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| photo by Jeff Cuyubamba |
That is a surprisingly difficult sentence to write.
I first met Bob when we were students at Stuyvesant High School. He was a junior when I was a freshman, so under ordinary circumstances our paths probably wouldn't have crossed. But we were both members of Stuycom, Stuyvesant's club for students interested in the subway, and involved with its publication, The Straphanger.
I don't remember much about our interactions then, except that we weren't exactly friends. We weren't enemies, either. We just knew each other. But apparently we made enough of an impression on each other that, when we ran into each other a couple of years later at Queens College, we remembered each other.
And, once again, we had independently gravitated toward the same thing: the campus newspapers.
So we became part of the same extended circle of friends, acquaintances and adversaries. And thus began a friendship that, with periodic interruptions, lasted the better part of four decades.
Being Bob's friend was not always easy.
Anyone who knew him well will understand that this is something of an understatement.
Bob was egotistical. He was opinionated. He generally wanted things done his way. He picked the restaurant, the movie, the coffee shop. He set the agenda. And his ego required regular feeding.
Consequently, ours was an on-again, off-again friendship. There were periods when we went years without speaking. Then one of us would reappear and somehow we'd pick up again.
Once, after a particularly long period without contact, Bob called me. After some preliminary chitchat, we decided we should get together for lunch.
"Can I bring my fiancée?" I asked.
There was a pause.
"Wow. It HAS been a while."
That fiancée was Blair. And at that first lunch, she immediately discovered one of the reasons I kept coming back to Bob despite everything else: Bob could make me laugh like nobody else.
He had a talent for turning ordinary human interaction into absurdist theater.
Back before E-ZPass, whenever we went on road trips—which were invariably in Bob's car, because Bob driving gave Bob more control—we'd pull up to a tollbooth. Bob would hand over the money and then say something incomprehensible in a fake Slavic language.
The toll collector would stare at him.
Bob would turn to me and say something else in fake Slavic.
That was my cue.
"Ahhhh," I'd say, in my own fake Slavic accent. "'Receipt.'"
Bob would turn back to the toll collector, magnificently rolling his R:
"RRRReceipt, please."
Another favorite involved approaching strangers on the streets of Manhattan.
"Do you know what time it is?" Bob would ask, again in some vaguely foreign-sounding accent.
If they didn't know: "Do you know what time it was an hour ago?"
Usually they didn't know that either.
"Because if you tell me what time it was an hour ago, I can add an hour and know what time it is now."
Why?
Because Bob.
There were many other incidents during our Queens College years, when we were young, stupid assholes.
One day, Bob and his friend Howie discovered that the metal chairs in the Student Union cafeteria could be crumpled if a sufficiently heavy person sat in them the right way. So, in an otherwise empty cafeteria, they merrily went from chair to chair destroying college property.
Eventually security arrived.
"Who? Us?"
They were told to leave.
"My good man, we are faculty."
Then, according to the friend who witnessed this, one of them turned approximately 90 degrees, as though breaking the fourth wall in a sitcom, and announced to absolutely nobody:
"Yeah, that's plausible!"
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| photo by Jeff Cuyubamba |
To be sure, there were limits to how much Bob I could take.
For a while I refused to accompany him into 7-Eleven because he'd developed a habit of drinking the chili and liquid cheese intended as hot-dog and nacho toppings directly from the dispensers.
Because Bob.
There are other stories.
Some are funny.
Some are funny only after several decades have passed.
Some aren't funny at all.
Bob had serious flaws, and I don't want his death to magically erase them. There are people who knew him who, even after all these years, have no desire to remember him fondly. Some have good reason. I understand that.
I just don't share their experience of him.
Or, perhaps more accurately, I had some of those experiences too. They just aren't the whole of my Bob.
I saw another side of him once at my wedding.
Years earlier at Queens College, Bob had gotten into an argument with another newspaper editor who, for reasons that would require an entirely different essay, I'll call The Beastwoman. The argument ended with Bob calling her "Schmucko" and storming out.
Years later, both were invited to my wedding.
Another old newspaper associate who, for equally good reasons, I'll call the Pot-Stirring Piece of Shit, approached Bob.
"Hey, Bob! There's The Beastwoman! Why don't you go over and call her Schmucko? For old times' sake!"
So Bob walked over.
"Hello! How are you doing?"
They exchanged pleasantries.
Then Bob walked back past the Pot-Stirring Piece of Shit.
