May 6. Cleveland, OH: Flat and the dirt clings. Been here so many times. Stayed in one girl’s house while her boyfriend who hated me shot junk in the other room. Another city gets stuck in my throat. Another flesh wave stands in front of my face. Heat. I sweat through my clothes. I shake their hands. The city waits outside the doors of the venue. Another night on the trail. Another city in the life. I don’t want to know them like they want to know me. It never works out. I sleep off heartbreak like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t translate.
May 28. Los Angeles, CA: I imagine watching myself from the back of the hall. I see a man with a bucket of his guts throwing pieces out to an audience. The bucket seems bottomless. The entrails never seem to stop coming. I feel sorry for the guy because I know that when the seemingly bottomless bucket is empty and he walks offstage to the basement and listens to the feet of the audience above as they walk out of the theater he will look down and see that there’s blood all over his shoes. He’ll look under his shirt and find that he has no more guts left. Confusedly he’ll shake the hands of people who are for some strange reason in the room with him. He’ll feel nothing for these people because he has no feeling in him whatsoever. He has no feeling of himself, for himself. He speaks thoughtlessly. The words fall out of him as he tries desperately to make these people who are saying things to his hollow frame feel at ease thinking that it will somehow make himself feel something. Soon they are gone and he stands in the room alone. He is as alone as he was several minutes before when he was in front of so many. He leaves the theater and walks unrecognized past people who are waiting to meet him. They imagine he is so much bigger than the average-height-and-build human who quickly walks by them, a broken machine on two legs. He returns to a small room and waits for sleep. The phone rings. It’s someone he doesn’t know who got his number. The stranger tells him that he was at the show. He asks the stranger, this person out there somewhere on the end of a curled black cord, “Was I good?” The stranger says yes. He hangs up and unplugs the phone. He feels like the only person in the world, so remote, so horribly singular. He knows that all the pain and bloodletting in the world won’t get it out. He’ll wake up a few hours later, and he’ll be full of venom and guts and poison and he’ll have to find another place to get it out before the pressure becomes too much.
May 31. Berlin, Germany: Sitting outside a coffee place looking at what’s left of Checkpoint Charlie. Some sections of the Wall are still standing. Looks stupid now, like you wonder what took them so long to tear the damn thing down in the first place, and you know why, but still. Small painted versions of the Wall stand in gift shops. The sun sets and she and I talk about getting out of America alive. She lives here now and has no reason to go back. I think of America, and it becomes a horror-filled murdering plane. Blood, glass, and needles. Lies and sorrow. Larger than Death, so much larger. Seems too big to go back to, like it’s the last thing you would want to do. The sun disappears and the night hovers above us. It’s one of those great nights that happens around here all the time. I hear about her roommate who was from the East. Her brother engineered wiretaps on her to turn her in for the state. You have to wonder about the ones who know how to use a title to their best advantage. Like he’ll never sell you out, he’s your brother. Sure he will. Your brother’s human. So’s your mother. What about a place where you could go and pay a small amount of money and sit in a room with someone and trust them completely and then after the time was up you would leave feeling like there really is someone out there who you can depend on. You would feel good about it because you had paid for it. I don’t trust anyone and I don’t ask anything from anyone I don’t pay. Do you? What a mess we’re in this time.
June 3. Dusseldorf, Germany: My skull exploded onstage last night. I wonder if anyone in the crowd saw it. I saw bright lights and smoke. I felt my heart scream and die. It was so hot, and the weight of the music was heavy. It occurred to me that there could be music that was so heavy that it destroys the people who play it. An honor to be destroyed by music. Build the body up to withstand the music that you took part in creating. Music doesn’t care. Music will rip your guts out and laugh in your face. The heat made me a visionary. I heard the dead of Vietnam scream, and I answered them with my own. No one would believe me if I told them. I looked up into the lights and felt so alone.
