NON-FICTION : Les Halles in Rural Ohio / Lauren Parker
I was a fan of Anthony Bourdain from the moment I watched him smoke a cigarette in Prague on one of his many, many iterations of his food travel show. After years of watching the bland celebrity silhouettes of the Food Network, this gray-haired, Humphrey Bogart-looking, shit-talking, food-loving guy was exactly what I wanted. I followed him, eagerly awaiting each new update to his grizzled, boozy shtick up until his suicide on June 8th, 2018.
It shocked me. It shocked a lot of people. Bourdain was a constant for me and so many others. Our man on the street on all the streets of the world. He died eight years ago on Saturday and it seemed more than appropriate to share a piece by Lauren Parker that grapples with what he meant to her, her life, and a doomed relationship in the hinterlands of the midwest.
Lauren will be reading with us at The Racket Presents : Woefully Inadequate w/ Elizabeth Stix on Thursday, June 27th at The Sycamore. Come on out.
Les Halles in Rural Ohio
Lauren Parker
The first boy I ever loved only had eyes for Anthony Bourdain.
I was a freshman in college when I got into a relationship with the sort of gentle, enthusiastic, blue collar boy that a middle class girl who’d grown up far enough out of town to be a twisted sort of lonely would fall in love with. He had the sort of grit that could show me the world.
And Anthony Bourdain was his hero; a cantankerous voice that fell out of my boyfriend’s mouth with persistent regularity. Cited like high counsel, whispered about like a lover.
I was flunking out of college, and I took out a credit card so that for his birthday I could get him every book Bourdain had ever written, including the gangster and crime novels he published in the ‘90s. But the great tome was the Les Halles cookbook.
We moved in together, we rented No Reservations seasons from the library, and we cooked in the frigid, poorly insulated rural apartment we lived in. My sweetheart made Bourdain’s Boeuf Bourguignon with Carlo Rossi burgundy, poured diligently out of a handle bought from the 24 hour Walmart (our regular date spot.)
We had wandered the offensively white tiled floors, thoroughly cataloged the fishing section and the single aisle of books and spent ten dollars we didn’t have on the sort of wine sold on the bottom shelf in one of the more evil box stores.
He played Slipknot as he cooked, cursing vegetarians and praising spice with the sort of certainty you only have as a young devotee. The worship of this great love of Saint Tony, patron to the foul mouthed and empty stomached. Tributes paid in coffee breath and fearlessness. The kitchen was loud with reaction, kinetic with the sound of liquid being added to hot oil, the symphony of shutting cabinets and the closing oven door.
“He travels the world and he eats everything,” my boyfriend would say, writing poetry in the air with the plastic spatula that would probably give us both cancer. The dutch oven was a gift from his hoarder grandmother. “He believes in the food of the locals, not in just the fancy delicacy, but the real food of the people.” He carefully added beef chuck, rubbed with salt and pepper, to the oiled pan, as erratic in his speech as he was when calculating with meat, carrots, and onions.
The meal still lives in my head as one of the best I’ve ever had. Sipping wine that tastes better in a jam jar (some wines just do), having someone make something so intently with their hands that you can taste their mood, their hopes, the sound of rolling the window down on the highway to the next great food adventure.
Evenings were spent watching the flashes of culture and color on the second hand television that our snowy Ohio apartment could not give us. There was our boy, Tony, sending us postcards and home videos from his culinary travels. Maybe someday we could all go. Maybe someday he would know how much we loved him and we would live happily ever after.
Working class boyfriends have the crucial but unfair task of instilling souls in their middle class girlfriends, of cracking open their cul-de-sac minds to understand how to take care of someone outside of the meager voting power of their crinkled dollars. To learn the gruff and beautiful realities of fusion, of cultural trade. To teach them how to show up for someone without an express invitation. The sort of adoration that knocks the door down.
I never really looked at Anthony directly, but saw him reflected from the pupils of my love’s eyes, and heard about him through description and story. He was a spector in my house, the third person in my relationship, the first great love and I couldn’t help but love him a little too.
We broke up because my love didn't actually want to see the world. I was moving away and he said “I don’t want to pick up and move so that you can move again as soon as you can.” I didn’t know what to say. The plan had been to roam cities, to open a restaurant, to write the great American novel, and the only way to do that was to see something outside of our small town perimeter. To live in the wilds of the world. To learn how to love it and all its lights and noise. The final conversation started with, “I’m not going to be able to come visit you, because I couldn’t get the time off.” I knew he hadn’t asked for it.
Bourdain’s blue collar sensibilities are his strongest artistic flavor. He’s as pungent as fennel, as sharp as sumac about the realities of culture and food. He was infinitely quotable, and annually his stances on international political influence go viral. When Kissinger died, his comments on Cambodia slid through the mail slots of the internet. Our own Cassandra, he looked the camera in the eye and sharply slashed at the xenophobia of American viewers. But he was the son of a New York Times editor and a record executive, he was devoted to the worker while being the outsider. The middle class girlfriend at every table, listening to the voices of the people who make food.
The struggle with middle class girlfriends is that they can have a hunger so ravenous and wide that it will drag you all over the world, keeping you entertained but exhausted, and she’ll leave you on the couch to forage for adventure. An ambition so devastating it licks the plate clean. It’s a wolf on a chain. They will spin you the tale of a simple domesticated life, but never plant their feet. They become Bourdains.
He was messing around with some new pale eyed, brunette with a college degree in writing, and I was cheating with vegetarianism. With prying myself away from the anticipation of my life beginning and allowing it to start. The wolf slipping its chain.
I moved away, and just kept moving, landing across the country, became vegan, cheating on not only my former love but on our beloved Anthony. The sort of betrayal cursed from the kitchen of Little Les Halles in rural Ohio.
I ate in strange kitchens, befriended bartenders and learned the whispered infractions of the food industry. I learned about cultural trade on American soil, and couldn’t stop eating. I fluctuated between the cheap eats and fine dining, never fully feeling comfortable in either world, but not daring to turn down the anthropology of a meal.
Anthony Bourdain killed himself on my ex’s birthday. He’d gone from lover to ex to Facebook acquaintance; We’d been broken up for five years. The only person left in that relationship had been Bourdain. I was dating another Bourdain fanboy who was an agoraphobic alcoholic, who spoke of traveling to Asia but couldn’t stay sober enough to leave the house. Who had drunk a hole in his stomach so he couldn’t eat the food of the people. Not a working class boy, but someone who clearly thought he was slumming by being with the likes of me. We never cooked together, and we never fucked and I was learning how to dread phone calls. What sort of danger a person blacking out could be. He spent five days on a bender after the awful news broke.
I listened to soundbites of Bourdain, his voice as gruff as an ashtray, as I bagged up empty bourbon bottles and tried to not think about how saints die, even the cooks. I felt like I was the only one left, the remaining member of these loves while everyone else had fallen away.
Bourdain’s voice remains music from another room; a parasocial relationship with nostalgia. Everything I’ve learned about him is written on the tattered napkin of internet quotes and the glorified write-ups of foodies. I did not know him; he owes me nothing, I am the voyeur that holds the grief of the fanboy, the only intimacy with it is my own, but his voice rolls through my head where the sounds of old love’s laughter and tears fade into nothing.
I couldn’t tell you my ex’s birthday. I can tell you the day Bourdain died.
Still, I wander these streets, a middle class girl to a working poor woman, wine in a jam jar, scribbling away about the ghosts of meals I half remember, too nervous to keep still, and wondering when some other sweet boy will make me boeuf bourguignon with tough cuts of meat in the intimacy of a shitty kitchen.
