They Call Me Baba Booey (2 page)

When the calls finally stopped, Mary looked at me and said, “Your head is so fucked up over your mom. You have to go see someone.”

Mary was the one pushing me to see a shrink, and that really meant something to me. I don’t think she has ever really believed in therapy, but I do. With a family like mine, I thought about therapy a lot, and it didn’t frighten me at all. Everyone needs help at times. Howard and Robin talked about their own experiences in therapy plenty of times on the Stern show. Plus, I had lived in New York for a long time—almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist or went to a support group. My close friend Patty had always told me that seeing a shrink was a fantastic experience because you can get
someone’s complete attention for fifty minutes and they put your thoughts into perspective. I always liked the way she described it.

But Mary telling me to go get help was the push I needed. That’s not to say it didn’t freak me out—if my skeptical wife wants me to go, I must be really acting crazy.

First, I had to find someone. I had heard through the grapevine about Alan, a therapist that a good friend of mine and some people I knew in the music business had seen. The lead singer for a band I liked went to Alan, too. I felt like he was the shrink to the industry. That was cool. And when I called him to make the appointment he sounded like a regular guy, not someone playing Freud in the movies. I felt as though I could talk to him and he would be straight with me.

As soon as I made the appointment I thought to myself,
Now it’s on, the adventure begins
. I was a little bit nervous. But mostly I had been so distraught I welcomed the change. I can only describe it as how I feel when I am sick and I make a doctor’s appointment and I know that after I see the doctor I will feel better. I saw this as the antidote to what ailed me. If this went well I was going to be feeling better. I was excited.

Two weeks later, March 24, 1997, I had my first appointment.

That morning I was in my office at K-Rock at 5:35, as I am every morning. As the show’s producer, I need to be in early and I need to know everything that happened in the world between when I went to bed and when I got to my desk. I checked emails and typed up a list of what was on the show that day. Howard showed up at 5:45, read the paper, and had some breakfast, then we chatted for about five minutes, a day like any other. I didn’t mention that I was seeing a shrink that
afternoon. Not a chance. I hadn’t told my mother, my father, or my brother. I was not ready to share news like this on the show.

At 6:01 Howard went on the air. And at 6:05 he called me into the studio. “What are you doing to your hair?” he asked me. “It looks like you got caught in the rain.”

“I put gel in my hair,” I said.

Whenever you do something different, someone on the show will call you on it. The exhausting part is not knowing what “different” actually is. Do something radical and you know you will get killed. I once shaved my mustache and immediately everyone told me I looked terrible and that I should grow it back. I kind of expected that. But if I had any thought that putting gel in my hair that morning would warrant discussion on the air, I wouldn’t have done it. In fact, I was wishing I hadn’t.

“You put way too much gel in,” Howard said.

“They put gel in my hair on the
Fox After Breakfast
show and I liked it, so I wanted to try it,” I said.

We had done the Fox show to promote the movie
Private Parts
, which was based on Howard’s book and had come out just two weeks earlier. It had debuted at No. 1. Being in the movie was a very happy thing for me. I went to the premiere with my parents, wife, brother, and sister-in-law. Mary and I walked the red carpet—heady stuff for a radio producer.

“It looks like it’s lying on your wet hair,” Howard said. “It makes your teeth look bigger.”

“I think it looks okay,” I said. “I’ll go back to my regular hair tomorrow.”

Then I left. And this is the flip side of working at the show. Was Howard just breaking my balls or was he doing me a favor? Was it good radio or was it the truth? Sometimes hurtful things were said and I’d talk to Howard during the break.
He’d say, “I was just doing a bit.” I still wouldn’t know if what was said on the air was the truth or if what was said on the break was a lie. It’s a labyrinth.

But it’s not why I needed to see a shrink.

My appointment was late in the day. I allowed plenty of time to get downtown. I knew that if you’re late to see a psychologist the whole appointment becomes about why you’re late. K-Rock was on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street and Alan’s office was in Greenwich Village, near New York University. I gave myself ninety minutes to get there, because I wasn’t sure if I’d find a parking spot. I was ready for the appointment and had been looking forward to it for two weeks. I was already convinced that peace of mind was just a handful of fifty-minute sessions away. But I’d be lying if I said my parking obsession wasn’t just another part of the neurosis that was sending me to Alan.

I am always early. I don’t like to be in a rush when going anywhere. I need to know where all the doors are, as they say, wherever I am. I like to scope out a scene. Surprises are not my thing. I grew up with lots of surprises, some of them nasty, every day. So the things I can control, I tend to try and control. I crave predictability. For instance, my drive to work is full of checkpoints that keep me comfortable. I pull out of my garage in Connecticut at 4:50 every morning. At 5
A.M.
, as I get on Interstate 95, I turn on 1010 WINS. If I hear the sports at 5:15 and I’m not on the Bruckner Expressway, I know I’m behind schedule. At 5:20 I turn on some music and no later than 5:30 I pull into the garage at the Sirius XM offices. I am at my desk by 5:35.

As I drove down Fifth Avenue to see Alan, I obsessed about the appointment. Who was this guy? What was he going to do? Was he going to ask me to lie on a couch with a piece of
tissue under my head so I wouldn’t get gel on the pillow? Would I click with him? What if I hated him? My friends who were in therapy told me I might have to see a few psychologists before I found one I clicked with. If that was true, then I’d have to talk to them again to find a new guy. Where was I going to park?

I pulled up to the address. I was glad it was a residential building instead of a crowded office tower. It was white and old and had a flight of marble steps leading up to a door with white pillars on either side. I drove around the block looking for a place to park and found a spot right away, which was a huge relief. Except then I had twenty minutes to kill. I sat in my car, listened to the radio, and thought about the appointment. I wondered who else might be in the waiting room. Would their something be more fucked up than my something?

