They Call Me Baba Booey (32 page)

Not that I’m over it, nor ever will be. Whenever anyone makes a bad first pitch—Shawn Johnson, the mayor of Cincinnati, please watch, theirs are worse than mine—I know that a reference to me and the video of my pitch is coming next. I actually haven’t thrown a ball since then. I can’t do pitching practice anymore for Little League. And if I am coaching third base and the ball rolls my way, I just lob it back to the pitcher underhanded. The pitch has seriously traumatized me.

In the winter of 2010 I actually got a call from someone at the Autism Society asking me if I would throw out the first pitch again in the upcoming season. He was really pressuring me because it would attract so much attention and raise so much money, but I couldn’t do it. I get the dry heaves now just watching other people throw out a first pitch.

But some good did come of it. I put the ball and the jersey that I wore that day up for auction at a LIFEbeat charity event. Hein tried to keep me from doing it because he thought I’d want to hold on to them for sentimental value. “I never want
to see these things again,” I told him. One of the show’s sponsors paid eighteen thousand dollars for it. He takes the ball around the country with him when he travels and, if he sees a celebrity, asks them to take a picture with it. I’ve got one of Tony Hawk smiling with the ball.

I’m glad it brought someone some joy.

I’D BE A LIAR
if I told you that a week into my job with Howard I could look ahead and see where I am today. When I started, I loved working for everyone in Howard’s orbit. He and Robin and Fred were maestros in the studio, riffing perfectly and setting one another up for comedy gold. They’d only been together for a couple of years at that point, but they had the rhythm of well-trained sketch artists. I was just the interloper who had thirty days to prove himself. But I was determined to make myself valuable during that month. If it worked out, great. If not, maybe they’d still like me enough to recommend me for another radio job.

The way the offices were set up, I sat on one side of the building near Fred and Howard. Robin was on the other side, in the newsroom. Because of that, I didn’t have as much interaction with her as I did with Howard and Fred. You could always hear her coming because she has that incredible laugh
that filled the halls. But those first couple of years, she was the one who reminded me most of my mother. I didn’t know how Robin was going to react to me day-to-day. I remember one afternoon I got to work and Fred met me at the front door. “I hear Robin and Howard talking in Howard’s office,” he said. “There’s a lot of yelling and your name keeps coming up.”

When Howard called me in it turned into a screaming match between Robin and me. I can’t remember what we were fighting about. Finally Howard said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on but figure it out.” I was a kid in my early twenties and what I cared about most was drinking and hooking up. After I read Robin’s book, I realized she was actually doing a very good job of putting on a good face while dealing with a lot of personal shit. We get along great now, but sometimes I got on her nerves.

Howard had created the kind of environment where everyone could be themselves and contribute to the show. He was so normal and funny and had such a good vibe, but he also had a very clear picture of what he wanted. He’d listen to all of our ideas, pick the best parts of each one, and incorporate them. I was used to working for Roz—someone who didn’t accept anyone’s opinions except her own.

In order to secure my place at the show, I had decided I should follow Fred around like a puppy. I spent more time watching him than anyone else because he clearly knew a lot about producing radio. Getting to see him work every day made me realize that he was a much more important element of the show than a listener might think. Plus, I could see that he needed a hand.

For his part, Fred wanted to show me the ropes so I could free him up to do more writing and segment producing. He knew that was why Howard hired me: to take care of stuff around the office so the creative people could be as creative as possible. If Fred said, “Hey, we need two baked potatoes and
four ounces of turkey with no salt,” my attitude wasn’t
Are you kidding me?
It was
I’ll get it for you as fast as I can
. I could see Fred was getting bogged down in nuts-and-bolts stuff and it was keeping him from being creative.

I watched Fred write some bits and Howard would voice them. Then Fred would do the background tracks for song parodies and harmonize with himself, layering one vocal on top of the other. Sometimes, if he required crowd noise we needed to make our own. Fred would grab people as they were walking by or call people from their desks into the studio to get a good buzz going. And if no one was around, he built the crowd himself, standing in different parts of the studio and at different distances from the microphone. He’d do a high voice and a low voice, then have the engineer layer one on top of the other until, like magic, you had a crowd of people where once there had just been a single guy behind a microphone.

He was so technically sound, an unbelievable writer and producer. Not the kind of producing I do, but producing pieces, telling engineers how to make them. No matter how pressed he was for time—the show would be starting in half an hour and an engineer would decide that that was when it was time to take a break—Fred would still calmly explain to me what was happening.

After working on the show for just three weeks I already felt an intense loyalty to it. The guys had really taken me in. All around me was this corporate environment—I was dealing with a station lawyer about a half-dozen daily issues regarding the show and I worked with music directors and the station general manager. But within the confines of the show it was very loose and comfortable. The only goal was doing something interesting and unique and entertaining. How we got there or who came up with the idea was secondary. Everyone found a way to contribute, on the air and off.

