By his early 20s, Bourdain was hooked on both the rough-and-tumble kitchen life and a host of illicit substances. During an early job in Soho, Bourdain was, he wrote, “high all the time” — cooking meals while on speed, cocaine and, “increasingly, heroin.” He would dispatch a busboy to Alphabet City to pick up bindles of smack. For kicks, the young chef and his crew would blast the soundtrack to “Apocalypse Now,” soak the kitchen’s range in brandy and set it alight to mimic scenes from the Vietnam flick.
Bourdain burned the candle at both ends, toiling over that stove all day and night, then going to see punk bands and doing drugs in after-hours clubs downtown, “working through” hits of blotter acid and shots of Stolichnaya.
Of course, it ended badly. On Reddit, Bourdain later recalled his worst moment as a drug addict: “Combing the shag carpet for paint chips in the hope that they were fallen crack bits. Smoking them anyway.”
Summing up his show for a story in The New Yorker, the chef recounted the original pitch: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of s- -t and basically do whatever the f- -k I want.”
On multiple occasions, it involved him getting tattooed on television. His first one was done privately, and “my first wife was not pleased,”
he told Maxim last year. “I just went out and did it to congratulate myself on my sudden change of fortune after 30 years toiling in obscurity.”
Bourdain last worked full time in a restaurant kitchen at Les Halles in 2000. By the end of his run there, he made only $800 per week and, until age 44, he had never had a savings account. Asked in 2013 if he missed the chef’s life, Bourdain cheekily replied, “Hell no! I like farting through hotel sheets.”
https://pagesix.com/2018/06/09/anthony-bourdain-was-regularly-suicidal-after-end-of-first-marriage/