This is not a bit about a brush with celebrity. It’s about finding common humanity with a stranger, albeit a stranger with whom there is so much familiarity that they don’t feel like a stranger. That happens. We learn so much about people in public life that we feel that somehow we not only know them intimately, but that we are alike. We turn to them for guidance, and for words when words fail us. We quote them. Anthony Bourdain is one of the more absolutely quotable celebrities of our time. It’s regrettable that he’s no longer around to say more, because if you’re like me, you’re constantly looking for the right words to express matters of the heart and matters of self.

I did actually meet Anthony Bourdain years ago, shortly after Kitchen Confidential was published. We had mutual friends through whom we ended up in the same place at the same time, several times. It would be nice to say we hit it off but that wasn’t the case. There was what might be called a mutual dis-ease. I think perhaps, thinking about it now 20 years down the line, that we each mirrored traits (maybe mutual insecurities or self-knowledge) that we loathed in ourselves. Our very limited communication, while not openly antagonistic, was sarcastic edging on sneering. It’s hard to say, but being obviously mutual, will never be sorted out while only one of us is living. I fell out of contact with our mutual friends anyway, so it wouldn’t have happened if we lived to 100.

There’s this quote though, and I no longer remember exactly what words I was looking for and why. The thing is though, with this guy, is that looking for something he said that was potentially meaningful or beautiful, is too easy. It’s like throwing a baseball at the side of a garage from a few feet away. You have to be a complete imbecile to miss. This one though, explains what drives me up out of bed and out of the house when my instinct and my body tell me to hide in bed. It pushes my feet into my shoes when every bone aches, and my heart hurts and every synapse is mis-firing and I just want to cry hard.

There are things out there. There are more things than I can count, that I haven’t seen or heard or touched or tasted yet. There is a thrill somewhere waiting for me, that is brand new and will be a very first time.

A very first time for so many things. You only get one of those for everything in your whole life you will experience. Just one. The thrill of the very new and the first time was something lost to me for years and years. It felt like all that was left ahead of me was a big, gray nothing. I am a little boy now, but going into the last quarter of my life, if even that. Every day could be the last tiny fraction, in a life that has at the better parts, been tens of thousands of tiny moments of joy and discovery. I have that, despite the gray days and the dull days and the sad days and the days when filling my boots just didn’t happen. They are mine and I can tell you about them. Or Anthony Bourdain could tell you. Or better yet, get your own fucking firsts. But read this first.

“Monsiuer Saint Jour (the oyster fisher), on hearing this – as if challenging his American passengers – inquired in his thick Girondais accent, if any of us would care to try an oyster. My parents hesitated. I doubt they’d realized they might actually have to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror. But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first. And in that unforgettably sweet moment of my personal history, that moment still more alive for me than so many of the other ‘firsts’ which followed – first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing – I attained glory. Monsieur Saint-Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale, where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster, huge and irregularly shaped, in his rough, claw like fist. With a snubby, rust covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive. I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future. I’d not only survived – I’d enjoyed. This, I knew, was the magic I had until now only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment. I’d learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually – even in some precursive way, sexually – and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle.”