To say this man, Anthony Bourdain, had a profound impact on my life would be a massive understatement. In 1999 I was handed a torn out copy of the New Yorker article, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, by my boss, Tom, chef and owner of the Trattoria Delia in my hometown, Burlington, VT. I took it back to my attic apartment room and read it three times. Not only was this guy, Anthony Bourdain, hilarious, he was also a great writer. His style somewhere between Hunter S. Thompson and Hemingway with a touch of Bukowski and Burroughs thrown in there for good measure. Brutally honest, poignant, touching, even brutal at times, but most importantly, the voice for people like myself, poor, working class slobs who toiled in kitchens with fierce devotion to what they did.

I placed him in the back of my mind until Kitchen Confidential erupted onto the scene in May of 2000. A new millennium, but mostly the same old shit. A guy who spoke so well about the life we all led, including the major dark parts of it all. Yeah, cooking wasn’t this spotless, great life everyone thought it was. There were a lot of people, like myself, who had fallen into it because they were misanthropic and just needed a way to make a living. I surrounded myself with other miscreants and outcasts. We drank a lot, did outrageous things sometimes, and always showed up the next day dedicated to our craft whether we wanted to admit it or not. Bourdain solidified that for us. He wrote often about the pride of being a cook. He put on paper what we all couldn’t talk about or just didn’t have the ability or words to explain.

After reading his stuff something latent blossomed in me. I had been reading Thompson, Burroughs, and too much Bukowski at the time. I started writing stories again. I had written on my own my whole life and very few people at that point had been very supportive. I had a crazy imagination from day one and often had meetings with my teachers and my parents in grade school, middle school, and high school about the subjects I wrote about. I did have one teacher in high school, Mr. Voland, who encouraged everything I wrote no matter how crazy it was, but after dropping out of college, I just stopped writing. Sometimes you just need a jumpstart, someone to look up to. I started taking classes at the local community college and eventually went back to school full time and graduated. I took the writing thing even further and got accepted into an elite master’s program in New York City.

Yes, I did the work, but if Anthony Bourdain never existed I can safely say I never would have done it all. I would probably still read a lot and would still work in kitchens. A different path.

About a month after I arrived in New York, I saw that Bourdain was doing a signing in Bryant Park and so brought his only two books at the time (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour) down there with me for him to sign. This was in Times Square on the backside of the big public library down there. I thought there would be some crazy line, but no, no one else was around. No masses of people surrounding him, no big crowds. There he sat, the man himself, at a regular old card table, legs crossed, looking pretty bored. I approached and said hi and shook his hand. I wanted to say a million other things but only blurted out, “I love your books.” “Thanks,” he said. I wanted to tell him he changed my life and really wanted to ask him if he wanted to ditch the publicity crap and go out for a beer. He signed my books, one of them I got signed and inscribed for a friend of mine’s coming birthday. I stood there awkwardly for a moment and he just stared at me and then I walked off.

This was all before No Reservations blew up and he became a household name seemingly overnight. It got weird when my parents started talking about him and watching the show on their own. His career accelerated to such a point over the years that he became one of the most famous people on the entire planet. When this happened I still bought some of his books but I think I liked it better before everyone knew who he was. To me, if something was popular, liked by the masses, then it was probably no good. This was far from the truth with Bourdain’s stuff, however. He got better and better as time went on and became more of a journalist, the gonzo type not afraid to bare himself and talk about the ugly stuff happening around him. His sheer honesty was his gift to us.

At some point Bourdain got obsessed with jiu jitsu. It was always a martial art I wanted to do ever since the first UFC back in 1994, but never had the motivation or the proximity to a good school but plenty of reasons why I couldn’t do it. Whatever, I don’t know. He started in 2014, I started shortly after, in 2015. We both became blue belts quickly. It took me just about a year of taking it seriously to be promoted. There we were, equals in this sense. I started doing it, not because he started doing it, but because I always wanted to. When I started getting better and being very consistent, I realized it had been something I had searched for my entire life and finally found at the right moment, albeit very late in life, but none of those details mattered.

Just like Hemingway, a writer he admired and modeled himself after, Bourdain became too famous, maybe one of the most famous people in the world at the time aside from Beyonce or Michael Jackson. I can only imagine what a toll that takes. Hemingway became so recognized for being what he was that he had to take on a false persona wherever he went. The bruiser, the drinker, the every man’s man. Bourdain couldn’t go anywhere without someone yelling at him on the street, I’m sure he couldn’t go into a restaurant without being harassed. It seemed to change him. I don’t want to make any assumptions about what plagued him and the why’s, etc. I can only describe that when he died it shook me so heavily that I couldn’t watch his show ever again or even see a picture of him without feeling like I had been punched in the heart. Only until years later I could read any of his stuff. It was just the other day, years after it came out, that I finally found the gumption to watch Roadrunner.

In December of 2021 I was promoted again. It took five years but I earned my purple belt in jiu jitsu which is the halfway point to a black belt. Some context here. It takes some guys very little time and some a lifetime. I’m somewhere in the middle. I thought about Bourdain when it happened because he killed himself before he could achieve it. The promotion meant that much more, so profound, because I attained more in that realm than my idol had but only because of what he had done. A strange, alien feeling that reminded me of his absence from the world but not from my life. He stays with me. I feel the world changed for the worse, shifted somehow, after his death. That the period of time, and the planet itself, was a better place before he died. That a sadness swept over all of us. It’s crazy that he’s been gone for five years, that he was this guy I looked up to and worshipped but didn’t know personally. That it’s taken this long for the heartache to finally dissipate to normal levels.