The Portable Henry Rollins

by Henry Rollins

  In New Brunswick he said I was a hippie

  In Birmingham he said I was

  “A talentless jerk that stole freely from bad sources”

  In Madison she said I was a typical asshole

  In Washington I quoted Hitler and made her cry

  In Athens I tried to fuck behind the police station

  In St. Louis she said that she hates all men

  In New Orleans he said that someone was coming to kick my ass

  In Pensacola she walked away from me, wordless

  In Daytona Beach she said I was a pig

  In Miami bugs crawled on my face and I couldn’t sleep

  In Jackson she said:

  “It’s hot and things move slow around here. That’s why we fuck a lot, fight a lot, eat a lot, and drink a lot”

  In Philadelphia I fucked in a men’s room stall

  In Columbia he said: “White power all right” I said: “Heil Budweiser”

  In Vermont I saw him get hit by a car

  In Albany I saw him get taken to the loony bin

  In Boston she said that her friend hadn’t washed her shirt since I sweated on it

  In Lincoln twenty people came and they all sat in back or left early

  In Memphis he pounded the stage with his brass knuckles

  In Hoboken I spat puke for the last three songs

  In Chicago I spat puke for the last four

  In Cincinnati I spat blood

  Here in LA I wait to go

  People get lost

  The alarm clock goes off and someone loses his way

  All of a sudden five years have passed

  Same job

  They look at themselves in the mirror

  Can’t understand where it all went

  A dirty underhanded trick

  Someone gets lost and destroyed

  People walking the streets like dumb animals

  Smart enough to be cruel

  Handcuffed to the television set

  Another beer can opens

  The sun goes down on another day

  Self-destruction slow and complete

  What nasty things we do to ourselves

  I get calls from crazy girls

  Late at night

  They sound like they’re calling from another planet

  The other night one calls from some bin in O.C.

  She tells me that her parents put her there

  They no longer want to see her

  Her older brother told her that she is ugly

  She believes him

  She starts to cry

  She says that he goes out with a girl that got named

  Ms. Huntington Beach

  She asks me if she is ugly

  I tell her she’s not ugly at all

  She says that her brother is a big fan of mine

  And he wouldn’t believe that we are talking right now

  She tells me that she lives in a ward

  A lot of other kids around her all the time

  A tough weird reality

  Almost thirteen years old

  She asks if she can call again sometime

  I say sure

  She says goodbye and hangs up

  I stare at the ceiling and try to fall asleep

  I feel so lonely right now

  1:22 a.m.

  Phone rings

  Long distance

  She is off medication

  Nervous about starting up with the new shrink

  Trying to get her friends off drugs

  “She works her ass off all week. Gets her pay on Fridayb and it all goes up her nose. She’s trying to quit but it’s hard.”

  She says that all of last year she was on medication

  She sat in her room and stared at the wall

  Her family pretended that she wasn’t there

  She goes to bars to be around people

  She can’t be alone for too long or she starts to slip

  She says she is coming out to LA

  She sounds like she’s talking in her sleep

  I tell her that I have to get up in a few hours

  She gets mad

  She tells me that I’m trying to avoid her

  She calls me a few names and hangs up

  Another night warped

  She calls me from a bin out in the sticks

  Tells me all about getting strapped down

  Tells me that she’s getting better

  She can’t feel it now

  But they tell her that she’s getting better all the time

  I think of her as she speaks

  Shitting her pants

  Men in smocks putting electrodes into her head

  I think about lab rats

  The smell of shit

  All these people getting better

  Bright lights

  White sheets

  This stranger

  124 Worlds

  #29: We walk down the street debating. Should we take a cab, bus, or should we walk to the graveyard? I say that I don’t mind walking. She says she doesn’t think I’m up to it and hails a cab.

  We get to the graveyard and walk through the gate. I feel hesitant. Not because I have a problem with walking past a bunch of stiffs, but because I think that some kind of custodian or cop is going to come out of the little shack at the front and give us shit about what the hell we were planning on doing in there. I could see it plain as day, some fat piece of shit pig,

  “What do you think you’re going to do in here? You’re looking for a place to screw aren’t you? Yeah, I figured as much … you little sluts. You think you’re going to go into one of those mausoleums and screw your little goddamn brains out don’t you? Well you’re not. You get the hell out of here before I kick your shit all the way down to the station. I see you looking at me fella. Go on, try something. I want you to. I’ll hit you so hard your mamma will get a black eye. Get the hell out of here you little shits.” Something like that. We go past the gates, no one comes out. We walk down the uneven, cracked pathway.

  Whole families lined up in rows. Some stones just say BABY. Small stones with numbers are all over. These are plots for sale. I think of a man walking down the path with the caretaker after they have had a cup of coffee and a few laughs. The man looks down at a stone and says to the caretaker,

  “Here, this is the place. Is this taken? I want my body put right here. Still open? Great. How much? Oh great. Yes, I like the way the sun catches it. Not near any trees, good. I don’t want any birds getting my stone dirty, not that I’ll know anything about it. That’s a joke. Yes, I believe that you’ve heard it all before, but yes, I’ll take it.”

