The Portable Henry Rollins

by Henry Rollins

  Flame on! A pig got torched on Lincoln Boulevard. Cuffed to a cement light pole and lit on fire. Funniest thing. That fucking arrogant pig was giving me shit all the way up until I lit the match and threw it on his pointy head. “You’re in shit city, asshole!” Etc. The pig was vainly attempting to affect what is called “command presence.” CP is being able to take total control of a situation immediately. You see it when pigs stop people for running red lights and parking violations and shit. They make it sound like they’re invading Poland or something. It’s all acting. I don’t take pig talk lightly, but I take it for what it is. So imagine what the fuck that looks like when the pig lights up the night. Screaming, and straining against the cuffs, trying to suck his dick so he could have a man in his mouth one last time. His uniform burns off except the belt. Appropriate too, as a lot of cops leave their belts on when they fuck each other in high school parking lots. How did I get the pig’s cuffs? Pigs are stupid and go for most lines. You can take one to the top of a tall building and tell him that there’s a stiff dick and a Mexican to beat up at the bottom and they’ll jump down there as fast as they can. Why does this shit surprise you? You have this world around you and you still insist that you’re different from the rest. You act like you’re shocked, but inside you wish for more murder, more catastrophe. If they could have executions of death row inmates on pay-per-view, it would be the biggest moneymaker going. The country’s money problem would be over in a matter of months. Why do I do this? Why am I burning? Why do I pull fire from the sky? Why am I a living explosion? I will never stop. It will come like a volcano. At the end of the line, the questions will all be theirs. I’ll leave with ashes on my face and my hands empty.

  Fat loudmouthed has-been, no one wants to fuck you. The thought of prison keeps you safe from me. So many times I’ve looked at you and imagined snapping your neck or just leaning over the counter and stabbing you in the throat as you ring up my food, you piece of shit. I think about it all the time. You’re safe though because the thought of prison freaks me out. The idea of going to prison for the rest of my life because all I did was kill you makes me sick. I would want to dig you up and kill you again if that were possible. Take your corpse and bash it with a hammer in front of your grieving parents just to hear them scream in horror. That’s the only thing that keeps the streets in my neighborhood safe. I take it out any way I can. I kick animals any chance I get. I crank-call the parents of old girlfriends telling them that I have the bitch in my cellar and I’m killing her slowly with tools. Pulling her eyes out with pliers, that kind of shit. When they scream, I tell them to shut the fuck up. The mothers always believe me. I hang up and punch the wall and imagine her face. I’m always calm when I see you though. You never see this side. You never will. I can look right at you and make you think that I am an oasis of understanding and kindness. Looking at your believing eyes and tender expression makes me want to spit on you. You should be killed all the time. When one of you is nice to me, all I see is a throat to be cut. It makes me hate you. I can barely restrain myself from killing you. When you try to touch me, I want to vomit. It makes me want to break your arm. Prison keeps me from killing you. I can’t live in this world. I think I was put here just to burn. Everything hurts. Daylight, voices, the stench of life. It’s all repulsive. The thought of spending the rest of it in a human zoo keeps me grinding my teeth. If I thought I could get away with it, I would. I would kill all the time. Every chance I got. Men, women, makes no difference. I don’t care if I know them or not. Any living human besides myself will do. It’s the only way to ease the pain. I know that I will not be able to fight off this urge forever. It’s too fucking strong inside me. When I kill, there will be no guns used. It will be all knives and blunt instruments. How good would that feel, to work someone over with a pipe until the body has no bones that are whole? You could really sleep well after that. Knifing someone until you had no more strength. Leave the bodies in places that are heavily populated. Leave a body hanging nude and battered from a basketball rim. I’ll never get caught. I’ll never stop once I’ve started. I know it will be too good.

  Human video shithole machine, get another nose job. You think you’re on your way, but you’re only on their way. You’re playing your game, but really you’re playing their game. You want the house on the hill. They move out the old fool and throw in the new meat. The masters own the game, and they move you into the well-worn slot. They feed themselves on your blood. They stay young. You get worked. Look at your fucked-up face and tell me I’m wrong. I see you running around making all your phone calls thinking you’re such a fucking mover. If you could see yourself, you might puke. You’re fast-talking and pathetic. It’s funny watching you do your routine. Hanging up the phone and laughing about the suit you think you just stiffed when you need him to exist and he needs you like he needs another bill in the mail. You don’t see that you’re just another in a long line of fuckheads who come up to the plate and take a swing. The big house on the hill looms large in your mind, but you’re still under lock and key. You’ll always work for the man you say you hate. You will always kiss his ass because it’s all you know how to do. People like you get used until there’s nothing left, and all the while you think you’re in paradise. You’re weak and disgusting, but you never get in my way.

