This essay was written the weekend after Anthony Bourdain died and was meant to reflect a feeling at the time.
It all began in Beirut. As far as we’re concerned, it always begins in Beirut.
You walked in, with your lanky ass, to tell a city’s story. Instead, you became a part of that story—a part of us, for better and for worse. Our city, ever occupied and never tamed, opened itself to a man—surrendering, the only way any of us can truly surrender, out of love—who thought he was just visiting.
It’s a strange sensation: wanting, aching, to possess a person that we’ve never known. It’s even stranger, I suppose, because of why we love you, Anthony: for making us ache, in that same way, for places we’ve never been; plates we’ve never touched; and people we have never known, will never know, and perhaps should never know.
We, all of us, are now clamoring to claim you as a friend, inspiration, companion. Absurd. You have family and friends, people with whom you’ve laughed and cried and whispered and shouted. Amazing. We all feel as if we’re a part of your life, just as we feel you’re a part of ours.
“I wanted to get it right,” you once said about Beirut.
Despite what others—clearly caught in the tyranny of today’s emotions—have written, you never captured Beirut. Not quite.
With the irrational and inexorable confidence of a man consumed, or a man in love, I always believed I’d be able to tell you that you failed to capture this city. In this much-imagined encounter, I’d tell you that anyone who said otherwise was being the sorts of sycophant that come with success. I’d convince you that they were wrong. I’d implore you to come back, with us, and see the city again. In the next breath, perhaps to soften the blow or just speak truth to truth, I’d tell you that it was alright. None of us can capture Beirut. We can only chase it.
You chased Beirut. Watching you struggle to explain why you loved this place, without retreating from or masking that love, we knew we had you. “I wanted to get it right.” With those words, you became us: Lebanese—condemned to race towards a moment that, though we always believed it could have been, never was. Not quite.
Anyway… We’re drinking in the dark, talking about you, and looking at the prettiest part of the ugliest thing we’ve ever loved: lights, in this concrete swamp. Beirut still smells, too, in case you’re wondering. She smells of sewage and trash, of shit and piss. And she smells of thyme, jasmine, and lavender.
Unlike some people—those most embittering of opportunists, Lebanese and foreign, who only love something for what they can extract and for as long as they can extract it—you never needed to learn to like it here. You never made it seem like Beirut was about you, even when it was. You never made it seem like you were doing us—a people whose “collective misery” and “maddening complexity” serve as the backdrop of so many people’s personal advancement—a fucking favor by being here. And you never made us feel like a story, even when we were–to be told, tweeted, and discarded like a dirty tissue the second you were done with whatever it was you needed.
You proved, in Beirut and elsewhere, that some shit is simple even if it isn’t easy. You love something, someone, or you don’t. You love a place, a people, or you don’t. And, no, you were not “wrong” to love Beirut or Lebanon. Love is unconditional, but it need not be—as some might have imagined, watching you consume Beirut’s beauty—uncritical. (Incidentally, if the rest of you love it here, ahla w sahla. “Welcome!” as a man here once said. “Welcome!” If not, rooho nteiko. “Go fuck yourselves.”) You loved us, with no reservations.
Anthony, you bastard. You must be drinking the Angel’s Share now. Cheers.
