Anthony Bourdain, Mac Miller, and the Worst Summer of My Life

No comic this week. CW: suicide, depression, substance abuse, mention of sexual assault although not in any detail.

The day your hero dies, you put on your prettiest skirt and your heeled sandals, even though they make people stare at you and you’re sick of people staring at you because you’re sick of being reminded you exist. You drag your sorry ass out of the house and onto two buses, even though all you want to do is lay in bed. You choke down the rising bile of anxiety in your throat and ask the laughing lady for six dumplings even as your brain invents all the different reasons why she hates you.

You look at the busy streets of Flushing, and your ugly, ugly brain only sees danger. It sees hatred for you in the eyes of people passing by, even though a tiny rational voice tells you they have bigger things to worry about. Your brain only sees noise and stress and very good reasons to curl up in a ball and never leave your house again. But Tony didn’t see that. Or if he did, he fought through it tooth or nail. 

You close your eyes, then try to see the street like Bourdain did. He saw life in the busyness. He saw new discoveries on every corner, from the street vendor selling dishes you’ve never heard of to the dumpling restaurant tucked in the corner of an unassuming shopping mall. 

You sit on the steps of the Main Street Library, the early summer heat burning through your skirt, warning of the hellfire that’s about to come in the next few months. You shut the ugly thoughts out of your brain and focus on the dumplings, the grease dripping down your chin. You shut out everything but the richness of the pork, cut by the freshness of the scallion. You imagine that you can smell the hot oil from Xi’an Famous Foods, even though realistically it’s too far away. You look down the street. There’s the bubble tea place where you and your teammates stopped to get tea before a match and it was worth the ire of your coach. There’s the bakery where you had coffee with your last love. Your ugly thoughts almost made you forget about the fond memories this place has. 

You stretch your mind beyond Queens, to that other home of yours beyond the seas, a land of truffles and fish. Bourdain knew that home too. Bourdain saw the beautiful parts in every place you’ve called home, and many others besides. 

You vow to try and see life like Bourdain, even though you have no idea how hard that will get in a few months.

You start your job as a tour guide for international teenagers. You cycle through the greatest tourist sites of your city until just the name “Statue of Liberty” fills you with dread. You try to look for the city you love, the city Bourdain would have loved. It is difficult to find under corporate plazas, soulless salad chains, and lines, but you find it. You find it in the taco place that sells overpriced tacos but gives you a freebie, one sweaty worker to another. You find it in the deli that sells you a sandwich at 3 am with your coworkers and then another one, at 9 am, when you come back alone and hungover. You find it in the dim sum place you take one of your favorite groups to, in the delight on their faces at their first taste of Chinese food. You see it in the trusty outlets of Xi’an Famous Foods, one of the only places you can get a decent meal on your work budget near the MoMA that won’t involve a burger. 

On one of your rare days off, you and a friend go to the East Village and find a mural to him, to Bourdain. You do not cry, instead, a smile breaks out on your face. Others loved him, too. Others understand why you miss him, too. 

But finding pockets of joy in the city, trying to see it like Tony did, becomes harder and harder. You work ten hour days, twelve hour days, sometimes fourteen hours on the weekends. You chose this job because you thought the constant work would drown out the bad thoughts, but now there’s a permanent feeling of pressure in your temples, like your head’s about to explode. Your brain decides now’s a good time to process those awful things that happened a few months ago—yep, right now. You make some choices you probably shouldn’t have.

You try breathing exercises but how can breathing exercises work when every breath feels like it’s stabbing you. You want to talk, but who are you going to talk to? You start drinking every night, every fucking night, and everyone else thinks you’re just having fun but you do it because it’s the only way you can sleep. 

You used to watch Bourdain to feel better when it got like this but how the fuck is it supposed to make you feel better when it’s just a reminder that he’s gone?

You make mistakes. Then more. You make a mistake that costs you a lot at work and even though you fix it eventually, you hate yourself for it because if you’re not good at your job anymore, then what, exactly, do you still have going for you? 

If Bourdain didn’t think his life was worth living, why the fuck is yours?

You take the pills, the tiny anxiety pills your therapist told you would make living in your brain a bit more bearable. You lie to yourself that you’re only taking them so that you can sleep instead of running through your mistakes in your head and the mistakes are running so fast you take another one to stop them even though normally you only take one and then you take another and another. At some point it occurs to you that you may not wake up after taking so many and then it occurs to you that it may not be a bad thing.

You take the fucking pills.

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You wake up. You wake up thirteen hours later, ten minutes before you’re supposed to show up at work, but you wake up. You have time to grab a granola bar and brush your teeth, but not enough time to process the fact that you woke up and figure out whether or not you wanted to wake up in the first place.