  If I were going to pick a place where my body was going to rest for eternity, I would want to be really sure of the place. I mean really sure. I would set up a tent and camp out at the spot for a few days. I know that it would look a bit strange, like if there was a funeral nearby and all these mourners filed past my bright orange tent. I’d smile and wave as I tended to my franks and beans cooking on the Sterno stove. I would stick out without question, but at the end, I would know for sure. I would walk up to that caretaker with a steady eye and a voice that defined conviction.

  “Yes sir, that’s the grave for me, you betcha. Where do I sign?”

  I would mean it and he would know it.

  I suggest that this place would be a great golf course. It has a pond and everything. It would take a mighty golfer to be able to get through the course, what with all the stones in the way, a real challenge. I mean come on, pro golfers must get bored of these tournaments. These big-ass fields, every once in a while an alligator or something. Imagine the fun these guys would have playing through a mausoleum. What if a golfer’s ball landed on his long-lost uncle’s grave?

  Okay, my dad used to walk his dogs on this golf course on the weekends. The course was huge. The dogs ran around and had a great time. The dogs were faithful and good. They would see those balls flying through the air. They would r
etrieve them and place them like a little pile of quail eggs at my father’s feet. From hundreds of yards away, I could see golfers shaking their fists. Although the distance was great, I could still hear what they were saying. A lot of shit about, “Goddammit, shit, dogs … my ball!” My dad would laugh his ass off. At times like these, he was almost human.

  We walk over to a mausoleum all decked out in iron and granite. The room inside is bigger than a lot of apartments I’ve lived in. She thinks that there might be passages underneath it. I ask her what she thinks a bunch of dead guys are going to do with secret passageways. I can see them all down there laughing,

  “Haw, haw, our wives still think we’re dead! Hey Moe, pass that over here. Haw haw …”

  You never know, so I go over and put my ear to the door and listen for sound, the sound of a stereo, the sound of bowling pins … Nothing, not a sound.

  We keep walking. I trip over a wreath and knock it over. I pick it up and put it back on its stand. I read the name on the stone.

  “Sorry John, I mean, Mr. Garland.”

  I walk away and look back. The wreath has fallen over again. I know that if there really is a hell, I’m going to be there and old John Garland will be pissing on my head from a cloud on high.

  We have walked all the way around, and we’re close to the gate again. I look over and I see what looks like a television antenna poking out from behind a stone. I walk over there and check it out; it’s just a wreath stand turned over. That would be great, to see a pair of rabbit ears clipped onto a stone. A repair guy hooking the grave up for cable. Hey, we got big-screen TV, grab a shovel and come on in.

  There’s every type of stone you can think of in here. I point out one that looks like a big ebony dick. She looks at me and starts laughing. I suggest that some of these people should have gotten their loved ones to put some fancy custom neon work on their stones—that would really stand out amongst all the gray and black.

  We get to the gate. I hear some voices. I look over and see three guys in workman uniforms leaning up against a truck. They are passing a joint between them. I tell her that David Lee Roth’s grave will have a full bar and a merchandising booth. We leave the graveyard.

  #30: He had the day off. He sat in the room. That’s what he did when he wasn’t at the job. The job made him hate, made him hate endlessly. Made him punch the wall. Made him keep his fucking mouth shut. It felt good to grind his teeth. He would walk home from the shift, hoping that someone would fuck with him so he could use his fists.

  It was the day before Christmas. Like many Christmases past, he didn’t send or receive presents or cards. To him, Christmas was another day. Just another day to be followed by another one. He knew they were full of shit because they needed a day of the year when they could be nice to each other. They couldn’t just be that way. They needed an occasion to come out of their holes and be human beings. What rotten shits they were. He knew this. It always boiled down to money for them. There was no escape. Life was waiting for the next shift to start.

  He remembered the Christmases of his youth. He was living with his mother. She would get him some presents and never let him forget for a minute that he was a pain in her ass. She would pull out the plastic Christmas tree from the closet and put it up with the same lights from the year before. It was a sad ritual. He remembered how she always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and she would tell him that he had better appreciate this shit. She put “goddamn” before everything she said. Goddamn presents, goddamn toys, etc.

  He wanted to tell her that he didn’t care about the tree and the presents and could she not be so nasty all the time, that she was scaring him and he hadn’t done a thing to deserve it. He didn’t make up Christmas.

  Opening the presents was a drag. He knew that she really couldn’t afford the presents and buying them made her angrier than usual.

  “You better enjoy that one. I paid a lot of goddamn money for that.”

  She would light up a cigarette and watch him like a hawk. He did his best to look happy when he opened the presents. In truth he had no interest in them. All he wanted to do was kill her. He could tell by the things that she got for him that she didn’t know anything about him. It was like having a crazy woman paying your rent and buying you shit and telling you that she wished you didn’t exist.

