Being Human

It is June 8th, 2018, and I am sitting in a crowded conference hall built into the guts of a former shipping warehouse on the edge of Berlin.

An array of company speakers drone away on stage about how artificial intelligence is going to change the world. I’m just trying to get human again, still in the last stages of recovery from a grueling flight into the city that pushed my altitude sickness hard. I am tired, bored, slightly irritated, and growing more so as the breathless pace of onstage monologues continues. I’m only really awake thanks to the laptop in my lap, feeding me just enough random internet noise to keep my brain from shutting down.

But I’m also excited. This is travel. This is what I longed for, for so many years, trapped in the states on a cook’s income and barely able to afford a Greyhound to go to the next city, let alone dream of travelling Europe, or Asia, or Latin America, eating everything in sight. Now I’m sitting here, half way around the world from the tiny town I grew up in, eagerly awaiting my chance to break away from the Official Company Schedule™ and get another taste of this new place.

As someone on stage eagerly announces his intent to bet the entire company on something I’m still not convinced is anything but huckster bullshit, I idly click through to one of my usual news feeds, and start scrolling for something, anything, to take my mind out of this place.

And then I see the headline.

Anthony Bourdain, dead at 61, of apparent suicide.

My chest stops.

The sound of the loud speaker becomes noise.

No, I scream in my mind’s ear, as the tears wage a battle of wills with my sense of decorum.

Please no.

Not yet.

Not now.

Why?

I click story after story, chasing something, any details, perhaps even hoping this is all some cruel joke. The man was about to air an episode in Berlin, for God’s sake. The irony is too thick for even this world.

But the headlines appear one after the other. Reality sets in.

My hero is dead.

I discovered Anthony Bourdain during one of my life’s many rough patches. My memory is hazy on the details, but it’s a pretty safe assumption to say I’d lost another cooking job, or another friend had finally got fed up with me sleeping on their couch. I found myself once again living in a spare room in the family home in rural Oregon, miles from town with nowhere to go and nothing to occupy my mind but a computer and a cable TV.

And then one day there was this voice coming from my TV. It was sarcastic, cynical, packed with foul-mouthed eloquence and a sharp sense of humor. The man who carried it was a cook (like me!), and he traveled the world, eating amazing food, and always on his own terms, always hunting for the real soul of a place instead of cheesy travel show cliches.

I was hooked immediately. I watched every episode and even the reruns religiously. Eventually I managed to score a ride into town to the local library and immediately devoured a copy of Kitchen Confidential, and like every young cook I was blown away.

Sure the details weren’t exactly the same for me. There was a lot less illicit sex and drug use on my end because even as a cook I was still a boring nerd, but I found in his book, as many did, a kind of vindication. He presented the world of the kitchen as a kind of punk rock hero’s struggle, a bunch of rejects and degenerates who carved their own space in a system that saw them as servant losers. It reminded me of the cyberpunk antiheroes I’d loved reading about as a teenager, but with less chrome, gunfire and synthetic drugs, and more knives, gas burners, and smoking pot in the storage room. For someone who by this point in their life had bounced from one shitty minimum-wage kitchen job to another, it gave me a sense of self-respect I’d never had before.

But what’s more, I saw myself in this guy. He had my sense of humor, my cynicism, and he’d had a life far rougher than mine, and yet somehow he’d gone from slinging frites to globe-trotting, eating the best the world had to offer. It gave me hope that maybe I could find a way up and out of this dead end town and these fake-ass “Asian” restaurants I kept working in.

It’s almost certainly Bourdain I have to blame for sticking with cooking for the next few years. For my first attempted stage at a real high-end restaurant. For the two underpaid restaurant reviews I managed to get published. The repeated dead-end attempts at a food blog. It’s probably even the promise of finally getting to travel that lead to me flying half-way around the world to Finland.

By all rights I should probably resent the guy for all the bad decisions he lead me into, and maybe I would by now, except … as time went on, he grew. As a creator, as a person, and as he did, so did I.

The cynical, snarky cook became something more. The guy who used to crack jokes about Guy Fieri was now sitting down with Emeril in his restaurant in New Orleans to talk about the destruction after Hurricane Katrina. Survived the outbreak of war in Lebanon. Met victims of the US bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos. Ate in the family homes of Palestinians and Israelis alike. Ate bun cha with the fucking President.

Seeing the world, seeing so many points of view changed him. Tony made it his mission to humanize the world. Instead of just making “food porn,” he turned to trying to find the commonality in all of us, to show we’re all just people, trying to get by.

He focused now on a different kind of hope: the hope that maybe, just maybe, we can sort all this mess out and learn to see each other for our common struggles.

