Descent Into Darkness

Bill,


The death of Anthony Bourdain has led to an unexpected chain of emotions from your faithful correspondent, some welcome, some not. I just read Kitchen Confidential. It's an extraordinary memoir, filled with wet-your-pants humor, masterful showmanship and searing honesty. It's dirty and soaring and sobering. He writes with a clarity and punch that I can only envy. You feel like you are sitting across the table (eating great food of course) as he recounts outrageous anecdote after anecdote, all connected to his deep love of cooking and his unblinking self awareness of the chaos and failed chances within his own life. He never imagined that Kitchen Confidential would transform his life that it did, catapulting him into the inner circle of the cooking world and turning him into an international celebrity. Despite his success and fame, he never lost his humility. He never reneged on his acceptance of responsibility for the crap he did and the people he harmed. He gave himself minimal credit for his deep respect for his comrades-in-arms in the kitchen, especially the mostly Black and Brown line cooks, dishwashers, busboys, and night porters. He never made himself out to be more than the journeyman chef he was, and he accepted that as the inevitable consequence of the choices that he alone made . Reading the book in the aftermath of his suicide, one could see hints of  despair lurking underneath the machismo. He tells a chilling story of an incompetent cook who hangs himself a week after being fired that feels clairvoyant. His excellence as a writer and his lust for life that shines throughout the book makes his own irreversible descent into darkness all the more incomprehensible.


But that is not true. Not for this writer. In the fall of 2015, as the buzzing in my  head grew  louder and more intolerable, I begin planning. The 7th floor of the parking lot looked inviting. But that would make a mess, and a spectacle, and I might end up alive but paralyzed, so perhaps a long swim out into the cove from our summer home would work, and might be constructed as an accident,. In that case I figured, the harm, the irreversible across-the-generations  damage to my family that I knew death would cause would somehow be lessened. Finally I settled on the garage. I would sit in my car with the door closed and wonder how long it would take, who would find me in cold and still in my improvised  gas chamber. I was sure I was done for. I was certain I couldn't function with the tinnitus for which there was no cure or relief . I was diminished, hopeless. and angry. I sought help from a psychologist and then a psychiatrist, both of whom turned out to be blaming and inept. After a particularly bad weekend I drove into work knowing that if I returned home alone I would kill myself. I paged the liaison psychiatrist and told him so.


They took my belt and shoes, and after they let me call my wife, my cell phone  The doctor came in and took a long and careful history of the progression of my tinnitus and depression and then left. The emergency room physician couldn't quite believe that there was nothing with the brain of this 60 something year old physician with no history of mental illness, and so ordered a useless )and expensive) MRI. Finally they loaded me into an ambulance and brought me to a locked unit  75 miles away. Golden Valley we can call it. I spent the next five days in oversized sweat pants in the company of the 15 most disconnected human beings I've ever encountered. Disconnected from each other, from themselves, and often from reality. I read books and wondered whether how the hell any of this would make any difference


Like any savvy inmate I learned the rules. No complaining to or about the sadistic bitch of an aide, not if you wanted to get out and not be sent back once you were. No razor, no nail clipper, no dental floss? No problem! Even though the possibility was still quite real I knew had to promise I wouldn't harm myself  before they would let me go, and so I did. In the entire time I spent there I saw 2 different bored looking shrinks for exactly five minutes apiece. For those five days they kept me alive. I'll give them credit for that. I'll also give them credit for making it so unpleasant that I would never, ever go back. 


A different, better psychologist there told me story about a famous Napa restaurant called the French Laundry. Despite the bizarre cost of a meal (think 4 figures for 2) it's impossible to get in as my wife and I learned during a trip through wine country some years back. But this guy had lived there and had buddies and so got a res with no trouble . Something came up, he had to cancel but his pals told him not to worry, the res would remain available any time he wanted. Suicidal ideation is like that. Something about your life sucks; your marriage or your kids, your job, your financial situation, your health. It doesn'1t matter what the particular suck is. Suicide is a solution, and as long as you keep that reservation open it's available, waiting  for you. So you after cancel that reservation. That story was the beginning of the journey out.


My daughter, my wife, my ex-wife,  and one gifted psychiatric social worker saved my life. "I need you Dad" my daughter said to me during her visit to Golden Valley, and that settled that. If she needed me to be around I would goddamn be around, buzz in my head or no. After discharge I entered an old fashioned psychotherapeutically oriented day program. There you create the most intimate relationships you will ever have with folks you have never met before and will never see again. You listen to and tell each other stuff you would never tell anyone else. And you root for each other get well. 


During one particularly bad morning with the tinnitus at full blast. the social worker said to me. "You  know Eli. you don't sound like someone who can't think straight. You sound  like yourself" So the buzzing was unpleasant for sure, but not disabling. It wouldn't kill me. Only I could do that.  An old fashioned no nonsense master-of-psychiatry took me on. I left the day program went back to work. Everybody acted liked I'd never left. Lots of meds off and on with wonderful side effects like night sweats and anorgasmia.  Lots of trips to Brooklyn to see a 90 year old ENT doc who for some reason has spent his life treating a problem  that affects 50 million American and that almost no one  is interested in. My wife was scared shitless through the whole thing but (almost) never showed it. We learned to meditate together (the biggest thing)  I returned to a lot of undeserved love and a life worth living.


I don't think much about my trip through the dark side. But I don't forget about it either. I have a little scout up in the front of my brain peering through the twilight for trouble, and a firmly honed commitment to snuff it out. And if I had some cosmic power for a do over, I would say to Anthony Bourdain, or anyone else, Give someone who cares about you a day. 1 day, And then another day after that, and another. Until you can look out of your hole and see the light that will surely come.  


Eli