One afternoon Howard decided we were going to do something
that had never been done on radio before: convince a woman to get naked on the air. Just because none of our listeners could see what we were doing didn’t mean we couldn’t be titillating and push the envelope. He announced the contest, and we had three women call in who wanted to do it. It really didn’t take much convincing. I took their numbers, called them back, and set up the times for them to come in the next day.

Before the show that afternoon, Howard pulled me aside and said, “Listen, this isn’t a circus, okay? I want you to put newspaper over the windows. Do not let anyone who doesn’t need to be in the studio get inside the studio.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

We went on the air. The girls were inside. And it was crazy. The way Howard described them was brilliant. You didn’t need to see them to get a clear picture of how good they looked. A steady stream of people—mostly the other young producers and assistants I had been working with for the past year—were coming up to the door trying to get into the studio. And I told all of them to turn around. That wasn’t too hard.

But then the lawyer I worked with every day came by. “I need to get in,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said. “Howard told me not to let anyone in.”

“I am the lawyer,” he said again, calmly but more forcefully. “You need to let me in.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “I am the lawyer and I need to see if there is anything indecent happening in there.”

I don’t know where I got the balls to say what I said next.

“Well,” I said, “you don’t really need to
see
if something indecent is going on. You need to
hear
if something indecent is going on. If you want, you can sit across the hall and listen on some headphones.”

He was pissed. He stared at me. And then he audibly grunted and turned on his heels to go to listen to the show.

Afterward I told Howard what happened. He told me I did the right thing, but two other things happened because of it: One, he saw that I had his back. Two, I saw that he had my back for having his back. There were no repercussions for what I did. And I realized, from then on, in any dispute between Howard and management, I was always going to side with Howard. If I had to put my eggs in one basket, without a doubt they were going in his.

Even after that incident, though, I still wasn’t sure if I had a full-time job. I had been working on the show for nearly a month. And I was literally counting the days until those four weeks were up. I figured Howard and Fred were, too, and then we would have a conversation about how I was doing, what I needed to do to get better, and whether I had a long-term future at the show.

The show ended at 6:54:30 on the dot and at the end of every day I would grab the drum and the cymbal and walk back to Howard’s office with him. We’d do some small talk about the show. But at the one-month mark I was too anxious. I just blurted out, “So, what’s the story?”

“About what?” he said, kind of confused.

“About me,” I said. “You guys told me I was being hired on a temporary basis for a month. Well, it’s been a month. Am I hired?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “What are you talking about? You got the job.”

IN 1996, AFTER THREE KIDS
and forty-five years of marriage, my parents should have been getting a place in Florida and settling into their twilight years.

Instead, they got divorced.

All those years while I was growing up, when my dad came home from work and my mom laced into him, he had threatened to walk out. But he never did it. Even after we were all out of the house, I kept waiting for him to call me and say, “I’m done.” Once Steven died, though, I assumed the trauma from that would keep them together forever.

So when my dad told me over the phone that he was leaving my mom, I thought he was bluffing.

But he wasn’t. She had had a complete mental breakdown—I can’t even tell you what it was about—and he had had enough. The fact that it took forty-five years was actually impressive.

When I called my mom she was in a rage. She wanted revenge, the way she did when she felt wronged by a neighbor or one of her sisters. “I want to call Dominic Barbara,” she said. Dominic is one of the most powerful divorce attorneys in New York, famous for representing Mary Jo Buttafuoco, and a regular on the show.

“Don’t call Dominic,” I said. “He handles really high-profile divorces for people who have a lot of money. You guys don’t have any money at all.”

She ignored me, looked up his number herself, and called him. Dominic called me and said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take really good care of your mother.”

“I wish you had told her you were too busy,” I said.

For some reason I thought this would be easy. My father had decided to give my mom the house and whatever money he had in his savings account. He told me, “No matter what happens, she is still your mother. I spent most of my life with her and I’ll always care about her.”

How he found the strength, I have no idea. Because my mom was out for blood. She wanted to go to court and get even more. As much as I tried to tell her there was nothing left to get, she didn’t want to listen. When I was a kid her rages would subside, eventually. But this was different; for the first month after my dad moved out of the house, she was in a constant pique. It was as though she were banging pots 24/7. Only now I was an adult, not a six-year-old kid at the kitchen table afraid to speak up. I could see that she was being irrational and I could tell her what I thought, because I could escape. “Mom,” I said, “you’re going to go to court and have to give a lawyer a third of whatever you get, which is nothing, because there is nothing left.”

My father really had given her whatever he had. He was living in an apartment on Long Island with four other guys. He wouldn’t even let me come see it. He had just wanted out.

When my mom realized she wasn’t going to go to court she began accusing Dominic of screwing her over. At one of their meetings he pulled out a tape recorder and turned it on, just to capture her tirades. But he did eventually get her to sign the papers. With the stroke of a pen, I was a child of divorce.