Happier, Stupider Times
In the weeks since Anthony Bourdain’s untimely passing, a sprawling conversation about life’s big questions takes his place.
“Who owns paradise after all? Who in the end gets to own paradise, use paradise, or even visit it? That’s a question that’s probably worth paying attention to before there’s none left at all.”
In the two weeks since Anthony Bourdain has passed, I’ve been unable to make sense of it. I’ve written about high profile deaths in the past, like so many others, but there was a higher barrier to entry this time. There was no clear way to begin.
On four or five occasions, I had started this piece, and it would flounder and die, or wither and cease to be meaningful. I desperately wanted to release my thoughts — to try to package up his legacy in a way that provides me with the selfish kind of closure I seek when a story like this comes across the wire. I struggled.
On a sepia-toned summer night in Boston’s North End, I figured I would try again. Ambling past the brick storefronts and shops towards a favorite cafe of mine, I moved past a small pizza bar on the corner of Hanover Street. The windows were open, as they typically are up and down the block on these kinds of nights, and I noticed a table of four young men overlooking the street. All four of them were burrowed in their phones, not speaking with each other, while a waitress placed beers in front of them.
This was precisely the kind of scene that would have bothered Anthony Bourdain.
Anthony Bourdain rocked gently in a hammock, surveying a Jamaican paradise he didn’t feel deserving of. Staring out over the ocean, he opined that it wasn’t a place James Bond would find himself. It was a place a Bond villain would be. There’s a certain level of sin, Bourdain mused, to be so warmly enveloped by earth’s great, unaltered gifts.
He had been speaking with local fishermen, earlier that day, who had been pushed to their homeland’s margins. Hulking hotels and luxury resorts encroached ever-further onto formerly pristine, snow-white sands.
After his Caribbean excursion, Bourdain wrote, as he so often did, with exceptional clarity.
“Increasingly, everywhere — whether New York City, Venice, the Jersey Shore or Jamaica — people who grow up adjacent to water, to idyllic views, lovely beaches, traditional architecture, can no longer afford to live there.
“Traditional ways of life, like fishing, seem quaint anachronisms when the simple fact is that you can make a lot more money carrying a golf bag for a tourist, or making blender drinks at Margaritaville.”
Anthony Bourdain appeared most at ease talking to the world’s nobodies. His tired eyes were alternately distant and point blank, finding their target on the disenfranchised faces he fused with in countries all over the world. His creed, his raison d’etre, was to understand life. That’s why it was so arresting, so wrong, that he took his own.
In the two weeks or so since Bourdain was found dead in a Paris hotel room, the world has sat up and has had a discussion, the way that it does after a famous person departs.
Bourdain was insatiable in his pursuit of something authentic. It’s why he seemed so affected when a Jamaican fishermen talks about his home eroding, while Sandals resorts full of bloated tourists lurch further down the coastline.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but there is nothing sharper in the rear view mirror than unseen requests for help. Bourdain was a man traveling the world, never alone and always lonely, listening to stories of real people having their livelihoods washed away through no fault of their own. He stared injustice and inequity in the face, and then asked them to share a meal and a cold beer.
High cuisine was the train that Bourdain rode to international fame, but it never seemed like his primary descriptor. It seems strange, now, to call him a “celebrity chef.” Celebrity chefs hawk pots and pans on morning television, while their guest du jour promotes a new movie. Bourdain wasn’t a chef. He was a writer. A tormented, Thompson-esque figure who did his best thinking over a dimly lit bar top.
Bourdain rarely seemed comfortable, but would, on occasion, find respite in the eyes of nobodies all over the world. The disenfranchised corners of the globe, and the ever-shrinking local populations that comprise those corners, were a reflection of their rugged, wandering interviewer. Calloused hands of fishermen from Kingston to Cape Cod who raised pints in defiance of their circumstances provided the cadence of his ceaseless quest for truth.
His skill as a storyteller belied his struggle. Someone with such narrative clarity, such mental acuity, surely would have things neatly aligned in his mind. But that organization of thought was just as much curse as it was a gift. In the time since his passing, I’ve watched more episodes of Parts Unknown than I care to admit. Time and again, he distilled the plight of the silent. With each new location, he seemed increasingly disturbed by the removal of real things. A small store in Havana selling Cubano sandwiches seemed ripe for Golden Arches to move in one day. This was his armageddon scenario.
In one episode of Parts Unknown, Bourdain traversed the greens and blues of Massachusetts, Provincetown’s rugged shoreline and crackling social progressiveness, all the way to Greenfield, a rusted out town in the western part of the state; Rockwell painting New England town, neglected by time and ravaged by heroin addiction.
During the episode, Bourdain seemed truly happy — deeply happy — on one specific occasion. A recovering addict shared her story with her host, a pronounced example of rehabilitation himself. She talked about the “boring” life she now leads with her daughter. She was on the other side and seeing clearly. Bourdain smiled.
Bourdain’s life was a search for connection. Perhaps that is why his death is pulled further into focus when stacked against the current political landscape. As the United States engages in the separation of families at the southern border, and drives a wedge between “us” and “them,” looking back at the body of Bourdain’s work makes this reality even harder to fathom.
At the cafe, I finished my glass of Chianti and began closing my thoughts in my notebook. To my left were two crowded tables. One had a couple from Argentina, speaking about law school, and the World Cup. Next to them were two young professionals from Saudi Arabia, sharing the story of how they came to Boston.
Parts unknown, slowly becoming home.
