In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain

by Tom Vitale

“It’s gonna get harder. This is the easy part, when everyone is together, all grieving at the same time. But a couple months from now, once everybody goes their separate ways, and life settles back into a normal routine—but you don’t feel normal—that’s when it’s really gonna suck.”

Tony had always been fascinated by Eastern legends of the hungry ghost—a spirit stranded in the netherworld due to a tragic death or lack of a proper burial—and in keeping with everything in his life playing out like a book, movie, or legend, now in some horrific twist of fate he had become a hungry ghost himself.

One of the amazing things about making the show was that whenever things went wrong, plan B had a magical way of working out even better.

That ambition seemed to match his brooding, almost guilt-tinged outlook on his own celebrity, that it didn’t really mean a damn thing unless he made it mean something.

But what we have to consider is whoever helped us off camera, whoever we hung out with, whoever we saw, whoever was nice to us, whoever associated with us during our time here, the point is, we don’t pay the price for that show. Everybody who helped us could very well pay that price, so that’s something we really got to balance especially when you know… we’re not journalists.” Tony paused and looked back out over Bagan. His hand fidgeted. “What happens to the people that we leave behind?”

ONE OF THE SECRETS TO Tony’s success was a fearless risk-all attitude that was at times indistinguishable from self-sabotage.

The only thing worse than risking personal disaster was a mediocre episode. Although our methods may have been somewhat unorthodox, it almost always made for great TV.

He always said you tend to see your life as a book or movie, and for Tony that story—if there had to be just one—was Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. The book, set in the Belgian Congo, and its cinematic reinterpretation Apocalypse Now, about the Vietnam War, had been recurring motifs throughout Tony’s work right from the beginning. Pretty much every river trip we ever filmed contained a Kurtz reference or some kind of homage to the theme of descending into madness deep in the jungle.

When not filming standard food and travel stuff, what the show did best was talk to people when their world wasn’t burning down. The Congo, however, was on fire.

‘I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.’ I’ve wanted to come to the Congo for as long as I’ve been telling stories or making television. I’ve been a student of its history. Uh, it’s a place that’s always fascinated me in… in sort of an awful and mesmerizing way. And I knew it was going to be a frustration shooting here, I mean, it’s a dangerous place. You’re at the mercy of many, many, many unpredictable things… I wanted to come here… And I did.”

In Kitchen Confidential, a chapter is devoted to Tony’s mentor, Bigfoot, whom he describes as, Cunning, manipulative, brilliant, mercurial, physically intimidating—even terrifying—a bully, a yenta, a sadist and a mensch: Bigfoot is all those things. He’s also the most stand-up guy I ever worked for. He inspires a strange and consuming loyalty. I try, in my kitchen, to be just like him. I want my cooks to have me inside their heads just like Bigfoot remains in mine. I want them to think that, like Bigfoot, when I look into their eyes, I see right into their very souls.

Always pushing forward, doing the hard thing, even the stupid thing, as long as it was the different thing. Tony was a big believer in failing gloriously in an attempt to do something interesting, rather than succeeding at being mediocre.

Anthony Bourdain was a great man, even though he could, at times, be a less successful human being.

He saw it this way: if you’re going to enjoy the perks of being famous, you have to be obliging to the people who make it possible.

he described our Tehran home-away-from-home as “only slightly less soul-destroying than the Soviet equivalent of a midrange Hilton.”

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Tony’s words as well as the episode’s theme had been inspired by the Bejalai, an Iban philosophy about taking a journey of self-discovery. An indigenous group native to the vast jungles of Borneo, the Iban considered the Bejalai central to their culture. The general idea is you go on an adventure, and learn something about the world. When all is said and done, hopefully you’re better for what you’ve seen, and you share the knowledge you’ve acquired with your home village. The Iban then commemorate the experience with a hand-tapped tattoo, à la “travel leaves marks.” It was literally a perfect theme for an episode of TV about travel.

I guess my hope is the more people see of the world, in person hopefully, or even on television, they see ordinary people doing ordinary things, so when news happens at least they have a better idea of who we’re talking about. Put a face to some empathy, to some kinship, to some understanding. This surely is a good thing. I hope it’s a useful thing.”

“As a father of a young girl, is it all gonna be okay? It’s all gonna work out?” Tony asked. “My daughter will be able to come here. In five years, ten years, twenty years, she’ll be able to have a bowl of bun cha and the world will be a better place?” “I think progress is not a straight line. You know?” President Obama said. “There are gonna be moments at any given part of the world where things are terrible. Where tragedy and cruelty are happening. Where our darkest impulses pop up. I think there are going to be some big issues our children are going to have to address, because we didn’t address them. But, having said all that, I think things are gonna work out. I think the world’s a big place, and I believe that people are basically good. I think humanity is still in its awkward adolescent phase, but it’s slowly maturing, and if we get a few big things right, I think we’ll be all right.”

