Bob Carroll Part 4
A Most Unforgettable Character
Part 4: Final Impressions
[This is a difficult period for me to write about, because it’s when Bob and I gradually drifted apart, our friendship strained by distance.]
Bob and I returned to the seminary after Mississippi and immediately launched a campaign to make the rule more relevant to real life (i.e., do away with most of it). Bob was on fire. Father Purta had led off the year by extending an ill-advised invitation to the class presidents to give him feedback on the rule changes. Using Vatican II verbiage, Bob composed a response from the presidents that was a model of diplomacy but also a veiled demand for deeper changes. He started by thanking Fr. Purta for implementing new policies and bringing a new spirit of collegiality to the seminary. Then he humbly invited him to critique our student behavior in the wake of those policy initiatives. Then he laid out some “hopes” for the future:
1) Guarantees written into the rule of open discussions with faculty without fear of reprisal;
2) Guarantees written into the rule that there would be permanent regular meetings between the rector and class presidents;
3) Guarantees written into the rule that, when a faculty member votes to clip a student, he must personally give the student his reasons along with specific examples; (Can you imagine?)
4) Guarantees written into the rule that there be a system of appeal in all clipping cases.
I took the letter to the next meeting of the Presidents’ Council and got everyone except the deacon class president to sign it. Purta now knew what he was up against.
Bob’s next political insight was that we needed to have a united student body. Father Purta was a master at divide-and-conquer, so we needed a strong, unitary voice. We began demanding an elected student body president.
Right about this time, the movie fiasco hit. (NOTE: At the end of Part Two, I mistakenly said the movie inquisition happened before we went to Mississippi. Actually, it happened right after we got back to St. Pat’s, Fall of ‘65.)
So you can imagine . . . we’re just back from the South, where we’ve watched Black citizens being deprived of civil rights and due process. We’ve arrived back at the seminary and realized that we don’t have any civil rights or due process either! We’re all set to do battle with the faculty, a fight to the death for individual liberty. And then a bunch of our classmates get all freaked out about a condom in a movie! What?!! Get serious!
Anyway, we’d just gone through all this drama, and then, shortly before Christmas, Bob told me he had decided to leave the seminary and move to the emerging Haight Ashbury neighborhood. At first I felt deserted, almost betrayed. Eventually though, I started to realize that I was much more invested in seminary issues than Bob, that his activism needed a much larger canvas; so I decided to continue the struggle for seminary liberation with the help of some of the younger guys who had found their liberation through Dylan and the Beatles. I ran for student body president, got elected, and continued to harass Father Purta for the rest of the year, until I decided to leave after my deacon summer.
In the meantime, Bob found an apartment on Cole Street in the Haight Ashbury and was soon joined by several other ex-seminarians - Mike Anderson, Mike McAlister, Gene Merlin and Kerry Yates. Six months later, I rented a place just up the hill on Belvedere Street, so we saw a lot of each other.
Bob’s first post-seminary project was something he called a “theatrical.” He recruited a number of us to play supporting roles in a loosely-structured play he wrote about W.C. Fields. He didn’t want to perform it in theaters, but rather in people’s living rooms. I remember going to several homes around the Bay Area and acting out various incidents from W.C. Fields’ life. We always ended the performance with a solemn funeral procession around the neighborhood singing the Dies Irae with candles and incense. (By now we’d grown fond of such spoof processions, having practiced them first in Dumpy Becker’s Canon Law class and then in our seminary movie.)
Bob was frustrating as a director, because he always pretended to welcome new ideas and suggestions from cast or audience, but actually he already knew exactly what he wanted and wasn’t about to change anything. It would have been easier for all of us if he’d just told us what he wanted from the start.
After the W.C. Fields show, he wrote another one about Mao’s China, again using several friends as supporting actors. Eventually, though, he got frustrated with the whole collaborative process and began developing what he called “One Man Shows.” The most famous of these was “The Salmon Show” where he compared the spawning of salmon to capitalism. He eventually ended up performing it around the world, and one European financial newspaper said in a review, “While we totally disagree with the artist’s political stance, he has the best grasp of cash flow we’ve ever seen.”
Sometime in the mid ‘70s, I had introduced Bob to Jack Davis, a colleague of mine from Lone Mountain. Jack was a theater guy with a big communal house on 25th and Sanchez, the perfect setting for “The Salmon Show.” Though I’d been living out of state for a couple of years, I happened to be back in the City when the performance was scheduled at Jack’s, so I showed up for it. Afterwards, Bob and I walked back to the Haight together, talking about the show and his other ventures. On the way, I made the mistake of asking him if he’d seen any of our old classmates lately. That totally set him off, and he flew into one of his drama-queen rages, telling me I was stuck in the past, still hung up on the seminary, afraid to move on with my life, etc., etc. I’d seen Bob get angry at a lot of other people over the years, but I’d never been the direct target of his wrath before. He stayed mad at me for the rest of our walk and, when we parted, I felt like our friendship might be over for good.
I subsequently moved to Oregon, then to Colorado, and didn’t see Bob for several years. In 1983 a friend in New York asked me to come out and officiate at his wedding. I got there a day early was wandering around Battery Park and the Village until, finally exhausted, I sat down on a bench in Washington Square. I was feeling solitary and depressed, very out-of-place in this fast-paced, high-performance city. Gradually I became aware of two guys at the other end of the bench talking about a fundraiser. One of the voices sounded very familiar. I looked over and, sure enough, it was Bob! His yellow hair was much longer now, frizzy and flared in a manic mophead. I got up and walked over behind him, reluctant to interrupt, since the last time we were together he almost tore my head off.
