The Portable Henry Rollins Read online

  I used to think that red, blue, green, and yellow were my friends. For a while there I thought that lines could go in circles if I wanted them to. I know better now. Black and white and the straight line are my friends. Inside my room I am free. Colors burst forth anytime they want to. The lines go wherever they please. Outside of my room I am not free, and that’s where the black and white are by my side, and that straight line is my chosen direction. I know what it does to you. I know how it makes you feel. There is another side to this blade and I know that one too, and I am tired of playing games with you. Thank you for all the gifts. I’ll return them one of these days.

  It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain. Damn, there’s nothing like that, is there? I’ve been there and you have too. You’re nodding your head.

  Cold outside, cold inside, the smell of grease and disinfectant. The guys behind the counter look like they hate everybody who comes in. It’s one of those jobs that you get, and all the while you’re telling yourself that it’s just temporary until the right thing comes along. It’s one of those jobs that when you look up, you would swear that the clock hasn’t moved a second since you looked at it an hour ago. The kind of job that you realize you’ve been at for over a year now. Sure, you hate it, but it doesn’t feel as bad as it used to. The brain numbs itself to everything except hate and the ability to take orders. But then again, who the fuck am I to say anything at all? For all I know, these guys might think that waiting on a bunch of meth dealers and whores is quite a great thing to be doing. Nobody understands anybody’s anything.

  Labels on records. Why not labels on booze? For example, a label that ran like so: Warning: Use of this product can cause vomiting, blurred vision, loss of control, loss of memory, severe headaches, dry mouth. Prolonged use of this product can lead to a dependency on this product. Prolonged use of this product can lead to the destruction of self-confidence. Prolonged use of this product can lead to the total destruction of self-respect. Prolonged use of this product can lead to the destruction of the soul.

  I found out what there is for me. Nothing. Nothing I can see. There are only things to learn from and forces to make myself aware of. My brain is on a different wavelength now. Names, faces, I don’t remember them. They don’t matter. More and more, day by day, I break from them. There are no answers, just a lot of questions. No, scratch that. I don’t have any questions anymore. No questions, nothing to explain. I can’t talk to them. They have proven that to me over and over. I used to think that I could talk to her, but sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes when I talk to her I think that I’m being quietly laughed at. That’s how I felt today. I held the phone in my hand and stared at it. Finally I just hung it up and walked away. Those phone booths are almost like coffins. I wonder if anyone ever gets buried in them.

  Sometimes I think of myself as this guy holding on to a propeller that is going full speed. My body twists and turns as I hold on for dear life. Pulled along. In motion but not really in control.

  If I close my eyes, I can see myself and this propeller go ripping by, the propeller cutting a path through dense underbrush and tree limbs. The propeller does fine. My body gets mangled as it slams into tree trunks, branches, and bushes.

  I need to make friends with the machine. I need to understand the power, to harness it and direct it, not be dragged along by it. I need to become one with the machine. I’ve got to stop holding on to the monkey’s tail. I must get on the monkey’s back.

  I can see it in your eyes. They’re wet like a dog’s. You’re looking for a leg to climb to keep you from drowning. Your hands reach out, clutching for something solid to hold on to. You’re weak and in need. You want something to hold so you can have something to blame. Don’t reach out to me. I’m drowning too.

  Take my no man’s body and point it toward the sun. Going home. You got me feeling like a hole dug in the ground. I got to fill up the hole. I fill it up with dirt. You got me feeling like a hole dug in the ground. I open up my window and I take a look around. I see killers looking back at me. Killers walking in the sunshine. Dirt hole man. Dig it. Dirt hole man. Pass me by. I got nothing to give you. Pass me by. I’m digging myself. I dig myself. I dig my hole alone. Don’t want nobody in my hole with me.

  Walking to the store. The first thing that hits me as I go out into the light is the smell. Dog-shit all over the grass. I walk down my street and watch the homeboys watch me. I have to look right at them, I can’t help it. They piss me off when they stare. I feel like shooting their little heads off. I turn onto the main street and walk past the family-planning center. A worn-out street dude looks at me and waves and nods his head like he knows me, that random recognition always leads to the hit-up for some change. I keep walking. There’s bums and garbage all over the place, it looks like some low-grade war was being fought. Bum soldiers. They look battle-torn, bloodshot eyes, slow stumbling walk. They pick through garbage like they’re picking over corpses. I keep walking. The store signs are mostly in Spanish. Little Mexican children run by me screaming and chasing each other. I see a bum in a doorway; his stench is so strong that I can smell him from almost ten feet away. His fingers are yellow from cigarettes. I breathe in, it’s like trying to breathe in a rock. My breath just seems to stop like it doesn’t want to go any further. I turn the corner and go into the store and get what I need. The lady at the checkout asks me how I’m doing, and I know she doesn’t really want to know so I don’t say anything. These people always make me want to destroy. All I can think of is the flamethrower and the destruction. I leave the store. The side of the shopping center is the place where several buses pick up and let off. Run-down people of all types. They look like they’re on their way to work, they all have that bottomed-out hopeless look. The more beaten-down they look the longer the shift is I bet. I pass the bum again, and again I get that smell. I turn my head to the street, and I see a beautiful girl on her bike. She has long blond hair and a blue tank top; her hair is streaming behind her. As she goes, I look back at the bum and then back at the girl—what a view, what a trip. I go to the bakery to get a loaf of bread. There’s a line out the door. I squeeze in and pick out some bread. The line is made up of two distinct groups, old Mexicans and old Jews. The Mexicans look like they have worked the night shift of every shit job there ever was. They are silent and they wait patiently. The Jewish folks are very talkative, they make a bunch of comments about how long the line is and how strange that is for this time of the week. They look like they have just gotten off a Miami golf course. The men have their pants pulled way up past their waist. I finally get out of there and make my way back to the apartment…

