A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain Read Free Book Online

fact, unpleasant in the extreme. I felt guilty, a little bit ashamed. I felt bad for that pig, imagining his panic, pain, and fear. But he’d tasted delicious. We’d wasted maybe eight ounces of his total weight.
         It would be easier next time.

Back to the Beach
    My younger brother, Chris, is about as different from me as anyone can be. While I’ve spent my whole life living a hand-to-mouth existence, paycheck to paycheck, letting the good times roll, not giving a fuck, a rapidly aging, now-aged hipster, Chris has always been the responsible one, the good son. He never smoked weed. He certainly never did drugs. His hair was never, ever too long or too short for the times. He graduated from an Ivy League school – probably (if I know him) with distinction. I’ve never seen him roaring or staggering drunk. He saved, and continues to save, his money, never having wasted it on a fast car or a loose woman or (as in my case) some cool-looking high-tech surveillance equipment, which looked good in the catalog when under the influence. He owns a house in Westchester, has a beautiful wife and two adorable, bright, and well-behaved children. If he doesn’t drive a Volvo, he probably should. His job, as best as I can understand it, is as a currency specialist for a bank; I think what he does is fly around and advise various South American, European, and Asian investors when to drop dollars and buy yen, when to trade deutsche marks for baht or dong or drachmas. If there’s an evil streak in there, I have yet to find it. And I’ve been looking my entire life.
         Chris has no particular reason to love me. I bullied him without mercy as a child, tried, in a fit of jealous rage, to bludgeon him to death as an infant (fortunately for us both, my chosen instrument was a balloon), blamed him constantly for crimes of which I was invariably the true perpetrator, then stood by and listened gleefully as he was spanked and interrogated. He was forced to watch the endlessly unfolding psychodrama at the dinner table when I’d show up late, stoned, belligerent, a miserable, sullen, angry older brother with shoulder-length hair and a bad attitude, who thought Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver had it about right – that my parents were fascist tools, instruments of the imperialist jackboot, that their love was what was holding me back from all those psychedelic drugs, free love, and hippie-chick pussy I should have been getting had I not been twelve years old and living at home. The fights, the screaming matches, the loud torments of my painful and pain-inducing early adolescence – he saw it all. And it probably screwed him up good. On the plus side, however, I had taught the little bastard to read by the time he was in kindergarten. And I did keep my mouth shut when he finally decided he’d had enough and coshed me over the head with a pig-iron window counterweight.
         There were, I guess, at least some good memories of growing up with Tony, and I think our summers in France as kids might have provided some of them. Each of us had been, for most of those times, the only English-speaking company the other had had. We hung out together, explored the little town of La Teste, spent hours playing army with little green plastic men in the back garden of my aunt’s house there. We traded bandes dessinées , Tintins, Lucky Lukes, and Asterixes, played with firecrackers, and, when really bored, ganged up on my poor mother. Surprisingly or not, over the years we’ve become very close. When I suggested a trip together down memory lane, Chris didn’t hesitate.
         ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. It was probably the most madcap thing he’s ever done.
         The idea was to leave our loved ones behind and, just the two of us, reexperience the France of our youth. We’d visit the house in La Teste. We’d eat in all the same places in town, and in neighboring Arcachon. We’d go out at the crack of dawn to the oyster parks in