  All my children are broken bones. I can close my eyes and see myself in a dirty room. I can smell my mother’s anger. I can smell all the men who walked through the place. I can hear the screams of the years of fear. I can smell the leather as it slammed into my skin. The scars talk to me. All I can do now is exhale, inhale, vent the rage. I wonder if real life has started yet. Is this it? Is the killing wound the only wound to hatch from? Can I reinvent myself in blood and stone? Burn muscle into forged fury? Once a veteran always a veteran. Shock to shock. There is a dark room always ready to receive. Always a room on the highway that has my name on it. Always a fucked-up memory to cause more brain cancer. Some people will never stop. They have no control over the rolling tragedy that is their lives. A walking accident that loves to happen. Revenge is not the operative. It’s caged animal sickness, that’s all.

  Choking hands. He had one of those typical piece-of-shit days. The grind always. At least this time he had the guts to stay away from the bar and not drive home to the wife and kid drunk. He got home and immediately everything pissed him off. Sometimes the way his wife looked at him made him want to kill himself. The way she all of a sudden appeared like a total stranger. The vacancy in her eyes, it was bad. He took his son’s favorite plastic mug, the one with the picture of Magic Johnson, and threw it into the trash. He felt better but not much.

  You and your glycerin tears. You’re a TV actor, and all of a sudden the still life of your fucked-up world of desperate AA meetings and panicked last-chance lunges at Christ’s punk-ass salvation are shook loose when reality comes crashing in. Your son is dead. Shot in the face. I wish it were you instead. You couldn’t even make it to the funeral. You’re a living piece of shit. Why couldn’t it have been you? I wouldn’t have lost a minute of sleep. It was great to see you in your moments of pain. You looked so good for the camera, so well rehearsed. I swear I saw you do that on Channel 7 once. Am I being too mean, shithead? I’m not sorry. Your weakness is so disgusting and I have a tendency to attack that which I don’t respect, so I’m attacking you. It’s your only son, and all you can do is try to look good and manage to be late for every meeting while your relatives talk over all the boring, less glamorous details involved in dealing with your son’s refrigerated corpse. You seemed more interested in your son’s material things than you were in him. What are you going to do? Sell his clothes? You and your designer tennis suits and your arrogant bullshit. I heard you have a history of suicide on your side of the family. I am hoping you’re going to do it on New Year’s. That would be great to hear about how you shot yourself in the face underneath your fake-ass Christmas tree. Should I just stop right here and put my arms around you and tel
l you that it’s all going to be all right? Should I? Hey fuck you. The more I think about you and your fucked-up little friend who you brought everywhere with you, the more I want to make your life miserable in hopes that you’ll kill yourself. Yes, I’d like to help you. I will concentrate all my best blow-my-brains-out thoughts over to you every day, and if the wind is just right, you’ll pick up on the signal and check out. Your friends at the wake—fake grief and studio tans. The one ugly, leather-faced bitch who should have kept her sagging breasts covered up was asking me what my sign was. Remember a couple of summers ago, when you kept trying to get me to go on those stupid tabloid TV shows with you? I said no and it really burned you. I saw the footage of you on Hard Copy walking to your son’s grave with the soft focus and the bullshit music soundtrack. Was it hard to get the cemetery to let you get the film crew inside the lot? Did you have to do a few takes to get the walk right? Who did your makeup? Do you remember you went on the Joan Rivers Show and talked all that shit about me? I know someone who was at one of your auditions a few weeks ago. Apparently you were really bad and you finally apologized and told them that you were hungover. I guess you fell off the wagon. I wish you would jump off the top of a forty-story building. You’re such a fuckup. Now all you have is your fake friends who will never be there for you when you need them because they’re not there for anyone ever, not even themselves. You can’t even help yourself. You’re the most pathetic person I know.

