The Portable Henry Rollins Read online

  You put me on the outskirts of town

  Now you want in?

  You think you do

  I’ll turn your lights out

  I’ll take your virginity away again

  I live in a hanging garden

  Suspended from your world

  In alienation: No Sears, Roebuck dreams

  No credit is good

  In alienation I am whole

  Complete

  The full circle realized

  In alienation

  In the alienation

  In the peace of 21361 minds

  It’s only cold in your world

  When I’m with you I’m cold

  Alien

  Your world is such a lonely place

  When I am there

  I am cold

  You are a bad trip

  That’s why I quit you

  That’s why I spat you out

  That’s why I went upriver

  Into the desert

  Into the jungle

  Into the sun

  I exist in alienation

  I am not alone

  I am joined by those who know that paradise

  Lies

  I’m looking through the window at these guys sitting at a bar. They stare into the darkness, they smoke, they drink, they try not to exist. They drink and curse and burn and weep and drink and hate it, and drink and grind their teeth, and drink and wring their hands and drink and live a slow lifelike death and drink and sink into their stools.

  When I was nineteen, I worked for a while at a lab facility in Rockville, Maryland. The place had mice, rats, and rabbits. I was a drone. Monday I mopped the facility. Tuesday I loaded dirty cages into a huge washer. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday would pass in similar fashion. One day while I was transferring the three hundredth batch of mice into a clean cage, Mike, the head man, came into the room. He told me that there was an outbreak of a rodent disease called ectromelia throughout the entire facility. All the animals in the facility were to be killed and incinerated.

  Mike: Henry, do you want to do it? I mean would it make you squeamish?

  Me: Hell no.

  Mike: So you’ll do it?

  Me: Sure.

  Fine. By order of the National Institute of Health, fifteen to seventeen thousand little beasts were to be destroyed. Fine, clean their cages, mop their floors, sterilize their rooms. Now I kill them. Most of the staff were relocated to another facility. It was pretty much just me and the animals. I had a room all empty and waiting. I was to gas them. The procedure was simple enough. I would put twenty to thirty animals in a plastic bag, squeeze the air out, stick in the gas tube, turn on the gas. Fine. I would go into the rooms and pull out the carts that held cages. I would wheel the cages into the death room. I had the bags and the gas tank of CO2. I would kill, cage by cage. When the boxes would fill up with dead rats and mice I would take the boxes over to the big N.I.H. facility where I would incinerate them. From 7:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the evening, I killed them. Each time I would gas, I watched the animals die. When the mice would be put into the bag, they would crawl around, sniff, and try to figure out what they were doing there. Then when I stuck the tube in and turned the gas on, they would leap up the sides of the plastic bag as it ballooned full of the gas. They looked like they were jumping for joy or something. They would fall back down to the bottom, gasping, soaking in their own urine. They always died with their eyes open. I would look through the bag and look at their eyes, their bodies stacked in a heap. The bottom of the bag was always warm from their piss and shit. I would tie the bag off and throw it in a specially marked box. That sound, I’ll never forget that sound, the gas hissing, and the scratch of the little claws scurrying up the inside of the bag. They always died the same, wide-eyed and with no idea why. I was Adolf Eichmann. I was ordered to terminate. I was not a murderer. I was just trying to get the job done with maximum efficiency. I would terminate and incinerate. I like the way that sounds. Yes, I brought them to the camp in carts that held up to two thousand at once, efficient. I gassed them in enclosures that contained the bodies, their wastes, and their disease. Efficient! The corpses were taken to the ovens and incinerated, leaving behind disease-free ashes, efficient. They called me a murderer. A saint maybe, a murderer, no. After all, it was I who cured the illness. It was I who stopped its spread. I destroyed the ill and the weak, those who were not fit for survival. Can’t you see? I did a job that had to be done. I tried to give rise to a strong, perfect, disease-free race, and you call me a criminal? I am a humanitarian in the strongest sense of the word.

