I wished we’d had more time to talk. I remember Tony once saying, while we were at Mars Bar, a now-defunct East Village dive, “I guess I was a lucky cook who had an opportunity to tell stories.”
“Bobby Gold at twenty one, in a red-and-white Dead Boys T-shirt, blue jeans, high-top Nikes and handcuffs, bent over the hood of the State Police cruiser, arms behind his back, wished he was anywhere but here.”
—The Bobby Gold Stories, by Anthony Bourdain
When I close my eyes and listen to the lyrical voice and metric rhythms of this sentence, the spondees and trochees, I think of another crime writer, the wizard of American vernacular and underworld parlance, George V. Higgins. Both Anthony Bourdain and I worshipped at the altar of Higgins and considered The Friends of Eddie Coyle to be the best crime novel ever written. When I pointed out the similitude of the first line of Higgins work, The Digger’s Game to Bobby Gold to Tony one night at a dive bar in Alphabet City after we’d had seven cocktails and an eighth of an ounce of pure Bolivian cocaine, Tony laughed and said that, “The Bobby Gold Stories was a homage to the canon of brilliant writing of one George V. Higgins.” We toasted with a round of Tequila Herradura.
I knew Anthony Bourdain for 23 years. We met in 1995 through a mutual friend just after the publication of his first book Bone in the Throat. It was an unusual first encounter in a men’s room stall in the bathroom of One Fifth Avenue restaurant in New York City.
“Owen,” my friend Stevie said, “I want you to meet the chef Anthony Bourdain.”
I looked up at this bean pole of a man. “Good to meet you, man,” I said.
At the time, I had an online antiquarian book business that specialized in crime and mystery fiction called Swag Books, named after an Elmore Leonard novel.
“Stevie said you’re in the book business,” Bourdain said.
“That and other things,” I said.
We spent the rest of the night talking about books and authors and writing. And to paraphrase that famous line in Casablanca, I thought, Anthony, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
When I woke up to the news last month that Anthony had taken his own life at the age of 61, a part of me also died. I can’t say we were very close over the years we knew each other, but Tony had always been a presence and proved himself a friend on a number of occasions. I remember after a surgery for Crohn’s disease at Mount Sinai, waking up to hear his familiar voice through a morphine induced haze.
“I think he’s faking it,” Bourdain said.
“Well he certainly has better drugs then we do,” someone else said.
“I wonder if we pull out his oxygen tube if something will happen.”
On another occasion, Tony read six chapters of a memoir with which I was struggling. He told other people at Brasserie Les Halles, the Park Avenue restaurant where he launched his career, that we had bonded over cocktail waitresses, fine French wine, and Peruvian flake (which was true) and that I was his coke supplier (which was NOT true). But, what was always on the forefront of our connection, was a love of good mystery and crime writing.
No matter which Anthony Bourdain you talk about, author of the superlative behind-the-scenes narrative of the restaurant industry blockbuster Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), or the host of one of his many travel shows (Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, The Layover, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown), Tony was a storyteller. Fortunately for us who enjoy a good read, especially one in the crime genre, Bourdain cut his teeth writing gritty crime novels.
His first book, Bone in the Throat: A Novel of Death and Digestion (1995), feels autobiographical. It tells the story of an up-and-coming chef Tony Pagana, who settles for a less-than-glamorous stint at his uncle’s restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy. When the local crime family decides to use Pagana's kitchen for a murder, Tony is squeezed between the mafia and the FBI to come up with a plan to do the right thing while avoiding getting killed in the meantime. Bone in the Throat was a New York Times notable book of the year. I remember Tony and I celebrating, Bone in the Throat at Siberia Bar in New York's Hell's Kitchen.
Bourdain had a fascination with criminals. When he found out about my earlier “career” as a cocaine smuggler for the Colombian Medellín Cartel, Bourdain kept me at the bar at One Fifth Avenue. He extracted stories out of me until five in the morning.
“I always wanted to be a criminal,” Bourdain told me. It was a sentiment he echoed in his essay, “A Life of Crime.”
