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The Brogue of Broken Men
Kirk Wisland
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Sickboy, the punky-blonde Scottish antihero of Trainspotting, was the reason I showed up for the Easter brunch of 1997 with orange hair. I had wanted blonde, but didn’t realize (or chose to willfully ignore the note on the store-bought dye box) that one could not metamorphosize from dark brown to Sickboy white blonde with Loreal-strength bleach. And so I arrived at my brief three-week stay as a shiny-orange punk. This was eventually remedied by a professional bleach job, which led to the second painful truth of the Sickboy blonde: you need hardcore scald-the-scalp bleaching power.
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I was entranced by Sickboy from his first scene in Trainspotting, the Scottish brogue of his opening lines of dialogue, riffing on the quality of various James Bond movies as he prepared to inject heroin into his girlfriend’s vein. It wasn’t just the badass hair of course, it was Sickboy’s skinny-mod suits, and the good looks, and the cocky Scottish charm with which he swaggered across the screen. I swooned. And the cheapest, most obvious route to my Sickboy metamorphosis was the hair, since I wasn’t going to take up heroin—although if any single moment made me want to try, it was Trainspotting. And I was never going to be Scottish, or as good looking or swaggeringly charming. I didn’t wear suits, or Doc Martens. But I could do the hair. I could raise my Sickboy flag high and proud through the singed follicles of my scalp, with three-inch spikes of pure salt-white hair jutting up like defiant stalagmites.
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Renton, as first-person narrator, was the true lead in the story, and ironically the man that was a better physical fit for my adulation, whose more boring but significantly cheaper and less painful buzz cut I would frequently repurpose in the following two decades. But Sickboy was the most interesting character. Sickboy was the one who could kick heroin just to be obnoxious about how easy it was for him. Sickboy was the ladies' man.
Of course things didn’t work out well for Sickboy by the end of Trainspotting. His baby dies, one of his friends is felled by AIDS, and his best mate rips him off and leaves him behind to deal with the raging aftermath of betrayal. Sickboy has to carry all that weight in his heart. Sickboy has to stay.
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I was never a serious addict or criminal. My life didn’t track Trainspotting that easily. But Sickboy was only a stumble or two down from my early-1990s existence—unfinished degree, bouncing from job to job, never in a workplace or relationship for more than a few months before getting fired or jumping ship. No heroin, but lots of booze and other recreational drugs. More significant than any chemical was a self-inflicted nihilism, a refusal to settle down, a rebellion that ecstatically absorbed those opening lines of Trainspotting like a siren call across the wasteland: choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television…
But I worshipped the style, not the substance, of the 1990s cultural ennui so perfectly encapsulated in Trainspotting, in the way that so many of us skimmed over the deeper, darker meanings to find the fun, glossing over the death and despair.
I never knew real addiction because I didn’t have the money or the friends who could have gotten me into that kind of trouble. I knew people who knew people, I skirted the edges of parties where that deeper darker prickly-needle stuff happened, had an ex who got hooked on heroin not long after we split. But I was into fun club-friendly upper drugs, mixed with stout booze chasers. I was chasing the dance floor highs, not some slumped-corner decrepitude. I was Renton in the clubs, wanting to be Sickboy.
And of course—the needles.
I have a lifetime trauma response to a needle in the vein. I pass out whenever someone tries to take my blood. I volunteered for a university study in 2015 and passed out looking at the image of someone getting their blood drawn on a computer screen. So I didn’t need the morbid tales of overdose and HIV and dead babies to scare me off of heroin. Nothing would get me to choose a needle in my vein.
In that autumn of the year of Trainspotting, I met my friend Brent, who was growing out his own Sickboy blonde locks, Brent who exists eternally at 29 years of age in a picture from my Halloween party 1996 with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his hair a yin and yang of dark scalp bottom topped with white tips, like a frosted plastic Christmas tree.
