by Tom Vitale
“What do we have in the way of provisions?” Tony asked.
“There are some protein bars in here somewhere,” I said.
“Now that would be a worst-case scenario if I have to eat one of those things,” Tony said.
“I’m sure the storm will let up soon.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, because if we get stranded out here in the blizzard, we might be forced to make some tough decisions,” Tony said. “Like which one of you we eat first…” The silence was eventually interrupted by a delayed reaction laugh from Todd. “With the threat of starvation, you’d be surprised how fast a situation can deteriorate,” Tony continued. “It’s important to think these things through while we’re all still of sound mind.”
“Easy, we draw straws,” Todd said.
“Amateur move,” Tony said. “There are just too many important variables at play to leave it to chance… For instance: useful skills that might possibly aid in our survival, ease of dispatch, and perhaps most important, who’s likely to make for a crap meal.”
I watched the driver concentrating on the highway amid the relentless lashing of the storm. It had ended up being worse than predicted and didn’t give the impression of letting up anytime soon. Tony looked around the dimly lit van, studying his prey, weighing pros and cons while mentally running through a list of recipes. I found the hunger in his determined gaze… unnerving.
“What about the driver?” I said.
“Well, that would just be cruel. Besides, if we ate him, then who’s gonna drive us out of here when the weather finally clears?” Tony said, shaking his head condescendingly. “Let’s see… in the increasingly probable event we’re forced to resort to intra-crew cannibalism… ability to operate a camera is of little use to the greater good.” Slowly looking Todd up and down, Tony’s eyes came to rest on his legs. “Those meaty calves would be fantastic slow-roasted with rosemary. But I don’t think Todd would go gentle into that good night…”
“Plus, I don’t know where we’d get rosemary around here this time of year,” Todd said.
“Zach might scratch, but he would definitely be less of a challenge to take down,” Tony said. He reached over and palpated Zach’s arm, causing him to squirm. “There’s not much meat on those bones, and what there is feels stringy. After a good deal of tenderizing he’d probably have to be stewed in a ragout for an extraordinarily long time. It’s a lot of work for minimal yield, and Zach does have first aid skills.”
“I mean, if we really end up going full-on Donner Party, somebody probably should film it,” I said. Then I instantly realized the error of speaking up. “Umm, also, I absolutely, definitely wouldn’t go down without a fight either.” I wanted to make sure that was on the record. Just in case.
“Ppphf. Yeah, right,” Tony said, rolling his eyes before studying me for a moment. “Tom would probably need to be barbequed with a lot of spice,” Tony said. “Kansas dry rub perhaps. Livestock raised under extreme stress tend to have a bitter taste. They’re called dark cutters.”
“I guess that leaves me,” Jared said.
“Too valuable to the operation,” Tony said. “You have the money and cigarettes. And I’ll need a witness whose testimony would hold up in court.”
“What if we all vote to eat Tony?” Zach asked.
“This is not a democracy,” Tony said. “Besides, if we’ve learned anything from making this show, it’s that, left to your own devices, within ten minutes you’d all be running around bashing open each other’s skulls, indiscriminately sucking out brains.”
Blessed with a gift for elevating the mundane to the absurd, Tony’s imagination was so powerful he could literally make his own reality come alive. I loved the way he reinterpreted the gray everyday, making it more colorful. It might not have always been easy living in Tony’s world, but it was never boring.
Tony had inherited his wicked sense of humor from his father. Pierre Bourdain worked for Columbia Records and instilled in Tony a love of music and cinema, showing him films like Doctor Strangelove from an extremely young age. Pierre died unexpectedly at fifty-seven, and Tony never really got over his passing.
“You know my father used to scrapbook bus plunge newspaper clippings,” Tony said, watching a heavily laden bus with worn brake pads careening toward us at full speed while rounding a blind curve. I made the mistake of looking out the window, and down at the narrow winding dirt road. The wheels of our Land Cruiser were mere inches from a 1,000-foot drop off the cliffside into a remote Himalayan chasm.