  Sell the tourists human ears. Watch a man get his spine ripped out every day for thirty years. A man alone in his room thinking about killing someone and then wishing he wasn’t so lonely. He has no idea that his brain is in hundreds of pieces underneath his scalp. He vomits his bone marrow whenever he speaks. He cuts himself on words. Nothing helps him from destroying himself. This man needs no drugs or alcohol to ruin himself. All he needs is life itself. The fact that he has a mother somewhere is horror enough. The fact that he has touched a woman and still has the skin on his back to prove it is bad enough. Anything that he has to feel is too much to deal with. He lives in the world that does not feel, that does not touch. At night he dreams of not being real. He dreams of getting out of his skin so he can have a breath that’s not like breathing in the sorrow of night. The black air of madness. I am falling through the night. I see things out of the corners of my eyes. My spine crawls across the floor and wraps itself around my feet. Nothing gets to me anymore. It’s all horrible. I’m free.

  Load the guns. Repeat, “They’re just ants at the picnic.” Walk into the dance with both barrels blazing. When I go to the store and have to walk around all the whores and drug dealers who block the sidewalk, I always wish one of the ones who didn’t have a gun would talk some shit so I could mutilate him. I’m not talking about a run-of-the-mill ass kicking. I’m talking about taking eyes out and breaking joints and smashing windpipes. It would be good to do that to a Hollywood neon shitboy and then hang him from a stop sign to let the rest know what happens to them when they open their dogshit mouths to the wrong person. Look. I see it. You can go to all the movies and watch all the television you want. I am the end of all time. I’m not hooked up to the machine. I don’t care about being labeled a misogynist, misanthropic hate addict. I don’t give a fuck if some human organism calls me politically incorrect. I like the idea of people getting killed in parking lots. I stab every person who passes me. In my mind, I stab them in the face with a fucking knife. If I thought I could get away with it, I would skin you alive. I only fear prison if I get caught killing one of you humans. I hate you all. I don’t know anyone. I am the enemy of humans. I am that which spits in the face of humanity.

  Boots on, trousers down. Onward to victory. Hello? Yeah man. Look man, your daughter is dead. She got burned on a drug deal and she got wasted. Don’t ask me my name, man. Look, it’s not me who did it, so don’t be getting all harsh on me. I loved her, man. She was my old lady and shit. We left her in a warehouse on Third and Kent downtown. You should get her picked up man, she’s been there a few days. If you don’t pick her up soon, the dogs will eat her. Yeah, it’s pretty fucked. I’ve seen it before. We didn’t know where to find you. I feel bad about it man. Don’t come looking, you know what I mean? Cool. Later, man.

  If we didn’t act our ages and acted our bank accounts instead, I’d be Father Time and you’d be teething. She belted him right in the mouth. It felt good. It had been building up all week. She would come home from work and there he was, sitting with the baby and listening to some shitty punk-rock music. She had no words for him. All she could do was hit. The baby would cry and she would yell and he would scream and cry and the neighbors on all four sides would knock or kick the wall, floor, and ceiling. She didn’t care. They would both yell at the neighbors to shut up. It was usually the thing that would get the fight to stop though. He would go see to the baby as she was walking to the box to get a beer. She had planned on being an artist.

  You want to be an actress, so you figure you’ll work on your technique by dancing naked in front of a bunch of idiots for seven years? I watched her shoot up in the bathroom. We had just finished fucking. I thought she was in the kitchen, so I went to the toilet and she was in there with the door open. I just looked at her. She looked up at me and said hi and went back to shooting the dope into her foot. I didn’t know she did that shit. I couldn’t tell when we were fucking. I wondered how long she had been doing that shit, but I was afraid to ask. I don’t know why I was afraid, I just was. She finished and leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. I asked her if she was all right. She didn’t say anything. She waved me away and I left the fucking place. She had said earlier that she had a boyfriend who was in jail and some of his friends would check up on her from time to time. I don’t know what the hell I even went to her place for. I guess I was lonely. She had a hard beauty that I hadn’t ever seen in a woman. I thought about her for days afterward. I never saw her again. I heard that she dumped the guy and married some Marine and the two of them moved to North Carolina. People get caught here on earth. We do the time and shit happens. I end up, you end up. Don’t try to make any big sense of it. That’s the first mistake. The more you try to figure it out, the more it fucks you up. I don’t know what the second mistake is.