June 12. Florence, Italy: Shit doesn’t work and you know you must be in Italy. Didn’t see much of the city, didn’t want to. Something about this country pisses me off. Maybe because no one ever seems to have their shit together. They get mad if you get mad at that fact. For me I don’t care. I’m good at lying awake in that bunk compartment reliving death trips over and over. Making up bullshit conversations with women who don’t exist. Thinking of ways to try to fool myself into wanting to live. I like it in there in that hole, that dark box. I don’t have to see anyone and I can breathe easy. I have become an enemy of language. When people talk to me I hate them for using the language that brings me pain. I don’t want to talk. I want to get away from anyone who wants to know me. When someone tries to talk to me I only feel the emptiness of the language, the desperation of words. The hunger of the need to communicate. I know my truth in that I know I’ll never be able to say anything back to them that isn’t coming from the dark room that is my mind. All I know is horror and ugliness. I’d rather keep most of it to myself. It’s like diving on hand grenades. I went out earlier and tried talking to the guy selling the horrible bootleg shirts outside the show. It was a great conversation. I told him he was a fucking thief. He smiled and shrugged. I told him to get the fuck out, and he said he couldn’t, he already bought the shirts. I told him he was fucking with our trip. He told me that he was sorry but this was his job. I told him I was going to beat the shit out of him. He begged me not to. I took a big pile of shirts and threw them to people in the street. He ran around trying to get them back, and I grabbed him and wouldn’t let him take them away from people. I told him to look and see how happy we were making people by giving them free shirts. There was really nothing I could do to persuade this guy to leave, and I really didn’t hate him, he seemed like too nice a guy to get mad at. In the end I don’t really give a fuck, but the shirts are so bad. I feel sorry for anyone who bought one of them.
June 24. Los Angeles, CA: This place is so dead except for the murderers. Whores on the corners, pigs everywhere. Burned-out buildings. Piles of rubble. Men working in the hulls of huge structures with smoke marks all over. Friend in the hospital. The city is killing another one. My room smells of Death. I can smell him in the closet. I can smell the blood. I can smell the brains. I leave soon. This city starves me for real life. It’s a heartbreaker, and all the inhabitants will die horrible deaths. I will not be one of them. I am a road man and get out whenever I can. You stand around here long enough, and you’ll get murder one done to you. Believe me, they’re all scum.
June 30. Columbia, MO: Everyone makes me crazy and mad. The more they talk, the more I get twisted inside. I sit by myself and they keep coming up with words. I wish I wasn’t so fucked up so I could talk to them, but I’m fucked up and I can’t talk to them. I play an hour later and I don’t know how it is for them. I know that they can’t be getting the same thing that we get. If they did, they wouldn’t get onstage and fuck us up. After the show I’m sitting in a place eating and a woman sits down and tells me that she likes what I do but the only thing she didn’t like was what I said about pigs. She’s a pig herself, and she says that she’s an individual. I tell the pig cunt that when she puts a uniform on she loses all individuality. I told her that I party down when I hear that a pig has gotten wasted. I hope she goes out and gets shot in the knees by some low-rent motherfucker who laughs in her face. She really thought that she was a human being. I don’t know how they brainwash these shitheads into being so self-righteous about being a bag of shit that should be taken out and shot in the face. Fuck these people. You never know when they are pigs in disguise. Fuck you, you stupid
pig bitch. I hope you get Magic Johnson disease and die in some ward. I wonder how long I have left with this shit.
July 1. St. Louis, MO: I had sex with a girl in the club shower. It was good. Then we played. I think we played well. It’s hard to tell when they don’t let you play as hard as you can. They get onstage and they fuck your shit up. We finished the show and I sat and waited for them to leave. It was hard as usual to deal with them after the show. I can’t talk and they just make me mad. After they left, me and the girl went back into the bathroom and had sex again. It was good again. She said that she was sorry that my friend had passed away. I told her that he didn’t pass away, he was murdered. Whatever. The flies ate the blood anyway. I went to the back door to get to the bus and saw all these people waiting by the door of the bus. I pulled back in and snuck around to the front of the club, and the bus picked me up and we got out of there. I don’t know what they get out of the music. I think about it more and more seeing how many of them get onstage and stomp on people’s heads. Now I’m vacant and waiting for sleep to take me out. The sex getoff was mutual. I had to wipe my cum off the floor so no one else would slip when they came in. Another page of life has been ripped out of the book.
