Bob Carroll

The Last Time I Saw Bob     

Greg McAllister

In 1982, I attended a friend’s wedding in New York City. All the people who came were successful young professionals - writers, photographers, editors, stewardesses, all pulling down huge salaries and all happily married, or at least happily in love.  All of them, that is, except me.  I was still working a low-end job, barely making ends meet, my love life in shambles.  The more I thought about it, as I wandered aimlessly around the city, the more depressed I got, until I finally sank down on a bench in Washington Square and put my head in my hands.  So immersed was I in my dark thoughts that it took me a while to register the voice at the other end of the bench.  There was something vaguely familiar about it, the intensity perhaps, as the speaker passionately ranted on about the poor of Alphabet Town, how they were about to be displaced from their homes because the mayor was offering low interest loans to artists, enticing them to move in and transform the neighborhood into another Soho.  Something about the voice made me lift my head and look over at the speaker. 

There, his wispy red hair teased into a sort of albino afro, was Bob Carroll, my old seminary classmate and fellow Mississippi freedom rider.  I hadn’t seen him for at least five years and we hadn’t parted on the best of terms,withheimangrily denouncing me for wallowing in seminary nostalgia instead of severing my ties to the past and moving on like he had. Bob’s anger was always intimidating, and I wasn’t sure if he was still mad at me or not, so I rather gingerly walked over behind him and spoke his name.  He turned around, saw me, and leapt to his feet to embrace me, seemingly with no memory of his former anger. We spent the rest of the day walking around the Village talking and laughing, and that night I accompanied him to a fundraiser he emceed for the soon-to-be-displaced residents of Alphabet Town.  When we got back to the loft he was sharing with a couple of other actors, he reverted to his old, more cynical self, doing his best to shock me out of any comfortable mindsets I might have settled into.  That was when he told me that he was “into depravity,” a phrase that would come back to haunt me four years later, after his attempted suicide and eventual death from AIDS.  Bob always chose to share the front lines with whatever population was most oppressed and marginalized, and he stayed true to that commitment to the end.