The Portable Henry Rollins

by Henry Rollins

  Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. Only when the body is strong can the mind think strong thoughts. It’s up to an individual’s character what he does with this strength. The difference between a big bouncer who gets off strong-arming people and putting them in pain and Mr. Pep-perman and his gift of strength.

  The strength I have attained through the combined efforts of what I described earlier is a One Relationship. The mind and body develop strength and grow as a single thing. Go out and see for yourself. The strongest number is One. Aspire to the One and understand strength and balance.

  I cannot believe a weak person who says he has true self-respect. I have never met a truly strong person who didn’t have it. I think that a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off for self-respect.

  I have found that the Iron is a great cure for loneliness. Loneliness is a desire for what is not there with you. You can be lonely for an infinite number of things, people, feelings—whatever creates a void in your life with its absence. Sometimes your loneliness has nothing to attach itself to. You’re just lonely, flat out. The Iron can pull you through when all else fails. You’ll find that it was you that got you through. Loneliness is energy. Powerful as hell. People kill themselves sick on loneliness. They drink themselves into the floorboards. They do all kinds of damaging things to themselves to combat their loneliness. The loneliness is real. The energy is real. I can’t see what good it does to damage yourself trying to feel better. If one can apply all this real energy to damaging oneself, then isn’t it possible to harness all this energy into something positive to combat loneliness?

  Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind and body degenerate. I turn on myself and wallow in thick depression that makes me unable to function. The body shuts my mind down. The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. No better way to fight weakness than with strength. Fight degeneration with generation. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, there is, in many ways, no way to turn back. You might not remember when you started working out, but you’ll remember when you stopped, and you won’t look back at it with much joy because you know you’re depriving yourself of yourself.

  The Iron will always kick you the real deal. You work out correctly and patiently and maintain a good diet, and you will become stronger. You don’t work out for a while, and muscle will go away. You get what you put into it. You learn the process of becoming.

  Life is capable of driving you out of your mind. The way it all comes down these days it’s some kind of miracle if you’re not insane. People have become separated from their bodies. I see them move from their offices to their cars and on to their homes. They stress out constantly. They lose sleep. Their egos run wild. They become motivated by that which will eventually give them a massive stroke. You never have to lose it. You really don’t. There’s no excuse for freaking out at the workplace, school, anywhere. No need for a mid-life crisis. You need the Iron mind.

  The Iron is always there for you. Your friends may come and go. In the time it takes to blink your eye someone you thought you knew might turn into someone you can no longer stand to be around. Fads come and go, almost everything comes and goes. However, the Iron is the Iron. Two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs, never lies.

  A noose of blood to stop a life of hope. When you hear screams coming from down the hall, don’t be afraid. It’s only me trying to get the ghosts out of my guts by beating my flesh with my fists. When you’re about to go to sleep and you hear the strange growling sounds coming through your wall, don’t think that you’re in danger. It’s just me trying to talk my blood cells into shooting themselves in self-defense. I’m packed full of glass and memories, and it all hurts. I’m breeding scars in here. I’ll sell you one cheap. Wrap it around you like a shield. You can wear my pain and it will seal out the pain of others. It will help keep the world from turning your mind into a slaughterhouse. If you find that the bathroom mirror has blood all over it, don’t worry. It’s only me and I can take a lot of pain. I’m good that way. I’m bad the rest of the ways. I carve my face off every night to make masks. You can have one. You can wear it on the street and no one will know you’re you and you can be yourself instead of that other person you pretend to be when other people are around. The mask gives you freedom. Use my pain. Benefit from my cowardice. If you pay my rent for another month, I’ll hack off one of my hands and you can use it to kill someone. Leave it at the crime scene, and they’ll never catch you. Use me. I have no use for myself.

  I don’t know why it’s now that I think of you. Of course I am with someone else. She is lying beside me cold. She has been dead for a few hours. We broke into this place this morning and no one knows we’re here, so when I leave tonight no one will find her for quite some time. I have pretty much forgotten about her even though her body is lying here. I did not kill her. She killed herself. I met her yesterday on the strip. She doesn’t matter to me. You do. She’s dead and gone and a stranger as well. You were never a stranger to me. I always felt like I knew you somehow. You didn’t want me and I was mad for a long time, but now I see that you could never be with someone like me. I know you don’t hate me either. I have not seen you in years, but I always think about you. I hope you’re alive. I don’t know anyone who knows you. I’m moving pretty fast these days, but l think of you still. I had been visiting some friends in Portland. I was taking a much needed break from my overdriven workload in Los Angeles where I work as an editor at a variety magazine that I am too ashamed to mention here. I was hoping it was going to be a temporary gig, but at times I felt lucky to have a job in that city at all. One of my friends threw a small party, and of course I showed up. It was small, about twenty people. Much smaller than the ego-fests I was still not getting used to down south in my newly adopted smog-ridden home. When I walked into the room and saw her I was in love. I had to withstand the entire evening being the only person in the room who had this knowledge. I tried to speak to her, but she was not interested in talking to me. I quickly lost my courage and left her alone. She left in the middle of the event. I asked the host and she didn’t know who she was and neither did anyone else. We all thought someone had brought her and it turned out that none of us had. That night I thought about her as I tried to sleep and figured the best way to deal with her was to forget her and move on. As the days passed it was all I could do not to think of her all the time. Months later I was still thinking of her and her disappearing act.

