The Portable Henry Rollins

by Henry Rollins

  The desire to possess, the will to lust. These things have brought me countless nights of bitterness. Example: I am sitting in a club waiting to play. A beautiful woman walks into the place. Her beauty intoxicates me. She walks by me, and the same beauty that intoxicated me moments before now infuriates me. I have made her beauty my problem. Beauty can fill one with loathing. How convenient to put your need on someone else’s shoulders. The smell of a beautiful woman’s perfume is enough to ruin an otherwise perfect day. It’s also easy to hate someone for their virtue or talent because it makes you feel small—bitter to the core.

  Bitterness is the core joy of self-pity. Bitterness reflects the result of when expectation meets reality. You wallow in the self-inspired swamp of your misery. A great way to meet yourself!

  Bitterness due to overload, too much. Perspective and reason can become blurred or lost altogether. Bitterness from fatigue. On tour I get asked the same questions every night. I get tired of answering the same thing. Like if you had to say hello to every person who passed you, you would get tired of the word and tired of people. You might even start hating their guts for no good reason. You could start hating people for their good intentions. That is the time you need a definite attitude adjustment.

  It’s easy to become so full of shit that you become deaf, dumb, and blind to common sense and good reason. I am constantly working to rid myself of the bullshit. I win some and lose some, but I keep working all the same. The coffee in this place is hell, and we don’t go on until 1:30 in the morning.

  November 28, 1989. Zagreb, Yugoslavia: It’s almost dark now. All the stores are closed. I was told that it was a holiday today. Few people on the streets, mostly soldiers walking in small groups, their long green coats flapping in the wind. The city looks strange to me. A block of buildings, ancient, ready to fall over, faces a row of buildings all shining glass and neon. The streets look tired, looted. Spray paint scars the fronts of the older buildings. This place looks like a frozen ghost town.

  Exhaustion was what I wanted to get to. Thirty-six shows down, ten more to go. Exhaustion has found me. Every morning I wake up tired. I keep myself to myself during the day. Time usually spent in the van watching the scenery pass by the window. I don’t want to talk, and the rest leave me alone to my thoughts. I keep my energy for the show that night. The only thing that makes all of this worth it—the chance to play. The music is the reward for feeling like you have carried someone’s luggage up five miles of stairs.

  December 16, 1989. Los Angeles, CA: Pathetic. In 1987 there was this woman I was down with. It was the first time in a long time that I had been into someone, and it felt great. I was out on this tour, and she called me and asked if she could come visit for a day or so. I thought it would be great. I was wrong. She flew out to the city where we were, and I hardly saw her most of the day because of sound check and all these interviews and then stretching before hitting the stage. After the show, she and I got this hotel room. We were in there and all I could do is stare at the wall. I was tired from playing, and my mind was on the road. I tried to find words to tell her that I was burnt. I didn’t pull it off. She got pissed off with me, my silence and my limp dick. The next day she told me to fuck off, and she left. After the show that night, I was in the parking lot looking at these pictures of her that I had. I started to cry. I was so mad at myself. I looked up and saw all these people gathered in a semicircle staring at me. I didn’t hear them come up. I must have looked pretty stupid. What the fuck was I supposed to do? I walked through them and tore the pics up and threw them into a dumpster. I walked back to the van, and there was this guy from the local newspaper wanting to take pictures of the band. Must have looked like I was stoned, with the red eyes and everything. I got over it after a while. Since then I haven’t let anyone get that close to me.

