They Call Me Baba Booey (3 page)

As close as they were, my mom’s family loved arguing. It was like they couldn’t stand to be too far away and then couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Chaos reigned at those family meals. My father called them the Fighting Cotroneos.

His family was different. He grew up in a railroad flat in Little
Italy, on the corner of Mott and Hester. His family was quieter and a little sadder. When my dad was small—“Too small to remember all the details,” he once told me—he had a one-year-old brother who died from a throat infection. The funeral was held in his parents’ apartment.

My dad was always in great shape and kind of looked like a low-level hood. There’s a great picture of him and my mom from their wedding in 1951. They both have ink black hair—hers is down to her shoulders and his is slicked black. He’s got on a double-breasted black tuxedo with a white tie—he was a dead ringer for Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto. They were both rail thin, but my dad had butcher’s hands. Thick and strong.

He wasn’t afraid of a fight, either. There was always tension with the Chinese where he lived because Chinatown and Little Italy are basically right on top of each other. One night he got into a fight with a kid from across Canal Street—which separates the two neighborhoods—and beat the crap out of him. A week later my dad saw the kid again, only this time he was in the back of a police car, pointing at him. Two cops got out, picked my dad up, and arrested him. He ended up spending the night at the Tombs, which is what they called the jail in lower Manhattan. It deserved the nickname.

My dad was pretty smart. A junior high teacher recommended him for Stuyvesant High School, one of New York City’s top public schools. “But I was always goofing around with kids in my neighborhood, so I dropped out. Never graduated. You weren’t supposed to know that,” my dad once told me when I interviewed him for a family history video.

He wasn’t a thug—but he lived on the periphery of the mob that ran Little Italy. And he liked to gamble. Even though he grew up on the Lower East Side, my dad loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a game-winning home run to beat the Dodgers for the
National League pennant, my dad lost a shitload of money. He was listening to the game on the roof of his building and was so upset he threw the radio over the edge.

Years later, I was signing autographs at an event and Giants hero Thomson was there, too, right next to me. I told him that story so he signed a picture for my father, which read, “To Sal, Sorry about the radio, Bobby Thomson.”

My dad knew enough about gambling and the guys running the rackets in his neighborhood to know it wasn’t the life for him. When World War II started he had just dropped out of high school so he decided to join the army. For more than a year he moved through the United States, training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, then in Illinois, and finally in Hawaii, “for jungle training,” he said. When he finally shipped out to fight in the Pacific he thought he was headed for the Yap Islands, but the officers on the ship announced that plans had changed. They were headed for the Philippines.

My mother later told me that when the two of them went to see
Saving Private Ryan
it was harrowing; it put my dad right back in the war. He was seventeen when he landed in the Philippines. Unreal. When I was seventeen I was reading album liner notes trying to figure out who played horns on a Bob Seger record. My dad told me, “It was just like that movie. Guys were puking as they bounced around the waves. Then the front of the boat comes down and we run into the water and it’s just every man for himself, guys were being killed right next to me on the beach.”

He spent his war on the front lines as a medic, even though he hadn’t even graduated from high school. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t doing battlefield surgery. His job was to patch someone together quick so they could stay alive long enough to get attention from the real doctors. Medics didn’t have the option of ignoring it when one of their guys was screaming. No matter how bad the gunfire, they had to get low and go. And they were
constantly under attack. “Banzai attacks,” my father called them. They happened at night. “You don’t hear them. It was hand-to-hand combat with bayonets. Every hill, every village was a battle.”

There was one firefight he remembered that went on for two straight nights. They were under heavy attack, and my dad was in a foxhole when he heard someone yelling, “Medic! Medic!”

“We were dug in and the Japs were dug in and we were shooting at each other,” he said. “Our men were hurt in the middle of no-man’s-land and the officer called for me. I crawled out there, bandaged them up, gave them sulfur, and dragged one guy back at a time. I couldn’t stand up because fire was coming constantly. It’s all luck, who lives.”

For that he earned a Bronze Star. Not that he wanted to discuss it. Ever. I remember when John Kerry was running for president my dad saw him on TV and said, “I don’t like that guy.” I asked him why and he said, “Because he’s always talking about his medals.” This was when the Republicans were claiming Kerry hadn’t earned his Vietnam honors. I said, “Dad, he’s being attacked. I thought if anyone would be on his side it would be you.” But my dad said, “I don’t care. You don’t talk about it. Talking about it is wrong.”

Later in the war, while in Okinawa, my father’s unit was under fire and an artillery shell exploded above his head. A piece of shrapnel pierced his backpack and became embedded next to his lung. They shipped him out to a hospital, performed surgery, let him recover for a month, and then shipped him back to the front lines. “As they were giving us new weapons and clothes for a major offensive, we got word that Truman had dropped the bomb. The war was over. Two weeks later I came home.”

I once asked my dad if he’d ever killed anyone and he ignored the question. But my older brother Anthony claims that, before my father died, he confessed to doing some bad things over there.

When he came home he hustled, delivering coffee around Manhattan, polishing costume jewelry, working as a proofreader for a publishing company. He was a young guy on the make. And my mom was a young woman with a little bit of sass. When I think of them courting each other I envision the movie
Goodfellas
, particularly the scenes in the nightclubs. My parents always used to talk about going to the Copa. I also hear my mom imitating her mother, who called my dad “the Mott Street gambler.”