  Have you ever thought that the night could be hungry? Like it wants to eat you up? That’s the feeling I get sometimes. I don’t want to move because if I do that, I won’t want to stop and I’ll get all wrapped up in some crazy shit that I won’t be able to deal with. But the night, it seems, is always there, waiting around, looming over me. It’s the feeling I get when I’m in this room at night. I want for something, but I don’t know what and I feel so isolated but at the same time I think I could run right through the wall if I really wanted to. No matter what I do I think I’m wasting time when I should be getting on to the real thing, but I don’t know what the hell that is. I tell myself that something’s coming. I don’t know what, but it’s coming… but it never does and I knew that it wouldn’t in the first place. But to think that something’s coming makes me feel like living a little more. Sometimes I don’t feel like that at all, living I mean. Sometimes I crave something so big that it will be big enough to really knock me out, or do something. I sit
here and I can hear all this noise and shit outside and I wonder if any of it’s for me, if any of those noises are supposed to be telling me something. I listen intently. I don’t want to miss the right one. What a drag, but I don’t know what’s dragging. The night is the only constant. But that doesn’t help much right now.

  I wanted this to be the real thing. I wanted it to finally be the real discipline. The discipline that I had been so well preparing myself for. I needed something to be real. I saw all things around me falling apart, all people caving in. I asked myself how long I was going to live this lie, how long I was going to let myself down and blame someone else. Finally I kicked through the wall. It was like a junkie who busts through the scar tissue that keeps him from hitting. It was like slashing through the womb with your teeth. It’s the lies that are killing me. The lack of discipline. I was killing myself and I didn’t even see it. I couldn’t feel it. The painless days are over.

  I went to a show last night. I went to help the soundman set up his system. What shitty bands. What a poor excuse for music. I looked at the crowd all night. There was nowhere else to go. All I could do was sit there and listen to this shit. I cannot count all the times that I wanted to take a flamethrower and fire it into the crowd. I wanted to incinerate the whole mess. That’s what it was, a fucking mess. The only thing I liked the whole night besides all the people leaving was the pig’s guns. I liked their clubs too. It would have been great to have rammed one of them down their throats. The show was at a university. Those kind of shows are always a joke. There’s something about colleges that really sets me off. I guess it’s all that idiotic knowledge going on. Like sheep getting trained for the slaughter. When I walk down the halls, I always get the strangest looks from the students. Makes me wonder if they would survive a war on these shores, or even an afternoon in a bad neighborhood. If some bad shit ever did go down, I bet they would make good prisoners of war, patient, obedient. When I walk the halls of these schools I feel that these guys are really getting taken for a ride, on their parent’s money; I guess that’s the way it should be.

  The music, what a mess. All of it was so hollow. The opening band was called Guns n’ Roses, and they blew the headliners off so hard it was pathetic. Even the applause after a number was hollow, well, that makes sense. The audience and the performers go hand in hand. Seemed really depressing that this is the stuff that these people are playing in their rooms at night. What a shitty world to go home to. I was so glad when all the people finally left. It was a joy to load the equipment out and get out of there.

  Some music might be alternative for a while, but if it is any good, it gets sucked into the big scene, and then that’s when they get their pants pulled down in front of everybody. There’s nothing like a little success to dissolve anything good about a band that had little to start with. Most bands have so little to start with these days. There’s this thing where alternative bands get to be real shitty and not get pinned to the wall for it. That’s the funny and stinking thing about the music business, it’s all bullshit, on every level. You just have to find the pile that smells the best.

  I choose to do what I want and not get in the light with a bunch of faces who are in competition with each other for the trophy. Gone are the bands that want to destroy and fuck the place up. This place needs fucking up….

  Goddamn I want a gun. The heat is making my brain stick to my skull. I’m thirsty. I want it so bad that I could crawl up the wall, grind my nails into the plaster. I wish I could kick my own head in. I wouldn’t think. I wouldn’t know shit. A bare bulb in the ceiling, that’s my brain. Hot and hollow. I wish I could scream the walls down. I can’t scream. I can hardly move. Hot prison man. If I wrap my arms around myself tight enough maybe I could collapse my rib cage. No I’m not getting out of here. I’m not getting out of this night. I’m not getting out of this brain. The brain I’m in. Prison, bastard, fucker, self-mutilator. I’m all those criminals. If I could somehow turn it all around. If I could somehow breathe life instead of death all the time. Then I could get out of here less painlessly than all the rest. I don’t have the guts to go out like you.