  Inside of a week and a half the facility was silent. All were incinerated, except for one load that I dumped in Burger King and 7-Eleven dumpsters. I quit the month after and started working in an ice cream store. A while ago, I was thinking that it would have been a lot more fun to distribute the boxes in more interesting locales. How about taking boxes of dead mice and rats to a nice residential neighborhood and putting a box on each doorstep? How about UPS-ing a whole bunch to your old high school or girlfriend’s house? You could open up the boxes and bomb people on the sidewalk. How about taking a bag, putting it on someone’s doorstep, lighting the bag on fire, and ringing the doorbell? The guy comes out and stomps the fire out and … gross, rodent flambé underfoot! You could freeze ’em and throw ’em at people in Westwood—fun!!! With an open mind, the possibilities are endless.

  Life’s abandonment is painless

  Life’s abandonment is silent

  The abandonment grows inside

  Like a freezing, killing, crawling cancer

  Born, and left in the dust

  The sun comes up

  You’re walking down the street

  You realize that you’ve been left in the house all alone

  It’s cold inside

  The doors are locked

  You’re never coming out

  Who left you?

  No one left you

  You’re looking at yourself

  And there’s nothing wrong

  You’re looking at yourself

  And there’s no one home inside

  You say: Hey where have I gone?

  You went nowhere

  That’s the abandonment

  I open my eyes and I see it

  I feel it

  It consumes me

  That’s the abandonment

  Turn me off

  Or cut me

  Take my mind off my mind

  Come home

  Close the door

  Lock the door

  Make sure you lock the door

  Pull back the curtains

  Look outside

  The streets are full of killers

  Snakes at your feet

  Feel the dirt touch the disease

  Cure the illness

  Stop the hurt

  Cure the illness

  Stop the vision

  Still the turbulence

  Sit down on the couch

  Take a load off

  Take out the gun

  Put the barrel in your mouth

  Close your eyes

  Think of the filth

  Think of the alienation

  Become the isolation

  Embody the alone

  Use it as a weapon

  Alienate others

  From yourself

  From themselves

  Use the weapon

  Pull the trigger

  Show them what you’re made of

  Stop flailing around

  Pull the trigger

  End the joke

  Make it real

  End it

  They’re at a bar, sitting at a table. The waitress comes over to take their order. She orders a dry martini, he orders a cup of coffee. Shortly after, the waitress comes back with the drinks. She says:

  “I’m confused, who is who?”

  The lady says, “I’m the martini.”

  The gentleman says, “I
’m the coffee.”

  The waitress puts the drinks down and leaves.

  She is the gin. Cold, intoxicating. Gives you a rush, makes you warm inside, makes you lose your head. Take too much, it makes you sick and shuts you down.

  He is the coffee, hot, steaming, filtered. You have to add stuff to it to make it taste good. Grinds your stomach, makes you jittery, wired, and tense. Bad trip, keeps you up, burns you out.

  Coffee and gin don’t mix, never do, everybody keeps trying and trying to make it taste good.

  Madonna. She makes me want to drink beer. She makes me want to drive fast and go bowling. She makes me want to shop at Sears. She makes me want to kick vegetarians. When I hear her sing, I know she’s singing to me. She wants to get nasty with me. When I see her face, her eyes, her lips, talking to me, telling me to come on. I get to feeling mean. T get to feeling like I wanna do a whole lot of push-ups, or go to a hardware store. Then I have to cool down. I gotta cool down, man. It’s either gonna be a cold shower or a Bruce Springsteen record.

  Man and woman

  Forever ruptured

  Forever severed

  Clutching

  Clawing each other’s flesh

  Fucking in shallow graves

  Rolling in blood-soaked dirt

  He looks into her eyes

  He reaches inside her

  Deep inside her

  He rips her uterus out

  And shakes it in her face

  He screams:

  Whose idea was this?

