They Call Me Baba Booey by Gary Dell'Abate Read Free Book Online Page A

my dad and Anthony chose to get into a crazy, knock-down, drag-out argument about Anthony joining the army after he graduated. My dad was demanding it; Anthony was defiant. I turned the volume up but they only yelled louder. I moved closer, my nose inches from the screen, and I still couldn’t hear. Soon my mom was crying and wailing, too.
    “Well, if you don’t like it here then you can move out!” my dad yelled.
    “Fuck you, maybe I will, because you can’t talk to me like that!” Anthony screamed.
    Oh no he didn’t!
My mom dropped F-bombs all the time, but no one in my house ever said the word back to my parents. Even for someone as used to cursing as I was—I heard it so often, to me it sounded like white noise—this was impossibleto ignore. The greatness of watching myself on TV and the entire
Wonderama
experience would have to wait.
    Anthony moving out? The idea seemed impossible. He hadn’t graduated from high school. He didn’t have a job. Where was he going to go? But none of these minor inconveniences stopped him. After that last exchange, my father was so stunned he didn’t have time to react. Anthony stomped into his room, grabbed his sleeping bag, threw some clothes out of his window onto the front lawn, and left. He was gone. It was devastating on two levels: I didn’t get to see myself on TV, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see my brother again.
    I never did get to watch the show. Years later, while shooting
Private Parts
, I met an extra who was friends with Bob McAllister’s daughter, who kept a tape of every show. Of course, she never labeled them. Four different times Bob McAllister’s daughter looked through her stack of tapes but she couldn’t find my episode. I did, however, get a chance to speak with McAllister. In 1994, four years before he died, he called in to the Stern show to say he thought it was okay for the government to control what kids could listen to. Howard hung up on him.
    For weeks after Anthony left, I had no idea where he was living. No one in my house spoke to me about it. I don’t even know if my parents knew where he was. Then one day at school a kid who always used to shake me down, Alan Franklin, stopped me in the hallway. He lived in the slums in Uniondale. “Hey,” he said, “your brother is living next door to me. Gimme a quarter.”
    Soon after that my brother came by the house to see me. He still wanted nothing to do with my parents, but I was just his little brother, I didn’t do anything wrong. One day he picked me up and brought me to his new place, right next to Alan’s. There were twelve white guys who looked like hippies in the middle of this run-down, black neighborhood. Everyone in theliving room was wearing a dashiki and smoking something. One of them had a water bed and I remember thinking,
This isn’t a house where a mother lives
. Which is exactly why my brother moved in.
    Eventually he tried to make peace with my parents. A week before he graduated he went to see them. Everyone apologized. He wanted them in the crowd when he received his diploma. But as he walked across the stage that night, he couldn’t resist making a personal statement against authority. When the principal offered him a handshake, my brother blew past him. I didn’t even notice it, but my parents did. Anthony was going out with friends after the ceremony and when my parents and I got into our car I could tell everyone was mad—the silence was thick with tension—so I asked what was going on. My mom said to me, “Did you see that Anthony wouldn’t shake his principal’s hand?” They were mortified.
    It was a couple of months before they all spoke to one another again.
    For all of Anthony’s outward rebellion, Steven was the one my mom worried about most. “It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to look out for,” she used to say.
    Everyone always said that Anthony and I were my mother’s kids, while Steven was my father’s. He was thinner than we were and,