Illustrations by Austin Hughes
IN SEASON 8 of his CNN travel show Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain visits a psychoanalyst during a trip to Buenos Aires, a city some have called the psychoanalytic capital of the world. Lying on a couch in a dimly lit room looking up into a fisheye camera lens, the host describes a recurring dream.
“So, I had this dream again that I've had for as long as I can remember,” Bourdain tells his analyst-for-the-day. “I'm stuck in a vast old Victorian hotel with endless rooms and hallways trying to check out, but I can't. I spend a lot of time in hotels, but this one is menacing because I just can't leave it. And then there's another part to this dream, always, where I'm trying to go home, but I can't quite remember where that is.”
During his two decades of fame, Bourdain—an itinerant, drugged out chef; truth-telling literary oracle; rugged vagabond with a camera crew in tow—pitched himself as something of an open book and haunted figure. He described in his writing and on his shows the temptations of addiction, his failed marriages, the burdens of his life on the road—somewhere between 200 and 250 days a year living in hotel rooms—and his flirtations with suicide.
Bourdain's approach to these struggles was to raise a glass to them, shrug them off with his dark sense of humor, and keep barreling forward despite them. On to the next flight, the next destination, the next hotel room. Privately, he was known to be skeptical of therapy, and he only began seeing a therapist in the months before the end of his life.
The dream he describes in the Buenos Aires episode carries a chilling significance now, considering the circumstances of his death. But in the show, he plays the scene as a bit of a gag. After describing the dream, he goes on, “I feel like Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame—if he stayed in a nice hotel suite with high thread count sheets, that would be me.” He also claims that eating an airport burger can throw him into a “spiral of depression,” as a whimsical soundtrack plays.
I've thought a lot about that episode since Bourdain's death. Tony, as his friends called him, ended his life where he lived much of it: in a hotel room. This uncomfortable coincidence went virtually unmentioned as the tributes to his life flowed in after his suicide in Alsace, France, on June 8, 2018, less than two years after the Buenos Aires episode aired.
By then, the man who lived what for millions of fans was a fantasy life, a winning lottery ticket, was lonely and miserable.
He was separated from his second wife and barely saw his teenage daughter. He described himself as increasingly agoraphobic, was drinking to the point of blackout, and had become impossibly ensnared in an obsessive, toxic relationship.
Bourdain, a person who seemed to know himself so well—who we seemed to know so well—in the end didn't appear to know himself at all.
A LITTLE OVER a year before Bourdain died, I was invited to spend the day with him in Brooklyn for a magazine profile as he got what was likely the last tattoo of his life.
He was early that morning. He was known for that. As my Uber idled at a red light at 8:30 a.m., I could see him outside the Bushwick tattoo studio wearing an olive bomber jacket and slim jeans, alone, smoking a cigarette in the winter cold. His face was tan from his travels and clean shaven. His head looked like an Easter Island statue. His damp hair matched the gray of the cloud of smoke he exhaled. By the time the car pulled up to the curb, he was inside, ready to shoot.
Bourdain came to tattoos, like fame, in middle age, but they had become one of his defining physical characteristics, as signature as his baritone voice and his mallet of a chin. There was a skull on his shoulder, a snake on his inner arm, and the tribal arm band he got around the time Kitchen Confidential transformed him into an international literary star.
On this day, he was shooting an episode for a YouTube series about craftspeople sponsored by a whiskey brand. The series featured a traditional Japanese tebori tattoo artist who lived in Brooklyn named Takashi Matsuba. During the filming, Matsuba would use a long stick and homemade ink to poke, by hand, a pale blue chrysanthemum onto Bourdain's shoulder, while Bourdain sipped whiskey and asked him about his work. This was Bourdain's life: meeting interesting people, coaxing out their stories, being the curious host. Later, between sessions, I would get to interview him for my piece.
This was a special experience for me. When I moved to New York in 2013, I became the features editor at Roads & Kingdoms, an online publication covering food, culture, and travel founded by a pair of journalists with a global outlook on storytelling. It was a part-time, low-paying gig, but it gave me some sense of stability. Two years later, Bourdain became an investor, and I was the original editor of his curated feature series, Dispatched by Bourdain, which published longform nonfiction pieces from all corners of the globe. I admired his commitment to helping our little outfit, which was very much made in his image.
“BOURDAIN'S APPROACH TO THESE STRUGGLES WAS TO RAISE A GLASS TO THEM, SHRUG THEM OFF WITH HIS DARK SENSE OF HUMOR, AND TO KEEP BARRELING FORWARD DESPITE THEM.”