  The room smells like vomit these days. She throws up every morning. She coughs and hacks into the bowl. Her breasts scrape the rim. She wipes her mouth off with a washcloth and gets ready for work. The pigs put the boy in the back of the car. The pigs shoved him in the back without trying to get his head under the roof. I saw them smash his head against the sides of the door like the way old Ma rings the triangle at dinnertime when it’s time to “come and git it!” I was standing there with a bunch of other people. The club owner had locked us inside, so watching was all we could do. I felt like an asshole standing in the window watching this guy get worked over, but there’s only so much you can do without modern firearms. Which leads me to the conclusion that life would be a lot more bearable if I had access to an RPG or a mortar. Hell, how about missiles, tanks? Thinking about it, I would have to put my money on that good old RPG. A good tool for traffic jams. Fuck it, someone should have shot that pig in the ass while he was fucking with that guy. These shitheads never get what they really need.

  All we are is angel dust in the wound. Rats chewed the hands, lips, and nose off a three-month-old girl in the apartment building across the street from me. The mother was on PCP and had her head in the stove trying to kill herself. God angel devil lover. In my house. Make it hot and kill it quick.

  A black guy and a Korean guy, arms around each other watching a white guy hang by the neck. United colors of we’ll-do-anything-to-sell-these-fucking-clothes-to-you-morons. He shot the guy. Big fucking deal. I saw the whole thing while I was walking back from doing the laundry. The guy just fell over. The gun didn’t make much noise. The guy who shot him ran away, and no one went after him—the guy had a gun! I felt absolutely nothing. I think I’ve been living in this city t
oo long. I work. I hate it but I do it. What the fuck else am I going to do? Rob a bank? I hate my job. I hate my life so what else is new? I’ve got ten minutes until I have to go to work. Ten whole minutes to myself. What should I do with my big ten minutes? I might as well go into work early. Fuck it.

  What about a gaaaaaaaaaaay GI Joe doll? I got your letter today. I should start by saying that I don’t hate you. I don’t have any problems with you, that is to say that I will not accept you as the blame for my state of being. In the last few years it has been very difficult for me to get by without bad depression. I have been doing a lot of thinking as to the root of all the bullshit that I put myself through. I ask myself why I do all this music and writing bullshit. I know why I do it all. I am trying to get out all the rage that I have. Do you know where that rage comes from? It comes from the way I was raised. I have a rage in me that dries my bone marrow, it goes so deep. All I can do now is make my rent money and eat year after year. It is up to me to get myself better. I know I was a horrible person growing up. I was never good at school, sports. I was a disappointment on all levels. I am only good at one thing. That is the taking and dispensing of pain. I know humiliation, that’s why I work so hard. No one will ever walk on me again. I command respect through intimidation and the fact that I will persist after all the rest have given up. My capacity for taking pain is what I am most proud of. It’s all I know at this point. I should have died when I was born. I have no happy memories of childhood. I know you did the best you could and I have no regrets and I appreciate all you did for me and I know you gave up a part of your life to raise me. I know there were things you would have done differently if you didn’t have me. I also know that I didn’t ask to be born. It is hard for me to deal with women past a business level. The thought of intimacy is repulsive and out of the question. I learned about sex by walking down the hall and seeing you and some guy. One of them once told me how good you are in bed. Do you have any idea what kind of shit that does to a freaked-out little boy? To me, every woman is a bitch. I make sure I hurt every one of them mentally when I have sex with them. I like the mental pain I cause them more than I like the sex. I do my best to feel legitimate and that I deserve a life. It is an ongoing struggle. So in the last two years I have had difficulty in dealing with you. This is no fault of yours. I hope that someday I can be your friend. I don’t mean to make this a problem. It is a full-time thing for me to maintain. I have bad problems with depression. It’s like a plague. It makes me want to either kill someone or kill myself. It sometimes ends with me beating some guy up. I never would take my fists to a female. I think you are a good person, and I know that you want to do good things. The problem with you and me not connecting is a problem that comes from my end. I can’t help how I feel though. I wish I didn’t feel like this. I would rather have had a normal life. Not the strange one that I have now. I feel more in common with a guy who murders a lot of people than I do with anyone in my world. So that’s it. My life is fucked. You wanted to know what was going on with me, and I told you the best I could.