  December 20, 1989. Los Angeles, CA:

  Don’t hold on to time

  It moves with or without you

  It’s like trying to hold on to a passing train

  Don’t hold on to people

  All you do is hurt yourself

  I come back from a tour, a dull roar in my ears. In my mind I play back the last show. How I walked off the stage, never told the audience that it was the last show on the tour. It’s none of their business. I remember walking up the stairs to the dressing room. While I walk, I remember the ends of other tours over the last nine years. I enter the dressing room. There’s no one there but me. I drink from a bottle of water. My sweat is turning to ammonia. I can smell it, I stink. Two girls come in and try to talk to me. I tell them to get out. Two days later I’m back in my room, jet-lagged from the Frankfurt-to-LA flight. I feel like talking to someone. I feel a vacancy. I don’t know what to do with the night when it’s gig time. After fifty shows in sixty days, it’s all I know how to do. I’m lonely for the tour. I miss the van and the road and the smell of the gasoline. I look at the floor and I feel like shit. Finally I come to my senses and let it go. When I let it go, it lets me go. When it’s over, it’s over. Let it go or it turns on you.

  Don’t attach

  Don’t hold on to anyone’s anything

  Throw out memories

  Pull them out like bad teeth

  Don’t attach

  What was, was

  It’s not easy to face

  February 12, 1990. San Francisco, CA: Oh yeah: We got to get that one on tape. We have to make a document out of that thought, a monument out of that tomb, a hero out of that corpse, a lifestyle out of that criminal. Yeah we got to get the awesome picture of that. Quick, get the light just right. Damn, we blew it. We had it right there and we let it go …

  Oh no: Sitting on the front porch, a whole mess of time on our hands. So much damn time that we had to get up at the crack of dawn to start plowing through it. So much of this time stuff did we possess that we had to stay up till near four in the morning on foot, skateboards, and bikes trying to chew our way through it. Steaming down endless cracked sidewalks and pitted streets. The median stripes radiating death and abundance under the relentless inspection of the crime lights that hovered above at iron tree stamina straightness. We were hypnotized by the neon, rust, and the raw fact that we were alive right then, righteously so. We were as alive as the power lines crackling. Alive like the dictionary’s definition of the word explosion. We were blind and full of shit, but we were alive. Throwing off ballast, insults, clumsy threats, promises, and other taunts at Death.

  Oh well: Here I am. Looking down, looking back, looking for broken pieces to put together. Making out like a desperate detective trying to find out where it went. Looking high and low for clues. All the while, Time is doubled over with laughter. “LOOKING FOR ME?!” Now I know. All time happens right now. The finger is pointed at me. There is only one direction.

  February 20, 1990, 3:36 a.m. Los Angeles, CA: Can’t sleep. Got my mind on my mind. I think I think too much. Been thinking about my friend, the hotel room. I feel more at home in those than I do here.

  Sure would be good to get back out to Europe. Been thinking about it ever since I got back here. So great to be in a room full of people and not have to know what they’re talking about.

  Tonight I fill the room with thoughts. I push out the unmoving air and replace it with my thoughts. Shifting rain, heat lightning, red neon shining on a wet sidewalk. Rain falling on the roof at 3 a.m.

  September 4, 1990, Munich, Germany: In a restaurant, eating alone on a night off. All around me, talk and laughter over the music. Body is in pain. Too much road in the last nine months. The time passes so quickly. I stare at my calendar. Third trip to Europe this year.

  The road keeps me alive. If it weren’t for the constant motion and work, I would have blown out years ago. It’s the only way to get rid of the pain that follows me. I am not an artist. I am a reaction to life. I know that I’m not as strong as life. Perhaps that’s why I drag it kicking and screaming down the road. It’s my life but it’s not. I can control it to a certain exte
nt. The parts I can’t control rip me up and keep me moving. I want to get old on the road, disappear without a trace. Take years to learn and unlearn, to learn to forget. Impossible for me now, a challenge for later on. You can go as far as you want on this motherfucker.