  We have a little war going on here. I just heard an ambulance go around the corner. What will it be tonight? The son who kicked his mother down the stairs? The father who beat his wife to death with the telephone? The baby who got forgotten by his mother because the drugs were real good today? You never know. You never know and you never get to know unless it’s you, and if it’s you, well, you don’t want to know. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be me. I’ll fuck up and walk on the wrong side of the street, and then someone will teach me a lesson and the ambulance will come for me and I can be the star for a while. Oh, there goes another siren. Holy shit, they’re dropping like flies out there. Tomorrow is just another day. You pack your lunch in a brown bag, make sure your gun is loaded, and get your ass to work. You don’t want to be late.

  A man sits in a jail cell serving a life sentence. He doesn’t want to live anymore. To live the way he must live now means no women, no safety, no life, no nothing. Just the rest of his life sitting behind bars waiting to die. He wants no part of it. He wants to die, better death than God knows how many years in the hole. Every day he looks for ways to kill himself. The guards took everything they could think of so he couldn’t do it after he tried to hang himself with his shoelaces. The guards love when they get a guy who wants to die. They know they cause the man great amounts of pain by keeping him alive. They have no concern for his life, they enjoy the amounts of suffering they can cause a man. They pride themselves on the duration of the man’s suffering. They know full well that at some point the man will find a way to kill himself. Imagine seeking death as fully as you would seek to regain your freedom. You would do anything! Imagine wanting death so bad. Imagine death as freedom. Wouldn’t you hate the men who kept you from your death, your freedom. All night, you would lie in your bed all alone, thinking about your death like you were thinking of your lover far away. You would miss what you never had. You would find a way to kill yourself. You would, you would die somehow. Some die inside, the guards can smell that a mile away, they can tell when a man’s dead from the inside. They give up. They leave the man alone, they let him get fed to the sharks.

  That’s how I feel sometimes, dead from the inside. I look into the mirror, I look dead, my eyes look tired and gone. Sometimes when I walk down the street I think that no one can see me; that’s when I wonder if I’m dead. I feel like a bottomless pit. Like a big garbage hole. You can put stuff in, but it never gets full. In fact you never see any of what you put in again. Kind of like in one ear and out the other, but down and out of sight. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m nothing and I’m passing time without the guts to make a move in out up down or otherwise. That’s the name of my tune. That’s the ring on my hangman’s noose. That’s my death row hallway walk. I’m fake, artificial. I think at one point I had it. I had it down but now I’m a swinging man. A cold breeze from way down the hallway blows my dangling body back and forth from day to day. Life has nothing in it worth living for, not in my mind. I tried all the things that were supposed to make me feel more alive, and they damn near killed me. I was lucky once.

  I’m always right when it comes to me

  I used to think that people got in my way

  Until I realized how little they have to do with what I’m doing

  I live in one man’s land

  I’m riding on the bus. I hear these youths sitting in the seats behind me. They’re talking all this shit about how they were at this party, and the one is going on about how hot this girl was when he had her in the hot tub and how soft she was and how her boyfriend in the other room was getting all jealous and shit. The other guy says that yeah, he knows that the girl is fine since he was with her last week. Then they start talking about all these fights they had gotten into last week, tripped me out. They were talking about how one dude got it with a chain in his head and how another got all messed up and h
ad to lie to his folks saying how he had taken a fall down a flight of stairs. All this shit is going down right behind me. I was too scared to look around at these guys. I thought they might kick my ass too. The thing that was funny about it was the Californian accents they had. They’re telling all these way-out tales of sex and violence, and it sounds like a bunch of rich surfers. So I’m hoping to fuck that these heavy mothers get off the bus soon before they get any ideas about knocking me around. About two stops later they get up to leave. They filed past me and didn’t give me even a second glance. You bet your ass I checked them out. I couldn’t believe it. They were fat kooks, and they were wearing these New Wave clothes that you could tell cost a lot of money. The last one to get off the bus is the one I can’t forget. Thick glasses, big butt, with a denim jacket that said THE CURE written in marker on the back. What the fuck is wrong with these people? The Cure? I’ll bet those kids raid their parents’ liquor cabinet and get out the Lite beer. Whatever happened to juvenile delinquents? It’s too late, I think. There should be a law: Anyone under the age of twenty-five will not be sold any weak alcohol products. It’s going to be malt liquor, whiskey, or nothing. Anybody who wants to purchase Lite beer will have to be over forty and have the identification to prove it.

  The palm trees make it all look like such a lie

  They make the streets look like they’re part of a movie set

  Bums and palm trees

  Garbage and palm trees