  Cockroaches are your gods. You are weak. You should pray to them. They are a more perfect life-form than you. You are fucked up, with your idiotic idiosyncrasies. You have analysts, tranquilizers, you need vacations, you start wars, you commit suicide, you steal, you lie, you cheat. You are weak. You cannot survive, you are too busy hauling around that big brain of yours. You have to build jails to keep your own kind from killing you. You kill everything. You live in fear. You could never live with the simplicity and beauty of the roach. You have abortions. You engage in meaningless activity. You are weak, cockroaches are your gods. You’re not even fit to kiss the smooth belly scales of the mother roach. You are repulsed by them, you fear them. There are more of them than there are of you. You get squeamish at just the sight, they make you sick. You are weak. Cockroaches are your gods. Give up your plate of food to them. Whether you do or not, they will survive you and your stupidity. You try to kill them with gas and poison just like you do to your own kind. The roach comes back, stronger, faster, immune. You watch television, you lock your doors to protect yourself from your species. You put needles in your arms, you sell your bodies, you find new and inventive ways to mutilate yourselves and others. You are weak. Cockroaches are your gods.

  She touches me

  The jungle lights up with incinerating fire

  Looks like a flaming serpent

  I look into her eyes

  I see a movie flickering

  Car crashes

  People kicking corpses

  Men ripping their tracheas out and shaking them at the sky

  I think to myself:

  I don’t want to survive this one

  I want to burn up in the wreckage

  Cooking flesh in the jungle

  My father died this winter. He just died. I am glad that he died in the winter. Just the idea of it, his body, sealed off in the season of cold. Doesn’t it seem more clean to you? Like less decay? I like that. I can almost imagine his face in death. The eyes, staring, tilted slightly upward. The mouth gaping open. Looking like almost every picture I have ever seen of a victim of the Nazi death camps. Yes, he died in the wintertime. Sealed off in cold. That is my memory of his death. Cold, frozen, stagnant. Totally unaffected by the heat and damp of the summer. A heat that makes my thoughts fester and boil in decay and rot. No, memories of him live in the freezer of my soul. The warmth of compassion and tender feeling will never reach there. These feelings do not exist anyway. I did not attend the funeral or any of the gatherings that preceded the funeral. I missed the two events that I would have liked to be present at. I missed his last breath. I would have wanted to have had my eyes so close to his that his last breath would have blown right upon me. I would have breathed in every single solitary particle of his last breath as I stared into his eyes. I would have savored this breath of air for as long as I could before expelling it into a jar for later use. I also missed the autopsy. I would have loved to have seen his guts, his brains, his body. Mutilated in cold, precise surgical fashion.

  … In my dream I hover above and study his gutted, sliced features. He looks pathetic. His cock, shriveled up gray-blue. He looks like dog meat. He looks helpless and stupid. I hate stupidity. I descend from my perch above and kick his brittle ribs with my steel-cap jack boots. The coroner waves me off and asks me to hold off until he has conducted his investigation. Respecting a job that has to be done, I sit in a folding chair and read a magazine. I cannot concentrate on the magazine because the cutting up and squeezing of my father’s corpse is captivating. I ask to help. I am refused, of course, as it is normal policy for the next-of-kin to have no part in the autopsy….

  I would have asked the coroner for my lather’s cold, dead heart. Having received the heart, I would have taken it home and cooked it in a hearty bouillon. I would have invited very special guests over. We could chat about small, unimportant matters, sip mineral water or white wine, and sup upon my father’s heart. To me that would be a very spiritual and intimate send-off. This would take a lot of intestinal fortitude on my part because I am a vegetarian. However, the opportunity to dine on my father’s heart is one that is irresistible to me.

