” Howard said.

“That’s how bad they used to be,” I said.

“You look like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist.”

Then there was a shot of the nurse, grimacing. Even she couldn’t believe it.

Pretty soon all four of my caps were off, revealing a bleeding, oozing mess of a mouth. Between my jagged, misshapen teeth were spaces as wide as Alfred E. Neuman’s.

“Ugh, I can’t believe we are asking people to pay $24.95 for this,” Howard exclaimed.

“I look like Michael Spinks,” I said.

Toward the end of the procedure Howard said into the camera, “Okay, give them the money shot.”

I smiled wide and showed off my brand-new teeth. They were better than ever. It had been worth the pain, physical and otherwise.

I RODE MY BIKE
all over town when I was growing up. To Uniondale Park, to a friend’s house. I had an itch to just hop on and go somewhere all the time. It used to drive me nuts sitting on that park bench, talking about what we were going to do all day. We’d start at ten in the morning and twelve hours later, we’d smoked, gotten yelled at, annoyed each other, and hit each other, but we hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Even worse, I couldn’t really drink or smoke as much as the other kids because my mom was like the Gestapo.

Whenever I came home—from anywhere—she’d grab me by both sides of my face and tilt my head down so she could give me a big kiss on the top of my head. While she was telling me how happy she was to see me and how much she’d missed me, because it had been nearly a whole day since I’d seen her, she’d take a big whiff to see if she could smell smoke or alcohol.
I hated that. But she did it with all of her kids. I blame Anthony.

Once he went to the Felt Forum, the theater next to Madison Square Garden, to see the Doors. He smoked a lot of pot that night and came home at around two in the morning. Everyone was asleep, but he was still seeing things. So he popped open his bedroom window and lit up another joint. Suddenly my mom jumped out of the closet and yelled, “Aha! I caught you!” Sadly, Anthony realized he wasn’t tripping. He was slammed back into real life with our mom.

I would get antsy hanging around the park every day, not drinking that much, barely smoking, not going anywhere. Around this age I started to develop the wanderlust my brothers had. Once I was old enough to know better, being at home was the last place I wanted to be. One day, months before I entered middle school, I hopped on my bike and rode over to the junior high. I was curious to see what the school was really like.

I arrived after the final bell had rung. School was out, but the doors were open, so I walked in to get a drink and have a look around. That’s when I had a
World According to Garp
moment. I heard a commotion down one of the hallways, turned a corner, and in front of me was the lunchroom. The double doors were wide open. The benches and tables were pushed against the walls, there were wrestling mats on the floor, and there was lots of yelling. The coach spotted me and yelled at me to get the hell out of there, but I stood transfixed. That was it for me. All I knew was pro wrestling and turnbuckles, but this just looked so cool. It looked hard. It looked like you had to be strong and very macho. I was none of these things, so that may have been the appeal.

When I finally got into seventh grade, I was absolutely the worst wrestler on the team. The older guys relished twisting me, pinning me, and just plain beating the shit out of me. I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. But I loved practice;
I loved trying to get better and seeing the smallest hints of improvement, even if I was the only one who noticed them.

I was so committed I went to a weeklong wrestling camp at Hofstra University, in Uniondale, between seventh and eighth grades. I got better. I even allowed myself to think I was getting good. I wrestled at 136 pounds. There were two wrestlers in each weight class on our team. But local meets only allowed schools to enter one wrestler from each class. So my team had wrestle-offs, where the guys in each weight class went one-on-one to see who got the tourney spot. I didn’t win a single wrestle-off in seventh grade. But in eighth I did. Again and again. Then I started to win matches, too. The coach loved me and I was seen as a rising star on the team.

Until, of course, I fucked up.

I was hanging out on the tennis courts at school one day toward the end of eighth grade when a teacher strolling by saw me smoking a cigarette. She told the wrestling coach.

The coach, Mr. Calabretta, was such a good, young, supportive guy. We could relate to him; we loved him. So it was crushing when he kicked me off the team with only two weeks left in the season. I couldn’t bear to tell my parents. Instead I spent time hanging at a friend’s whose mom was never home. I stayed there until dinner. When I got home I’d tell my parents, “Wow, practice was exhausting today.”

My mom probably had no idea, until now. Sorry, Ma.

It wasn’t a particularly good time for me to be fucking up. While her moods became less erratic over the years, my mom was never cured. Even when she wasn’t depressed she was always ready for a fight.

One Saturday morning my buddy Steve was over and, as usual, she was railing at me. As I got older, I gave it right back. And on this particular morning the fight ended with me at the
bottom of the stairs in our basement and her at the top of them, heaving an Electrolux vacuum cleaner at me. It landed with a thud in the middle of the steps and rolled down, stopping at my feet. Steve said, “What was that about?”

“Nothing. It’s just Saturday morning,” I answered.