  September 11, 1990. Bordeaux, France: Night off. Hotel room # I’ve lost count. The bed takes up most of the room, hard to walk around. Smash my eyes out. Eight-hour drive, maybe they’ll fall out on their own. This endless trail of lit-up boxes. Bonnie and Clyde over-dubbed in French on the television. If I could remember what your face looked like, I could better imagine what it would be like to touch you. Hours ago I saw you in my mind. It was just a flash, couldn’t hold on to it. Days go by without name. Tuesday could be Friday—dayless, dateless. Coltrane playing on my tape machine. Coming up on midnight. Your eyes … I have been trying to remember what they looked like when I stared into them. Exhaustion turns everything into an endless expanse of road. I’ll take it though. Short tour, long tour, whatever. I was thinking the other day when we were at some gas station, how great it will be to tour this coming winter. Touring by myself in the cold, it’s a great test. The guys in the band don’t like it because they say that it makes their hands cold. It’s okay though, I like touring on my own better anyway. But the bottom line is, I’ll take a tour anytime, anywhere, hot or cold. Canada. Hell, even Italy. Even England, and that’s saying a lot, seeing how crummy it is there. Anywhere is better than my room for more than five days straight. I wonder if you like me, what you think of me, what you think of everything. I wonder what your hair smells like. How it would feel on my chest. I should have smashed that piece of shit in Pisa the other night. Should have taken that bottle he threw at my head and shoved it down his throat. Someone told me how they saw Michael Stipe catch a bottle in the face in Vienna, Austria, in the same club that I played with Black Flag in 1983. Things are different there now. It was enjoyable smacking those three guys, not to mention cutting that guy’s head open with the glass a while ago in Vienna.

  Chris and I walked to a post office today during a rest stop. We asked for stamps for mail to America. The man laughed at us. If you saw the river and the bridges and buildings, centuries old, you might think that a postcard to a country of hotheaded murderers is a joke. I might be able to convince you to get together with me. But even if you wanted to, it would be a bad idea. I don’t work well up close. I am abusive and I don’t know when it starts or where it comes from.

  Must keep moving. These hotel rooms are good—no one knows where I am. I would never want to hurt you, but I know that I would. I wouldn’t know when to stop either, happens every time. Better off on the road. Happiness chokes me. There’s nothing I could tell you that wouldn’t turn you away. I can cough and spit out thousands of miles of black pavement. Miles of stinking men’s rooms, a planet of stench. I don’t want to alienate you. Years ago I would have been able to get around all this and get to you. But now, I’ll take the long tour, the short tour, winter, summer, bus, train, plane. Motion is a disease. A beautiful plague. A fever that burns my dreams.

  September 18, 1990. Frankfurt, Germany: Waiting for the flight out. Outside on the street, the drunks argue and laugh. The hauptbahnhof is a few blocks away. The junkie dead collect and drool. Tonight I was on the Autobahn. Clear night, stars, pine trees. Motion is all. I am hooked. Those truckers, the hard faraway look in their eyes. I know this is where I belong.

  October 5, 1990. Somewhere in Georgia: Big moon on the rivers we cross. Roads full of debris and sadness, old music shifting on the radio. The smell of gasoline on my hands. The woman at the diner said that all the other employees were either in AA, NA, or were “drug fiends.” How many times down this road? Station to station of exhaustion. Keep moving fast enough, enough of the time without looking back. You won’t see the pieces of yourself fall and shatter. Crackling voice on the phone reinforces the distance. One ear to the receiver, so you’re already only half-listening to the voice talking to you from the other world. The world that isn’t addicted to motion. Miles go by, stare at the cracks in your hands. Smell the gasoline, fall into yourself further. Roy Orbison was on the FM tonight. “Oh, Pretty Woman” doesn’t do anything to me anymore. That was over with fifty thousand miles ago. The truck stop near the river with the beautiful Indian name. The man inside fixing CB radios and telling jokes for the truckers gathered around him, watching him work at his folding table. Country music, stale lights, dry air. Later on the moving road, the desperate mortal artery. I watch the Road Men slam by. Sitting high up in their mad cubicles, shielded by glass and steel. Enshrouded by dead insects and bird blood. I see the tail end of a truck pull away, OVER NITE across its back. We’re all going to die out here—in transit.

  October 9, 1990. Tucson, AZ: The man with the swastika tattooed on his chest helped us load our gear into the shitty club.

