David Simon | Tony [Bourdain]

Lost in the Twitterverse and the cluttered maze of justice, suffering from TDS, all I knew of Anthony Bourdain was his ubiquity and my brother in law's regular quips and observations about him.  A chef and travel writer...not my track.
And then he died and the flood of tributes followed.
This long, brilliant piece by David Simon (The Wire, Treme, Homicide) reports the loss of a dear friend.  Simon's compelling writing reminds me that my lawyerly mastery of the declaratory sentence is, well, not memorable.  So READ THIS.
David Simon | Tony

I was still on the sofa at four in the afternoon, still half-dressed, when I decided that my life could not be complete if I did not somehow become friends with Anthony Bourdain. My son, then a young teenager, also in his underwear, was as inert and transfixed as I was. We were both locked into the ninth or tenth consecutive hour of a Labor Day weekend marathon of Bourdain’s cultural-journey-through-food breakthrough show, “No Reservations.”

I remember the exact moment, the exact image:

The long, lanky, exquisitely sad-faced visage of a road-worn Bourdain sitting on broken pavement in a South American alley – Buenos Aires or maybe Montevideo, there is no way to be sure when twenty episodes are consumed at once — his back to a stone wall, arms crossed above his knees, watching children play at rag-tag soccer with a deflated ball. And with the older men, he is sharing Siete y Tres, the backstreet concoction of cheap red wine and Coca-Cola. And all this imagery with his narration — his exquisite writing so weighted with love for other worlds and their peoples – just washing over another delicate moment.

“This guy is so fucking real,” I remember telling my son.

“This guy,” Ethan replied, correcting me, “might be the absolute coolest person on the entire planet.”

Still prostrate before the Travel Channel two hours later, I was located by my more culturally literate wife who informed me not only that my discovery of Tony Bourdain’s greatness was belated – the man was already a phenomenon in the world of cuisine — but also that we had met and enjoyed part of an evening with him at a crime-writing convention in England some years before. Freshly boosted by the success of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain had been trying his hand at crime fiction – a master storyteller still sampling forms before simply inventing the documentarian oeuvre for which he was perfection itself.

DEFINITELY KEEP READING