Why Couldn't I Save Anthony Bourdain?

He taught us to live, travel, and laugh at ourselves

A scene from upcoming biopic Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,

I have this wildly delusional belief that had I known Anthony Bourdain, I might have saved him. On every level, this is farce—people who are suicidal and depressed are usually beyond the reach of amendment—and yet my belief is unshaken. I’m good at listening. I have a genuine curiosity about others, can usually pinpoint a problem when asked, and never ever judge. How can I, without judging myself?

Rocks: glass houses. It’s a thing.

For those of you who don’t know Anthony Bourdain (which is not actually possible. Were you in a coma?) Bourdain was an American chef, author and travel show host. He was extremely funny, marvelously self-deprecating, and absolutely fearless in what he ate and how he traveled. I’ve watched all thirty-five episodes of A Cook’s Tour, his first food-and-travel show, every episode of No Reservations and also Parts Unknown. You could say I’m a fan.

Bourdain has often been equated with Hunter S. Thompson, but I disagree. Both men injected themselves into their respective narratives, but I find Thompson’s endless self-absorption and macho posturing a bit tiresome. Bourdain, on the other hand, never bored us with the minutiae of his life. He made scathing assessments of it, and then confessed his sins on camera. This kind of candor is rare in Hollywood, but Bourdain was a man who spoke openly about his one-time heroin addiction, drinking problem, and predilection for Gothy, depressive Italian women like Asia Argento.

Argento is weird. I could forgive her for that, except that she slept with an underaged boy who referred to her as “Mommy,” and then talked Bourdain into bailing her out after the kid went public. The settlement was something like $380,000, and at least some of that came out of Bourdain’s pocket. That’s the kind of guy he was. Trust me, if someone I was dating came to me and said, “I slept with a seventeen-year-old, now give me some money,” they’d be finding pieces of that guy for weeks.

Bourdain was married to and had a daughter with mixed martial arts fighter Ottavia Busia, who is a dead ringer for Argento. Dude had a type, and that type was Italian. Since Bourdain was on the road about 250 days a year, it was probably wise to have an “unconventional” relationship. Unfortunately with “unconventional” relationships, once the gate is open, people tend to walk right through it.

Bourdain with second wife, Italian mixed martial arts fighter and television personality Ottavia Busia

He fell hard for Argento, and almost assuredly left Ottavia to be with her. Friends described him as “a teenage boy, just absolutely lovestruck,” which must have been great. In the beginning. But you know how love is—there’s always a pinion hidden somewhere in those wings. And the “unconventional relationship” playbook that might have worked in his previous relationship likely cut him to ribbons with Argento. Mere days before Bourdain’s death, a paparazzo published photos of Asia Argento in the streets of Rome with a new lover, French photog Hugo Clement.

Was that why Bourdain killed himself? Honestly, I don’t know, and it’s unfair to speculate.

Asia Argento and Hugo Clement.

My own father, now many years deceased, tried talking his third wife into an open relationship. Being a frisky, attractive woman, she took him at his word, and had an affair with his best friend. Since my father divorced her the very next day, it’s safe to say humans can delude themselves into believing they’re not jealous and sexually possessive when, in fact, they are. The roots of romantic love are sexual possession. That’s just the way it works.

These details about Bourdain’s life may flesh him out a bit, but they’re hardly the most important thing about him. For me, what Anthony Bourdain did was blaze a trail for other intrepid and not-so-intrepid adventurers to follow.

I’ve watched him eat Icelandic hákarl, a kind of putrid, pickled shark meat fermented in lye. In Namibia, an indigenous man squeezed excrement out of warthog’s anus, filled with dust, sand, and yet more excrement, before presenting it to Bourdain to eat. Instead of running for his life, as I would have done, Bourdain ate that warthog anus with the same grim determination that Jesus died for our sins. One hopes he went back to the hotel afterwards and downed as much Scotch as he could to kill the legions of bacteria he’d ingested.

In his episode on Iran, he stated, “Of all the places, of all the countries, of all the years of traveling, it’s here, in Iran, that I’m greeted most warmly by total strangers”—and this was smack-dab in the middle of our conflict with that country, a time when the nightly news showed gruesome images of Iranian soldiers doing despicable things. But that was our Anthony, speaking truth no matter how much the world didn’t want to hear it, fearless to the last.

He hated fakery, in himself and others. In Parts Unknown, “Sicily,” Bourdain embarks on a quest for octopus with a local Italian chef. They’re out in the Mediterranean in a motorboat when the chef’s assistant tosses dead, frozen octopus in the ocean for Bourdain and the chef to magically “discover.”

This tacky, pointless deception completely demoralized Bourdain. “For some reason, I feel something snap and I slide quickly into a near-hysterical depression,” he says in the episode. “Complicit in a shameful, shameful incident of fakery, but there I was bobbing listlessly in the water with dead sea life sinking to the bottom all around me. You’ve got to be pretty immune to the world to not see the obvious metaphor here. I’ve never had a nervous breakdown before, but I tell you from the bottom of my heart, something fell apart down there. And it took a long, long time after this damn episode to recover.”

Anthony Bourdain taught us about ourselves as much as he did traveling. He didn’t book vacations aboard massive, Venetian-lagoon-killing cruise ships. He sat down and quaffed Peroni with the locals. He wanted us to take the roads less traveled, to not play it so safe, to get our hands dirty. Why don’t Americans do more of this kind of traveling?

Being in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and can’t get your bearings may result in your bloody, premature death, but at least you’d be fully alive in the preceding moments. That was Bourdain’s whole point. Skip the tour and the cruise ship. Instead, buy a map, stick a pin in it, and go there. Even the worst trip brings you joy in the retelling.

Travel, dammit, before it’s too late.

What’s your favorite Bourdain episode? Leave your comments below.