Anthony Bourdain: Suicide is a Motherfucker
When the news broke of Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide, I was on an airplane on my way to Edmonton to celebrate my wife’s grandmother’s ninetieth birthday.
Edmonton, sometimes called D’edmonton by locals, is not a place that, to my knowledge, Anthony Bourdain had ever visited, much less written about. It is, as they like to say, off the map. And definitely not a destination. However, with the town’s working class ethos, the oil derricks and oil refineries, the old school western themed pubs, the incredibly warm and caring people, it’s easy to imagine he would have found something to appreciate here. An episode of Parts Unknown might have included a visit to the Ukrainian village, which he likely would have found a little Schlocky. He would have climbed onto one of the old tractors for a dorky photo-op, or enjoyed a plate of sausage and pierogis by himself at an outdoor picnic table. He would have gone to one of the old dive bars on Whyte Ave. Played some slots, and sipped beers with the mustachioed locals. He would have played some five-pin at Bonnie Doon; getting schooled by the old ladies and teenaged girls tossing four pound balls, spinning serious English, at rubber pins. He would have ridden on the indoor roller coaster at West Edmonton Mall, the world’s largest shopping mall. Or enjoyed a world renowned Alberta beef steak at Ruth’s Chris Steak house on Jasper Avenue. Finally, one could imagine Bourdain, in blue jeans, button down shirt, sunglasses, and perhaps a beige hunting jacket, sitting outside at a plastic folding table, in front of a massive rig, chowing down on lunchbox food with a bunch riggers in steel-toed work boots. Conversation would range from the controversial pipeline, to the Edmonton Oilers, to Justin Trudeau, and of course, food.
But we will never know. There will be no new episodes of Parts Unknown (presumably, CNN may release some of the completed episodes of what would be a shortened twelfth season.) There will be no more Cook’s Tours. No more corny comparisons of food to sex. No more dinners at someone’s house in Detroit, Beirut, or Havana. That earthy, profane, sometimes urbane, sometimes eloquent voice has been silenced forever.
Suicide is a motherfucker. So is mental illness. I do not claim to be an expert. Nor to diagnose anyone with anything, much less depression. To say so would be reductive and lazy. And naturally, I am not qualified to provide an assessment. However, when a person chooses to extinguish their life, a part of the brain is clearly overriding the body and the mind’s natural inclination towards survival.
My ex-wife suffered from mental illness and depression. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She had spent time in mental institutions. I once caught her talking to herself inside a rental car after I had paid for our hotel bill. She said the universe spoke to her. Or sometimes God. I hid the knives and cleaning chemicals. I moved us from New York city and back to her hometown of St. Louis so that she could not jump from the rooftop of our Long Island City Apartment building. I pulled her off a cliff in Zion National Park. She once said that she found living in the present bearable only because the thought that she could kill herself at some point in the future gave her relief. The only thing that frightened her was the method, and whether or not it would hurt. She said it was like putting money in the bank for a rainy day. It lessened the pain of living. She hung herself about a year and a half after our divorce.
I got the opportunity to meet Anthony Bourdain. Not once, but twice. The first time I was working at a bookstore in New York. He was reading and signing copies of Kitchen Confidential. We shook hands, I told him my name, he told me his. Before this, I had not known who he was. Had never heard of him. My best friend had a crush on him. There was a huge line that snaked all the way around the second floor of the bookstore. Despite this, he still held his day job “slinging hash” at Brasserie Les Halles. He was in his forties, ancient in my eyes. He was at the beginning of what would become a remarkable mid-career, mid-life renaissance.
I met him again seven years later. He was big time. We shook hands. I told him we had met once before. He said he was sorry; he didn’t remember. He was always brutally honest. I was not offended. Call me Tony, he said.
Anthony Bourdain had money, fame, travelled the world, dined with Barak Obama and Iggy Pop. He wielded complete creative control over all of his projects. He was dating Asia Argento; cinematic royalty in her home country of Italy. He described his recent episode of Parts Unknown, filmed in Hong Kong, as the apotheosis of his career. The episode was directed by Argento, and featured the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who had worked on one of Bourdain’s favorite movies, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. Watching the Hong Kong episode, the scenes of the two men riding the Central-Mid-Level escalators and walkways, it’s hard not feel envy. Doyle flamboyantly expounds on cinematography, living in Hong Kong, and making Art. Bourdain looks on in awe and appears happy to be speaking with one of his heroes.
For Anthony Bourdain, that rainy day finally arrived on June 8th, 2018, in a hotel bathroom at a small picturesque village in Alsace, France. This was not the first time that he had contemplated suicide. In the essay The Rich Eat Differently Than You and me, he writes about driving through seaside roads somewhere in the Caribbean and seriously considering killing himself. All it would take to do the deed is a sharp turn of the wheel and he could plunge the car, and himself in it, into the sea. His first marriage had ended. He was, as he mentions in the piece, seriously at loose ends.
The world is definitely not a better place now that he is gone. And although I, like Anthony Bourdain, am an atheist, I find comfort in the thought of him, sitting on a plastic chair , hunched over a small bowl, noisily slurping up noodles, in an unknown place somewhere in the uncharted universe.