  Imagine my surprise when I walked right by her on the sidewalk near my office. I said hello and asked her why she had left the party so early. She just shrugged. I didn’t bother to ask her how she had ended up there, I was too busy looking at her eyes and her mouth. I asked her if she lived in town, and she said, “I’m in the process of moving.” I asked her if she would go out with me, and she said yes. She said that she would meet me at the restaurant we were standing in front of at seven that evening and walked quickly away. I didn’t get her name, and now that I think about it, she didn’t smile once.

  The five hours until then crawled. I couldn’t believe that I had seen her again. The chances of that happening were next to impossible. It started making me think of all that stupid crap like destiny and karma.

  At seven she was standing right where I had encountered her before. I asked her what her name was, and she said it was Louise. We went in and sat down. With the food ordered I tried to get her to talk to me, but she’d only answer in short sentences. She worked in video, but she didn’t tell me anything more than that. I asked her where she lived, and she replied that she was thinking of moving to San Francisco or Los Angeles but not where she lived. She never asked me anything, so I started talking about myself and you know how fast you b
ury yourself when you try to make yourself sound interesting to someone who just stares at you. Basically the whole thing was going nowhere. I wanted to tell her that I had been thinking about her nonstop since the night I met her, but I couldn’t find the words. I just couldn’t muster the courage to make a fool out of my almost-silent date. She excused herself to the ladies’ room. I figured that when she got back I would tell her everything that I had been going through. I would force a reaction out of her with my truth and passion. It sounded lame, but it was all I had. So I waited. After twenty minutes I asked the waiter if he had seen her. He said that he had seen her, he had seen her walk out the door right after she got up from the table twenty minutes ago. I paid and left.

  Okay, tell me that you don’t want the story to end, that you really feel for me and want to know what I did next. Tell me that you want me to get in the car and take a long meaningful drive around the streets looking for her. Tell me that this meant something to you. Tell me that you’re not laughing at me right now. Please don’t be laughing.

  Keep walking empty-eyed man. The first feeling I ever had that I felt was my own was when I was young and riding my bike at night. The sound of the tires on the street and the wind rushing by my ears made me feel good. I felt strong and that no one could tell me what to do. I noticed that all the kids around me were always with other kids. I never saw a person my age walking alone. I hated males my age. They would tease me and beat me up. The humiliation was hard to take. I would eventually learn to engage these males in episodes of my violent fury that they always regretted. I learned there is a lot of strength in having nothing to lose. I saw early that I was always going to be on the outside. I knew this by the time I was twelve.

  I started to think of myself as a person from another planet. My hatred for people grew more intense as I grew older and understood more of the ways of the world and just how weak humans were. I was done with my parents by the time I was sixteen and merely listened to them so I could remember what to say and what not to say so I could get around them with more ease. I never tried to do anything to make them proud of me. I never thought they were anything more than people I was staying with until I could get loose and nothing more. I never did anything to learn about their lives, and to this day I know nothing more about them than when I was a teenager. I do not know when either of them died.

  The years passed and I grew farther and farther apart from my parents and people in school. The only thing that brought me back a little closer to them was the pursuit of women. I always felt that women belonged to them and their planet and that they could always tell that I had spent most of my time on my own. I had almost zero social skills besides those which I had learned from watching television shows. I knew that life wasn’t like that, but I tried to affect the cool of the people I would watch. It did nothing more than alienate people further from me.

  As I got older and started living on my own I remained a loner. The farther along I got, the more natural it felt. When I walk the streets alone I can still hear the wind like I did on my bike over twenty years ago. When I am near people I can’t hear the wind. Nights are wasted when spent around others.

  The years passed and the jobs and addresses changed. I drifted all over America, never staying in any one place for more than a year. The scar tissue on my eyebrows and knuckles became deep lines on my face and hands.

  I learned to forget. I learned to hear the sound of the wind rushing by my ears even while working in a mail room or some dank factory. I always lived alone. Women came seldom and went quickly. After a while I stopped looking for company and just thought about it as I walked the streets at night.

  I eat at this one place a few nights a week. Usually there’s a man sitting in the corner table reading a book or a newspaper. One night he came over to where I was and sat down across from me.

