They Call Me Baba Booey Read Online Free Page B

That’s not music!” Then he’d break into a Frank Sinatra song from the 1940s.
    We all laughed, especially my mom.
    When she was in a good mood and balanced, she was all love. She was very physical, and she would grab my friends and kiss them on the head and say, for no reason at all, “Oh your mother must be so proud.” She’d be so warm, telling all the neighbors and my friends to come over, that her kitchen was never closed. The problem was, you never knew when that mood was going to change. She would spend three days being as warm and loving as anyone you’d ever seen. And then three days of being a normal mom. And then on the seventh day she’d wake up saying she was feeling blue.
    Most people in their lives have “an incident” involving their parents, the moment when their mom or dad just loses it and rage trumps being rational. Well, we had “incidents.”
    Sometimes my mom would plop food down at dinner and then angrily bang some pots and pans while she washed them, before dropping them altogether in a loud clang. We never knew what had set her off. She’d walk into her room screaming and slam the door. You couldn’t believe the words that came out of her mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. A sailor would have blushed. She’d come out, we’d think it was over, and then she would dial a number, usually one of her sisters, and fight with whoever could provoke her into a rage. Then she’d slam the phone down five or six times and go back into her room and scream some more. “These people think they live on an island,” she liked to say. “Like you live all by yourself and can do whatever you want. They think they can pull one over on me, they think I don’t know, they think I don’t see. I see, I see what’s going on.”
    The episodes didn’t frighten me in a way that made me cower under the table or flinch if my mom came near me. I alwaysloved her. But they affected me in other ways. How could they not? I had a bedwetting problem until I was in second grade. And I felt horrible about it. Not because my parents got angry with me or because my brothers made fun of me. Neither happened actually. I was too young for my brothers to think of me as a rival worthy of their torment. I just felt bad because I didn’t know why it was happening. I was peeing in my sleep so often that my mom went to the drugstore and bought an expensive machine that connected to the bed. It had an alarm that went off whenever liquid hit the mattress. We never even connected it. That night my dad got home and said, “What good is that? If the alarm goes off when liquid hits the mattress, it’s too late.” My mom said she was going to return it and that’s when Steven chimed in, pretending to be our mom calling the pharmacy. “Hi, this is Mrs. Dell’Abate, I’d like to return the piss machine.”
    One morning, showing a little frustration, my mom said to me, “You have to stop doing this.” I said back, “I know. I want to.” If I had known then what I know now, I would have said, “Stop screaming like a banshee and maybe I will stop peeing in my bed.”
    Mostly, when my mom lost it, Anthony, Steven, and I never said a word to one another. If she morphed at dinner, we just kept eating, giving one another looks. But we didn’t want to talk because whoever spoke would draw attention to himself and become the target of her rant. Other than my mom yelling, no one said a word.
    Blind rages like that only have to happen seven or eight times before you adapt and get used to it. Every explosion, we’d all just wonder how long the episode would last. Their length was never something you could gauge. My dad would get home, hear what was going on, and say, “Okay, this is what we get today.”
    From where I sat, it always seemed like my mom was theone looking to pick a fight. One day she accused my father of cheating. I was at home when she called his office and started screaming at his assistant and the boss’s assistant.