“Bus plunge?” I asked, an octave or two higher than usual.
“Yeah, editors used them when they had to fill empty space in the paper. They always seemed to be stories about buses plunging off a bridge or cliff into a remote gorge or canyon in some faraway place like… well… the Himalayas. The more gruesome the wreck, the more interesting. Extra points if there was a noteworthy group of people aboard, like a funeral party or scientist’s picnic.”
Though his reckless behavior suggested he had a death wish, Tony was uncomfortable with the concept of dying. Like other things that upset him, he used gallows humor as a defense. Tony would say, “Painful is funny, one of the essential rules of comedy. The shit that really hurts, your greatest humiliations, they’re funny, you know?”
Tony always said, “Butchers have the best sense of humor. Hacking up body parts all day gives you a hilariously twisted perspective.” Tony could put any butcher to shame. His talents were never more apparent than when we found ourselves in an uncomfortable situation.
In addition to his macabre sense of humor, Tony constantly and flippantly mentioned suicide, and I just as casually included his references in the shows because they were, well, entertaining. The way Tony openly spoke about fears, weaknesses, angst, and death prevented even those close to him from seeing how deep, dark, and destructive these feelings really were. After Tony died, one of the first things people asked was if he left a note. I was horrified when I realized I’d been unwittingly helping him make one for sixteen years.
Chapter Sixteen
KARMA
“WHERE ARE YOU HEADED?” MY NEIGHBOR ANDREA ASKED.
“Java and Bali,” I said, hoisting my suitcase into the car. “That is if I make the flight.” I was late, as usual, having waited until the last minute to pack, again.
“Are you going to film a funeral?” she asked. “I was invited to join one when I was in Indonesia; it was the highlight of the trip.”
My ears perked up. Over the years we’d filmed nearly every manner of festival and celebration imaginable, but never a funeral. Apparently in Bali a funeral was quite a raucous party. After arriving in-country, I brought up the idea at our first production meeting.
“Funerals in Bali are like nothing else,” Desak, one of our local fixers, said. “Cremations are a big party!”
I was intrigued. There were, however, some daunting logistics to consider. How would we fit the funeral for someone who wasn’t dead yet into a rigid production schedule? Would the family of the deceased want us there? Would Tony even agree to the scene? Was pursuing such a long-shot a valuable use of limited resources? But a funeral that was also a party fit in perfectly with the episode’s theme of duality in Balinese culture. In stark contrast to the more rigid Western way of thinking, on the island of Bali, seemingly contrasting opposites—light and dark, the seen and unseen, life and death—are interdependent and coexist peacefully. It was a concept perfectly epitomized by the belief that a person’s death was something to be celebrated. So despite the risks, I decided to roll the dice.
“I will pray somebody dies, so we can get our funeral.” Desak smiled.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable at having once again found myself in the awkward position of courting misfortune to benefit the show.
But with each passing day came a statistical decrease in the likelihood we’d be able to include a funeral. In the week and a half since I’d arrived in Indonesia, jus
t about everything that possibly could had gone wrong. Emblematic of the comedy of errors befalling our tropical misadventure thus far, the only time we weren’t stuck in traffic was the one time we’d scheduled to film traffic jams. During a scene in Jakarta a cat gave birth to a single dead kitten, which seemed like it might be a bad omen. Threatening to erupt, Bali’s volcano started smoking for the first time in fifteen years, and we missed the shot. It felt like anything that involved leaving the hotel was causing the production to collapse under its own weight.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised on discovering that the catamaran we’d chartered for the day’s sailing beat didn’t have working sails. Nonetheless, I was doing my best to keep a positive attitude and ignore the sputtering, loud twin outboard motors messing up the audio. The cameramen struggled to keep both a steady shot and their footing as the bow lifted skyward before settling back again, rolling over ten-foot swells.