I had never paid close attention to his career, but when I started reading Bourdain's writing, I began seeing myself more and more in him. This was probably his real gift: the way his voice, his self-doubt and angst, his curiosity, could convince his fans that he was in communion with them. He was a cooler, rougher, luckier version of you, a guy moving through the world, taking things as they came, seeing through the bullshit of it all.
I had always wanted to be someone like Bourdain, even before I knew who Bourdain was—a swashbuckling, hard living (and drinking), world-traveling lone wolf. In 2007 I moved from Canada to China, looking for that kind of life, as I documented in my book Apologies to My Censor, a memoir of the six years I lived in Asia. Along the way, however, I learned that a life without roots, without real growth or a real home, presented its own challenges. It was lonelier, more shapeless than the alternative. I suspect it was the same for Bourdain. “Travel isn't always pretty,” he once said. “It isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart.”
The tattoo profile was my first real chance to sit down and talk with a man who was in many ways my inspiration. The studio that morning was buzzing and warm. A crew of a dozen or so scurried about while Bourdain and Matsuba prepared on a tatami mat. I poured myself a cup of coffee and made myself invisible.
The tattoo looked painful—I could hear the fleshy sound of the stick penetrating the skin, thook, thook, thook—but the host put on a brave face. He sipped the whiskey. It was still early, and I didn't get the sense that he wanted to drink it—he didn't drink it at all when the cameras were off. But the story called for it, and he obliged.
Bourdain was sixty years old at the time. This was a rare day off, and yet he was still working, with a crew who appeared half his age. He was collegial with them but removed. As I watched him smoke outside through the window, I couldn't help but notice how solitary he appeared. I thought about how isolating it must be being the Anthony Bourdain, permanent vagabond.
A FEW YEARS before the tattoo shoot, the life I had built myself, precarious as it was, began to fall apart. I was addicted to the high highs and low lows of life, and this manifested in my career and relationships. I was lonely, single, drinking too much, and feeling a general despair about what to do or how to grow up. My situation was not dissimilar to the one Bourdain described before Kitchen Confidential changed his life.
I began seeing a therapist, a trained psychoanalyst. I had no idea what psychoanalysis was or what it entailed. When she described it to me, it sounded both impossible and somewhat ridiculous. Who, I thought, could possibly afford the time and money for that?
We began with a more conventional approach: meeting once a week, sitting across from each other, looking at my problems in broad strokes. One day she said, “You would make a good candidate for analysis.” I almost laughed.
We trudged along, barely chipping away at the surface of the things that ailed me. From time to time, she brought up the subject of analysis, and, over time, I grew more curious. I read about it, and we spoke more about options. Eventually I moved to the couch, then from one to two days a week. It was like dipping my toes into hot bath water: I was getting used to it but still not ready to go all the way in.
Then, in the summer of 2016, I went through a particularly devastating breakup that tore me up so deeply I could barely function. I thought of suicide. I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I had no real plan, and very little hope that things would improve.
“This is rock bottom,” I told my therapist the day I decided to start an analysis in full. “I have nothing to lose.”
As I launched into my analysis, I did what I had long resisted: I took a full-time, well-paying job with health insurance so I could pay for the treatment, and I committed to staying in New York after long agonizing about moving elsewhere.
It wasn't easy. My analyst often compared the early stages
“I TOOK THE MANY LESSONS I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF OVER THE YEARS OF MY ANALYSIS AND GRAFTED THEM ONTO BOURDAIN'S STORY.”
of analysis to flipping over boulders in a quarry: you learn about a lot of the biggest, hardest things in your life right away, but you can't move them at first. I learned, for example, how hard it was for me to commit to anything, like a job, a girlfriend, or an analysis. Staying the course became our earliest obstacle to work through.
I learned just how much damage my parents' difficult marriage had on my ability to foster nurturing, long-term relationships with women. I learned about my addictive personality, the types of relationships I was drawn to: dramatic, fast-burning, doomed. I realized how much rage I carried with me, and what a burden it was, even if I would continue to have a hard time quelling it. I learned, over time, that I was a lot like Anthony Bourdain.
WHEN I FINALLY got the chance to interview Bourdain at the tattoo parlor, he sat across from me on a couch in the shop's waiting area, his jacket still draped over his shoulders. For someone who did this kind of thing all the time, there seemed to be a certain rigidity to him, a kind of hesitance or skepticism. His posture was stiff and upright, and he looked at me from an angle, maintaining eye contact throughout.
I asked him about his love of tattoos. “It's a selfish, personal thing,” he told me. “I jokingly say, ‘I'm driving an old car. It's filled with dents. One more dent ain't gonna make it any worse than this.’” I asked about his writing, and he said he was working on a ghost story. “About these spirit houses in Asia Pacific, Thailand, Vietnam. They need to lure the hungry ghosts away from the main house, and I'm obsessed. I'm interested in these figures from folklore and history. In some way I feel a kinship with them—a wandering spirit, never satisfied.”