  He leaned over the table and looked directly into my eyes. I could tell that he wanted to tell me something that he knew from experience. Whatever was going to come out of his mouth was something that he had lived, was living through, and was doomed to keep living. I could see the pain in his face as he was trying to find the words. He pulled back and looked away from me and sighed deeply. He spoke quickly and quietly. “I’ve seen you in here a lot. I’m checking out soon. The Agent Orange is pushing through my chest bad, I don’t give a fuck. Marine?” I shook my head no. “Doesn’t matter, fuck it. Here.” He handed me a piece of paper and a war medal. I looked at the medal, it was a Purple Heart. He looked at it and smiled. He shook his head, said, “Fuck it” again, got up, and exited the diner quickly without looking back. I read the piece of paper. Blue ballpoint ink, barely readable.

  This may come as a relief to you… You will always be alone. Crowded rooms, busy streets, it doesn’t matter. Your solitude will be everywhere with you always. You will wake up mornings of all four seasons alone and go to sleep the same way. The years will pass and you will witness your body slowly show the ravages of time. Of course there will be the intermittent crossing of paths with women. Be assured, all these liaisons will be short-lived. If you are not immediately distracted and alienated, you find yourself filled with contempt either real or imagined soon enough. You have seen too much. You know the wrong things. Experience is a well-dressed curse. The higher power has a price. The price is the silence of truth. The ghosts never leave, the echoes never die down. They know you better than anyone living ever will. Until you stop fighting the reality of your life, you will pass the nights looking for someone else to share your isolation with. You will never meet your equal because you have none. You will only be reminded of your discontent, hence your emptiness and contempt while in the intimate company of another. You are uniquely damaged. It’s the scars that keep you from ever getting away from what you know, what you are. The sooner you learn to accept your fate the better. The time passes easier, you stop tormenting yourself. I know how it is sometimes, trust me, there is no one who understands except other people like me, ones who are damned and know it. And in my company there is no solace because all we have in common is the Abyss, which life has cast us to walk forever through. And you know you always walk through it alone. This is life’s sickness. This is the joke life plays on us. Look too deeply and regret forever. I know you know all this shit. I’m dragging this motherfucker all the way down the drain. Fuck it!

  No signature. I left the note and the medal on the table after I finished eating. Didn’t mean a thing to me. Never saw the man again. I have learned to forget. I forget it as soon as I learn it, I never actually know too much at any one time. There’s nothing or no one I want to know. I don’t ponder the great mysteries of life. I don’t think there are any, and if there are, so what. I don’t think about when I’m going to die. I don’t read books, watch television, or go to movies. I just work, walk, and sit. I don’t hate people like I used to. I don’t remember when I stopped. I don’t remember when I stopped being proud of anything or feeling superior to others either. I have never told anyone I loved them but my parents, and I only said it because they did and it seemed like a good idea to repeat the phrase. I never felt anything when I said it. Love never seemed like anything I ever needed. I just move on, live through it. Watch the seasons, walk the miles, survive the time.

  Not disabled, unable. In my dream I die and come back as a brick. Yes, a brick. The brick that I come back as is lodged in a wall that was built in 1951. The exposed side of the brick faces the window of a woman who I love but who turned me away years before. Day after day I stare into her room, into her life. I watch her come and go. I see her with different men. I cannot call out, I cannot move. I am embedded in cement. I can do nothing but silently and motionlessly watch. I see her alone. I watch her cry and hold her head in her hands. I am forced to watch relentlessly. Sometimes she stares out the window and looks right at me. It is excruciating to look directly into her eyes and know she does not see me, she only sees a wall. She leaves for weeks at a time, and I wonder where she is. Who she
’s with. I wait. All the other bricks are just bricks, they do not speak, they don’t do anything at all. It is only my discontent that makes me believe that I am alive at all. I have no arms or legs. I feel neither hot nor cold. I do not sleep. I do not hunger or thirst. My face is a small rectangle of smooth red clay, anonymous. Sometimes I think that I am a man merely dreaming of being a brick, but the days pass and I can see enough to know that I am indeed a brick in a large wall. One day she moves away. Days turn into months, and soon the first year of her absence arrives. In this time I have done nothing but think and make up every possibility of her return, to my view a potential reality. Five years pass. My mind has begun to drift. I watch the squirrels and birds in the tree to my left. I watch a few families move in and out. See a few traffic accidents, a robbery. I watch the leaves explode into colors and fall off the branches. But at night when everything is quiet I think of her. She is somewhere. I am here. Always here. Not waiting, just here. Please do not let me live my life untouched and tormented. Please help me escape the tragedy of myself. I envision my face: contorted and agonized, wild-eyed, my mouth frozen in midscream. Never able to say the truth. Forever trapped, suspended inside solid black eternity. Embedded, silent, identical to the hundreds of others symmetrically stacked around me.