They Call Me Baba Booey (19 page)

I befriended a young sound engineer who taught me how to set up microphones in the studio. I saw how to deal with clients. I learned how talent can fix anything. We were once doing an ad for Champale, a lowbrow alcoholic drink, and the corporate suits kept poking their heads in, complaining that the jingle wasn’t working. Our engineer reassured them, saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine when Grady gets here. He’ll bring it to life.” I didn’t know who Grady was, but I knew the jingle
sounded like crap. Finally, at four in the afternoon, after we had been there seven hours, Grady Tate showed up. He was an old black guy, a well-known club jazz singer, who swaggered in looking as cool as could be. He had a gravelly voice, but it turned the jingle from ridiculous to radio-worthy.

I also learned how talent controlled a room, no matter how minuscule the talent. At night the jingle shop transformed into a second-rate recording studio for would-be artists. Once, they handed the keys to a guy named Meco, who recorded a million-selling disco remix of the
Star Wars
theme. When he came around everyone kissed his ass and I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, he wore nice wide collars and kept his shirt unbuttoned, but with his side part, high forehead, and oversize wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like an accountant doing karaoke. Besides, all he did was put a disco beat to someone else’s song. But it made the studio some money, so he was the big shot.

Even the last internship I had, in the Adelphi film department, proved invaluable. The film teachers there had started a business shooting educational movies and used the students as free labor. One of the movies, commissioned by the ASPCA in New York, was called
Sam
. It was fifteen minutes of point-of-view shots in which you never see the subject of the film, just the world from his perspective. Here’s Sam being abandoned on Fire Island. Here is Sam finding his way to the mainland. And here he is walking the streets, looking for food. The way it’s written you’d think Sam was a boy, then comes the big reveal: Sam is a dog.

I worked on another film called
Intimate Companions
, which was about the human/animal bond. We interviewed this tough truck driver who was a real fuck-you kind of guy with the voice of someone who spent his life smoking cigarettes in the cab of his truck. Then we handed him his dog, a tiny toy poodle, and he started cooing, in his gruff voice, “Baby, hey baby, how you doing?”

The teachers tried selling all these films to schools around the country, so I was put in charge of the distribution department at Adelphi. That meant writing letters to schools, asking if they wanted to rent the film and, if they did, instructing them to send me a check. I realized that you can make the best movie in the world, but if no one distributes it you are screwed. When the check came in I sent out the movie and kept track of where it went. It sounds boring on the surface, but it showed me a different aspect of the business.

Being on the air wasn’t the only option.

1991

Over Christmas of 1988 my roommate Greg and I decided to have a blowout of a party at my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. The place was packed all night. I don’t think the last person left until about five in the morning. I went to bed wasted and, when the phone rang around nine the next morning, I was still pretty drunk.

It was Anthony. Before I could yell at him for calling so early he said, “Listen, I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

“Steven has AIDS.”

Anthony knew a lot more about the way Steven lived than I did. He had heard from mutual friends that Steven liked to party a lot, and he worried about him. We all understood that AIDS existed and that it was decimating the gay population. A guy I worked with at WNBC told everyone he had AIDS at Halloween and by Thanksgiving he was dead. In my heart I
knew Steven was at risk, but like everyone else I was in complete denial. It certainly didn’t cross my parents’ minds. That’s not how it was with Anthony, though; he’s too smart. Anthony harped on Steven to get tested every month and call him with the results.

It started to feel like a game of Russian roulette. Anthony would beg Steven to get tested, then he’d wait for Steven’s call. When Anthony heard Steven was negative, he would breathe easy for a few weeks, then he’d wait for the call again the next month. This went on for several years. I had no idea. Until I got that call.

There was no preamble. Anthony didn’t tell me to take a seat or that he had bad news. It was just, “Steven has AIDS.” So matter-of-fact. When Steven called him to deliver the same news there was nothing ceremonial about it, either. Steven just said, “I’m positive.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t speak. The conversation didn’t last more than a minute after he told me. I just hung up and spent the next several hours trying to absorb the news. I didn’t know if I should call Steven. Instead I called Anthony back and tried to talk through the shock. “I don’t understand,” I said. “He looks healthy. How could he possibly be sick?”

Anthony and I didn’t really know what to do with the information, or even how to process it. And worse, we were sad for our parents, who had no idea. When Steven told Anthony he was sick, Anthony’s first response was “You have to tell Mom and Dad.” But Steven couldn’t do it. At least not yet. He didn’t know how.

It was a couple of days before Steven and I spoke. I had decided not to call him, probably because he was a private person and had always let me know when he was ready to talk about stuff. When we finally did connect it wasn’t one of those Hallmark moments, full of emotion, where everything
that had always been left unsaid is finally shared. He never actually told me he was sick. He just said, “You spoke to Anthony?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to say any more than was necessary.

“Then I need your advice,” he said. “How should I tell Mom and Dad?”

The first thing that came out of my mouth was “I don’t think you should. I don’t think you should tell them until you have absolutely no choice.”

To this day, when I tell that story, some people jump all over me. They think I was wrong and that my parents had a right to know their son was dying. But my reasoning was that there was nothing they could do. Steven didn’t look sick. He wasn’t showing any symptoms. He was living his life. Their only option was to freak out and worry. That would not make Steven better; it would only make them more miserable. Why should they have an extra year of that kind of pain? Their son had been given a death sentence, but they didn’t need to spend the rest of his life thinking about when he was going to die. I also worried about how my mom would take it. She was fragile when life was going well. Just thinking about Steven telling her conjured visions of her falling to the ground in agony, kicking and screaming and crying. It would have been the most natural reaction for her to have.