When the interview was over and the voice recorder turned off, a crew member appeared to reattach his microphone. Out of curiosity, I asked Bourdain about Siberia Bar. It was his favorite Hell's Kitchen drinking haunt, now closed, that once occupied a space in the 50th Street Subway station. I had recently met the bar's former owner, as well as one of Bourdain's old drinking buddies from the time.
Immediately, he lit up. His shoulders bounced up and down and he swayed from side to side telling me about breaking up fights and drinking with Jimmy Fallon and the other “fucking degenerates” that frequented Siberia. (Fallon was a big drinker, apparently.)
Bourdain was like a kid excitedly telling a story he just couldn't wait to get out. And I thought—this was it. That
magical spirit, that lover of life who captivated the world. What a gift it was to see it, I later realized, that spirit, if only for a moment.
Soon, he was called back to shoot. I thanked him for his time, shook his hand, and wished him luck with the rest of the tattoo. “It looks painful,” I said. “It's not as bad as it looks,” he replied with a tired smile.
He took his place on the tatami, under the lights. The cameras rolled, Matsuba poked, and the host continued his work. He took a sip of whiskey and endured.
I WAS TWO YEARS into my analysis when Bourdain died. I was shocked, of course, but also not terribly surprised. People who knew him far better than I did described the sadness that radiated off him like cold off ice. They worried about his behavior toward the end of his life, and how his relationship with the actress and filmmaker Asia Argento was tearing him apart.
I tried to imagine what he was experiencing at the end through the experiences that pulled me toward analysis. I imagined him tortured by the decisions he had made, consumed by loneliness, fear, and anger, briefly redeemed by a person who could never really give him what he was looking for—true companionship, a home—and then having that fantasy ripped away. Wandering spirit, never satisfied. I knew about that, I thought.
I kept thinking about the dream he described in Parts Unknown. I was haunted by it. Life, to me, often felt like what he described in the dream: an endless loop, waking up day after day stuck in the same situation, unable to escape no matter what you do. Given the context of Bourdain's death, and the life he led—a twice-divorced, sixty-one-year-old father, who spent three-quarters of the year on the road—the hotel room, in both his dream and in real life, was a kind of purgatory for him.
I had similar dreams. They took place in different places, but always had the same theme: abandonment. In the dreams, I had fallen in love, found a home and a partner, finally, and then was suddenly and without explanation left alone. In the dreams, I frantically searched for my companion, wondering why she left, where she went, what I had done wrong. I could never find her.
I felt like I had something to say about Bourdain's life and death, and what it all meant. I just didn't know how, exactly, to express it. I was taking acting classes at the time as a way of filling the creative void that was left when I migrated from freelancing into a full-time job. I had theater on my mind and was trying to write plays.
An idea began to take shape: the story of a solitary man, the Traveler, who wakes up in a hotel room, somewhere, unsure of how he got there, where he's going, or where home even is. The character was based on Bourdain, obviously, but it was more than that. Through a fictionalized, undefined version of him, I could dive into the themes that he embodied in life and death. I took pieces of the story of Bourdain's life—a career in the kitchen, from dishwasher to chef; overnight literary stardom; a globe traveling TV host—and strung them up like guiding lights, and then fictionalized the stories within.
As it came together, the play became a sort of psychoanalysis of Bourdain. The source material was his writings and shows, to be sure, but more than that it was my own analysis. I took the many lessons I learned about myself over the years of my analysis and grafted them onto Bourdain's story.
The Traveler's only other companion on this journey is the Concierge, a shapeshifter who adopts numerous guises in the Traveler's stories while concealing a few secrets of her own. It wasn't until I saw the play on stage several years later that I realized I had unconsciously written my analyst into the story. The play opens with the Traveler lying in bed, with the Concierge seated over his right shoulder. The Concierge is his companion, confidant, torturer, jailer, wife, fellow-traveler, mother. Talk about transference.
That play, called Last Room, premiered in New York in Spring 2023, the result of five years of work and more than six years of analysis, which is still ongoing. Our producer on the show worked on Parts Unknown, the actress who played the Concierge once worked at Siberia Bar, and the musician who scored the show performed there, too. We became like a creative family during the production. And Anthony Bourdain was our spirit guide. Our wandering spirit.
Mitch Moxley is a writer in New York who has contributed to Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He's the author of the memoir Apologies to My Censor and the play Last Room, inspired by Anthony Bourdain.