They Call Me Baba Booey (28 page)

THERE WERE A LOT
of fresh-faced college grads working at WNBC in the ’80s. We all thought we were too hip for the place, but we loved radio and couldn’t believe that we were working at a 50,000-watt station. In a lot of ways, it was just like the record store; we all became friends. I met my future roommate, Greg, there. He was a quiet, red-headed kid who worked in the engineering department. He had a high voice and later became a regular on the Stern show at NBC, filling in when our usual engineer would go on vacation. We lived together for four years and are still great friends.

My buddy Bernard, a promotions intern who eventually became Imus’s producer, married the hot chick from accounting. We hung out at night and shared a house in the Hamptons for a couple of summers.

It didn’t matter that we weren’t getting paid shit. My fifteen hours barely covered the cost of my monthly pass on the Long
Island Rail Road. I still humped it back on the 9:15
A.M
. most days to go work at the kennel supply store. I even kept that crappy overnight shift at the automated station WCTO through the summer, four months after I took the WNBC job, although partly that was to prove to the jerks that I could last there longer than three months.

When I wasn’t rushing back to Long Island, I hung at WNBC long after my shifts were over. I wanted to meet people and I needed to know everything about what happened there. There wasn’t an aspect of working in radio I didn’t find interesting. I became friendly with the prop master for NBC-TV, an old guy who had been there since it was the Blue and the Red networks. I spent some afternoons in the basement of the building talking to him, listening to his stories from the early days of radio and TV. Every trunk stacked in his storage room held a million different stories.

I was around so often that even Imus grew comfortable with me. Back then he had agreed to do a PSA for the American Cancer Society about quitting smoking. He tried stopping for a while. But eventually he picked up the habit again and still had to do these PSAs. So he did them while he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. That’s part of the beauty of radio.

I was a smoker, too. Back then you could light up in your cubicle without breaking the law. I had an ashtray on top of my desk, and I kept my cigarettes perched next to it. One day Imus came out of the studio and, as he walked by my desk, I heard him mumble something. Then he turned back and grabbed one of my cigarettes. He did that every day for a week, just mumbling and taking my cigarettes. One morning when he picked up my pack I looked at him and said, “Did you quit smoking or just quit buying?”

“Fuck you,” he said in the nicest way anyone could possibly say it. Later that day his producer handed me three packs of cigarettes without a word. I felt like I was in the club after that.

The best part about working the morning shift was being done by 9:15. It meant I could volunteer for just about any other job at the station that needed free labor. When my shifts were over I hung out with my friend Lori in the promotions department. She always had a task no one else wanted to do.

Every summer NBC did a big promotion where you put a bumper sticker on your car and then drove around hoping to be spotted by the station’s “N” car. At the time it was for Stroh’s beer. Listeners went to convenience stores like 7-Eleven and picked up a Stroh’s/WNBC bumper sticker. Then the station sent out the N car, searching for people that had the bumper stickers on their cars. During the day, Imus or the DJs or whoever was hosting a show would say, “Okay, the N car is going to be driving around Livingston, New Jersey, between three and seven this afternoon, so be listening.” Then, if the guy in the N car saw the bumper sticker, he’d call in to the show, give the license plate number of the car he saw with the bumper sticker, and, if the driver was listening and waved when his license plate was read on the air, he got paid some cash. Lori needed drivers for the N car, so I did that a few days a week. I earned minimum wage, and was happy to get it.

It was a great job. I got to drive around, listen to the radio, and occasionally I got on the air. I called in to the station from a car phone that took up the entire middle console between the two front seats. It was fucking enormous. The first thing the manager of the N car told me was that I couldn’t call my friends while I was driving around, because it cost about $150 an hour to use that thing.

Usually I was in the N car after my shift, for WNBC’s midday show, which was hosted by Captain Frank. He was a real religious guy. Every call began and ended with him saying, “God bless you, Gary, God bless you.” Then it went something like this:

“How you doing in the N car today?”

“I’m great today, Frank.”

“Are you following a car?”

“I am, Frank.”

“Okay, driver, wave to Gary to win your sixty-six dollars. Are they waving, Gary?”

“They sure are, Frank.”

Then they’d win sixty-six dollars (WNBC was at 660 on the AM dial). Once a month, the station gave away $660 and at the end of the year it offered up $6,600.

Pretty soon people around the building got to know me. They may not have known my name, but they knew I was that kid at Roz’s desk or the guy who drove the N car.

Every once in a while, I got to drive the N car during Howard’s afternoon show. Howard Stern was the guy everyone at WNBC talked about. Imus was the legend, a big star in New York. My dad listened to him in the mornings on a transistor radio in his bathroom while he was shaving. But Howard was the guy who was off-the-map crazy. To be honest, I didn’t listen to him that much because I was still a radio snob. I listened to music or one of the rock stations. I didn’t listen to talk radio.

But so many people kept talking about him that I grew a little jealous of this guy Lonnie, who interviewed for a traffic assistant position at the same time I did, and got to work the afternoon shift, while I was stuck on the morning show. Then, one day, Lonnie asked me if we could switch. He had a doctor’s appointment. I said of course. And when I went in that afternoon the first thing that struck me was how different the vibe was with Howard than with Imus. It was relaxed and fun. No one told me not to look at Howard.

Working that shift happened to be the first time I heard the show. Howard did a bit about wondering why people always check out the Kleenex after they blow their nose, and then throw it away. The whole thing was just great, observational humor. When he walked out of the studio to go to the bathroom,
he had to walk right by my desk. I told him I thought it was really funny. He didn’t blow me off or just say thanks and keep walking. He stopped and started talking to me. “It’s crazy, right? Everyone looks. What do they expect to find?”