Brent told me in the first year of our friendship that he was a “functional alcoholic,” something that my 24-year-old brain couldn’t compute. I still thought of alcoholics as the guys with their paper bag-robed bottles who lived down by the Mississippi River in the urban wildlands near my college dorm, some repository image of a 1950s “wino.” I couldn’t make the descriptor “functional” work with that noun of “addict.”
I didn’t know about real addictions, so those traumas of Trainspotting were sloughed off as soon as we’d left the Uptown Theater and headed to the nearest bar. We were “fun” not “functional” alcoholics. We were fun “Lust for Life” Trainspotting, not dead-baby Trainspotting.
But.
Sixteen years later my friend Brent would drink himself to death a short distance down the road from where I was living in Southern California. I was spared the trauma of seeing his dead body, but standing in the hallway outside his apartment, mumbling numbly to the police, swamped by knee-buckling grief, I imagined that I looked like Sickboy standing over baby Dawn dead in her crib.
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Twenty years after my Orange Easter, I drive out to the Park Place Mall in Tucson to see Trainspotting 2 on the big screen. Or T2—Trainspotting as the overpaid marketing geniuses have tagged it, which is confusing because for most people of my generation T2 means Terminator 2, Ah-nold and Linda Hamilton being chased by an unrelenting liquid-metal nemesis.
I have been eagerly anticipating this day since the first Trainspotting 2 trailer moved me to tears months earlier. I am an open sponge, feeling a wave of melancholy and nostalgia as I scan the mostly-empty Sunday afternoon theater, waiting for the lights to go down. I am a natural sucker for a sequel, but there is something about this particular re-boot that lands deeply in my guts. Who was I then when I wanted to be Sickboy? Who I am now twenty-one years later? The scars accumulated, the loves lost and gained and lost. Would Sickboy and Renton be married too? Could they have turned their dead-end lives into something approximating normalcy, if not full ecstatic daily joy? Has Renton parlayed his ill-gotten riches into a good life?
The power of the cinematic reboot is in the continuation. A film is a brief record player needle-drop into a timeline that continues onwards for the surviving characters after the credits roll. This is why I prefer Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset to the original Before Sunrise. Why Boyhood is such a magnificent film. The reality check of the reunion show. So it is with this roiling anticipation that I prepare to rediscover Sickboy and Renton and Spud and Begbie. How has the passage of time treated them?
Not well. The truth of Trainspotting 2 is that it is the tale of broken men. Begbie in prison, estranged from his wife and son. Spud, still addicted to heroin, estranged from girlfriend and son, preparing his suicide. Sickboy pulling blackmail scams with a pretty Bulgarian twenty-something not-really-girlfriend. Sickboy is still bleaching himself blonde, but balding now, the swagger reduced to an aging wanna-be tough guy posture. Sickboy is estranged from his son as well, who lives in London with his mother. Even Renton, the putative hero, the triumphant victor who strode off into the future so brightly in 1996 is crumbling—fleeing a childless divorce in Amsterdam, trying to piece together the next phase of his life. Broken, lonely, nowhere to go but home to Scotland with his tail between his legs.
No amount of high-energy hijinks and club scene remixes can overcome the weight of these collective failures. The attempted levity in the film is drowned out by the far more frequent moments of intense melancholy. Revisiting their deceased friend Tommy’s favorite hiking spot. Spud finding himself on the same street where he and Renton once fled the cops two decades back; now lonely, dark, deserted. But he hears the echo of those footsteps reverberating through time. I know that ache—I lived in my hometown of Minneapolis until I was thirty-six, and I was constantly aware of the multi-level graveyard of my past, the pain of being reminded of site-specific failures—even the occasional triumphant moments saturated with the ache of nostalgia.
This is why going home is so dangerous. How do people who never leave get through it? What magical switch gets flipped in one’s life that allows one to stay rooted, the grace to deal with that saturation of history? Perhaps rootedness is for people who never fail. If you have a good life, got married early and got lucky in labor, maybe there is nothing to flee.
