To Tony, with love.

From The Writer’s Desk #3

Do you ever think about someone you’ve never met in your life so often that you start having dreams about them? No? Okay, then maybe I’m officially going NUTS.

In my dream, I’m looking at the sea. It’s a very peaceful view, kind of a foggy view, too. I feel so calm, and at ease ( in a way that you can almost tell it’s a dream because life gets peaceful like that once in a fucking lifetime). I look around and guess who’s there? In a hoodie and very worn out jeans.. Gray hair don’t care swirling around in the wind..? Anthony Motherfucking Bourdain.

Look, I can’t cook for shit. Not even if I tried my hardest. Not even if my life depended on it. So, you’re asking yourself, why this hyperfixation on a chef? And my answer to you is: He’s not just a chef. He never was. How can someone be ‘just’ their profession? For Christ’s sake, Linguini from Ratatouille isn’t just a chef. People have nuances to them. Like having a rat controlling your movements. But, still, let me elaborate more:

I was a very anxious kid. At eight, I would lift my own mattress up and drag it to my parents’s bedroom so i could sleep with them. Almost every day, at about 9pm or so. And on their TV is where I would see chef Bourdain in “Parts Unknown”. I would be UP, dude. As long as the TV was showing all of these beautiful places he’d go, and all of the food he’d taste and all of his insightful voiceovers, I was UP for it.  “God, I want to be like this guy”, I used to think.

My anxiety would be replaced with a will to live the next day as I was off to my own adventures. Excited for what was coming towards me.

This is a high that only someone as passionate and intense as Anthony could provide. It changed my life.

As i grew up, he got even bigger. A true fucking star. “Parts Unknown” was still a huge part of my life, like a breath of fresh air. It used to hit every single time. I wouldn’t miss ONE episode.

A still from “Parts Unknown”.

You could tell that he was such an intense soul, with a fire for every opportunity he’d get and with a curiosity that only he had. If curiosity killed the cat, it made the opposite effect on Anthony. He lived for it, because he was a searcher.

I, too, was discovering myself as a searcher. I tried the volleyball team, bible study, gymnastics, tap dancing, theatre, and still wouldn’t find myself anywhere. Then, my first journal was given to me and I’ve been unstoppable ever since. No, seriously. Someone please stop me. Imagine how happy I was a few years later, when I found out my personal hero, Tony Bourdain, had written books. NOT just cook books. He was a writer first and foremost. He wrote! You know how in “Duplex”, when Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore are trying to get that old lady’s house and when she asks what Ben Stiller’s character did for a living and he says he’s a writer, she says something like: “Huh. Always thought of writing as a hobby, not a profession”? That’s how I felt as a kid. When I found out Bourdain wrote books, I really thought that maybe writing is worth something, as someone as cool as him did it.

“Kitchen Confidential” changed my life. I first read it when I was 13, and even now, I’ve never seen someone write about their experiences with such heart, soul, and fucking wit. Again, he made me want to live my life to the fullest, so that I could experience everything with an open heart and with passion the way that he did. In my head, I wasn’t at school, with zero friends and worried teachers because my English paper about what my perfect day would look like was “too dark”, I was someone who couldn’t wait to be an adult and experience stuff like Anthony Bourdain! Yes, my perfect day is the day i’m finally leaving school, what fucking about it? ( Spoiler alert: It really was).

Kitchen Confidential.

Bourdain was the reason why I thoroughly documented every single thing that has ever happened to me in my journals. I used to experience eating at Bubba Gump like I was at the goddamn Mediterranean. That sort of stuff.

I wanted to be known as an irreverent explorer, just like him, someone whose words mattered and were appreciated. Someone that created something that people looked forward to. And, looking back at his life now, i don’t think he even knew that.

As an adult now, i have complete understanding of how hard his job actually was. To even make his job look like “the best job in the world” WAS hard. To be constantly delivering that amount of quality is so challenging, and it’s insane how much we put pressure in ourselves to do that. That’s why I do my absolute best to appreciate my fellow writer friends that put stuff out every week ( or twice a week, even). You all are warriors.

And it made me appreciate Anthony even more. He was someone who put a hundred percent of himself in his craft, every fiber of his being. Every book, every TV show, every country, every city. And it consumed him. This is why I also do my absolute best to understand if my fellow writers are worn out. If they can’t. If they’re tired. If they have writer’s block. If they think they suck when their work is actually masterful.

I get so sad when I think about how lonely he must have been towards the end of his life, how exhausted he was. And I hate when someone brings up that the brightest flame burns quickest because it makes me think about his life trajectory. Some say that it was a reflex of his intense lifestyle, or point potential reasons as to why he may have died but i don’t like to remember him that way. That wasn’t who he was. He was so much more than his death. And whenever I want to remember him, I don’t watch conspiracy theories on YouTube or watch any of the exploitative documentaries made about him because I just know that that’s not how he would like to be remembered.

I think about him a lot ever since he died, especially in June. I’ve had a considerable amount of boyfriends that thought it was absolutely dumb to mourn a celebrity’s death and I’ve dumped all of them because fuck you. Not only do I miss Anthony Bourdain the person, but his death left a huge hole in my heart because I miss writers like him. Multifaceted, intense and funny. He was the best storyteller ever. We don’t get to have another Bourdain and it saddens me very deeply. I mourn that.

In my dream, I’m looking at the sea. I get all nervous trying to tell him how much he’s very loved and appreciated by me or how much I feel like we are kindred souls or how I stole a copy of “Kitchen Confidential” from a book shop with my best friend when I was sixteen or even maybe how I see him in every skinny gray haired man and I always stupidly look at them to see if maybe I could find his face, as if maybe he never died. In my mind, he never did.

As I'm trying to place all of this in my mind and finally say it to him, he looks at me and laughs.

“ Aw, shut up, man. You’re spoiling the view!”

I wake up. I’m all sweaty and gross. It’s Saturday. I’m going to live. He always makes me feel like this. Maybe i AM going nuts, after all.

IN MEMORY OF

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

( JUN 25, 1956 - JUN 8, 2018)

988 Lifeline Org

Wanna Talk About It?