26 July 2018

I ‘lost’ this essay, that is to say, it vanished into the morass of my hard disk until, quite by chance, I ‘rediscovered’ it. Written for Carol’s funeral celebration by her friends in NYC, it needs no further explanation. WB

A memory of Carol By William Bowles 

20 October 2013

It’s a freezing cold night in Brooklyn and I’ve not long been in New York. It’s November or maybe it was December 1975 and I’m on my way to meet Carol for the very first time. My friend Valerie Wilmer gave me some names of people she thought I’d should meet when I got to New York. Amongst them was Carol and Rajah Blank.

So I get off the subway at Marcy Avenue which is in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and pretty much a wasteland of abandoned factories and burned out brownstones and walk down Broadway toward the East River, past a steak house called Peter Luger’s, frequented by gangsters and cops (if you can spot the difference). But in that desolate and abandoned section of Brooklyn, the wide street outside the solid brick-faced building is incongruously lined with a row of long, black Cadillacs. A single neon sign on one end of the building is the only indication that it’s a restaurant. Welcome to New York.

Continue reading →