And despite all of the success, he never let it go to his head, never forgot where he came from, never hesitated to remind people he was just some mouthy cook who got lucky. He became a passionate activist in the food scene for the recognition of the countless, hard-working Hispanic cooks and restaurant workers who more and more do all the hard dirty work he wrote about all those years ago in Kitchen Confidential. He spoke in no uncertain terms in support of the #MeToo movement, and was even reflective about his own role in the sexist environment in the food world.

That’s just what he did. He wanted to show us all we were just hungry humans in the end, trying to survive, just like he had.

Berlin is a challenge.

It’s dirty, chaotic, seemingly completely disorganized, and makes only the barest concessions to even being navigable by an outsider. Every other block seems to smell like an open sewer drain, directions are almost useless because street signs are few and far between, and even your GPS seems to conspire against you ever feeling like you have the slightest clue where you are.

By my third day in the blistering summer heat, I was exhausted, drained, and increasingly thinking I didn’t even like this place. There’d been moments of promise, of course: a short-lived trip to a queer beer garden that ended in an accidental dine-and-dash, a literal underground record release party, and an admittedly astounding shawarma from a random hole in the wall in Kreuzberg.

But today I was at least temporarily unmoored from the schedule of corporate events. I was free to roam, and roam I did. I went to a video games museum in the former Communist government district. I ate at a restaurant themed like an East Berlin living room circa 1970 and ate East German home cooking: a “jaegerschnitzel” made from a slice of sausage meat with a side of plain noodles with parsley and tomato sauce. I got trapped on a bus in Berlin traffic and wound up bailing out to go check out a used game store. I went shopping at a queer feminist sex shop, its walls lined with organic lubes, anti-fascist stickers, indie porn, and underwear and binders for trans folks.

It was a great experience, despite the mind-boggling temperatures and the growing blisters on my sandal-clad feet, but there was one aspect of it that didn’t even occur to me until a conversation at the company party that night.

In Berlin, I am just another person.

I’ve seldom ever been hassled in Finland for being visibly trans. Finns are far too reserved and polite to resort to bothering strangers vocally unless they are quite drunk.

Instead, they give the look. A particular judgmental stare that tells you you’re outside the bounds of “normal” that, to a Finn, is the highest condemnation they’ll ever level in public. I’ve watched smiles wipe from faces, cheer turn to frowns, seen mothers go from laughing with their children to the steely-faced grimace of the paranoid. I’ve sat in a restaurant in the suburbs while every single eye in the place stared at me while I ate. This silent disgust surrounds my time in Finland, a constant white noise in my daily life.

The only dirty looks I got in four days in Berlin were from the small cluster of butch lesbians at the beer garden. I’m just not that big of a deal. Berlin, for whatever else it may be, is a relentlessly diverse city. I was constantly surrounded on the metro every day by people all over the world, and LGBT people are everywhere. On any given night in Berlin you can doubtless find a club somewhere packed to the walls with weirder people than just a boring old trans girl.

Berlin was the first time since I transitioned where people just seemed to look at me as another human.

Monday, June 12th, 2018. Back home in Helsinki and it’s almost midnight. The window has been open on my screen for hours now, but I can’t click it.

I find other things to do, other things to watch. I spend over half an hour watching Adam Savage build a giant Nerf gun. I run down half a dozen technical rabbit holes, switching from one programming language to the next, one micro project after another, at least three times in the course of an evening.

We associate procrastination with being unproductive. But no one is ever more productive, a busier bee, than someone putting off something else, especially when it’s something painful, and I know this one is going to hurt.

Finally, after a sausage dinner and a string of Youtube stand-up comedy videos, I manage to catch myself off guard enough to finally click the button, and soon enough I’m whisked away by that voice one more time.

Just as so many times before, in a space that somehow never feels long enough but always manages to fit, he’s on my screen holding the very heart of the place up to the light.

But one thing is different this time. For the first time in my life, he’s going somewhere I’ve already been. Familiar sites and names pass by, alongside others I never saw. A strange irony once again strikes me as he and a guest partake of a late-night showing of Metropolis, a film which served as the theme of the very event I was in Berlin to see. There is even a segment where he meets a man who documented the life in Berlin of another of my heroes: David Bowie.

As he and his guests tell the story of Berlin, speak of its culture, of its soul, of its history, I piece them together with my own attempt to grapple with the place and realize something.

Sometimes in life we have heroes because we want to be like them.

Sometimes in life we have heroes because we want to be in love with them.

And sometimes, maybe just once in a life time, we have heroes because we find ourselves in someone, and it is as if we have come across an old friend we’ve never met yet.

I never met Anthony Bourdain in life, and now I never will. But tonight as he spoke of Berlin, as he saw the things that I saw, felt the things I felt, it was as if we met minds just for a moment.

Until we meet again, Mr. Bourdain, it was an absolute honor knowing you.