When I finally entered the building, it was eerily quiet. There was no doorman, no one walking around. Just an elevator. When I got to the waiting room, there wasn’t a receptionist, just some worn-looking furniture and framed posters of flowers on the walls. Across the room was a closed door, a mystery door leading to someplace else. I was alone, the only one with a fucked-up anything in the whole place.

And that’s when I started wondering:
What the hell are we going to talk about?
I mean, I knew why I was there, but to get to that we were going to have to talk about a lot of other stuff.

Just then Alan walked through the mystery door into the waiting room. My first thought was,
Hey, it’s Judd Hirsch as the shrink in
Ordinary People. He was in his mid-fifties, wore glasses and comfortable shoes, and had a thick New York accent. The guy just looked like New York to me. He reached out his hand. “Gary?”

I was the only one in the room, so I stood up.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

I followed him through the mystery door. We walked down a long, dark hallway with offices lining both sides. Each door had a sound machine in front of it running on static, so no one could hear what was happening on the other side. Alan’s was the office at the end of the hall. My stomach buzzed with nerves, the good kind. I just couldn’t help thinking that if the appointment went well, I was going to leave there feeling better.

“Right in here,” he said, pointing to his office.

It was less luxurious than I expected, maybe even a little bit shabby. There was no oak library, no couch to lie down on, just a love seat, opposite a leather chair that Alan plopped himself into.

Then he leaned forward, rubbed his hands together like he was warming them up, and said, “So, why are we here?”

“Well,” I answered. “Many people must sit on this love seat and tell you that their mother is crazy.” I paused. “I have documentation.”

He laughed and said,
“Okay.”

For the next hour I told Alan my deepest, darkest secrets, things I had never shared during a life spent oversharing on the show. In fact no one—not Howard, Robin, Fred, none of the Stern regulars—truly knows how crazy my life was growing up.

Let me tell you, becoming Baba Booey wasn’t easy.

I STOOD ON THE AVOCADO GREEN CARPET
of my living room in Uniondale, Long Island. My mom, Ellen, walked out of her bedroom, carrying an overnight bag she had just packed. Our house was a one-story ranch, and I watched her as she inched down the hall toward the living room.

She stopped just a few steps from me and bent down, practically kneeling on the carpet in her dress. She always cared about how she looked, no matter where she was going. “Come here,” she told me. I was five years old and she wanted to tell me something face-to-face. I walked closer. She hugged me and said, “Mommy isn’t feeling very well. I have to go away for a couple of days.”

I knew she cried a lot. I knew she screamed a lot. And I knew people didn’t do those things unless something was wrong. I thought she was physically sick and going to a hospital to get better.

My older brothers, Anthony, who was thirteen, and Steven, who was eleven, stood next to her. They knew what was really happening. So did my aunt Maryann, who had come over to watch us that afternoon.

When my mom let go of me she stood up, smoothed down her dress, picked up her bag, and followed my dad, Sal, out the front door. They were headed for the psych ward at Syosset Hospital.

My parents met in 1947 at Webster Hall, a dance place in Manhattan. He was twenty-two from Little Italy; she was twenty and from Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn. “He walked up to me and asked me to dance,” my mom once told me. “I told him, ‘I heard about all you fellas from Manhattan. You’re all a bunch of gangsters.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I checked my gun at the bar.’ I thought,
how sarcastic
. That intrigued me.

“My friend Anne thought he was so cute—he reminded her of Humphrey Bogart. He had on a pin-striped suit and really did look like Bogart.”

My mom was stylish, had a big smile, and loved mugging for a crowd or a camera. In every picture I have ever seen of her, from when she was young to today, she looks happy. There was never any sign in her eyes of the trouble behind them. On Saturdays when I was growing up, she’d spend three hours at the beauty parlor getting her hair colored and cut and then would sit with rollers in her hair under one of those huge dryers. She even had a cape and a hat that made her look just like Marlo Thomas in the opening credits for
That Girl
. She always liked to keep up appearances.

That was true when she was growing up in Bensonhurst, too. Her parents came to America from Sicily and Reggio Calabria when they were both kids. They met in Brooklyn and had seven children over fifteen years. The oldest one, Aunt
Josie, was nicknamed the General, because she did a lot of the child rearing. My grandmother worked as a seamstress and my grandfather was a construction worker (my aunts and uncles say he helped build the Empire State Building, but I think people say that about every construction worker from back then). My mom was the baby of the Cotroneo clan. The whole family lived together in a multifamily apartment building my grandfather owned.

But my mother didn’t grow up rich. My mom likes to tell the story about how she wore nothing but hand-me-downs and had to put cardboard in her shoes because the soles had holes in them. She worked at Macy’s while in high school and she’d bring her check home and hand it over to her mother, who cashed it and took all the money, except for a couple of bucks she kicked back to my mother.

None of the Cotroneos moved out of the building until long after they were married. Newlywed kids lived in one of the building’s apartments until they could save enough money to buy a place of their own. Of course, most of them didn’t move very far away. I had an uncle who moved to Los Angeles and an aunt who lived near us in Uniondale. Everyone else settled within a quarter mile of each other in Bensonhurst. Growing up we went to Brooklyn at least a couple of Sundays every month for huge Italian family dinners, the kind that began at three in the afternoon and started with three or four kinds of pasta piled with different meat sauces. That’s when my aunt Angie, who probably never set foot outside Brooklyn, used to say to us, “Brooklyn is the best place in the world. I don’t know why anyone would want to live anywhere else.”