"Sorry. I just couldn't do it."
There was something revealing about that. For all his impulsiveness and all the times he crossed lines that other people wouldn't even approach, Bob actually had lines of his own. This was my wedding. He wasn't going to create a scene there for someone else's amusement.
And when Bob did create a scene, he generally didn't hide behind somebody else.
He'd take the fall himself.
Some of my favorite memories of Bob are from our road trips.
There was a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country where, among other things, Bob ate two entire shoofly pies. Afterward, we went searching for a restaurant somebody had recommended. We repeatedly stopped and asked locals for directions to "The Black Agnes."
Nobody seemed to know what we were talking about.
Eventually we found the restaurant.
It was called The Black Angus.
Mystery solved.
We went to the New York State Fair once. I remember betting on pig races. I also remember finding a booth where you could sing along with a prerecorded backing track and leave with a cassette of your performance.
Bob and I chose Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's "Say Say Say."
We sang it badly, off-key and in a variety of fake accents.
It was magnificent.
I would pay good money to have that tape now.
There were trips with our friend Vinnie to see minor-league baseball games in New York and Pennsylvania.
At a game in Williamsport, I said something like "Oy vey."
Bob immediately admonished me. We weren't in New York anymore, he explained. We were out in rural Pennsylvania. People might not take kindly to Jews being around.
This struck me as an odd concern, especially since a few minutes earlier Bob had recognized one of the coaches as a former New York Met and shouted that they should get together sometime and "have a bissel glass tea," using his finest imitation of a stereotypical elderly Jewish man. Because Bob.
Later, he walked into the men's room and announced: "Gentlemen! Start your penises!"
I suggested that, on balance, my "Oy vey" probably wasn't our biggest public-relations problem.
My favorite trip was probably to Geneva, New York, to see the Geneva Cubs.
For reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I had a gorilla costume in the car. Bob and Vinnie persuaded me to wear it.
So there I sat, in the stands, on a hot, humid summer night, slowly cooking inside a gorilla suit.
Then somebody from the team approached me. During the seventh-inning stretch, they had someone in a bear-cub costume run around the field. Would I like to join her?
Would I?
We chased each other around the field. Then I spent the rest of the game wandering through the stands high-fiving people.
It was glorious.
There was also the teenage boy who wanted to know whether the gorilla was male or female and decided the best investigative technique was to reach inside the costume and squeeze my breast.
He was disappointed.
I was somewhat more disturbed.
On another trip, Vinnie and I got into an argument while playing pool—or billiards; I still don't know the difference. Vinnie won.
I immediately declared it a "tainted win." Then a "tainted Vin."
Then I began singing "Tainted Vin" to the tune of "Tainted Love."
Repeatedly.
Vinnie wanted to kill me.
For perhaps the only time in recorded history, Bob was the peacemaker.
Bob and I also spent countless weekends driving around Long Island looking for antiques. Back then, the North Fork seemed to be filled with little antique stores.
Bob could haggle.
I couldn't.
I'd ask the price. The dealer would tell me. Then I'd either buy it or I wouldn't. This caused Bob physical pain.
Once I asked about something that cost $200. I was about to agree when Bob intervened. "How about a hundred?"
The dealer protested that I'd already been about to pay $200.
But Bob had entered the negotiation, and there was no going back. Eventually I let him take over.
I paid $125.
Of course, I had to buy Bob lunch afterward.
Bob was extraordinarily cheap. Pathologically cheap might be more accurate. Eating with him often required either vigilance or a willingness to subsidize his meal.
Once, when we had ordered exactly the same thing, we agreed to split the bill. Then we disagreed over the tip. I wanted to leave one dollar more than Bob did.
Rather than argue over fifty cents apiece, I put in the extra dollar myself.
Bob immediately tried to take it.
His reasoning was impeccable, at least inside the sovereign nation of Bob: we'd agreed on what the tip should be—meaning what he thought it should be—so if I wanted to contribute another dollar, that dollar should reduce his share.
That time I made a scene.
Bob backed down.
But once, wonderfully, Bob caught himself.
We were somewhere on Long Island and stopped for gas. Since we'd been driving around in his car, I asked if he wanted me to give him some money toward the gas.
"Yeah—"
He stopped.
"Don't do that, Moish! You know how I am!"
Antiques eventually became more than an amusement for Bob.
Bob wasn't built for conventional employment.
