Interviewee in ‘Parts Unknown’ recalls drug chat

For one episode of his popular CNN series “Parts Unknown,” Anthony Bourdain traveled to western Massachusetts to interview Dr. Ruth Potee about what she refers to now as the “epidemic of hopelessness and despair” around opioids.

It was a phenomenon to which Bourdain was not exactly a stranger, she would learn during their intense, 90-minute conversation in 2014 over beers at The People’s Pint in Greenfield.

“He was very frank about his hard-partying days and substance abuse in Provincetown, where he started out as a dishwasher in the 1970s,” Potee said yesterday. “My guess is sometime in the 1980s, he cleaned up his act. And we talked about his daughter, and I remember thinking here is a dad who is in love with his child. And I felt good for him and good for his daughter. But I also came away thinking this guy’s got struggles.”

When CNN called her yesterday after the 61-year-old celebrity chef and citizen of the world had been found dead of an apparent suicide in France, where he had been working on his series on culinary traditions, Potee was shocked, yes, but not entirely surprised.

Widely loved and rarely afraid to speak his mind, he mixed a coarseness and whimsical sense of adventurousness, true to the rock ’n’ roll music he loved. Part travelogue, part history lesson, part love letter to exotic foods, Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” seemed like an odd choice for CNN when it started in 2013. There had been nothing quite like it on the staid news network, and it became an immediate hit.

“We are constantly asking ourselves, first and foremost, what is the most (messed) up thing we can do next week?” Bourdain said in a 2014 interview with The Associated Press.

Potee, a family physician and addiction specialist, remembers him being very respectful of kitchen staff but his producers being very protective of his privacy, which led her to believe that he was actually an introvert in an extrovert’s profession — a difficult thing to pull off.

“There was a sense of him turning on when the camera was on,” she said. “He was a performer who ran with very high energy but also had his demons apparently. People don’t kill themselves unless they’re struggling. Even people with money and resources can feel that the only out they have is to take their own lives.”

In the same episode of “Parts Unknown” in which he interviewed Potee, Bourdain made a confession to a support group for addicts.

“I’ll tell you something really shameful about myself: The first time I shot up, I looked at myself in the mirror with a big grin,” he told them. “Something was missing in me . ... There was some dark genie inside of me.”