  When she comes:

  She pulls you close

  She breathes in short bursts

  Her eyes close

  Her head tilts back

  Her mouth opens slightly

  Her thighs turn to steel and then melt

  She is perfect

  And you feel like you are everything

  I saw it on TV. An L-1011. Full-color footage. It looked like a ruptured toy. The men were out with their garbage bags, picking up limbs. There was luggage, clothes, bodies, and big hunks of metal all over the place. I’ll never forget the sight of that enormous plane ripped apart and gutted like a big foot had kicked it around. I wonder what that must have been like. Picking up heads, arms, fingers, and assorted guts and loading them into plastic bags. I wonder if those guys go through the pockets of the dead, maybe get a little beer money. Why not? What the fuck is a stiff going to do with money? There must have been flies all over the place, being summer and all. Ask any fly and he’ll tell you, there’s nothing better than fresh guts on a summer day! The telecast turned to the chief coroner. He said that identification of the corpses would take a long time. He said that most of the bodies were covered with jet fuel, a lot were burned beyond recognition. He asked that the relatives bring any photographs, dental records, and doctor’s info (operation scars) that they had to help speed up the process. In a few days Time and Newsweek will have good color pictures of the twisted metal and destroyed bodies. I dig those pictures; a few months ago they had some great color shots of dead bodies stacked high at the Belsen concentration camp. But anyway, when those mags come out with those airplane pictures, I’m gonna buy ’em, yes sir. And I’m gonna say: “Boy! Am I glad I wasn’t on that plane! Look at all those people. They’re dead, naked, and burned up!”

  To me, she’s not even human, she’s some kind of a germ. A concoction. She is neurotic, nasty, and abusive. Pathetic is a word that springs to mind. When she is loud and drunk, it’s torture being around her. She treats marijuana like some life-preserving drug. She is most lively when she has a chance to get “fucked up.” Whenever she’s spazzing out and drooling over pot, I think to myself, “coke whore,” but I change the word coke to pot. She doesn’t bathe much, and sometimes the stench can be quite noxious. I don’t like being associated with her because I see how nasty she is
with people that I work with. When she comes into a room, I either leave or try to get out of earshot of her. I hope she goes on her painful little way and leaves my sight. Not a bone in me hates that girl. She has managed to turn off everyone around her. She sure did it to me. I never set out to feel like that, no way. Now it’s at the point where it’s totally irreversible. I avoid her whenever possible.

  I overheard some people talking. This girl was complaining about having to shell out money every time her period came around. She said that Midol and tampons should be given away in welfare boxes. I had never thought of that before. She had a point there. What if a guy had to put out a dime every time he took a piss. It would be nothing at first, but after a while those dimes would start to pile up and you might try and hold out to make that dime go a bit farther. Imagine saying, “Fuck, I spent a buck on urine today!” What if you were into beer? What if you are out of $$$? What if you had to write a check? A credit card? What if you had to say, “Brother, can you spare a dime? I gotta piss.” You would be in bladder hell pal. Think about that!

  It’s cold here, cold and raining. It’s August but it feels like October. Even the air smells like autumn. Autumn time makes me think of working at the ice cream store in Washington, DC. I lived in this really dingy apartment in the fall of 1980, and I used to avoid it as much as possible. I would do this by hanging out on the street and working extra shifts at the ice cream store. I would spend a lot of time alone. While my car still worked, I would go for drives at night with all the windows open, just to have the cold air wash over me. I would drive through different neighborhoods in NW just to clear my head. I later stopped driving as much because I started to enjoy walking more.

  I would go for long walks by myself. That made me feel old, getting enjoyment from going for walks by myself. I’ll never forget how the autumn air smelled that year. I spent a lot of time out and around because I only used the apartment as a last resort. At the time it seemed that everything frustrated me. I would work behind the counter at the ice cream store, and the customers would just wear me down. I would take orders all day long. I felt like an old shirt going through the laundry over and over. By the end of the shift I was burned out on people, their talk and their bullshit. The walks did me good. It was so great to be outside when the air was clear and cool. Everything looked good.