The Coyote Chases the Roadrunner

There's a greasy black crosshatch decorating the toe of my right suede boot from where I dropped a hot grill mesh on it, leaving the permanent traces of salsiccia and cevapi. My boots are splotched and stained from rain puddles, from dusty gravel, from incessant travel. I'm not going to clean them. That gaunt, salt-and-pepper haired spectre with the crooked smile tells me not to. "What are you going to do, clean them up for the ball? Fuck that, those are memories." And he's right. I'm going to wear these boots into the fucking ground.

Last summer, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain came out. I finally watched it and felt salty tears welling up and figured I'd do something semi-productive and write something about it. Tony always makes me want to start writing again. The movie documents the life of the self-proclaimed culinary bad boy who, after a lifetime of slaving away in a hot kitchen, wrote a book and became famous at the age of 44. A goal I sometimes see myself trying to pursue, desperate to shirk the chains of petty bourgeois ambition. Write a book, travel the world, eat everything in sight. I guess I'm kind of doing it now.

I grew up watching No Reservations and Parts Unknown. I can't count the hours I sat in my living room, side by side with my family, watching in awe as he traversed perilous rivers in the Congo, drank cobra whiskey in dingy Vietnamese jungle villages, and washed down kilos of foie gras and truffles with champagne alongside world famous chefs. Those shows, they're what inspired me to go travel the world (or at least up to this point, Europe), soaking in the culture of numerous countries and their peoples, constantly and, at times, unavailingly seeking my own self-actualization.

Anthony Bourdain has long been my antihero. Being the host of a travel show dedicated to food, to culture, to people, sounded to me like the dream for a long time, and he made it seem like he was someone who had that dream come true. But now, as I get older and I see the scars that every second of those shows and that fame inflicted on him, I'm not so sure. He's someone I look up to while similarly castigating for his abundantly reckless, carefree attitudes; attitudes that I wish I could spark in myself. He's the person I want to be yet if I became him it would be a tragedy. I don't want to spend my life in front of the lens of a camera, chain-smoking Marlboros, and making smarmy remarks to an invisible audience, living each day without any sense of anonymity, but don't I?

Like millions of others around the world, I developed a parasocial relationship with him. I watched his shows, I read his books, I saw parts of him in myself (get your mind out of the gutter). I imagined a life of travel and hedonism, paid for in full, the only compensation required that I make a few jokes and eat some purposefully bizarre foods for some salacious shock value (admittedly, when you tell people you've eaten brains, you've eaten balls, you've eaten nearly every part of every farm animal and then some, there's a sick pleasure to be felt in watching them squirm, in seeing a look of disgust in their face as you steep yourself in that sense of holier-than-thou, braver-than-thou, more-adventurous-than-thou, all because they wanted a pony as a kid and you just ate one).

For all his faults, of which there were many, he was, and still is, an inspiration for me. When I write, I draw heavily on his snarky humor to disguise dark feelings, I desperately try to paint visual pictures half as vibrant as he could, I make the focus about food and culture as strongly as I can (hell, the fact that I'm writing again now is even thanks to him). I wear sand suede desert boots because he did. I'm wearing a fucking earring as I write this, trying to inspire in myself some of that same temerity for life. I'll probably end up with a tattoo of his by the end of the year. 

So, am I a fan boy? Am I such a shallow husk of a person that I have to try to steal the life of a dead guy to feel complete? Am I some mangy coyote chasing after a roadrunner that's always just out of reach with the forlorn hope of finally catching it? I don't know. Maybe. I hope not.