The Voice That Gave Me Permission

I'm in a dark hotel room, in the foothills of Northern California... just out of the shower and getting ready for another day of training. I hear my phone chirp. Pick it up, and see the text from my wife. More than one.

The first said: "Anthony Bourdain died today".

I reread that sentence over and over. I honestly couldn't believe it. I sat down on the rickety chair by the window. Looking out into the parking lot. Seeing the cars drive by in the early morning fog.

I was at a loss for words. I mean, he always seemed to be a melancholic guy. But dead?

How?

"Suicide," she typed in another message.

"..."

I had to get ready.

I got up in a stupor. Got dressed. Grabbed my uniform and my belt and walked out the door. While driving to the dojo that morning, through the countryside and gravel roads to this isolated dojo, all I could think was "he's dead?" And I had to question myself. Why obsess about a TV personality like this? I didn't even know him.

But I felt like I did.

Like so many, I watched his shows - like a fanboy - many times over. Not necessarily because of what he ate or the places he went to... but his narration. The story beneath it all... it's also why I read his first book "Kitchen Confidential" multiple times.

That book spoke to me.

As a kid - even as a teenager, I dreamt of becoming a chef.

Before there was Food Network, there was whatever strange bit of cable programming I could find; Paul Bocuse in a chef’s coat, making food look like ceremony. He was the "Pope of Gastronomy" after all. I watched it like other kids watched cartoons.

I followed Bocuse D'or like it was the Olympics. And a few years later, even met and learned stuff from some of the competitors for the national team.

Sommeliers taught me about wine before I was legally old enough to drink it (not that it stopped me).

I'd worked in kitchens throughout my childhood and teens.

I was probably nine, maybe ten, spending weekends and school holidays learning the bottom rung of kitchen work; dishes, pots and pans so large I could literally stand inside them while scrubbing. Watching line cooks move like dancers in a space the size of a closet. Getting yelled at in Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish when I got in the way. Learning that "behind you, hot!" was both a warning and a prayer.

In my late teens, I worked at a fish market. Visiting chefs came through and introduced me to high-level gourmet cooking; the kind of stuff that made food feel less like food and more like edible art. Catering events I helped prep for and work at. Working in bars... then many years later, training as a sushi chef.

The controlled chaos. The profanity. The strange camaraderie of people working impossible hours for mediocre pay because they loved something about the work itself.

Tony wrote about the underbelly of restaurant culture. The drugs, alcohol, the violence, the way kitchens could chew people up and spit them out. My experience had its own darkness. Chefs drinking on the job, coming in so hungover they could barely function. The constant drama between wait staff and kitchen, feuds that could explode over the smallest slight. Learning the best hangover cures from the head-chef when I was eleven, twelve... I watched them smoke like chimneys... and later, there was the "speed". I don't know how they got their hands on it... but they did.

But I recognized the rhythm Tony described. The way food service attracts people who don't fit anywhere else, or those with bigger dreams just passing through until something better comes along. The strange honor code that develops when you're all suffering together.

At that age, it felt like being allowed backstage to the adult world. A dirty little secret society with knives.

But more than the shared experience, it was how he wrote about it that stopped me cold. He didn't romanticize it. Didn't pretend it was noble or pure. He just told the truth, with all its contradictions intact.

I think a lot of people read that book and thought about how cool it would be to be a “rebel cook.” But to me, it was how he turned his scars into stories. Weaving his ups and downs into this tapestry of words.

I'd been writing since I was a kid. Simple cowboy stories set in Colorado mountains, always featuring some heroic character named Steve (go figure). Later, martial arts essays that tried to sound wise and traditional, following the formula I'd absorbed from books by Dave Lowry and other martial writers. They were safe. They bore no scars. You could call them respectful and proper even. Careful not to reveal too much.

But after reading Tony, something changed.

I thought: "This is how I want to sound when I write."

Not like a teacher delivering wisdom from on high, but like a fellow traveler sharing what the road had shown him. Someone willing to admit that he was still figuring it out, still making mistakes, still carrying wounds from childhood that shaped how he moved through the world. I continued writing beyond where I would have stepped on the brakes in the past.

He gave me permission to write about my life as something that could be simultaneously sacred and profane, beautiful and brutal, transformative and traumatic. That the best stories often came from the spaces between joy and sorrow, where real life actually happens.

I wrote about being nineteen. Homeless in a foreign country with no family. Eating 19-cent packets of ramen dry, uncooked, stretching them over days because I didn’t want to sneak around another trash can in the college cafeteria, picking through garbage in front of everyone.

Or about how I was chased by a mob of kids. Looking to teach the gaijin kid a lesson. And once caught, get beat up with torn shirts and missing shoes. That old familiar lesson that looking different was sometimes enough reason to be hated, but never enough to belong.

He showed me that you could take your worst experiences and alchemize them into something useful. Something that might help someone else feel less alone in their own darkness.

Writing became a way of excavating my own life. Digging through layers of experience I'd buried or forgotten, finding the stories that had shaped me without my realizing it.

It's been years since Tony passed.

But I'm still writing. Still using that voice that he helped me find. And I do still miss him. His writing... watching him push the boundaries, ask difficult questions. And refuse to let anyone - including himself - off the hook. I miss knowing he was out there somewhere, still turning his life inside out for the rest of us to examine. Still showing us that it was possible to be both cynical and hopeful.

His writing is my north star.

It's allowed me to be vulnerable. To be raw, unpolished. Willing to admit when I am wrong, when I'm scared, when I'm completely out of my depth.

And out of my depth, I am. All the time.

But here I am.

Writing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Bourdain.