Tonight I watched TRAINSPOTTING for the first time in nineteen years . . . I last saw it the summer I graduated from high school. I braced myself for the Toilet Scene, which was thankfully shorter than I had recalled, and braced myself again for the Baby Scene, which is one of the most traumatizing scenes of any movie I’ve ever seen. It ain’t exactly any given scene from COME AND SEE, and it’s not necessarily the imagery itself but rather the idea of it. Is there anything more utterly depressing than a dead baby, specifically one which has died as the result of junkie neglect? If there is, I’m sure I don’t know it. I’m just glad I was wise enough not to get stoned before I put the movie on. That would have truly wrecked me . . .
Anyway: It’s very good. Nineteen years ago, I had never been to Edinburgh, and probably supposed I never would. And yet now I have been there three times, most recently in April. And so saying, I recognized most of the major locations in the movie. So in the midst of all the insane darkness unfolding, I thought: “Hey, I’ve waited at that bus stop.” Ewan McGregor even runs down a street where my hostel was. Granted it’s not a large city, but still, sorry, I thought it was cool . . .
FINALLY: I will never be able to separate TRAINSPOTTING from that night nineteen years ago when I first saw it, because it was a significant event in The History of Myself, one that now brings me despair. But then what else is new? I was in Baltimore that night with my friend Brent . . . we had driven up that afternoon after our shift at [an embarrassing restaurant where I worked]. We used to go to Baltimore on the weekends on account of the place being only an hour away from our hometown. As I recall, we had taken separate cars (for some reason) and were in the city to look for an apartment. I had graduated from high school the week before, and I was determined to immediately move to Baltimore to go to college there and be closer to my brother. I had convinced myself I loved that city, which I would come to greatly dislike and even loathe. But back then Brent and I wanted an apartment there, which we ended up getting a month later.
I had told Brent I needed to get back to our hometown by nine or ten to go to a huge bonfire at this dude’s house. This dude lived on a Christmas tree farm where my family and I had gotten our Christmas trees every year since I was a little kid. I reckon if you’ve got a bunch of trees that didn’t sell, you may as well burn them . . . and of course with that kind of juice, you can throw a real big bonfire. And where I’m from, a bonfire is the primary venue for any sort of social gathering. Simply having stuff to burn is excuse enough to summon everyone you know to the bonfire pit.
Listen: I am from what you might call a small rural community. It is agrarian. I knew practically everyone in my high school, especially in my senior class, which was only a hundred or so people. And being that I was the class clown and thus possessed the highly coveted jester’s privilege, essentially a Social Platinum Card, I glad-handed with all walks of life. How can you hate the court jester?? Everyone was OK with me. I was a well-intentioned idiot!
This bonfire was a Big Deal because practically everyone from my just-graduated class would be there, and so of course I had to make an appearance. This was the social event of the season! And though I did not know it then because back then I knew even less than I do now (which is saying something . . .), that night would be the last time I would see 95% of those people. Even saying that makes my chest ache . . .
Anyway . . . once Brent and I had wrapped up our affairs in Charm City, having accomplished nothing, and after getting sushi by the Inner Harbor, which was a sort of dumb ritual we had, the two of us boarded our respective vehicles and gunned it back to Virginia at about 100 miles per hour, often double-helixing around each other across two lanes with a sort of wild stupidity every American teenage boy possesses, given their low IQs and great love of danger and disregard for their own mortality (never mind that of everyone else around them).
On account of our speed we shaved off fifteen minutes from the hour drive and soon enough roared onto those dark forested roads in the direction of the Christmas tree farm. I remember we’d both taken off our shirts and were hootin-n-hollerin and blasting music with the windows rolled down. It was warm outside and fireflies were glowing in the fields. Had I turned down the volume, I would have heard frogs and crickets in the tall grass. Again, my chest aches from this recollection!
I loved and still love being Fashionably Late, which we were . . . so by this point a majority of the people there were on their way to being completely wasted. I would guess that for at least half of them, this was the first time they had ever had alcohol. Meanwhile the bonfire was at its apex . . . a great big hellish fireball raging in the center of a dark field, with everyone gathered around it like a pagan circle. Having grown bored of the Christmas trees, the big redneck dudes were now tossing random furniture into the enormous unquenchable flames. I remember them burning an entire couch, and all of us inhaling the embers of old foam padding. The smell was horrendous. I stuck around for a little while to glad-hand all those fine people who have since become ghosts in my mind, but as the amount of people puking in the woods increased tenfold, I figured it was prime time for me to vanish into the darkness from which I had come.
There was a girl back then. I guess there is always a girl, when I really think about it, but she was the very first one. I had been hanging out with this girl for a few weeks by that point, and although there was some unspoken Thing there, a sort of YOUTHFUL SWEETNESS, we had been totally platonic. On that night, she texted me and asked if I wanted to come over to her friend’s house and watch a movie. We had not gone to the same high school, and in fact she was a whole year older than me . . . a college sophomore no less! I replied: “You’re god damn right I do.” Beneath a starry sky I slithered back to my car and drove a few miles down that dark road to get to this girl’s friend’s house. She met me in the driveway and said the magic words: “By the way, [my friend]’s parents are out of town, so you can spend the night if you’d like.” She led me inside and told me her friend had already fallen asleep. We went down into the basement, which was that sort of nice suburban basement every middle-class family in my hometown had, ones in which I spent at least half of my childhood.
She put on TRAINSPOTTING of all things and, outside of the Toilet Scene and the Baby Scene, in which we both groaned and recoiled in horror, we otherwise watched the movie in silence. I had never really seen anything like it before. It’s wild to think now that the movie was already ten years old at that point. Afterwards we went into a little spare bedroom off the main room. Inside were three single beds in a row, almost like the Goldilocks house. The beds all had these faux bear fur blankets overtop them. The A/C was cranked way the hell up, so it felt nice to get into a warm bed. I remember thinking it was sweet that we hadn’t made out that night, which had almost felt like a given when I first pulled into the driveway. We were both too shy to initiate anything, and anyway I suppose a movie about junkies and one in which a baby dies isn’t a great aphrodisiac. Though yeah, that we simply said good-night and fell asleep in the darkness of the room colors that night with a sort of wholesomeness that once again makes my chest feel like it’s going to collapse in on itself nearly twenty years later.
I did not know it at the time, but a few weeks later I would kiss that girl for the first time on a warm summer night under many stars while lying next to a pond listening to frogs. I know that’s saccharine as hell but it’s also true. We eventually moved to Baltimore together and I was with her for four and a half years, which is by far the longest thing I’ve ever been in. It was so good that nothing else has felt the same way in all that time. My friend Amissa said recently that unlike women, who couldn’t really care less about their first boyfriend (who was usually a total ass anyway), men always seem to have this eternal wistfulness for their first girlfriend, and regard them dreamily from beneath the pedestal upon which they have been placed. There is an unspoken tragedy whenever this first girlfriend is brought up, because of course it means he lost her. You always lose them. I suppose I have just outed myself as someone who is guilty of this same sin, of exalting my first girlfriend whom I miss so much I want to die. She really was a very special person though. I was just too much a fool to know it then. Such is my tale.
Well . . .