“I grew up reading books about pirates. Conrad and Lord Jim very much resonated with me,” Tony said. “I guess it goes a long way to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
“This is one of the three most piratical places on the planet,” Lawrence said, adjusting his eye patch. A British expat with a PhD in psycho-anthropology, Lawrence had spent the better part of the 1970s sailing across the Indonesian archipelago with his brother and a sixteen-millimeter camera. “I lived for six months with the Boogies,” he continued. “They’re a wild, seafaring lot believed to have given the word ‘boogie’ or ‘bogeyman’ to the English language. I also filmed with the cannibal tribe who ate Michael Rockefeller.”
Lawrence and his brother produced a documentary series about their adventure, after which they’d decided to stay. Out of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, they’d chosen Bali to call home.
“When we arrived, there were only a handful of foreigners who lived here,” Lawrence said. “No electricity, only one telephone at the airport.”
“I was in Bali eleven years ago,” Tony said. “And so much has changed.”
On that first trip for No Reservations, Tony had been enchanted by the island’s lush green rice paddies, ancient temples, religious ceremonies, trance-inducing gamelan music, and warm welcome from the local population. Returning for this shoot in spring 2018, Tony was chagrined to find the once bucolic island paradise had been transformed into a maze of gridlock traffic. Retail shops, hostels, bars, yoga studios, and restaurants had replaced what had once been rice paddies. Tourists and luxury hotels crowded formerly unspoiled beaches. Plastic garbage was everywhere, blowing like urban tumbleweeds across what Tony called a post–Eat Pray Love apocalypse. So a trip across the Lombok Straits to a comparatively undeveloped island seemed like a good idea.
“I think we’ll be arriving soon,” I said. “This might be a good time to talk about where we’re headed.”
“Well, Nusa Penida was once a penal colony for Bali,” Lawrence said. “And they also believe that it is the home of the Leyaks, the witches, the black magicians.”
“This island has not been invaded by tourists like Bali?” Tony asked.
“No,” Lawrence said. “Somehow it hasn’t.”
Drawing closer to Nusa Penida’s rugged coastline, I could make out odd-shaped rock formations protruding from dense jungle canopy. The island appeared timeless, unmarred by the scourge of tourism. Rounding a jagged escarpment, we entered a protected cove and dropped anchor. Our destination—a stunning white sand beach surrounded by bright turquoise water—couldn’t have been more beautiful. There was a feeling of having stumbled upon a hidden treasure, as if the island’s cliffs and dense vegetation colluded to keep this place their jealously guarded secret.
“Well, we certainly have it all to ourselves,” Lawrence said.
Surveying the landscape, it was hard to believe we were only twenty kilometers from Bali’s discos, hotels, yoga studios, and exhaust fumes. Landing on shore, however, an unpleasant surprise awaited.
“That’s the trouble, even the wildest and most remote beaches still have garbage washing up on them,” Lawrence said.
In addition to the usual styrofoam, shredded fishing nets, and plastic bottles, we collected five hypodermic syringes. With the beach restored to its natural state, it was time to set up. Everything needed for the scene—tables, chairs, umbrellas, a barbeque, giant spiny lobsters, as well as a local chef—had come with us by boat. Keeping one eye on the cameras filming b-roll and food prep and the other on Tony, who’d gone for a swim, I took a moment to sit down in the sand and breathe in the fresh sea air. It was a perfect day, late afternoon sun glinting off the lagoon, the only sound crashing waves. I took a couple hits from the bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker stashed in my backpack. After the cheek-by-jowl chaos of Bali, something felt almost eerie about the emptiness.
“All right, everyone, let’s reconfigure to the table,” I called over the walkie. I didn’t consider myself superstitious, but I’d heard nothing but creepy stories about “Black Magic Island,” as it was known locally, and missing the tide would mean being marooned here overnight.
“These are the biggest local lobsters I’ve ever seen,” Lawrence said as the massive crustaceans hit the table with a thud. “Actually, those are really crayfish, aren’t they?”
“If that’s a crayfish, I don’t want to meet the lobster,” Tony said, digging in.