July 15. Los Angeles, CA: Night off in LA. Got here this morning. I don’t think it was a good idea for me to come here for this one day. I feel weak being off the road. It takes so much compression to get through the sets that when I’m not near it feeling the pressure so much that I stop feeling it, I fall apart. That’s how I am tonight. Sitting here in my room wondering if I’ll be able to do it tomorrow night. Knowing that I have to. I was with a woman tonight. I don’t think it was a good idea as good as it felt to be with her. It fucked my head up to where all I can feel is the exhaustion that makes my bones ache from the marrow out. All I can feel is the need for my body and mind to get away from this for a little while. I also know it’s greatness calling, seeing if I have what it takes. Greatness is seeing if it can weed me out. My room is the siren song calling out to me to stop what I’m doing. Trying to separate the eagles from the birds. To do this you have to fly in the thin air. One cannot surround oneself with friends and feel that fake support. It only breeds a false sense of security. The only thing that will get you through this shit is to pull inward and harden and move forward. The less friends and words you exchange, the better. I have at least fifty to sixty more shows to do this year. If I don’t do it just right, I’ll wind up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. This is my hardest year yet. A lot of things are going against me. It’s greatness calling.
July 21. Los Angeles, CA: Hot onstage. I actually felt pressure tonight. Something about the size of the place and all, I was wondering if we were going to get swallowed up in there. Body Count was in the house. Played hard but I don’t know how it went. Dave Navarro came out for the encore tarn. What a great guy, good to see him again. Looking forward to getting back on the road. Something about playing in California doesn’t seem real to me. So many people, they come out of the cracks, they spill over the edges, they are everywhere. I like them more than they will ever know. I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell them the way I want to.
July 30. Pensacola, FL: Hottest show I can remember. It was like breathing your own flesh. All I could do was try to stand. I hid from them tonight knowing that I was in no shape to even shake anyone’s hand. I woke up in the parking lot of a hotel with interviews starting soon after I walked into the room. I worked out too hard. Losing weight. Nothing but that. Didn’t talk to anyone. Came here and played and now I’m leaving. I don’t know if the people at the show have any idea what we’re about, but they seemed to like us okay. I am pounded flat and totally useless.
August 3. Minneapolis, MN: Eighteen hundred people in the big room. More than Black Flag ever had in there. I watched the equipment come in, and all I could think about was loading the gear into the small room a few years ago. Taking shit from the 135 in attendance as they got shitfaced. Tonight we played hard and it felt good to be set free from bullshit thought. Throw out thoughts that you don’t need—what a great idea, what a time-waste-eliminating lifesaver. Went to a thing to meet people from BMG. Not my kind of thing. Standing around saying thank you. Thank you, I’m glad you like the way I’m fucked up. I’m not good for much, but what I’m good for I’m really good for, and that’s all that matters. The rest is just bullshit.
August 12. Toronto, Canada: Woke up in a woman’s bed after a day off. Back into harness once again, felt strange to be out of the zone for twenty-four entire hours. Did a small press conference and then went to the venue, to a gym, and then back to the venue. Phone interviews with Australia after sound check. Short sleep and then got ready to play. Twenty-one hundred tickets, sold-out show. By the time we went on, the walls were sweating. There were no moments when the stage was clear of people. Tonight I tried a different tack. I stood in the middle of them and got kicked around for two hours. Sitting in the bus with no liquid left in my body. Sometimes the days turn into nonevents. A day like today leading into a night like tonight where you get up and stagger around until sound check and then wander onto the stage, do your trip, and wander off again. I stayed inside the venue until they all left. When I emerged from the hall no one was on the streets, it was as if the whole thing never happened at all.