You tell nobody. You tell your roommate who saw you sleeping like the dead that it was an accident and when she goes away you almost throw up at the thought that you almost inflicted the sight of your pathetic dead body on her beautiful, gentle self.

If this was an emotionally satisfying essay, you flush your pills down the toilet and this is a wake-up call but it is not, because sometimes when you hit rock bottom you only bounce a little. You keep sleeping with the guy you shouldn’t be sleeping with because it’s not fair to him, he doesn’t know that he’s fucking a dead girl walking, and you keep taking the pills. You take a pill a day for the rest of that summer because the only way you can get through your horrible job and the hell you built for yourself in your own brain and the nightmares of men with hands that grab at you is by using the chemical cocktails of modern medicine to turn yourself into a functional zombie.

Nobody notices.

You keep taking the pills and you discover a man who, when he sings, sounds just as sad as you feel. His name is Mac Miller and you do not call yourself a fan because you have not listened to his older albums, but “Swimming” drops into your life like a life vest.

Every day before work, you curl up on your bed and listen to “Swimming,” front to back. You still take your pills, but now you’re able to get out of bed in one hour instead of two and sometimes you smile again. Mac reminds you that there are other incredibly sad people in the world and if they are dragging their sorry asses through the world, and so can you.

The job finishes and you make it through in one piece, somehow. You take your paycheck and you vow never to work for the company again, even though you know the problem was more you than them.

You stop taking the pills.

You listen to Mac less and less.

You watch Tony for what remains of your summer.

You go back to college instead of into a clinic, although you spend the first week back wondering if you made the right choice.  

You find out Mac Miller died when you’re walking back to your empty house. You can’t think of anybody on campus you could share your grief with because only your friends from working orientation are here.  The shine on your friendship is still new and your grief would rub out that shine and the whole friendship as well, because your grief is such an ugly thing to witness. You think about reaching for your pills and then you hate yourself for even thinking that because it seems disrespectful to him. You watch the “Self Care” music video on repeat instead and sob.

You finally get a therapy appointment, weeks after requesting one. The therapist asks you if you’re suicidal, and even though it’s been over a month since you’ve thought that way you say maybe. You remember your mother’s reaction when you told her about Anthony Bourdain’s death. “I’m not surprised,” she had said, “everyone who feels suicidal once keeps going until they succeed.”

Your own mother sees you as a walking deathtrap, what else are you supposed to answer?

He makes you fill out a safety contract and a worksheet. He asks you to list reasons why you might kill yourself. You realize you can’t think of any. “I can’t think of any!” you tell the therapist gleefully, because normally your brain is swelling with reasons why you do not deserve to live and now, for once, it is blissfully silent.

“Well, can’t you try harder and think of at least one reason to kill yourself?” the therapist asks you.

You leave the office vowing to live, if for no other reason than spite.

(Eric, if you ever read this, fuck you and your stupid pageboy cap. My grandpa wore it better. Headass.)

You find other reasons to live that year.

Friends, new and old, that love and respect you.

Professors you can share a beer with.

A new therapist that doesn’t treat you like a ticking time bomb and tells you that just because you were sad and suicidal once, that does not mean you will be forever. That you can change. That you are not a condition, you are a person.

When you feel yourself slipping a bit, you make a sign for your room that reads, “Do It For Mac and Tony,” and you realize how much joy there was in each of their lives. Anthony Bourdain managed to squeeze out 61 years of life, Mac Miller squeezed out 26. Although it was hard and shitty and ugly, they squeezed out every ounce of life they could, every smidge of joy to keep them going. Everybody else around you only remembers the tragic part, the one time they failed, but you know how much more both men were. How many days they woke up anyway even though they didn’t want to. How many smiles they brought to other people’s faces. You think about how strong they were, how they kept fighting for life. Not just survival but life at its fullest with art and beauty that cuts through the blanket cloud of sadness that makes it hard for your eyes to see anything good. You remember the victories, because they count just as much as the sadness. 

You vow to fight as hard as they did.

The sign goes with you, to new places where you don’t find what you want but you get what you need. The sign goes with you back to your childhood bedroom when a pandemic upends your plans. It was your worst nightmare to wind up there once, but now you think you’ll make it through. 

It’s been two years and you lived. You know jack shit about the afterlife and are not anxious to find out, but you hope that wherever Tony and Mac are, they know how much they meant to you, even though you are probably insignificant to them. Because of them, you fought for every ounce of time you got. Because of them, you kept getting up even when you didn’t want to.

Because of them, you lived.