Like a Fist Around Your Heart
by Laurie Woolever
Because I worked with Anthony Bourdain for a number of years, and wrote Bourdain, an oral biography, after his death, people often share their memories and ideas about Tony with me. Without asking for them or seeking them out, I’ve now seen hundreds, or probably thousands, of Bourdain tattoos, T-shirts, murals, collages.
A friend sent me this photo recently of a young woman he’d seen on a commuter train. What does it say about a person when they wear a hat announcing, “I miss Anthony Bourdain”? Does it mean that they miss seeing new episodes of his TV shows, reading new things that he’s written? Do they miss his sharp Twitter persona, his deliberately envy-inducing Instagram posts, the possibility of seeing him on the street or in an airport, somewhere in the world?
Maybe the sentiment means, “If you liked Tony Bourdain, you will like me,” or alternatively, “keep away from me if you didn’t like Anthony Bourdain.” I will note in passing that there are no “I miss Dick Cheney” hats, only this.*
An “I miss Anthony Bourdain” hat might mean, “I am kind of a guy’s girl” or “I am kind of a guy’s guy” or “I take Ambien and shop online.” It is a totem, easily donned and easily removed, like the hat with Mickey Mouse ears that I once (age four) proudly wore at Disney World, and that’s fine. To take issue with the hat is to start becoming a version of Comic Book Guy, or guy who demands that a woman in a Stooges T-shirt name four Stooges songs. Casual fandom is the long tail that helps keep the memory alive.
I mostly don’t pay attention to any level of Bourdain fan culture, because it is a sad reminder for me that everything he made already exists; there’s been nothing new from Tony since 2018, only more and more things about him. I have participated in the making of some of those things: the aforementioned book, and the 2021 documentary Roadrunner, for which I was a consulting producer. I am not involved in the forthcoming biopic, Tony, the trailer for which has just been released, but I know that it’s going to re-surface a lot of feelings when it’s out in the world.
Tony loved going to the movies, and anyway, in the immortal words of Nicole Kidman, “heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
I’ve got a time limit set on my social media platforms, along with a Brick, and I’ve been spending most of my allotted internet time poring over memes and videos about Summer House, a Bravo reality show about young New Yorkers spending their July and August weekends in a rental mansion in the Hamptons.
There’s currently a lot of off-camera, off-season drama involving the romantic pursuits of a charismatic young guy named West Wilson. Shortly before Wilson was transformed into a rakish TV villain for the enjoyment of certain segments of the Summer House fandom, he explained on a podcast that his work (somewhere on the spectrum between journalist and entertainer) has been inspired, in part, by Tony Bourdain.
When I heard West Wilson say Bourdain, I felt my mind compartments collapse like a child’s toy telescope. Up to that moment, West was just an idea of a man, whose televised messiness provided a bit of mindless distraction; an opportunity to indulge in gossip without betraying someone who would ever know or care what I thought. Suddenly I was jolted into realizing the obvious; West and his colleagues exist in the material world, as entertainers and as human beings, in this weird era where it is a job to perform a specific version of one’s humanity, or lack thereof.
I visited with my father last week. On Wednesday, we started watching the Mets game; tickets to Citi Field can be had for as little as $6, if you’re wondering what kind of a season the Mets are having. By the fifth inning, my dad switched over to his DVR queue and asked if I wanted to choose an old episode of Parts Unknown; he keeps them all. He is 79 and does not know from streaming, and I do not have it in me to try and explain the concept. He is obsessed with the DVR and is constantly trying to get his friends to “get DVR.”
I chose a 2015 episode, “Borneo.” I hadn’t seen it in many years; I remembered it as a stunning, moving, fierce, funny piece of television, but when we actually watched it, I found it kind of boring. About half the episode consists of people getting shitfaced on whiskey during Gawai, a harvest festival. Much of the rest of it is Tony riding in a low-slung river boat, with voiceover about how the last time he had been in Borneo, ten years before. He’d been at the end of his first marriage and “sick with love, the bad kind, the fist around your heart kind.” He wasn’t openly lovesick in the episode, but still he seemed unmoored, at odds with himself, not yet acknowledging that his second marriage was coming to an end, unable to keep his cynicism and fatigue from bleeding through.
He got very drunk because that was what the situation demanded. I found it very sad to watch. He was doing the job of “being himself” and living his life on camera, but also doing things that I believe he wouldn’t have done if the cameras weren’t demanding it of him—spearing a pig to death in the pouring rain, for example, and using his history of heartbreak as a framing device for an episode of television.
Sometimes people say they miss Tony because they think he would “have something to say about everything that’s going on.” What, like maybe he could have influenced the Democratic primary in 2020, or talked some sense into the anti-vaxxers? Might he have had a stern conversation with his buddy Joe Rogan, and shamed the rest of the MAGA cheerleader comics into sitting this one out, in 2024? If you believe in ghosts, imagine the pressure on the ghost of Anthony Bourdain, to use his quick wit and his smartphone to change the course of history.
I miss him too, both the persona and the person. He’s still hanging around the world, in the memories of millions of people, on their screens and on their hats. A bit like your dead grandmother who approved of your Sunday gravy, a little like the ghost of William Burroughs, giving junkies cover; like a saint to pray to, someone to look to for comfort, for guidance, for absolution.
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*The link is to a hat from Etsy in which it's noted that Dick Cheney died on the day that Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of NYC, which to me is a funny hat.