Not too long after that, I happened to be driving the N car during Howard’s show. He hated going to the N car. He wanted to do what he wanted to do and he saw the whole giveaway as a pain in the ass. I’d drive around for three hours and Fred would keep telling me, “We are coming to you soon, real soon.” Then he’d finally call me to say, “Looks like we are not getting to you today.”

When he did get to me, it sure didn’t end with a “God bless you, you’ve won sixty-six dollars!” Once I was following a woman who had the bumper sticker on her car and I called in to the show with her license plate number. Howard picked up and said, “If you’re driving this car, wave and win.” But the woman didn’t wave. Howard kept asking her, but she clearly wasn’t listening. Now he was pissed—and smelled opportunity. “What kind of moron would get the bumper sticker, put it on her car, and then not listen to the radio station when she’s driving around? Who would do such a thing? That is just idiotic. What a moron!”

I just kept following, waiting for my instructions. “Gary,” he said. “I want you to keep following her until she pulls over. We’ll check back with you. But let us know when she does. Then hand her the phone so I can yell at her.”

Every few minutes they would come back to me, hoping she would pull over before they went off the air at seven. They were nearly doing the sign-off when the woman finally pulled over. I swerved across traffic, got to the side of the road, and practically jumped her. I have no idea why she didn’t run away from me, but when I asked her to come to my car and take a phone call, she agreed. Then Howard blasted her. “What kind of moron are you? We’ve been asking you to wave for three hours.
You blew your chance to win a lot of money. We’ve been asking you to wave for hours.”

“I’m so sorry, I can’t believe it,” she answered. “It’s my husband’s car. I had no idea he even had a bumper sticker on there.”

“Well, that’s too bad. You had a chance to win sixty-six hundred dollars if you had just waved to me once.” He was lying. “Why would you do this? You should feel terrible.”

Then he hung up. The woman was practically in tears. So was I. I had never laughed so hard at anything on the radio.

GARY’S REVERSE BUCKET LIST

The Most Amazing Things I’ve Done That I Never Thought I’d Do

1. Shooting a machine gun out of a Black Hawk helicopter, 150 miles north of Kandahar, Afghanistan
   
2. Being in the No. 1 movie in the country
   
3. Seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers play on the North Pole
   
4. Meeting President Bill Clinton
   
5. Defeating Weird Al Yankovic on
   Rock & Roll Jeopardy
   
6. Winning two hundred thousand dollars for LIFEbeat on
   Don’t Forget the Lyrics
   .
   

AFTER THE N CAR EXPERIENCE
, I listened to Howard as often as I could. But what truly converted me from afternoon music snob into a full-fledged fan was the Friday Dial-a-Date segment. One Friday they had on a millionaire, who fielded calls from three women who wanted to go out with him. Each one sounded hotter than the next and was willing to prove it. One girl called herself the snow bunny and she talked about how she didn’t want to work. She just wanted to ski and have fun and marry a rich guy.

During the bit, Howard pretended to put each girl in the shower and made her convince the guy how hot she was while the water was running. Fred would play sound effects of a shower stream the entire time, and this ski bunny woman didn’t let up. She gave everything she had to this call. I was listening to the radio, and I was getting worked up.

But it wasn’t just the soft-core porn aspect to that particular
show that made me a believer. It was also funny and witty and full of satire. The comments Howard made to the girls and what he said about the millionaire all spoke to larger issues than just some broads looking to score a date with a rich guy. I felt the way I did when I listened to Bob Grant with my dad while I was growing up. Howard attacked callers. And he didn’t just passively let something develop; he aggressively led the segment into something that would be interesting and provocative. He exposed people’s prejudices. The more I listened the more I realized what he was doing. Good or bad didn’t matter as much as being interesting. If something stunk it was lost from the show; if something was good it stayed. But anything that was interesting, that made people think or say, “I can’t believe he did that,” at the very least got a chance. Dial-a-Date was provocative in a fascinating way.

This was August 1984. And my life was about to get a whole lot more interesting, too.

I had been working as Roz’s traffic whipping boy for five months, enduring her rants nearly every morning. But I was doing enough each week—between N car promotions and just hanging around the station—to know there was more out there for me. Every day I walked by that job posting board and prayed I would find something that spoke to me.

One afternoon I saw an opening for a producer’s job. Soupy Sales had been hired to do a midday show. I went to Lyndon, Imus’s old producer, who was now running programming for the station. He was the guy who told me never to look at Imus. He was kind of aloof, but I realized he was a good guy. I told him I wanted to apply for the job. But I was already too late. He had given it to another young producer, named Lee Davis.

I really liked Lee. He went on to become the general manager of WFAN. But at the time he was a roving producer, filling
in for people wherever they needed him. His most recent job had been as a really low-paying, low-level assistant for Howard. Almost immediately, when Lyndon told me Lee had gotten the Soupy Sales job, I blurted out, “Then I want Lee’s job.” I still don’t know what made me think to say that.

“Really?” Lyndon asked. “You want that job?” He seemed surprised because it was barely a step above what I was doing.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Okay, let me talk to some people and see what I can do.”

I don’t even think you could call what Lee had been doing a producer’s job. It was more like a paid internship, because the salary—$150 a week; $114 after taxes—was barely the living wage. To call it a salary was almost illegal. It was closer to allowance. But that didn’t matter; every person my age working at WNBC Radio wanted that job.

But I needed this job. And decided it was mine to lose. The months I had spent in the office, hunched over in my cubicle listening to traffic scanners, had been building to this moment.