I watched Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain this weekend. Spoilers about all that from here on, but in the back of my mind was the fragment of a memory, a friend telling me about him after he’d read Kitchen Confidential that Bourdain had committed suicide. I wanted to watch this film over everything else that was currently out. I’d watched Zola days earlier and The Green Knight hadn’t come out yet. So I picked Roadrunner, at least aware that I’d be watching something with emotional weight to it without really stopping to think about it.
The first two thirds of the documentary are fairly standard as far as profiles of brilliant creatives go. This is not to minimize Bourdain, but to say that I recognized in him the common traits of his peers, these brilliant creatives: a storm mind, wandering eyes and heart, the seeming inability to be still, obsessive focus and passions. Again, this is not to minimize him, I absolutely loved hearing this in the first two thirds. So there I was, absolutely giddy for this creative madman, when they started in on his negative traits.
It’s around this time in the documentary, when he’s on his third marriage, that they really got into the negatives of his personality with his friends and family. Hints had been there in the documentary throughout, there had been the first divorce, him rejecting that stability despite a claim that he once desired to be normal. Did he really? I wonder now if that desire didn’t only rear its head when he was feeling down on himself, unsure of his work or life choices. Again, when one of his friends said that nothing could last for him, I realized I would need to get out my phone and start jotting down thoughts.
Before I continue, I want to be clear that I wasn’t nothing his accolades and brilliance in an attempt to elevate myself to his stature. Rather, it’s to give myself the permission to be honest about the ways in which his mental illness resonated with mine and to give myself the space to pity him, to hope for a better outcome for myself. It was at first only a mild not of similarity, the hints of his sexual infidelities, perhaps they were just unrealized desires, but the way he joked about his first wife’s divorce lawyer only needing to subpoena the film suggested more. In that grimace as he turned to the camera, for it was no joyous smirk, I saw a man aware that his desires and passions could lead him astray, they greater in fervor than his spousal obligations. I had my phone out already when a friend of his admitted that it felt like nothing could last for Bourdain.
I bristled at the though, at that character note. I had earlier in the day been noting my annoyance with my college friends, their way of upgrading any passing reference to something more serious. At a recent get together, I had thrice separately had to correct the record, as the guy who I had been seeing and somewhat interested in had received the label of boyfriend. I explained to them that we actually did not know each other all that well, hadn’t even gotten to a point where we could talk about a future together. I had then, in the back of my mind, thought of Jose Esteban Munoz’s description of queer time and straight time in Cruising Utopia. My friends, married and straight, only had this timeline in their heads of dating for a relationship, a pressure I had thought I’d felt from my therapist in our last session as well. Not all straight people subscribe to this notion of course, but these beloved friends have married in their 20s and thus could not understand, not immediately, just dating for intimacy without concern for it lasting.
Going back to the documentary, either the man himself or one of his friends, somehow the idea was raised that life goes on for a long time and asks whether it’s possible to escape our younger self’s anger or cynicism. It could have been his friend, but, funny enough, there was a scene with a therapist. His therapist asks him to reflect on his life, his resources, and whether he really wanted to change anything. Bourdain responds that it’s too late for him. When I recounted this scene in particular to my therapist, she seemed annoyed that I was comparing myself to him. “Sweetie, it is never too late to change!”
“I know, I understand, it was just an emotion that came up during the documentary,” I realized as I was telling her some of this that I would need to moderate what and how I said things to her. It was relieving to hear someone finally say that it was never too late to change, but I didn’t note that till just now. I think it may be prudent to explain to her that I have often used external media to help me process my own emotions, to face up to them.
After all, at our last session, we had been discussing my anger and bitterness. Her response, then and now, was to recommend that I work out more, more gym time and specifically to get into boxing. Bourdain’s friends felt that him getting into jiu-jitsu, courtesy of his last wife, did a lot for him. I haven’t told her that I am hesitant to learn how to actually fight, although we’ll see where I’m at several lessons in. Perhaps it will make me more committed to pacifism. Asia Argento said, of her own practice, that she wanted to be able to hurt anyone who had tried to hurt her. Again, for myself, the concern is that I would do exactly that, violently lash out and hurt anyone who had once hurt me. On that again, the resonance was with the negatives, as Bourdain himself also said he wished to inflict violence on people and dreamt of one day being happy.
Of his suicide, one of his friends discussed what seemed like an explosive anger, a need to lash out. “Had there been someone in the room with him, it would have been a homicide, not a suicide.” I wondered about that sickly feeling, when my thoughts and feelings crescendo into a desire to maim myself, to burst at the seams, to feel the release of anger by destroying a limb. On this subject of violence, I recalled the statement, the likely claim in Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIP) that men tend to be more successful in both suicide and homicide attempts. She doesn’t elaborate, or hasn’t yet at the point in my reread. I brought this up to my therapist and she agreed and circled again, back to boxing, to help get the anger out. I agree with her wisdom and note with sadness that Bourdain’s friend thought either murder or suicide were equally likely.
Finally, the obsessiveness as an alternative to deadlier addictions. I am not surprised by this. It often feels like I’m in that boating, weening off alcohol but not sex, not video games, exercise, weed, fishing for attention on the apps. Perhaps these are less destructive than addiction to hard drugs and alcohol, but this desire to chase something, someone, anything new that could give a dopamine rush, that was familiar. What was new to see linked to this type of behavior though, was that Bourdain would cut off people regularly at the smallest slights. Again, behavior that I have seen in my life, but I was surprised to see it mentioned with these other bad habits. I thought again of what I’d recently read in ACEIP, that the emotionally immature parent will engage in black and white thinking. However, as I had been reflecting on my own behavior, my own black and white thinking and my own ability to cut off people, I wondered too if that book wasn’t written to help the reader engage in their own bad habits, to help unlearn the emotionally immature lessons we’ve carried with us into adulthood. I wondered how much the manifestations of my childhood trauma had helped to hide other nefarious characteristics of mine, how the fed into each other. Am I an asshole, I wondered. After all, Bourdain stated his parents only committed the sin of loving him, otherwise gave him a nice childhood. That is not true in my case, but the resonance with his shitty behaviors was hard to ignore. I thought they shouldn’t be ignored, not if I wanted to heal. Again, my therapist didn’t seem to care for this style of emotional analysis… She was quick to point out what she knew of Bourdain, of his drug addictions, of a relatively stable childhood versus what she knows so far of mine.
To end on a more hopeful note though and riding the idea that you don’t escape the emotional tones of your childhood: if we don’t truly break free of the pain and anger, perhaps I’ll be able to replicate some of the successes from my early life. I had strived in my youth to be myself, regardless of and often to spite societal pressures. So it was that I started to come out young, in middle school, as bisexual. I had, with a child’s understanding of sexuality, stared my pubescent desires in the face and acknowledged their truth. Perhaps, the reality is that I’m pansexual, but these are labels that ebb and flow into each other. What mattered then wasn’t getting it 100 percent right, but the feeling of relief when I could finally speak my truth, find love for myself in being seen and no longer hiding. It is true that I had to hide to survive my parents, to fit in, but do I care anymore to fit in at work? Isn’t it better to be myself than to fit in where I am now? I do acknowledge though, before I came out to my parents I had a plan for what to do if things went south, a plan I needed in the end. So it is that I have begun to seek out a new section, for this and other reasons. Still, in spending so much time worrying about the past, I need to also, if I’m going to be dragged back to then, spend time acknowledging what worked, what steps I took to improve my situation, and repeat those with the greater experience and resources that I have available to me now.