“Bob?” I finally blurted. He turned around, looked at me, and said, “Greg??!!” Then he jumped up and pulled me into a bear hug, just like nothing had ever happened. He introduced me to the guy he’d been talking to and told me I had to come to the fundraiser he was emceeing that evening. Alphabet City was one of the last bastions for the poor, he said, and the mayor had just offered artists low interest loans to buy up property there and turn it into another SOHO. Everyone in New York evidently thought it was a great idea - except Bob and all the impoverished residents who would be forced out of their homes. I remembered then something I had always known about Bob: He invariably sided with the most vulnerable members of society. Even though he could have had fame and fortune for himself, he always reverted back to his priestly compassion for the poor and suffering.
We walked over to Alphabet City that night, to an old church hall where the fundraiser was being held. I went in and sat down, watching people of all types, ages, and colors file in. The hall was filled to capacity. This was their place and their battle. And Bob was their catalyst. He came out on the stage and did his usual charismatic, funny, cynical, loving schtick. He had them laughing, he had them angry, and he had them clapping appreciatively for every performer who had volunteered for this slop-show fundraiser. Bob impressed me more than ever that night. I saw him as a fierce saint in the Dorothy Day tradition, entering the places Jesus walked, places I had always conveniently avoided. And, as usual, he made me very uncomfortable, even as I admired his courage, integrity, and vision.
After the fundraiser, we went over to the flat he was sharing with several other actors, a spare place whose main ornamentation was the wit and conversation of its inhabitants. Later that evening I asked Bob what other interests he was pursuing. In typical Bob fashion, always wanting to knock me off balance, he said simply, “I’m into depravity.”
The next time I heard about him, he was dying. It was three years later, at our 25th reunion, that Bob Murnane came up to me and said, “I hear Bob’s got some kind of terminal illness and he’s contemplating suicide.
He gave me Bob’s phone number and I called him a few days later. The voice that answered seemed as vibrant and upbeat as ever.
I said, “What’s this I hear about you dying?” and, as though he were describing another theatrical production, Bob told me he had Hodgkins disease (he never admitted to having AIDS), but that he had been performing benefits for the Hemlock Society and had stockpiled all the drugs necessary to commit suicide. He couldn’t tell me when or where, he said, because that could make me an accessory to a crime. Dramatic pause . . . “I hope you’re not shocked by any of this.”
I told him I’d known him long enough that I’d never be shocked by anything he said or did. We talked a little longer about his plans to stage his suicide as a final theater piece. Then, when there was nothing else to talk about, we said goodbye, knowing this was probably the last time we’d ever hear the sound of each other’s voices. I think I told him I loved him, though I’m sure I couched it in much more cynically-Bob-like terms.
It was almost two years later that I got a call from Fran Barley, Bob’s old friend from San Francisco. She said that, a few days earlier, Bob had called and told her he had decided to end his life the next day. He’d been performing his grand finale, The (W)hole Show, about his own suicide for a couple of years, building up the suspense among his friends, and evidently the time had finally arrived. Fran told me she got up the next morning, uncharacteristically went to Mass in Bob’s honor, and bought a bottle of Jamesons on her way home from work, so she could wake him in true Irish fashion. She had no sooner filled and raised her glass than there was a knock on the door. It was Bob, showing up for his own funeral. He came in and they drank Irish whiskey and laughed about his timing. Then they called a few of his friends, played South Pacific and Otis Redding on the stereo, and toasted his imminent death. Finally one of them drove him to a friend’s basement where, presumably, he would do the deed. Around midnight, Bob swallowed the drugs he had systematically pocketed from his many hospital stays, and went into a coma. Either the drugs weren’t strong enough, or his digestive system was too compromised to keep them down. Much to his subsequent anger and chagrin, he didn’t die. He was found the next morning, resuscitated against his living will, and placed in a psychiatric cell due to “suicidal tendencies.” Eventually he was transferred to a hospice right across from Most Holy Redeemer Church. Fran was with him as the attendant wheeled him up the ramp to the hospice. She said the attendant was bracing the heavy metal door open with his foot while he attempted to get Bob around the top of the ramp. Suddenly the door slammed shut and the attendant had to start banging on it with his fist to get someone to open it. Bob, totally disgusted, groused, “This is what Marx said the end of the world would be like.”
The attendant said, “Which Marx? - Karl or Groucho?”
Bob didn’t miss a beat. “Groucho was the one who really knew what was happening.”
Bob died April 7, 1988 at the Coming Home Hospice. His brother Don was there, as well as a few of his close friends. He had attempted to be the ultimate performer, personally choreographing every drama life presented him, even his own death. But Bob’s career as writer/director was, in the end, cut short. His final script, so meticulously written and re-edited, was eventually scrapped by the cosmic producer.
And Bob - who so prided himself on his isolation and cynical bravado, who so relished the idea of riding off into the sunset as a heroically-unencumbered Shane figure - found himself dying, not on a lonely basement floor, but in a comfortable hospice bed surrounded by family and friends.
It was a surprise ending for Bob; but one heartily applauded by all who loved him.