This is why I found the ending of Trainspotting 2 so unsatisfying. Yes, the Prodigy remix of Iggy Pop’s "Lust for Life" brings the story full circle—but only in the most obvious, painfully cliched way. It’s a great cinematic shot—the telescoping room turning into the visual simulation of a train roaring by. And maybe there is a believable moment of personal relief, of rebellion against that weight of history, when Renton starts dancing in his old room to that song.
But I didn’t buy it.
The real ending is the sad one, the previous scene’s multi-character montage. Renton back home with nothing to show for his half-life. Sickboy jilted by his Bulgarian, burned once again after Spud helps this femme fatale run off with the European Union funding Renton and Sickboy had won for the revitalization of the sad old pub Sickboy was running. Begbie thwarted in his lust for revenge, sold out again, back in prison, probably for good this time with an extra decade for his jailbreak.
Ironically, only Spud is given a glimmer of hope. Spud the lovable loser, who finally achieves redemption, who saves his mates, who sheds his lifetime of impotent cowering by clocking the murder-intentioned Begbie across the head with a toilet bowl. Spud the nascent writer, mining his pains for glory. Spud who is perhaps the true literary and cinematic offspring of his author, Irvine Welsh.
For me that “Lust For Life” remix ending felt painfully tacked on. Don’t try to recreate the uplifting outro of the original. Because this reunion is the sad reality of broken men, and nothing more. Men who time has passed by. Men who are starting over, or finished, by their mid-forties. Failed fathers and the lonely childless. Linger there in that sad truth, the one that Sickboy’s thinning blonde hair can’t obscure.
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The “Renton’s been living in Amsterdam” storyline was an unexpected punch in the gut. Two years after watching Renton stroll off into the sunrise at the end of the original Trainspotting, I would be in the Netherlands myself, two train stops outside of Amsterdam, trying to make a brief summer stopover into a life with my Dutch girlfriend and her son.
Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you'd done it all differently. Choose never learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself.
“I’m forty-six years old and I’m fucked. I’ve got no home, no place that I think of as a home,” Renton spits halfway through Trainspotting 2, finally coming clean to Sickboy about his divorce and soon-to-be unemployment, topped by aortic failings and a stent that the doctors have promised will buy him another thirty years.
I was watching Trainspotting 2 one year too early, I was only forty-five, a year away from my forty-sixth, which I would celebrate in California as my marriage disintegrated, in the second-saddest birthday dinner of my life, doing my damndest to enjoy the fresh seafood and bright California sun setting behind me and my best mate and his wife in the Ventura harbor, awash in my grief, my hair momentarily lit orange as all the certainties of the previous five years of marriage and the assumptions of another thirty sank into the Pacific Ocean with the sun.
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How easy it is from the perch of my fifties, to simply cast a glance backwards, to sniff with the all-knowing assurance of hindsight that my early-twenties were just wasted years. My 1990s were mostly wasted, in terms of any “real” accomplishment. Compared to my more serious friends who graduated from college in four years and got real jobs and got married and bought houses and got into that real grownup stuff, I was just a wannabe Sickboy wasting my life away.
Or I could critique the performative rebellion, the attitude of hedonism tinged with nihilism that we were cultivating during our late-night chain-smoking Trainspotting soundtrack vibe-alongs. That angst was unearned. We were so perfectly ensconced in our safe white middle-class bubble that we truly believed that the loss of that particular relationship was the greatest tragedy we’d ever know, or that the affront of that particular boss was making us martyrs in our bar and café jobs. We were wallowing in unearned melancholies.
But there was one truth that holds up even three decades later. We were in rebellion. We were, in our own often-pointless ways, rebelling against those middle-class expectations. We were not choosing big fucking televisions. We were not choosing good health and dental insurance. We were not choosing spouses and starter homes. We were choosing our friends—the worst ones, the fun ones, the friends who would unquestioningly, euphorically twirl their lives away with us. We were trying to carve out some kind of existence that didn’t involve selling our souls. We could hold onto those parts of ourselves that seemed holy and inviable. We would not cut our hair or shave our sideburns or take our earrings out. We would not wear a suit and tie and buy into that security—not at any price.