For a while he had a corporate job doing some sort of graphic-arts work for an investment bank. He also worked for New York City's School Construction Authority, where he frequently complained that he'd somehow landed in the only department where nobody had an opportunity to accept bribes. Neither job ended well.
Eventually he found another way.
He placed advertisements saying he bought old radios. People would call him, and he'd visit homes where old radios and other antiques had been gathering dust in basements and attics. He'd buy things and resell them.
And he became good at it.
Bob had tremendous native intelligence and an ability to become intensely knowledgeable about whatever interested him. He read voraciously about collectibles. Radios and televisions became particular specialties. He could talk for hours about some obscure radio that most of us would have looked at and seen only an old box.
He had reinvented himself.
It wouldn't be the last time.
Bob was always creating something.
He published an underground comic called Comicphobia. Later came Cinemaphobia, a movie magazine for which I occasionally wrote reviews under assumed names.
One of my pseudonyms was "Q. Whinston Brockmoore."
I wanted to make it "Q. Whinston Brockmoore III."
Bob vetoed that because it sounded fake and pretentious.
Thank God he was there to preserve my journalistic credibility.
Bob and some of our Queens College friends also made films.
Calling them "films" may be generous.
It began with Bob and Howie standing behind a table piled with food, reading from scripts. Gradually they started eating. Then the eating became more aggressive. Eventually the script was more or less abandoned while food was shoved into clothing and soda was poured over people.
At one point Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" played while the camera lovingly contemplated a carton of ice cream rotating on a Lazy Susan.
Then another food item rotated.
And another.
It was horrifying.
I laughed hysterically.
One time Bob, Howie and a third friend -- I forget who -- bought time on a local radio station to put on a comedy show. They had planned it all out well, but somehow disaster struck. I don't know if it started with technical problems or human error, but things spiraled out of control. Blair and I laughed hysterically listening to the three of them argue while "Hava Nagila" played. And then, to top it off, Howie took the mic and informed their audience that "This is the tightest ninety minutes of radio comedy you'll ever hear."
Years later, during Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates installation in Central Park, Bob made Angry Bob Meets the Gates. By then he was performing stand-up under the name Angry Bob and weighed more than 500 pounds.
I wish that film were still online.
Eventually Bob decided to become a stand-up comedian.
Most people who dream of going into show business either start young or eventually conclude that it isn't going to happen.
Bob started late.
He called himself Angry Bob. His explanation for the name was characteristically elaborate: "My name is Bob, and I'm angry."
I watched a lot of his early performances. They were unpredictable. Sometimes he was hilarious. Sometimes he was terrible.
But Bob kept doing it.
And slowly, something happened.
He got better.
Then he got much better.
There was even talk at one point of a spin-off built around Zach Galifianakis' character, with Bob as a regular.
It never happened.
That's show business.
He found a manufacturer in China and tried to explain what he wanted: essentially a three-dimensional caricature of himself. Fat. Unattractive. Holding a bucket of fried chicken. The lack of flattery was the entire point. A handsome Angry Bob wasn't funny.
This concept apparently did not translate well.
The first prototype came back slim and handsome.
No, Bob explained. He needed to be fat.
Another version arrived.
Still too flattering.
No. Fatter. Uglier.
It took several iterations before Bob managed to convince a manufacturer on the other side of the world that, yes, the customer was actually complaining that the doll they had made of him was too thin and too good-looking.
Eventually they got it right.
I had one of those Angry Bob bobbleheads.
I don't anymore.
I really wish I did.
He never did.
And then, for reasons I never completely understood, Bob walked away from comedy. He nuked his online presence. His explanations never quite made sense to me.
I still think it was a shame.
Bob lived much of his life convinced that eventually he was going to become famous.
With most people, you'd politely call that a dream.
With Bob, you might have called it a delusion.
Except for one inconvenient fact:
He actually had talent.
He was funny. He was creative. He was intelligent. He could perform. And he'd gotten just close enough to the real thing that you couldn't dismiss the possibility completely.
I sometimes thought Bob's greatest obstacle to becoming successful was Bob.
There was another struggle running through virtually all the years I knew him.
His weight.
When I first knew Bob in high school, he was what people then called "husky." In college he was fat, but not extraordinarily so.
Later his weight began swinging wildly.
He'd balloon to an enormous size. Then he'd decide to lose the weight and, through sheer willpower and an almost impossibly restrictive diet, lose hundreds of pounds.