“When he would be coming over my mother didn’t even say his name,” my mom told me. “She just said, ‘Is Mott Street coming over?’ ”

It wasn’t that my grandma didn’t like him. She was just wary of guys who dressed like gangsters, lived in the city, and courted her daughter. Still, that didn’t stop my parents from getting married at a Coney Island Italian restaurant called Villa Joe’s, in front of one hundred friends and family.

Naturally, after their weeklong honeymoon in Miami, they moved into an apartment in the Cotroneos’ building in Bensonhurst. Their life together seemed like the beginning of their own American dream. “Back then,” my father once told me, “your mom was normal.”

The night after my mom went into the hospital, my dad and I took a ride to the Syosset psych ward. I was five, too young to visit her there, but my brothers weren’t, and they had spent the afternoon with her. It was time for them to come home, and my dad thought the car ride would be a good opportunity to explain what was going on.

He never talked to me like I was a kid. I try to talk to my kids the same way—honestly. There were plenty of times when, after my mom experienced a screaming fit or broke down in tears, he told me I hadn’t done anything wrong, that it
wasn’t my fault Mom was upset. And he made sure I understood it wasn’t his fault, either.

Syosset Hospital was twenty-five minutes from our house. While driving, my dad said to me, “Your mom is sick. But not the regular kind of sick.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Her brain is sick,” he answered. “And when she acts sad or angry it isn’t her fault. She doesn’t want to be like this.” That sounded good to me. I knew enough to think that doctors made people better.

The hospital was a big, gray, stone building that was six stories high, tall for Long Island. We pulled into a circular driveway that was surrounded by flowers and then walked into the first-floor lobby, which was bustling with people. To a five-year-old, it was a fantastic place. The walls were painted a bright yellow; there was a gift shop and couches to play on and a vending machine in the corner. It wasn’t a mental institution. It was exciting. And it was where my mother was, so it was where I wanted to be.

The door to the psych ward happened to be directly off the main lobby, and the entry was always protected by a security guard, who looked like he was defending Fort Knox. That’s because it wasn’t just a regular door, but something heavy that moved back and forth with wires and cables. You had to push a button that opened it. My father worked in the ice cream business—first as a deliveryman and then in sales—and I had been to his office in the Bronx. It had a blast freezer that was kept at 40 degrees below zero to store inventory. I loved that the door to my mom’s room at the hospital looked just like the one at the ice cream factory. As I got older, I realized it also looked like the last line of defense in a cell block.

Since I couldn’t go in to see my mom, I waited in the lobby with one of my brothers, while the other one was with her.
Then they’d switch, and the other one would keep an eye on me. This was our routine every other night for two weeks.

In the mornings a family friend from Brooklyn we called Jeanie Blah Blah made us breakfast and helped get us ready for school. We kids didn’t know her real name. Everyone called her Jeanie Blah Blah behind her back because she never, ever shut up. She was like a utility aunt, an honorary Cotroneo who grew up near my mom and knew all the siblings. She wasn’t married, smoked like a chimney, didn’t work, didn’t have children, and was always around. When someone needed some extra help with the kids, they called Jeanie Blah Blah. Once, she showed up at our door for a party and Steven yelled, “Jeanie Blah Blah is here.” The adults practically died.

After school Jeanie gave us a snack and then for dinner my aunt Maryann, who was really my cousin but was closer in age to my mom than to us, either brought us food or had us over to her house since she lived nearby. Then, after dinner, we’d go back to the hospital.

In the car on the way there, we always sat in the same places: I was in the back behind Anthony, who sat where my mom would have been sitting in the front. And Steven sat behind my dad. We didn’t talk on those trips. My mom was the chatterbox. I am a chatterbox. But my dad was always stoic. He even mowed the lawn in double-knit pants, collared shirts, and brown shoes. When my mom bought him sneakers he returned them and said, “These are for kids.” Steven tended to keep to himself; he was the only person in my house who could find a way to disappear while he was standing right in front of you. And Anthony, at this point in his life, was full of rage and rebellion, a streak he was already prone to. I’m sure watching his mother deteriorate didn’t help.

Instead of talking, we listened to the great AM pop station of the time, WABC. Music was something we all loved.

At the hospital, I would sit and wonder what was happening behind that ice cream freezer door. But as I waited with one of my brothers in the lobby, they never talked to me about it. They didn’t talk to each other, either. While Steven and I shared a room at home, the age difference between us ensured that he and Anthony were much closer to each other than I was to them. Anthony tells me now the two of them never discussed what was happening, either, because they were too freaked out. They didn’t want to go behind that door. But what were they going to do? It was our mom.

I saw her once. By accident. One of my brothers was coming out and the other was going in. I was sitting in the yellow lobby, bobbing up and down on my knees, peering over the back of the sofa, as I did whenever the cables started whirring and the door began sliding open. I was about to turn back around when, just then, I caught a glimpse of my mom.

She was shuffling to the front of the door, her black hair matted down in a way she would never let it be at home. There were paper slippers on her feet and a hospital gown hanging loosely from her shoulders to the floor. She tried to smile. She slowly lifted her arm to wave. Then one brother walked out, another walked in, and the doors whirred shut. And just like that, she disappeared.

AFTER TWELVE YEARS IN BROOKLYN
—only a couple of them spent at Hotel Cotroneo—my parents moved to Uniondale. For $21,500, they bought a 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath brick ranch with a basement. I was two years old when we moved in. My mom had a field of avocado green carpet installed over the wood floors. She covered the living room couches in sheets so no one messed them up. I think I saw the actual cushions of those couches five times in the twenty-three years I lived at home.

It was a tiny house. There was nowhere to hide. And the only constant was that my mom was completely inconsistent.