  At Christmastime, his mother’s mother would call. Grandmother was a drunk. He met her a few times and she was always fucked up, slurring her words, makeup on all crooked, falling over chairs, laughing. They would get on the phone, and his mother would start screaming, her cigarette ashes falling all over the floor. Finally, his mother would slam the phone down and start breaking things in the kitchen. He would run to his room and hide.

  A few days later he would be sent over to his father’s house to visit and collect presents that had been bought for him. Sometimes there was a Christmas tree, but most times there wasn’t and that was a big relief. His presents were always in the closet next to his father’s boots. The presents were never wrapped. He could tell that his father didn’t know him at all. His mother would give him a box of cigars to take over to his father for a present. Father would look at them and put them on a shelf and not say anything. His father would watch some sports game and fall asleep in front of the television with a lit cigar in his hand. He would watch his father sleep, debating if he should let the cigar burn his father’s hand. At the last minute he would gently remove the cigar and put it in the ashtray.

  Later on there was the overcooked dinner served up by his stepmother, a terrifying and unpleasant bitch. She would never use sugar. She put artificial sweetener in everything. The meal was dry and neglected, a hateful heap of shitty food. He would get a sharp poke in the ribs from his father signifying that it was time for him to say something nice about the meal.

  “Real good ma’am.”

  His father would look at him and nod. She made it clear that he was a pain in her ass. He couldn’t wait to leave. She scared the shit out of him.

  He would go back to his mother’s house with all the presents from his father. His mother would pull it all out and look it over, muttering as she went through the lot. “Goddamn, he really is a goddamn slob isn’t he? How do you work this goddamn thing…” She would force a moving part on of one of the toys, breaking it. “See? This goddamn stuff is cheap. You see what a cheap bastard he is … Christ.”

  He would pull the presents into his room and put them in a pile in the corner. He rarely played with the things that they bought him. He was scared to break them. She would hit him. Call him ungrateful and threaten to have the police come and take him to jail forever.

  “I’m thinking about calling the police and having them take you away. How would you like that?”

  Whack.

  “How,” whack, “would,” whack, “you,” whack, “like,” whack, “that?”

  He sat and thought out loud.

  I should have let you burn your whole fucking house down Dad, just what you needed.

  Another Christmas going by. He sat and watched the snow fall by the window. Nice view from where he was—another apartment building. He could see a few Christmas-tree lights blinking. The occasional head pass by. The heater was making small rattling sounds like it was shivering.

  “Yeah, you and me both pal, ha ha.”

  Tomorrow another day off. Another day to wait until the shift started again. The shift would always start again. Any time away from the job was just the spaces in its big teeth—little gaps in which you were allowed to breathe, lie to yourself, and make yourself think that you were alive. They had you coming and going. They had you. There was nothing but the shift and the apartment. The work and the wait. He spent his off time resting, soaking his feet in hot water to keep the swelling down. It was endless. The room was poorly lit. There were three sockets in the ceiling, but he never replaced the bulbs after they burned out. He was now down to one. Darkness came. The snow kept falling. He sat and waited for the shift to
start.

  #34: He watched a lot of television. He didn’t care what was on, he was picking up information. It was all recon. Every hour that he watched, the more he knew about them, about how they worked—their patterns. The more he knew, the easier it was going to be to take action when it was time. He was on a mission that was classified. Protocol demanded that all details of the operation be kept out of general circulation. This was, after all, a matter of national security.

  At work, all his fellow employees thought that he was crazy, but they liked him because they knew that it wasn’t every day that a top agent used a dish-packing company as a cover. This was fine with him. He used this to work inside without raising his profile. Easier to get into their lives and see how they ticked. The more information, the better.

  Back at the house, he watched the television nonstop. He had the notebook open and took notes furiously. The woman in the shampoo ad would scratch her ear the same way every time. In fact, her movements and speech patterns were so precise that he could swear it was the same ad every time. He made a note to get all possible information on lifelike robots. That was another thing he knew about her—about them all.

  “They lack any kind of style, definitely a cult of personality. It’s easy to see that they are used to lying and getting lied to. In fact, from my estimation, they use lies as their primary means to exchange information. When dealing with them, use lies to befriend them. Employ the truth to confuse and debilitate them … must get more information.”

  Years went by. People at work would ask, “How’s the mission going Larry?” He would tell them that he knew of no such mission, that even if he did have any knowledge of any so-called mission, he wouldn’t be at liberty to disclose the details of such a mission, even if it did exist. The piles of notebooks grew higher.

  He found a new and fantastic place to pick up information: the library. They were always whispering in there. They must be exchanging secret lies. He would go into the library and pretend to look through the books. He even went as far as to get himself a library card. Every once in a while he would take out books to make them think that he was a fan of literature. He usually selected books that he had already read so he would be able to answer questions in case the librarian attempted to spot-quiz him. Keeping all the bases covered is a principle detail in top security work. You have to be sharp and at your best at all times.