We had no idea what we wanted, or how to get close to even the fuzzy outline of what we thought might be the ideal life. But there was still time. We were young and living fast and slow—fast in the bars and nightclubs and late-nights, but slow in the big picture. We were experts at drawing out those hedonistic moments, weeks and months distilled into amped-up dancefloors and our sweaty Sickboy blonde hair, widening our psychic pupils to take in all the elements of our perfectly concocted scenes. Conversely we could speed up time, shut down our minds and work eight, nine, ten-hour shifts in restaurants chopping and dicing and frying and whiling away the time with the lustful life soundtrack of the dance floor in our head or blasting through kitchen boombox speakers to tide us over until the end of our shift.
We were resisting the “real world.” We were living in opposition to those rules and regulations, to those expectations of adulthood. We were bit players in our own lives but in our hearts we were as wild and free as the hippies and the early rock-n-rollers before them—Elvis with his pompadour and sideburns snarling I don’t wanna DRIVE that truck no more, man! We were not going anywhere, but in our defiance we imagined ourselves soul brothers with the earliest outsiders and wanderers, the bluesmen at the crossroads, and if we weren’t going to sell our souls to the devil for glory (although we would have if we’d believed in him), we certainly weren’t going to go to church.
While the modes and manners of our rebellion (and hair) were copied and borrowed from our rock-n-roll and celluloid heroes, the feeling wasn’t counterfeit. The certainty that giving in and accepting that 9-to-5 lifestyle, shouldering those responsibilities, would be some small irrevocable death—that was as sizzlingly real as bleach on the scalp. We were artists, writers and poets and magic-makers and guitar-strummers, and even if those weren’t our skills for paying the bills, that’s still who we were deep down.
Spared any real addiction (aside from cigarettes, which I grimly puffed until my 30th birthday), I never bottomed out into any cinematic life-saving epiphanies. I never walked away from my old life with a duffle bag of ill-gotten cash to seed a radical new existence across the sea. I just got…bored. Bored with hedonism, and its after-effects. Tired of scraping through the desert of my life, paycheck to paycheck, relationship to relationship. As the initial Act I highs became commonplace, the desiccated valley of the Act II lows widened into a chasm that swallowed most of my waking hours. I got tired of feeling terrible. I gravitated to reliable work, stable relationships, quiet nights. I chose life.
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Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get rather than what you always hoped for. Choose regret…
In my early thirties, slogging away at a monotonous clerical job in an underground cubicle at the University of Minnesota, I fought a daily existential battle against the certainty that I had finally in fact sold out. I had bent my unruly steel, had hammered myself into a simulacrum of normalcy, had in fact chosen a safe job with good dental insurance, had bought that starter home and a big fucking television, had settled into a routine of responsibility and adulthood that had been incomprehensible a decade earlier. As much as I tried to find the tiny joys in routine, I kind of hated this new adult me.
So in 2008 I walked away. Gave up the mortgage payments and the normalcy and the secure union job—in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression—to go get a creative writing degree. Like Renton striding triumphantly into the future with his duffle bag, I drove west in a moving truck, my cashed-out Minnesota State Retirement funds as seed money for my new graduate school life in the Tucson desert.
Twenty-nine years after my initial infatuation with Sickboy, I wear a suit coat to my job as a professor of writing. But no tie. Blue jeans. Boots with the kind of stylish heels that could be hollowed out to hold the accouterments of a heroin habit, like Sickboy’s slick black footwear in the initial film.
I still feel melancholy sometimes when I am back home in Minneapolis. But never regret. Not for who I was then, or who I became. No regrets for my Sickboy phase. No regrets for my 1990s. Not even the hair.
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Kirk Wisland is a reformed 1990s nihil-hedon-ist, who still looks around the room momentarily confused when his students address him as “Dr. Wisland.” He has some words scattered in print and online, including at Iron Horse, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Proximity, The Normal School, Electric Literature, and Essay Daily. Kirk lives in Tucson, where he teaches writing at the University of Arizona in a suit jacket but never a tie.
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