They Call Me Baba Booey Read Online Free Page A

helping. I never felt angry with her. I never stopped believing my dad when he told me it wasn’t her fault. It just seemed like the more that doctors tried to help her, the worse it got. I’d have grown up angry if she had been an alcoholic who never quit. But you can’t tell someone to stop being crazy.
    So we all learned to deal with it.
    Some days I came home from school and before I could put my book bag down she had her coat on and was frantically looking for the car keys, practically buzzing around the house. Then she’d push me out the door, saying, “I’ve been waiting for you; we have to go, a lot of stuff to do.” We’d drive to the Macy’s in the Roosevelt Field mall or return a book to the library or drop something off at the Cancer Society, where she worked as a volunteer. Other days I’d walk in and she’d be at an ironing board in the kitchen, happily watching Mike Douglas on the Zenith she rolled in on the TV stand from the living room. Those were the good days, the enjoyable days.
    Then there were the days when I’d get home and the house would be silent. By the time I was in school full-time, Anthony was in high school and Steven was in junior high. They had already been through my mom’s up-and-down cycles and found ways to stay out of the house until dinner. I wasn’t old enough yet. When I walked through the door it was just my mom and me. I knew the silence meant she was sleeping, or had spent most of the day sleeping and was resting. She’d slowly walk down the hall from her room to the living room, wearing her robe and looking tired. This is what happened when she was blue. She would tell me she was sick and tightly clutch her collar around her neck, complaining of a sore throat. Those days I had to play quietly by myself. I remember thinking to myself,
She is sick a lot
. Now I wonder if the physical symptoms were apart of her mental illness or the side effect of all the pills she was taking.
    Somehow, though, she always pulled herself together for dinner. Our kitchen was tiny and decorated in avocado green to match the carpet. The avocado upholstery on our chairs matched the avocado fridge, which complemented the faux-oak table in the center of the room that seated six. I was always stuck at the end of the table right in front of the oven, and the door couldn’t be opened if I was sitting at the table. When my mom had food to get out, I had to move.
    Every night I and my brothers and my mom ate dinner together at six. I sat in front of the oven, Anthony sat next to my mom, and Steven sat by himself across from them. My dad sat at the opposite end from me. But he usually came home too late for dinner. We were not a family who ate out, except for the occasional Sunday trip to Borrelli’s—the only place we deemed good enough to replace a proper Italian meal—or pizza at a place called Anthony’s. But mostly, my mom cooked, and she was a great cook. Chicken cutlets. Broiled steak. She occasionally worked as a food demonstrator—meaning she was the lady in the mall with a microphone around her neck who made something in a wok and then handed out samples. I remember being in ninth grade when she did the wok demo. We ate Chinese three days a week. In tenth grade it was the pasta maker, which looked like a toaster with a hand crank.
    Once we sat down, dinner lasted about five minutes and was almost always eaten in front of the Zenith. We watched the news, the Vietnam War unfolding on our screen as we shoveled food into our mouths.
    It was actually television, more than food, that brought us together. None of us could believe it when
The Sound of Music
—Best Picture in 1965!—appeared on TV just a year later. We couldn’t wait to watch it. It was an event! Saturday nights in our house were ruled by Carol Burnett and
All in the
Family;
Sundays belonged to Ed Sullivan. And then during commercials we talked about the musical acts, with my dad usually joking, “You call that music?