  “I’m glad you guys don’t have much stuff. Just as soon as I get your stuff in, I can go home and get my dick sucked again. This place used to be a shit country-western bar. No one ever comes here.”

  The Southwest is filled with sadness. The sun takes so long to set. Seemingly motionless it hangs, painting everything with deep resounding sorrow. It mourns the earth before finally dropping out of sight. Rolling along the 10 West, every town looks like a ghost town. Like they built them so they could have a place to leave. So many dead ends. The heat paralyzes, holds everything in its grip. These shitkickers, they have eyes of stone that fix upon you with a vise grip. They stare right through you like a hot moving desert night stares through you. A fat man staggers through the dressing room.

  “Yeah, it’s dead out there tonight. Deader than hell. Almost as dead as when John Doe was here …”

  Drinking, smoking, broken knuckles, jail time, tattoos, missing teeth, motorcycles, poverty, and violence. America’s glittering hollow dream lying on its side. The oasis dried up a long time ago. So much sadness out here in this sand-and-cactus sprawl. In less than an hour, we go onstage to shoot electricity through this empty desert night.

  October 29, 1990. Leitham, NY: In a cold beer barn. When we came in, we saw this big barrier in front of the stage. We asked the man if he could remove it. The guy said no because it keeps the people off the stage and that’s good for the kids because the bouncers beat the shit out of them any chance they get and that’s the way it is. The barn is out on a small highway in the middle of the sticks. Danzig played here last night, and they only drew a few hundred people. This place reminds me of the places I played when I was in Black Flag. Cold rooms in the middle of nowhere, staffed by nasty coked-out, jaded burners. This whole place is cold. The toilets don’t work. The walls are covered with moronic displays of sexual frustration. This is the kind of place that would make you miss your girlfriend if you had one. Makes you think of your room at home and makes you want to be there right now. Three or four nights in a row in places like this and part of you dies. Like you could ever hope to translate the boredom and depression that a place like this generates. The attraction I have for these places I will never understand. Perhaps it’s because it’s so far away from their world that I feel like I can breathe. In a place like this, I know what the deal is, I know my place. There is purpose and pain. Without movement, pressure, and confrontation, life is an embarrassment.

  June 18, 1991. 8:28 p.m. Los Angeles, CA: Motion sickness. I’ve got it bad. Been home for a few days and I never want to see another one of them again. They call on the phone and it’s torture. The only thing that makes sense is to get back out there where anything can happen. The tour of Europe was good. I’m okay when I’m out there. When I’m here, the voices get me. I can’t take them. The guy from a band called Pantera called me today. How the hell he got my number I’ll never know. What the fuck is my problem? I had to do two interviews the other day. It was like getting teeth pulled. It was never this bad before. The phone has become an enemy. I am complaining like a child, but fuck it, it’s the way I feel right now.

&
nbsp; The night is here and I’m playing Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. It’s getting better by degrees. Slowly the pieces are settling and I’m not wishing I was going 150K an hour down the Autobahn. Motion sickness gets you coming and going. Makes all the words come out strange and fucked up. Makes me unable to deal with the reality of these people that don’t travel 600K a day. If you don’t do it, then you don’t know how to deal with someone who does and vice versa.

  Let’s not talk when we meet. We can nod and move on. There’s no need for words, smiles, or questions. Life is in passing anyway. All in passing.

  Fuck it

  Life is an embarrassment

  Every breath threatens to pull your pants down

  The lies are stacked in obscene piles

  Makes me think of a dead man

  Swinging in an apartment by an extension cord

  The note in his pocket reads:

  I stopped it, it did not stop me

  I’m not going to grow old

  I’m not in love with this heap

  I will stop it

  It will not stop me

  Language falls out of my mouth

  Ritual habit

  Love hates

  Truth lies

  Blah blah blah

  The convenient torture methods

  Stacked layered and crammed into every pore

  Until you’re forced to stand next to yourself

  On bended knees

  With all the smirking clown faces

  Without motion and confrontation

  Without my hand around life’s throat squeezing