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

by Tom Vitale

I DON’T KNOW IF MY LIFE ENDED OR IF IT BEGAN WHEN I STARTED WORKING with Tony. Whatever the hell I did for a living was so vivid and spectacular, it all but consumed me. Then, without warning, it was over forever, reduced to nothing more than a memory.

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.

Real life doesn’t offer clear beginings, of course. At least, we rarely recognize them as such at the time.

From behind the camera, I tried again. “So Tony, perhaps you’d like to comment on the train ride?” “I’d rather have a fucking water buffalo with a barbed penis chasing me across a rice paddy,” Tony said.

CASUALLY ATTIRED IN A KHAKI LINEN SHIRT, CLARK DESERT BOOTS, AND his trademark Persol sunglasses, Tony made trekking through war-torn Congo look effortless.

Prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance.

In order to maintain the intense, small, in-club loyalty, Tony gave us a license to kill. Creatively speaking, of course. Everyone who worked the show looked up to our “fearless leader” adoringly, and we operated more like a fraternal organization than a standard TV production. It was very hard to get in; once you got in, it was very hard to get out; and once you were out, you were dead. Or might as well be.

unforgivable deal-breakers for Tony. Stingy tipper, vegan, mediocre, tea drinker, late, or a fan of Jimmy Buffett’s music, you’re off the show.

Tony’s leadership techniques were CIA caliber: duplicitous, unforgivable, possibly criminal, and usually extremely effective. Tony recruited informants, disseminated fake information, and stoked inter-team rivalries, pitting director against director, camera against camera, to motivate everyone to do our best work.

Tony’s leadership philosophy, “Only pat the baby when it’s sleeping,” was a calculated approach from his days in the kitchen that meant you were unlikely to hear praise for having done a good job.

Tony said, “You know, Tom, trust is a funny thing. Very easily given, very easily lost, and almost impossible to earn back.”

The edit was the part of the creative process Tony enjoyed the most. Tony was as ingenious as he was demanding, and his feedback could be scorching. “Rule one? Show, don’t tell! It’s intro to storytelling, for fuck’s sake!” Tony said.

But Hunter pulled it off. No talking, no voice-over for five and a half minutes, just natural sound and music over footage of Tony at a local festival. Colorful paper lantern dragons along with countless floating candles are set adrift, transforming the entire Mekong River into an ethereal blaze of light as the soundtrack builds to a crescendo. It was beautiful and a record time without speaking, a true high-water mark. “My god, he’s some kind of wunderkind,” Tony said. “Nobody’s that perfect. He must murder hookers in his basement to vent his rage, it’s the only logical explanation. Make sure Hunter doesn’t get busted. He’s too valuable to go to prison.”

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.

Tony advised to “watch movies, read everything you can. Be inspired by what others have done and learn from their mistakes. Stealing is fine as long as you can reasonably suggest it was just ‘borrowing’ in court.”

TONY WAS CHAMPION OF THE misunderstood, stragglers, stalwarts, pioneers, lovable drunks, the marginalized—those left behind or left out or fallen by the wayside.

IN THIS WORLD OF EVER more rules and regulations, Tony was a rebel who constantly dared to say fuck it. Every hero needs a villain, and ironically for us, the bad guys were also the ones who paid the bills.

Usually, Tony pushed the boundaries of what was permissible to air for an arguably artistic or even altruistic reason. But sometimes we just thought it sounded like fun to toss a bunch of monkey wrenches into the machine and see what we could get away with.

but at the moment I was surrounded by a bunch of AK-47s. “Umm… those can’t go off if we hit a big bump or something?” I asked. “That depends on the position of the safety,” Damien said. “However, I’d consider the case of grenades and road traffic collisions to be of greater concern.”

“It seems whenever they kill a despot, turns out their things are always tacky,” Tony said. “Like a pimp.”

Hearing from the flight deck was a good sign, I reminded myself. In an emergency, they’re far too busy to bother talking to the cattle.

The whole evening was bathed in the fluorescent glow of unreality, and I had to repeatedly shake my head as if resetting a magic eight ball each time the thoughts piled up and threatened to overwhelm.

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

He possessed a charisma that made him distinctly accessible, familiar even. His magic radiated out through the television to people he never met.

Tony openly admitted he couldn’t complain, nobody was going to sympathize with the burden of being popular. 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.

I think to some degree Tony suffered from the same sense of imposter syndrome that I found so paralyzing. Whenever a personal hero, let alone someone as powerful and respected as President Obama, requested to appear on the show, it confused Tony. His increasing social anxiety and agoraphobia was, I think, connected to this pervasive fear of being exposed as a fraud.

She was a vaguely European line producer who spoke with an accent that landed somewhere between “German war criminal” and “Stalinist henchman.”

Jet lag and antimalarials make for cheap thrills.

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 ethic of relentlessly pushing the envelope—the very drive responsible for getting us where we were—had reached such a fever pitch, it felt like the pace was becoming unsustainable. Flexibility and margin for error were shrinking by the episode.

Total Murphy’s law. Whenever I was at my wit’s end, Tony would show up chipper as a Girl Scout selling cookies.

“Everybody wants to fuck people over,” Asia said. “They do, they really do.” “You know, I’m coming around on that,” Tony said. “I think, actually, that it’s not that. It’s the people who act in their perceived self-interest, and I think most people do the best they can, and a lot of times that means they’re going to fuck you over. And you know, it’s on me if I have unreasonable expectations of people, which I do.”

“There’s no place to say goodbye to him,” I said, overcome with emotion and a wave of booze. “If I can’t say goodbye, then how am I going to move on?” I asked through tears. “We’re never going to move on or get on with it,” Asia said. “There will never be a goodbye to him. I have to live with it. Thirty times a day, everything I see reminds me of him, everything I do relates to him. We will always be like this.”

In the final sixty seconds before the presidential motorcade arrived, I could feel the energy in the restaurant intensify, almost like a charge of electricity in the air. This must be what a dog feels when it senses an earthquake before it happens, I thought.

I am on balance pretty convinced that generally speaking the human race are doing the best they can to be as good as they can, under the circumstances, whatever they may be.

IT’S BEEN SAID TONY USED FOOD AS A PASSPORT, AND WE DID.

As much as they did their best to remain “down to earth,” there was an undeniable cult of personality surrounding whichever chef helmed one of these culinary cathedrals.

Any time we filmed in Italy, Tony insisted we include a nonna.

Tony frequently said that his great sadness in life was that he wasn’t born into a big Italian family.

I started writing about Tony and my travels because there was nothing else I could do. Searching for inspiration through old shoot notebooks, raw footage, and emails, I was startled how much Tony talked about death, on camera and off.

I’d begun to think of him as invincible, if not immortal. He had nine lives, despite what seemed like a death wish.

Blessed with a gift for elevating the mundane to the absurd, Tony’s imagination was so powerful he could literally make his own reality come alive. I loved the way he reinterpreted the gray everyday, making it more colorful. It might not have always been easy living in Tony’s world, but it was never boring.

ultimately 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 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.