The Not So Quiet American

I awoke to the sounds of footsteps on our roof and chainsaws blaring.  Instead of being on red-alert, Lola rose her head slowly and sleepily, giving me her version of a smile.

The tree men were here.

I gathered her up and went where the tree men were not.  I pulled up the newspaper on my laptop.  Anthony Bourdain was dead.

I worked in restaurants, mostly as a cook, for around ten years.  I culminated my experience with a brief stint as an assistant pastry chef in a French restaurant where I met one of the owners, Eric Ripert, shortly before Alec and I left on a nearly year long trip through Asia.

I read Kitchen Confidential shortly after it came out and devoured Bourdain's stories.  The pirate brigade ferociousness of the line cooks.  The lifestyle. I vicariously relished the sight of a dinner service beginning with the line doused in brandy and set aflame to the sounds of Flight of the Valkyries.  A mad scientist, pastry "terror dome" filled with gallons of molten seafood stew, conceived while fucked up and served to unsuspecting guests, with hopes that it didn't spring a lava-spurting leak.  My experience was never quite as intense as his, but I did enjoy reading the ride.

Later, he would talk about The Quiet American and show the world Hanoi.  All you have to say is 'Hanoi' to me and it invokes memories; I found it one of the most beautiful places I had ever been.  It holds a place in my heart that is bigger than New Orleans, larger than Havana, it's Hanoi.  I read the The Quiet American while in Vietnam, and was entranced by the mystery of Indochina, the roots of war, the opium and the decaying splendor.  He went to Hanoi for the first time the same year Alec and I did, the year 2000.

We are all friends here, right?  I've got my demons.  You've probably got yours, too.  But Anthony Bourdain seemed to have slayed the beast, whether it was worries of an unaccomplished life, the slavish life of a restaurant worker, addiction, mental illness.  He went on to craft a life of anyone's dreams well past the point when, in his own words, he should have been sent to the glue factory.  Extensive travel, exotic food, basically doing whatever the fuck he wanted.

But, it looks like you can never really slay the beast.  It lays and it waits.