"I want you to meet fellow writer 'Joe Dogs' Iannuzzi,” said Tony ,introducing me to a portly fellow with skin the color of veal.
“You write, Joe?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Joe Dogs said, “a cookbook.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Mafia Cookbook,” Joe Dogs smiled.
I later learned Joe Dogs, also known as “Joe Diner” and “Joe Drywall,” was a Gambino Crime family associate and FBI informant who also happened to make one hell of a steak pizzaiola.
Bourdain’s 1997 novel, Gone Bamboo, features a hit man, Henry Denard, and his wife Frances, they live an idyllic life on Saint Martin until a former target of his, Donny Wicks, is relocated to the island by the US Federal Witness Protection Program. The novel, a fun read with some fine character development, had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard novel mixed with Carl Hiaasen. At “around six foot tall, thin and deeply tanned,” Denard, is modeled on Bourdain down to the gold hoop earring he used to wear. And like Denard, Bourdain also spent time living on Saint Martin.
In 2001, Bourdain wrote what I consider to be his pièce de résistance, The Bobby Gold Stories. Whether the caliber of his writing improved after attending writing classes at Columbia University or matured following the publication of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s third novel soars. The characterizations and dialogue deepen, and so does the romance. Like the crime writers Tony admired, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard and Higgins, Bourdain gets into scenes late and exits early, leaving the reader wanting more.
When crime writer Ian Rankin asked Anthony Bourdain in a Guardian interview what issues he was working through in Bobby Gold, Bourdain replied, “Shame and guilt. It’s a book about a guy who, when we meet him, is breaking an old man’s arm, yet he’s the hero. He’s a big, hulking dangerous guy, who likes to think he performs his tasks of breaking arms and legs with a minimum of force. In some pathetic way, he yearning to be normal. I can relate to that. There’s the urge to stand in the backyard and barbeque. I try to create characters that are caught in the grey universe.”
Anthony Bourdain lived in that grey world. He became a celebrity television host and bestselling author, but he had a darker side that I witnessed. I’m a former addict like Bourdain, so I wanted Tony, the underdog, to succeed. I thought if he could find a way to be happy, maybe, there was a chance for me, too.
The last time we met was a book event at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo, Brooklyn. He was there representing his book imprint. We only got to talk for a few minutes before he retreated into the office to avoid the throngs of admiring fans. He asked me about my Crohn’s disease, if I was staying out of trouble and then out of the blue, he thanked me for an inscribed copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle I gave him 20 years before. He liked the story of how I had ambushed Higgins before his writing at class at Boston University to get his signature.
I wished we’d had more time to talk. I remember Tony once saying, while we were at Mars Bar, a now-defunct East Village dive, “I guess I was a lucky cook who had an opportunity to tell stories.”
And what stories.
I was honored to hear some of them straight from his mouth. Like Anthony, for most of my life I have struggled with my own personal demons. I’ve had over 70 hospitalizations for Crohn’s Disease, countless surgeries, drug addiction. What Anthony taught me was how to survive day by day. I wish he had taken his own advice.
If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.
After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Boston University and working for the governor of Florida, Owen Band returned to Miami where he successfully smuggled cocaine for the Medellín Cartel and attended the MFA program at Florida International University. His writing has appeared in the Miami New Times, The Forward, Perspective and Mystery Scene Magazine. Owen currently resides on the UWS of Manhattan where he daily struggles with middle age, baldness, a slightly enlarged prostate. He is currently writing a memoir.
I must have been six or seven, visiting one of the small branch libraries near our house. It was an exceedingly cozy place, a small but charming building that made one want to read. I see myself standing on tiptoe, reaching for a book in the children's section. It was Rocket in my Pocket, a collection of almost subversive verses. And the first poem I read
The International Thriller Writers (ITW)
Many people who don’t live in Florida tend to think of the Sunshine State as a wild frontier, a place where the weirdest, oddest, and downright stupidest events happen.
I sometimes joke that everything I’ve learned since college is because I read mysteries. I will use that sentence time and again as mysteries teach me something I didn’t know. 
“Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett, and his stories are as compelling and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.” —Anthony Boucher
FILM
AUDIOBOOKS