August 21, Asbury Park, NJ: Did a photo shoot for some magazine and then went to the gig. Got there late and made sound check. Asbury Park is a hard place. The club is a depressing dive, don’t know how the evening will go. The boardwalk is empty with only the occasional jogger to break up the lack of humans. I got stomped on, kicked, and whacked around by people getting onstage. Managed to play anyway. I don’t remember waking up this morning. I have started to think of women again. No one in particular. It doesn’t matter anymore. I am thrown into the fabric of the road, and I am not anyone who anyone will ever know. When I think of other people, I know that I’m from another world. I’m too tired to think of anything to write. We played and we were good and I’m alone as always and sometimes it’s hard to take. My body is in pain, I am still sitting crooked from the kick in the ribs I got from one of the people who claims to like us so much, yeah right.
August 29. Reading, England: Reading Festival 1992. We drove past hundreds of people who were doing their best to look fucked up and filthy. It looked like they had rubbed shit into their hair. We got to the compound and waited for our passes. The press bullshit never stops, started as soon as I got my pass. Talked to the shithead from Kerrang! and he has no idea how close he came to getting smacked like a bitch right in the teeth. He’s asking me all this shit about now that I’m a big rock star he reckons all of our new stuff will suck. If I were going to interview someone, the last thing I would do is try to get on the guy’s nerves. I got suckered into a tent with a bunch of people who wanted autographs. I stood behind a table like a propped-up asshole and signed pictures like a human Xerox machine. All I could think of was getting on with the gig. Finally I got to get ready and hit the stage. Played as hard as I could. Sure were a lot of people, about thirty, forty thousand. As far out as I could see there were people waving. After the set I had to do some photos, and then I got the fuck out of there. I was amazed at how hard it was to do the autograph thing; it was unbearable. The people were cool and all, but I can’t stand making people stand in line to meet me and get their little thing signed, it makes me feel like such an asshole. I’m out of here.
September 11. Brisbane, Australia: Brisbane is always a taste of the waste. On jet lag I was sleeping up until an hour before the show. I woke up in a dark room with the show yet to do. When we got there, it seemed unreal. Like this whole evening had been going on while I was asleep. I looked out at the other band and watched the stage divers push them around; it looked like the band didn’t give a fuck about it either way. The people at the show were either beating the shit out of each other or beating up the bouncers or throwing up or drinking. Tonight was no exception. Not as many fights as
last time. There were about fifteen hundred in there tonight; I think they all got onstage at least once. I played a little. I spent most of the time at the back of the stage keeping out of their way. What utter bullshit, having to stay out of their way. I don’t care about them because they don’t care about the music. So we played and I stayed in the kitchen until nearly 3 a.m. so I wouldn’t have to meet and speak with drunks—they always make me mad with their slurred speech and bullshit talk. Finally we left the kitchen area and I looked on the floor of the hall. It was covered in beer cans. The green Victoria Bitter can was all over the place. Over 2,000 sold tonight. One girl told me that she stocked 2,400 cans herself earlier in the day. I’m glad to be by myself right now. I hope I don’t dream tonight; the moon is full and it’s shining down upon the water. I wish someone knew me.
September 15. Canberra, Australia: Today we drove from Sydney, we saw kangaroos and desert. The air is so clear here. I thought about Joe and what he might think of this scene as it flew by the window. Another night of them getting onstage all the time and me getting out of their way instead of playing as hard as I could. We played well anyway. After a show like this one I will not talk to them, I will not sign anything. I take it personally that they will not let me play hard. They don’t respect the music so I can’t respect them, end of thought on that. Too bad though because last time we played here I remember it being a lot better in that respect. Maybe I take this too seriously. I don’t think so. Life is so short, why fuck around. Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Miles, Monk, Hendrix, they didn’t fuck around. I must aspire to that weight at all times. Tomorrow is a day off. I go to Melbourne to do press. I see things differently now. Press doesn’t matter, the punters and what they think doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is the music. The rest is just ego and entertainment. I think you can do a lot more if you sidestep the ego trips and the entertainment bullshit factor. The music is enough. If it’s not, then you’re in the wrong business.
The Portable Henry Rollins Page 14