In every writer there exists a towering, ever-struggling duality: the desire to be left alone, to your words, books, thoughts, hidden quiet corners of libraries; and the wish to be celebrated, toasted by everyone as the smartest person in the room.
From a staggering array of novels, non-fiction, and cookbooks, to a series of popular and acclaimed travel TV shows, Anthony Bourdain achieved both. In grand fashion. And he did so with such an easy grace and badass authenticity, strident but unposturing, always walking through some faraway airport in sunglasses and jeans, a knowing swagger married to selfless curiosity, a seen-it-all, snobby curmudgeon with the air of—yes, as it’s been said before, appropriately—your coolest uncle. The one with the tats and back porch stories and faraway look in his eye while describing some distant bar, some endless night in Hanoi, another day’s chilli dog.
Which is all why you’ll read one million of just this sort of personal tomes. As is the practice of the day, when someone dies, something big happens, one can almost hear the collective laptops in coffee shops the world over, softly plodding with hastily penned takes. It is an epoch of “let me tell you what this means to me.” So maybe there needn’t be any more Bourdain tributes like there needn’t be any more gun control Facebook posts.
But there’s a reason chefs, foodies, fans, all of us, really, can’t help themselves with Bourdain. And the desire feels even deeper still with writers.
Simply, he was living our dream: widely published, successful, adored, pervasive, respected, still cool, on the road while the rest of us squirmed stuck in the quicksand of digital glow, all while seemingly never needing to sell out. He made himself a rock star in an era where nobody cares about writers. While Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth can pass to the next world like a ship in the night, with Bourdain co-workers that had never even read him approached my desk on the day of the news with tears. “I’m sorry he’s” passed in text message form like a family member had died, like I had known the man, simply because I idolized him.
It was easy to feel familiarity—you could go along, exploring, discovering, scoffing, smoking, looking, feeling like you were figuring something out about the world with a poet’s removed involvement. I followed, time and again, through countless joints and ventures, not knowing there was another place to even consider starting travel research. I ended up in a multitude of places like Tadich Grill in San Francisco, Eisenbergs in New York, a cacio e pepe spot in Rome, some chicken joint in Brazil. In a pre-smartphone, pre-Uber era, I wandered for hours through uptown New Orleans, backtracking, circling Audubon park, hailing cabs just to futilely beg directions, assisted only by a known street name—Bellecastle—and a vivid memory of his enjoyment of Domilise’s off-the-menu fried shrimp, cheese, and gravy po’ boy.
There has always been a validation in going to the places he’d been, a way of feeling you were doing things right, appropriately appreciating culture, a place. You’d see him at a dive in Chicago and feel smug with satisfaction over your own life’s pursuits. It was an easy extension to think you knew him off camera too. Everyone knew about his reformed bad boy antics, penchant for drunkenness, graceful entry to fatherhood, budding relationship with Asia Argento. “He doesn’t smoke anymore.” We all knew that. “He loves KFC.” And so I feel no need for shame in occasionally blasting an eight piece with mac n’ cheese and biscuits, sitting solo in my car, in a parking lot on Layton, cranking classic rock radio. “He wears Clark’s.” I have three pairs. I could never remember the name of his new show. And it didn’t matter, there he was, in my living room, showing me someplace in Africa I’ll surely never go, illuminating what I did wrong, misunderstood about Detroit.
Practically, this is why suicide seemed so wrong. He had it all, but mostly he had perspective. Realistically, it is a reminder: You have no idea what’s going on in another human being. You don’t understand your own brain, let alone somebody else’s. By now we all at least know the “selfish” trope is hooey. But if you’ve been through it, close to it, if the suicide of my best friend, at the age of 25, taught me anything, it’s that you can devote your personal life to pondering the matter, study the professionals that have given their careers to the issue, and never get any closer to an answer of Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Really, we all have so little understanding of the world.
Which was actually so much the point of Bourdain’s body of life work.
Years ago, in a random episode of “No Reservations,” I found myself finding Bourdain perched outside a tiny corner Istanbul kebab shop. He was eating, rapping with a local, mostly always smart enough to balance, to know when to let himself be guided. In my mind, he seemed to go from liking his sandwich to a string-swelling discovery of love moment, just within a few bites. A subtle kind of euphoria played across a thanks-for-showing-me-this type smile, him wrapping up the kebab in typical lyrical summation, “torpedo of joy.” There was something in the combination: the dripping meat package, the contentment, the all-is-well realization amidst a cobblestoned old world setting of winding, shambly, timeless streets, a feel of fearlessness yielding intense hedonist pleasure in the heart of a mysterious world. It was an unscrubbable moment of enlightenment, he had decided for me: Turkey was suddenly the place of my heart.
Through no coincidence, years later, my wife and I found ourselves closing our honeymoon in Istanbul. On our last night, post dinner of endless mezzes, our breaths heavy with smoked eggplant, sumac, parsley, our bodies already sluggish with lamb meat, it was nonetheless the last checkmark I needed, desperately, on my first trip to Europe. At midnight it would be my 32nd birthday. At noon tomorrow we would be on a flight home. But for now, I was after something. Down snaking back alleys, a stream of dark loud bars pouring boozers onto the street side tables, fish shops still open and stinky and neon-lit, the distinction between patrons and pedestrians blurring, a propulsive cacophony of raised foreign tongues jibing with tinkling glasses, everyone young and hungry and dressed in black and close together, the streets too narrow for anything but whizzing mopeds.
By the time we got there—me realizing the ultimate consummation of fresh marriage is when a new bride will follow you into questionable neighborhoods in strange lands for midnight snacks—a man, a brother or cousin of the proprietor it seemed, on my side of the counter with a drugged big-pupil look, upsold me on extra meat. I obliged, forking over Lira, salivating, breathing deep hand-stoked charcoal fumes, noting the coating of the bread with meat fat, noticing everything, stoically, or so I thought, chasing that Bourdain vibe. Bold. At least bold enough to hit a rough-edged corner store on the way home, for a six-pack of bad but frigid Turkish beer, a pack of locally-flavored Camels.
Twenty minutes later I was on our hotel room’s balcony, delaying my meal, swallowing a Bond movie scenescape, mosques doting the horizon, minarets standing rigid like menacing fingers, the Bosphorous River flowing behind me, the hotel where Agatha Christie penned Murder on the Orient Express just around the corner. In a grand gesture of chivalry, I eventually tried to wake my wife for a bite. She shrugged me off, opting for some sleep after two weeks of trekking around Italy and Turkey, eating endlessly of my deranged itinerary, now facing a 12-hour flight home. Instead I stood alone outside, I let the spice-addled cucumber sauce run down my arm as the rotisserie-ed beef and lamb combo danced, delivered on the wings of crisped lavash bread, popped up by red onion and juicy tomato. Solitary on a balcony, framed in smoke and late-night buzz, I ate and drank, Istanbul spread endlessly around me. It was now my birthday. It was also my poetry moment. And Bourdain had brought me here. It was the apex of everything his books and bevy of heavy-hearted shows had taught me, the joy within being an active, discerning participant in life’s sorrows. His was the art of looking at the world. And showing how much better is the view when sided by a cold beer and really good sandwich.
