They Call Me Baba Booey (22 page)

RECORD WORLD PLAYLIST,
CIRCA 1982–83

“Only Time Will Tell,”
Asia

“Every Breath You Take,”
Police

“Billie Jean,”
Michael Jackson

“Flashdance … What a Feeling,”
Irene Cara

“Down Under,”
Men at Work

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),”
Eurythmics

“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,”
Culture Club

“Come On Eileen,”
Dexys Midnight Runners

“Hungry Like the Wolf,”
Duran Duran

“Let’s Dance,”
David Bowie

“Electric Avenue,”
Eddy Grant

“She Blinded Me with Science,”
Thomas Dolby

“Africa,”
Toto

“Der Kommissar,”
After the Fire

“Puttin’ on the Ritz,”
Taco

“The Safety Dance,”
Men Without Hats

“Mickey,”
Toni Basil

“Rock This Town,”
Stray Cats

“Our House,”
Madness

“Rock the Casbah,”
Clash

“Photograph,”
Def Leppard

“Pass the Dutchie,”
Musical Youth

“Don’t You Want Me,”
Human League

“Abracadabra,”
Steve Miller Band

“867-5309 (Jenny),”
Tommy Tutone

“We Got the Beat,”
Go-Go’s

“Caught Up in You,”
.38 Special

“I Ran,”
A Flock of Seagulls

“Kids in America,”
Kim Wilde

“Edge of Seventeen,”
Stevie Nicks

“Sunday Bloody Sunday,”
U2

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun,”
Cyndi Lauper

“Owner of a Lonely Heart,”
Yes

“Steppin’ Out,”
Joe Jackson

“Uptown Girl,”
Billy Joel

“Family Man,”
Hall and Oates

“Cum On Feel the Noise,”
Quiet Riot

“Harden My Heart,”
Quarterflash

“Burning Down the House,”
Talking Heads

A WEEK AFTER I GOT HOME
from Italy, I typed up my résumé.

All the important stuff was on there, with a line or two about my responsibilities: the WLIR internships, reporting from D.C., covering the Islanders and Rick Cerone, and sledding newspaper articles. The SportsChannel gig where I hauled banners and hustled interviews for Stan Fischler, the recording studio where I set up microphones, my job as a production assistant on
Intimate Companions
, and running the distribution center for the Adelphi Film School PSA movies. I had a 3.79 and the Clemo Award.

It was a fine-looking résumé. I congratulated myself on being so well-rounded.

The next morning I woke up early and opened up
The New York Times
to the classifieds. I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and circled all the help-wanteds that read
RADIO AND TV EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
. That sounded professional, like it
would pay well, and since I had so much success with internships, it might be the kind of job I could learn from. I’d be assisting an executive, and executives know a lot of shit.

After breakfast I took a shower and threw on my gray pin-striped suit. It was the middle of July, a little hot for wool. But it’s all I had, and I wanted to look professional. No one hires assistants that look like John Oates. I put my résumé in a folder and put that in a leather briefcase one of my relatives had given me for graduation. Then I hopped in my tricked-out Firebird and drove to the Long Island Rail Road station. Everyone else on the platform looked like a more grown-up version of me: briefcase, suit, empty stare, not sure what the day was going to bring. Professor Primeggia was right about getting away before getting a job. The rest of our lives was going to last a long time. Is this what it looked like?

On the train I prepared, writing down the addresses of the offices I wanted to hit and the interview times, and then mapping out my path. I was methodical.

I arrived at my first interview, already starting to sweat in my suit, and began to pull my impressive résumé from my new leather briefcase for the woman behind the front desk. She wasn’t interested. Instead she pointed to an empty chair in the waiting room, the only one available in a space packed with aspiring executive assistants. Pretty soon they called my name and sent me to another room filled with even more people and rows and rows of typewriters. Everyone was clanging away.

I had to take a typing test. I didn’t learn typing at the Adelphi School of Communications! None of my internships focused on that, either. In fact, I was and still am a terrible typist (one more thing I get mocked for on the show) who uses the hunt-and-peck method. They weren’t looking for Clemo Award winners; they wanted 80–100-words-per-minute typists who didn’t make any mistakes. Everywhere I went, it was the same story. All the executive assistant jobs were for people
with experience and skills I didn’t have. What the hell was I learning in college? Clearly, despite my brilliant planning, I was looking in all the wrong places and circling all the wrong jobs.

It was the middle of July and it was sweltering as I trudged across Midtown, from one glass skyscraper to another, waiting in the same rooms to fail the same typing tests. My wool suit was getting heavier every time I stepped outside.

Finally, toward the end of the day, I had had enough. I found myself walking by the New York Public Library, where people were lounging all over the steps out front. It was late, after five in the afternoon. They all looked like they were taking a break at the end of their workday, undoing their ties, loosening their collars. Who knows if they were successful or just shlubs like me, looking for work. I assumed it was the former, and that I was the only loser in town at that particular moment.

I sat down in an empty spot on the steps, slung my jacket over my shoulder, and loosened my tie. Then I rested my elbows on my knees and dropped my head to my chest. That’s when I saw them: pit stains under each of my arms big enough to block out the sun.

It was the perfect way to end the day.

1988/1999

The workday was almost over. We were done with guests. No more breaks. A couple of minutes and I’d be on the way back to Connecticut to spend a beautiful summer afternoon with Mary and the boys. It was 1999. Jackson was a little more than three. Lucas was still a baby. It would have been a great day, a sweet spot in life.

Until that call came in.

“Hey, Howard,” the caller said. I was half listening while returning emails and planning out the next day’s show. But I noticed the guy had an accent, a thick Long Island one, like he could have grown up in or spent time in Nassau County. “I’m the guy Gary’s old girlfriend dumped him for.”

Here we go again, I thought. Ever since Nancy dumped me and the guys went after me on the show for it, people still called in to talk about it. They’d call me a pussy or make fun of me for having been so heartbroken. That segment aired on the
Best of Stern
shows we reran every few years, so a lot of people were just discovering it for the first time.

But by 1999, eleven years after Nancy and I broke up, even Howard was getting tired of the story. He quickly lost interest in these calls because it meant explaining the situation to everyone all over again. And he was just about to drop this douche bag on the phone—he had his finger on the button to cut him off—when the guy pulled this comment out of his bag: “Howard, there’s a tape.”

I gasped at my desk. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I thought back to the days after Nancy dumped me. I was desperate. And when that happens your mind takes off in new directions. You find clarity that wasn’t possible when more logical options were still available. And in that state of mind, I came up with a brilliant idea: I’d make Nancy a videotape.

It was the summer of ’88. I had just bought a video camera. I thought I would film myself and show Nancy how much I missed her. It would explain everything, with a lot more impact than a letter. If she could see the pain in my face and hear the regret in my voice she would take me back. For sure.

I lived with a roommate in an apartment at 105th and Amsterdam. I came home early one afternoon. My roommate wasn’t home. I set up the tripod and the camera in the kitchen, jotted down a few points I wanted to make, and threw on my Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Concert T-shirt. I had the sleeves rolled up tightly around my arms. Even wearing the T-shirt was a strategic move: The concert had taken place just a month earlier. Since we were both so into music, if she saw it she’d think it was cool I was there, and maybe even subliminally, she’d regret that she wasn’t with a guy like me.