Steven agreed with me. No one else would know he was sick until it was obvious. Anthony and I told Steven we would help him decide when it was time.

Before Steven was sick we’d occasionally get together for a steak dinner or to go to a Knicks game. But I was young, working hard and then partying on weekends. When I had free
time, I went back to Long Island to see my parents and hang out with my guys. Steven was driving a cab on the overnight shift, from 4
P.M
.
to 4
A.M
.
We were just living two very different lives. But after I learned he had AIDS, I made an effort to see him regularly. That turned out to be pretty weird.

When someone is terminally ill, the last thing they want is for you to change your behavior and pity them or act differently around them. The more I made an effort to see Steven, the more obviously my behavior changed.

I tried not to ask him how he was feeling. He didn’t talk about it much, either, other than to tell me he was going to different doctors and trying different things. One had him on an all-vegetable diet for a while. But in those early days, even doctors weren’t sure how to make people better; they were trying solutions and tonics and cocktails. When my grandmother was dying of cancer in the 1950s, she paid a lot of money to a doctor who put her on an all-steamed-vegetables diet. People get desperate for miracles.

That first year Steven didn’t look any different. He had always been trim and athletic-looking, and he still maintained his weight. I wanted so badly to believe he had figured out a way to beat the disease. If he avoided talking about how he felt it was because he was feeling fine. If I checked him out and he didn’t look any worse, maybe he’d been cured. The whole year went by like that. I guess I was in denial.

Soon enough I became painfully aware of reality. Over Christmas of 1989 we were all at my parents’ house on Long Island. I broke out my video camera and was getting shots of the whole family doing their thing. At one point I went over to Steven and started interviewing him. I knew I was doing it because he was going to die and I wanted to remember him, what he looked like and sounded like. I wanted to be able to see him twenty years from now, so that when I told my kids about their uncle Steven they’d know who I was talking
about. He knew why I was videotaping him, too. Which is why he told me to get the camera out of his face.

That spring, though, we could see that the disease was progressing. Steven didn’t look healthy and fit anymore; he started looking sickly. By Easter he looked especially hollow. I wasn’t sure if my parents noticed—they didn’t mention anything—but Anthony and I both told Steven it was time to tell them. A week went by, and he didn’t do it. Another week went by. He still hadn’t done it. Finally Steven admitted he couldn’t tell our parents. He asked Anthony to do it, just as he had asked Anthony to tell them he was gay.

This was a huge burden to put on someone, but Anthony didn’t balk. A couple of weeks after Easter he drove over to my parents’ house to tell them. Dad broke down crying, freaking out with sadness. Mom turned out to be the strong one. She was like a rock. I guess as long as she had other people’s problems to focus on she could handle anything.

We had planned to get together on Memorial Day. My father called me early in the week to let me know he’d be picking me and Steven up in the city on Saturday morning. He casually mentioned that he had tried calling Steven, too, but no one had answered. By Saturday morning, before he left Long Island, my father called me again to tell me that he still hadn’t been able to reach Steven. “I’m coming to get you first,” he told me. “So we can go check on him together.”

My father was a brave and strong man who had earned medals in World War II, but he feared the worst when he didn’t hear from Steven. He had been in this situation before.

When I was very young, too young to remember, my grandfather developed throat cancer and had to have his larynx removed. But he refused to break old habits, like chewing tobacco. He’d walk around his apartment on the Lower East Side with a wad of chew in his mouth while carrying a real glass spittoon, like something out of the Wild West.

For years my dad would drive into the city on weekends to pick up his parents and bring them out to our house for a weekly visit. But as my grandfather grew ill, he became too tired and uncomfortable to make the trip. He’d stay home while my grandmother came out. One Sunday afternoon, while dropping my grandma back at home, they realized they didn’t have the key, but they couldn’t get my grandfather to open the door. They banged, they rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. My father walked downstairs, walked up the fire escape, and climbed in through a window. His father was lying facedown in the living room. There was blood everywhere. He had fallen. His glass spittoon had shattered. His neck had been cut and he’d bled to death. This was one of those strange family secrets that I didn’t know of until many years later. I always thought my grandfather had just died of cancer.

We didn’t know why Steven wasn’t answering his phone. But my dad didn’t want to be alone when we found out. When we arrived at his building in Chelsea, I rang the buzzer downstairs, but there was no answer. We waited and then we tried it again, but there was still no answer. We stood there wondering what we should do when, finally, we heard Steven yelling from his window, “I am sick! I can’t buzz you in!”

My brother lived alone in an old building and often the buzzer to let people in didn’t work. When that happened, Steven would put the front door key in a sock and toss the sock out the window. I yelled back to him, “Throw down the sock.”

“I can’t,” he said. My only option was to climb up an old, rusty fire escape to his fourth-floor window.

I slowly pulled myself up, with my dad eyeballing me from the street. As I reached Steven’s window, I stopped. There was Steven, naked and curled up in a ball on his comforter in the middle of the living room. There was vomit all around him.
He had been there for nearly two days, too weak to move or even to answer the phone.

I threw down the sock with the key to my father and he raced upstairs. We lifted Steven and put him in the shower to clean him up, holding him the whole time. We took him to a diner to get some food in his system, but he threw up all over his plate. Then we rushed him into the car and, for some reason, decided to take him to a hospital in Long Island rather than in Manhattan. To this day I don’t know why we thought that was a good idea; the hospital didn’t know what to do with him. Steven was given fluids, and the doctors told us that he’d be more comfortable at home. That night he slept in my old bed in the room we used to share.