Then he'd gain it back.
And lose it again.
At various times I saw Bob go from weights in the many hundreds of pounds to something approaching normal and back again.
On one of our road trips with Vinnie, Bob was in one of his weight-loss phases. We'd stop for lunch. Vinnie and I would order food.
Bob would order a glass of water. He'd mix some nutritional powder into it. That was lunch.
His one indulgence was to ask one of us for a French fry or onion ring.
Not to eat.
To sniff.
So Vinnie and I would eat our lunches while Bob drank his shake and occasionally inhaled deeply from a French fry.
That's willpower.
Or insanity.
With Bob, the border could be difficult to locate.
As we got older, the adventures became less adventurous.
During the on-again portions of our friendship, Bob and I increasingly just got together to eat and talk.
There were pizza places he liked. We'd go to whichever one he wasn't feuding with at the moment.
Then we'd often head to the Panera in Little Neck.
Bob had one of their unlimited-coffee subscriptions, which naturally appealed enormously to him. I'd buy my coffee. He'd get his for free and then try to cajole the cashier into giving him a free cookie.
And we'd sit there for hours.
Talking.
Arguing.
Remembering people.
Complaining about people.
Making each other laugh.
Just shooting the shit.
In some ways, that was the best of Bob.
Not Angry Bob the comedian.
Not Radio Rob the antique dealer.
Not Bob the guy crushing cafeteria chairs or stealing food from college banquets.
Just Bob, sitting across from me over coffee.
It was during one of those outings that Bob told me he had cancer.
He was emphatic that I wasn't to tell anyone.
A mass had been removed from his leg, he said, but the doctors had gotten it all. He had a clean bill of health.
Later, there was more cancer. As I remember it, that time it involved his spine. He was treated and again told me he was cancer-free.
Then something appeared in his abdomen.
Again there was treatment.
Again, apparently, an all-clear.
By then I was worried. I wondered privately whether these really were isolated incidents or whether something larger was happening. But I wasn't his doctor, and I saw no benefit in sharing my amateur medical speculation with him.
In the last several months, the cancer returned with a vengeance.
His decline was frighteningly fast.
Bob and I weren't speaking when that happened.
Our friendship had entered another one of its dormant periods in late 2024, this time at Bob's choosing.
A few months ago, he called me.
We talked.
But we didn't really reconnect.
I wish we had.
There had been so many previous interruptions that perhaps some part of me assumed this was just another one. Eventually Bob would call, or I would call, and we'd have pizza and coffee and pick up the argument wherever we'd left it.
There isn't going to be another round.
That's difficult to absorb.
I know there are people who will remember a very different Bob.
I'm not going to tell them they're wrong. Because they're not.
Bob could be selfish. He could be infuriating. He could be grotesquely inappropriate. He could exhaust your patience. He could make friendship much harder than friendship needed to be.
Death doesn't erase any of that.
But neither do those things erase the Bob I knew.
The Bob who made me laugh until I couldn't breathe.
The Bob of tollbooths and fake accents.
The Bob who ate two entire shoofly pies and then went looking for The Black Agnes.
The Bob who warned me not to say "Oy vey" in rural Pennsylvania and then walked into a public restroom and yelled, "Gentlemen! Start your penises!"
The Bob who negotiated $75 off an antique because he couldn't stand watching me pay asking price.
The Bob who knew himself well enough, at least once, to stop me from offering him gas money because "You know how I am!"
The Bob who dreamed up Comicphobia and Cinemaphobia and terrible movies and comedy routines and radio shows.
The Bob who kept reinventing himself.
The Bob who, despite everything, got up on a stage at an age when most people would have decided it was too late to chase that particular dream—and eventually became pretty damned good at it.
The Bob who sat with me over coffee for hours and made an ordinary afternoon entertaining.
I'll also remember the road trip to Rochester and Toronto. I told that story onstage years ago, as captured in this video. It captures Bob better than another thousand words here probably could: the enthusiasm, the anger, the absurdity, and what it was like to go somewhere with him.
We were friends for a very long time.
It was a bumpy ride.
There were times I was furious with him. There were times he was furious with me. There were years when we didn't speak.
But through all of it, I always cared about Bob.
And whatever else I can say about him, he never made me doubt that he cared about me.
Bob was never going to be an easy friend.
He was, in the end, the best friend he could be.
And I'm going to miss him.
Goodbye, Angry Bob.
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