While cameras rolled, the conversation meandered between topics such as psycho-anthropology, reincarnation, and Balinese religion.
“We call Bali the Island of the Gods. That’s the slogan for the tourism industry, but it’s equally an island of the demons,” Lawrence said. “The Balinese believe the universe is a balance of light and darkness, good and evil. One cannot exist without the other.”
“We’ve been talking about this throughout the show,” Tony said. “In the West we tend to think of things in a binary way. There’s good and evil, capitalist and communist, life and death. But in this part of the world those notions of light and dark, good and evil, are not absolute ones?”
“Not at all,” Lawrence said. “It’s particularly the case in Bali with the Hindu Buddhist. They see it in terms of balance.”
“So they know things we don’t?” Tony asked.
“Absolutely,” Lawrence said.
Spirituality and magic were so interwoven into the fabric of everyday life that Bali had more temples than houses. In contrast to the rest of Indonesia—the most populous Muslim nation on Earth—Balinese practiced a unique form of Hinduism that blended elements of Buddhism with ancient beliefs of ancestor worship and animism.
“No matter where I am, there’s always a little voice outside of me second-guessing the experience,” Tony said. “There’s always an ‘I would like to be here now.’ But very rarely have I been able to feel so… unless aided by some psychoactive drug. I wish I could free myself of the analytical part of my mind.”
Over the last couple years, I’d seen Tony exhibit a genuine motivation toward personal philosophical growth. Perhaps it was because he was getting older, or more mature. Whatever the reason, his attitude in regard to religion had evolved from a generally snarky distain to a sort of intellectual curiosity, for certain elements of Buddhism in particular. A couple months before Indonesia, while in Bhutan, I’d been surprised by his considerable knowledge of Buddhist teachings. He’d been impressed at how the Bhutanese considered it therapeutic to spend time every day reflecting on death.
“Maybe Lawrence can tell us about funerals?” I asked.
“Yeah, tell me about the funerals,” Tony said. “Hopefully we’re attending one.”
“You are?” Lawrence asked. “Well, a Balinese funeral is a very sobering phenomenon, especially for us Westerners who distance ourselves from death. It’s quite an extraordinary thing, that you actually light the match that consumes your loved one.”
“Yeah, I wonder… I’ve thought about, as one does, how I want to go,” Tony said.
“You want them all to cry, don’t yo
u?” Lawrence asked with a chuckle.
“No, leave me in the jungle,” Tony said. “I don’t want anybody seeing my body. I don’t want a party.”
“Okay,” Lawrence said, unsure of where Tony was taking the conversation.
“What actually happens to my physical remains is of zero interest to me, unless it could provide entertainment value… I mean in a perverse or subversive way. If you could throw me into a wood chipper and spray me into Harrods, you know, at the middle of the rush hour. That would be pretty epic. I wouldn’t mind being remembered in that way…” Tony thought for a moment, looking out at the ocean. “But other than that, yeah, I wouldn’t want my loved ones to be inconvenienced or burdened with the responsibility of having to emulate some concern, affection, or sense of loss when really, they’re just thinking about… you know, ‘It’s two for one chicken wings at Applebee’s.’”
LATER THAT EVENING I SAT reclined on an oversize purple banquette watching well-heeled vacationers sip designer cocktails. The DJ played techno dance music beneath a polychrome of lights pulsing aqua, violet, and magenta. The ambiance was more beachside nightclub than hotel bar, but everything about the W Bali was over the top.
“It’s like a whole room,” Tony said. “With a rain shower. Then next is a garden with an open roof and a giant marble bowl that’s a bathtub. That’s another room.”
“You have a bathtub room?” I asked.
“I have a bathtub room,” Tony said. “And a private lap pool. Why don’t you move into my place, man? Seriously.”
“Well, I don’t want to bother you,” I said, not knowing quite what to make of the invitation.
“There’s a guest wing that’s like a whole other apartment complex,” Tony said. “In between there’s a communal living area. So move your shit over, man. Leave your oppressive lodgings. Seriously.”