IT’S BEEN SAID TONY USED FOOD AS A PASSPORT, AND WE DID. FOOD was a fantastic device, our way into a culture. Sharing a meal put people at ease, helped them forget the cameras were there, and inspired them to open up about their lives.

“No matter where I am, there’s always a little voice outside of me second-guessing the experience,” Tony said. “There’s always an ‘I would like to be here now.’ But very rarely have I been able to feel so… unless aided by some psychoactive drug. I wish I could free myself of the analytical part of my mind.”

Tony thought for a moment, looking out at the ocean. “But other than that, yeah, I wouldn’t want my loved ones to be inconvenienced or burdened with the responsibility of having to emulate some concern, affection, or sense of loss when really, they’re just thinking about… you know, ‘It’s two for one chicken wings at Applebee’s.’”

“It’s a joyous occasion, especially the cremation. It’s a big party to send the spirit to the afterlife,” Kadek said. “Because people firmly believe that we are not talking about the end, so this is something to be happy about?” Tony asked. “Life is cyclical,” Kadek said, nodding in agreement. “The state of mind at the time of death is very important for your next journey… Cremation frees the soul, purifying it by fire. This allows the dead to rejoin the cycle of reincarnation.”

Dressed from head to toe in white, the band beat drums, cymbals, chimes, gongs, and gamelans, some small, others massive, over four feet in diameter, keeping time to an increasingly frantic tempo. “I love the sound, it’s beautiful,” Tony said. “It’s slightly off tune always, so they create that big noise that reverberates throughout your body,” Kadek said above the din. “The idea is that it shatters the illusion between the seen and the unseen worlds.”

One thing was clear, Tony was thoroughly exhausted and could use a vacation. Tony had an addictive personality and was without doubt a workaholic, choosing to travel over 250 days a year for as long as I’d known him. Whenever I used to suggest he take some time off, Tony would say, “Television is a cruel mistress. She does not let you cheat on her, even for a while.” I’d learned that the truth was he couldn’t rest. Tony always needed a distraction, a project, a problem to solve. And, for better or worse, the show provided that in spades.

Tony was a man who was trying his best—to free himself of his analytical mind, to find a belief system that was more forgiving of his spiritual ambivalence, to express his love to the people he cared about, to reconcile the contradictions that embodied his internal and external life and ultimately defined his persona. His best was enough for millions of fans, but it wasn’t enough for him. Throughout the years, both before and after his death, I’ve struggled with persistent questions of whether he actually cared enough about me to give me his best. But ultimately it doesn’t matter: I’m just grateful for the time I had with him.

Tony succeeded at effortlessly capturing the dislocation of moving through space, the blur of a life spent in motion.

Tony described himself as wandering from place to place, haunted by crushing loneliness. A lost soul trapped in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction, always longing for more, he was the very embodiment of a hungry ghost.

“I DO want to tell you the story of Tom’s birthday in Iran,” Tony wrote. “… It was an extraordinary moment.” He stopped shortly afterward, the setup to something never finished. It was a powerful metaphor for Tony’s life—incomplete and interrupted. Even more powerful, the writing expressed the feelings Tony had struggled to communicate while he was alive, the same feelings I’d had such difficulty accepting when I’d heard them. Here was my longed-for missing clue, and yet, finding it, I only felt a deepening emptiness and regret. Faced with tangible evidence that Tony had cared, would I finally have to admit that I’d convinced myself he hated me so I wouldn’t have to accept the magnitude of the loss?

Maybe the real question was, how do you end a story that you don’t want to be over? I’d assumed writing this book was an attempt to process the last two decades of my life. Was it possible instead I’d figured out a way of keeping Tony alive? The more I mulled it over, the more the realization sunk in that I’d been living in a delusion, surrounding myself with artifacts from a world that no longer existed. There are consequences to living in the past, however. The boundaries between my life and work were less defined now than they’d ever been. That’s the danger of a ghost: it follows you wherever you go. Trapped, simultaneously overwhelmed and left longing, it turned out I was the hungry ghost.

So what did I learn from my time traveling around the world? What meaning have I found in writing this book? I’ve learned that it’s time to put away my pictures, souvenirs, and shiny objects and figure out who the fuck I am. But I’ve come to the realization that moving on doesn’t mean giving up all my extraordinary experiences. They were mine all along, even if it didn’t always feel like it at the time. Clearly I still have a lot to unpack.