The tension level in the house when I was in middle school was unusually high, because my father was out of work. My dad was stubborn and, well, he was the Mott Street Gambler, so he wasn’t afraid to play a game of chicken. He was very good at selling ice cream. So good that, when his boss started his own company making a high-end premium brand of ice cream, my dad was recruited as one of the first salesmen. The company was called Häagen-Dazs, which looked nice but meant nothing. The guy who started the company, Reuben Mattus, grew up in the Bronx.

My father once explained the company’s philosophy to me: Most other ice cream was selling for sixty-five cents a gallon. “But we sold it for a dollar twenty-five a pint. The idea was that if it sounded exotic and it was expensive, it must be good.” And it was. There were nights my dad came home and his trunk was loaded with Häagen-Dazs. The pints used to come in sleeves of eight and his car would be weighed down with ice cream packed in dry ice. We had an extra freezer in our basement dedicated to rum raisin, strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate, my favorite. We had so much of it we didn’t even use bowls. Instead we’d put the first letter of our first name in Magic Marker on the bottom of a pint, eat a little bit, and then put it away.

Häagen-Dazs started to do really well and the company was growing, but my dad thought Reuben wasn’t delivering on some of the compensation promises he’d made when the company first started. So my dad just quit. He felt betrayed and for a while the Mattus name was a dirty word around our house. The real problem was that my father didn’t have another job
lined up. And he wasn’t making all that much to begin with. The only savings I knew about were in an old water cooler jug in my parents’ closet that was filled with coins, mostly pennies.

My family struggled for three years after my father quit his job, throughout my time in junior high. But he handled it the same way he did everything else: with old-school stoicism. He’d never say that he felt scared or ashamed. But I knew it was killing him, because no one I knew worked harder than my father. He could be puking on the side of the road on the way to work and not turn around to come home.

He refused to go on the dole. Instead, to make ends meet, he hustled to scrape together a few dollars, just like he had when my parents were first married. Only this time the stakes were higher. He got involved with a guy who had a start-up pantyhose business. Then he tried selling ladies’ clothing and handbags at flea markets. We were barely paying the bills. My mom did the food demonstrations at department stores, but she could never keep a job for very long.

Before he quit, I knew we weren’t rich, but if I wanted to go to Nathan’s or if I asked my dad for a couple of bucks to go hang with my friends, it was never a big deal. Now when I asked, he couldn’t give it to me. The man had never been out of work in his life, and I could feel the pressure mounting. I quickly learned not to ask for stuff.

I knew things were getting bad when, the summer before eighth grade, I didn’t make that annual trek to the department store for new school clothes. My father was working in the clothing business at this point and all I wanted was a new pair of Levi’s, but there was no way we could afford them. Instead my father had a box of a brand called Cheap Jeans at the warehouse. He brought those home and that’s what I wore when school started. Of course I got made fun of; there was a big label on the back of the pants that read
CHEAP JEANS
. It was
humiliating. But I never told my father, because I knew it was worse for him.

Once, our phone was turned off. That wasn’t something that happened to people we knew. I remember a buddy telling me at school that he had tried calling me but he kept getting a strange message from the phone company and couldn’t get through. I just told him I didn’t know what was going on, even though I knew exactly why he couldn’t reach me.

Another afternoon I came home from school and there was a man in a suit sitting in our living room. The sheets were off the couch. That meant someone important was over. The man in the suit was talking to my father, in the middle of the day, and as soon as I walked in I could see this wasn’t a conversation for me, so I went straight to my room. The man left a few minutes later and I heard my father screaming, “I’ve been paying this mortgage for ten years and you come after me because we’re a month late?” Then he swore like an army medic under fire.

It’s not like I hadn’t seen financial stress in the house. But before this it seemed like something out of an
I Love Lucy
episode. Once a month my dad would break out the checkbook to pay bills and he’d notice one was missing.

“Ellen! Ellen!” he’d shout. She would pretend not to hear him. “Ellen, there is a check missing.”

“Yeah?” she’d say. She was half asking, as though she was surprised, and half telling him, “So what.”

“What did you do with it?” He knew, she knew, even I knew, that she would take the check, spend it, and forget what she spent it on. She did it to me, too. I used to keep my money in an old Tropicana orange juice jar under my bed, and she’d borrow it but often forget to replace it. Plenty of times she just preemptively gave me money in the morning because she had no idea if she had taken any from me or not.

“Ellen,” my dad would continue, getting angry. “How can I balance the checkbook if I don’t know what you wrote a check for?”

Then she’d start to cry.

When my dad was out of work, though, there was actually less screaming, less crying. That’s how much tension there was. It permeated every day. Nothing was being released. It was so bad that, when I asked for twenty dollars to go on a school ski trip, my dad told me, “I am really sorry, but we don’t have the money.” For him to say that out loud was a big deal. I knew it broke his heart.