Henry Rollins: Regarding Henry

In any case, when they got home, Cole and Rollins had the misfortune of walking in on a robbery in progress. Guns were pressed to their heads and the two of them were told to lay flat with their faces flush against the floor. While Rollins followed orders, his buddy got into an altercation with one of the robbers and wound up with two bullets in his head. "For $40 they killed Joe and basically ruined my life," says Rollins, who keeps a jar of Cole's blood and the dirt on which it spilled inside a closet, "I'm a completely different person now than I was then. Try cleaning your best friend's brains off the sidewalk so his mother won't see them. It would have an effect on you, too."

I make the mistake of asking Rollins if he has ever used the emotions from that incident to inform a character in a movie. He stares at me, then flatly says, "Put it this way. If they ever need a guy to be horribly sad, it by a print of his own pencil sketch. Strangest of all is a spiraling, abstract drawing signed by Charles Manson with a message that thanks Rollins for his music and concludes, I've really been tripping out on you guys lately.

"He sent me this years ago," Rollins says, shrugging off a rumor that he and Manson actually maintained a lively correspondence. "He saw me on MTV."

I suggest to Rollins that we take a tour through the rest of his digs, "This isn't really a home," he says in a tone that sounds more matter-of-fact than apologetic. "People are walking in and out of the place all the time. And I'm never here. I am usually on the road." Rollins then explains that the house is soundproofed ("I like to really let loose with the stereo system") and wired like a bank safe against break-ins. The latter, he says, is to satisfy an insurance company, though I imagine that his security consciousness stems from an incident that look place in 1991 and seems to have left Rollins with his bottomless pool of rage. Back then he was sharing a place in Venice with his best friend, the will not be a stretch for me."

After a few minutes of small talk, Rollins reluctantly agrees to take me upstairs. On the second floor, past a shin-high rack of videocassettes, arranged alphabetically from the punk band Birthday Party to the radical documentary Weathermen '69, Rollins hangs a left and stops in front of an open door. "This is my room," he says, ushering me into a tidy, dark space that is probably smaller than Stallone's utility closet. On the floor is an unmade futon. Behind it, where a bed's headboard would ordinarily go, rests a blue plastic milk crate. Papers and a few files are stacked inside and its top supports a mini boom box. Fish-patterned fabric hangs over the window. The whole setup reminds me of how I lived during an especially lean semester at a New Jersey state college in 1981.

"This is a spartan existence," I comment.

"What else do you need?" Rollins snaps back.

Then he leads me into the next room, where there is a 27-inch television/VCR/laser disc combo propped across from an IKEA-looking couch and a pair of chest-high book cases. "This is where I've thrown all my books and files and documentation. There's a lot of Henry Miller, a lot of signed first editions, a lot of Céline, Knut Hamsun." He stops to check out a wooden box that is about as big as a crab trap and stuffed end to end with compact discs. "Those are all the CDs I've either played on or released. I'm kinda proud of that, though I look at them and say. 'All right, I did it. Now I gotta go.' I'm a workaholic, man. I'd like to spend more time here, see some videos and stuff, sit out on the balcony and read. But I'm usually too high-strung to stay put and watch something for more than 20 minutes.

"I don't have anything else but work,'' Rollins continues. "I have no hobbies, no wife, no children, no drug habit to maintain. Nothing is in my way. I'm very simple," He gestures expansively with his arms, as if trying to bear hug the oxygen around him. "I'm used to living in a backpack for months out of the year. All my life, ever since I was a kid living with my mother in apartments, I never had a room this big. Right now, for me, this is wild. I've never had my books on shelves. They've always been in boxes because I never had any dough or anything."

For some reason, Rollins's lack of domesticity leads me to wonder about his sexuality. Is he into women or men or what? "I get hit on by so many guys," he says. "But that's been going on since I was 14, so it's no big deal. In fact, I see it as a compliment. If I was a gay guy, and I saw someone who was muscular, tattooed, intense, in a band-well, I'd be all over it."

"Henry, do you have a girlfriend?"

"Nah," he says, shaking his head. "Besides lacking the guts to talk to women. I'm too picky. Too many things turn me off. If they drink, I'm bored: if they smoke, I'm bored; if they're boring, I'm bored. If you're a little unambitious, if you don't work out. I'm outta there." He slips into an imitation of a whiny woman: "'I'm slightly overweight. I'm thinking of working out.' Don't tell me that shit! Don't admit it! As a result of my pickiness, I end up with these really intense überbabes."

Is that good? Rollins makes a face that reads not so good. "I just do the single guy thing. I spend most of my time alone. The gratuitous sex thing. I got over that by the time I was 25. It was cool in my early 20s, when I was in Black Flag and being offered everything and everybody you can imagine, but if you're 33 and doing that, well, you should really get a life."

The tour of Rollins's crib ends downstairs, in the best room of the house. It is dominated by a massive weight-lifting cage and racks of weights. Regular workouts here--he began lifting at the age of 14. at the behest of a teacher--provide Rollins with the bulk that makes him famous. "My best bench press is 285, 290," he says, surveying the equipment with obvious pride. "Usually I go at it very hard, very studiously. But I haven't had time to do the workouts I want, so it leaves me handicapped. And when I'm not given the chance to work out the way I like to, I feel really...furious."

Gazing at the machine the way other men might look upon a loved one's bed, Rollins tells me that lifting weights means more to him than simply keeping fit. "It is a total metaphor for life. If you hit it hard, it gives back to you. You give it 100 percent and you're built like a brick shithouse; you cheat and you break your back. Three hundred pounds does not care if it crushes your head or if you put it back on the hooks. I don't think you get a better deal in life. Women leave you, money gels stolen, 300 pounds just sits on that bar, saying, 'Lift me or don't.'"

Checking his watch, Rollins announces that he has a plane to catch in a couple of hours. He'll be heading to New York to shoot a video and he wants to know if I would mind if he sorted some freshly laundered clothing to take on the trip. We make our way through the kitchen to a washer and dryer from which he extracts a tangle of black-and-white workout togs. Telling me that this is all he ever wears, he spreads the stuff out on the floor of his office, and folds and packs it with a meticulous sense of order.

I ask Rollins about the legacy he wants to leave behind. Is the movie work Rollins's attempt to find a kind of immortality that does not come from balls-to-the-wall rock'n'roll? "Nah. "he says resolutely. "There'll be no lega¬cy. No funeral, no casket. Cremate the body and sweep it into the refuse. When I'm dying I'll start giving everything away. My personal copy of my first album will go to a fan. I'll give my publishing royalties to my manager's kid as a college fund. I'll give my computers away to students--after erasing ail the disks so that there's not some disgusting collector's thing posthumously published. That'd be great, to just leave the earth with nothing."

The sentiment sounds surprisingly cleansing as Rollins loads the last of his T-shirts into the duffle bag and zips the bag shut. He smiles for the first lime all day and dreamily concludes, "Lying on my death bed in an otherwise empty house would be the ultimate coup."

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Michael Kaplan interviewed Stephen Baldwin for the September 1994 Movieline.

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