Remembering the friend I never met: Anthony Bourdain
It's said you should never meet your heroes in real life because they'll always disappoint you yet many still foolishly seek them out. I never met Anthony Bourdain in real life, never wanted to and never had to because I knew who he was through the honest brutality of his words which he never minced. He'd be the first person to tell you he was the luckiest fuck-up on the planet. If it hadn't been for his mother who was an editor for the New York Times that helped him land his big break with the publication of "Don't Eat Before Reading This" in the New Yorker back in 1999, an article previously panned by a free weekly newspaper, it's most likely he'd still be dunking spuds somewhere or worse a long forgotten heroin addict that overdosed even longer ago. As someone that also doesn't subscribe to the "just world fallacy" where all one needs is hard work to succeed and if you fail it's all your own fault I also believe getting that big break and becoming well-known to countless fans is more luck than anything else. Not to say he didn't have talent because of course he had that in spades but so don't many other forgotten writers. Anthony didn't write to become famous, he wrote because he was a writer and I'm truly thankful the world got to read his words and hear him read them in audiobooks like only he could.
While never a drug addict our lives seem to have many similarities. I grew up on Cape Cod and was living there when he started his culinary career. I often ate at Spiritus Pizza (it was the cheapest food in town and made a decent pie) where he once slept above the walk-in freezer and ate at the Flagship aka the Dreadnaught and a close friend's uncle owned Ciro & Sal's aka Mario's Restaurant. I also worked in P-town be it stationed at the US Coast Guard station as an engineer and boarding officer. I too worked for a bit as a commie and cookie. We also fell in love with and in what we both considered the most beautiful place in this sometimes ugly world: Vietnam, a place I once lived. And like him I too suffer from depression which we have both used as a source for our deepest written works.
No other writer has ever moved me like his words. If I'd ever met him and told him he was my favorite writer I have no doubt he'd tell me to read more authors. He was humble because his talent didn't come from the ego but the id, that place so very deep inside of us and a place we have so little control over.
With the help of a competent staff made up of mostly ghost writers and editors along with an agent that sees you for nothing more than a ticket to her next new luxury toy she really doesn't need, anyone can get published. This can be seen by just looking at any best-seller list. While "Fifty Shades of Grey" is grammatically correct it is to literature as candy corn is to vegetables. The much beloved "Harry Potter" series, also grammatically correct, is a children's book series that uses cheap plot devices to pluck at the heart-strings of its readers. If you can't invoke sympathy in your reader by starting off a novel with an abused orphan you clearly can't write. And don't even get me started on the myriad of Christian-theme screeds that while posing as books aren't fit to wipe-up an oil spill from a Saturday morning oil change on the family car. But Anthony was different, very different. He wrote from a place of pain and anger. He didn't care who he pissed off or if he offended the reader, which he did. He was a writer's writer.
I won't say his work as a writer was good because that's subjective but I will say it was solid because it's honest. While we all take liberties with facts he was honest about his emotions and that honesty touched everyone who read his words.
I really wish he hadn't chosen to end his life. I really do because he still had much more to share with those that read his words but he did. A few times I came close to death while performing search-and-rescue missions out in the North Atlantic Ocean during some very fierce storms because folks rarely got into trouble on nice, sunny days. We'd hit monster waves in our tiny 44' motorized lifeboat, the last open cockpit lifeboat in service by the US Coast Guard, we called "widowmakers" because one wrong move, one misplaced hand hold on a rail for dear life or one slip of a foot would be our demise. One particularly bad day we got a call of a boat in distress. A tropical storm was heading up the coast and we knew we'd be in for hell. On "normal" rescues a first-class boatswain's mate would be assigned to pilot our craft and on difficult rescues it'd be a chief boatswain's mate. As the engineer I was first to head to our boat and get her started. Soon the crew showed up and this time senior chief was going to be at the helm. I'd like to say I put on a brave face but I didn't. He came aboard and saw my hand shaking. I was scared because the only time he took us out was when we stood the greatest chance of death. He looked at me and my shaking hand and just said "You have to go out. You don't have to come back." I calmed down because I knew my fate was not in my hands but his and that if I died my mother would get a nice letter. We made it through a night of very rough seas and brought back three souls the next morning. It was sunrise and Chatham Harbor never looked so beautiful. I can still hear the sound of our hull scraping across the bar as we made our final approach to our bearth. We made it home not because of a mythical deity but because of our training and the skilled hand of our pilot. In reality my chances of making it home were almost always pretty good and my fear was mostly unfounded. All storms clear and it's only after those horrible storms do we appreciate the calm they make way for. I wish Anthony could've remembered during the storm he was in on the night he died that all storms clear. I guess that's how we're different.
Albert Camus in the "Myth of Sisyphus" started his novel with the proposition that the only question one should ask themselves is if they should commit suicide but near the end said that suicide is not an option against what we see as impossible odds but that we should take joy in our struggles. While Anthony had lost sight of that thought I never have. Another way I guess we're different.
I and much of the world will miss you Anthony but your words in both print and spoken will be with us forever. Just in case you also find yourself in a storm don't lose sight that the calm afterwards will never look sweeter and that taking joy in your fight against that storm will be well worth it.
Goodbye Anthony. Gone but not forgotten.
"To fall in love with Asia is one thing, to fall in love in Asia is another. Both have happened to me. ... It's a gift, a dream, a curse. The best thing, the happiest thing and yet also the loneliest thing in the world." - Anthony Bourdain
Image; Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) enjoying a bowl of cơm hến (rice with clams) and a can of bia Huda. tp. Huế, Việt Nam. image: cntraveller
