Hillery Occasionally

Every relationship, real or imagined, develops from one kind of thing into another—but they all start with a spark.  You notice something about your other that compels you not to look away, not for a second.  I noticed Henry Rollins the first time I ever saw him, in Punk: Attitude, a rock-doc from Don Lets on a generation of music that at the time was completely unknown to me.  The film was solid, but my second (consecutive) viewing was solely to the purpose of confirming my first impression of this man—yes, I could listen to him talk endlessly and about anything and everything he might judge worthy of discussion.

I was in luck.  As a latecomer to his fandom, there were already hundreds of minutes of spoken word at my disposal.  I had a vocal record of Henry from his mid-twenties right up through the present, his early forties.  And thanks to the blizzard that paralyzed traffic in New York City that winter, I had nothing much else to do.  I used my new AirTunes gadget to stream everything I could download through my stereo—from bootlegs of early live shows to Eric the Pilot (parts one through six).  I listened to everything Henry had to say.  And with this influx of material—in lieu of any real interaction—I moved from one stage to another.

Infatuation is a willful state.  You hold on to your vision of the other through that lens of initial attraction.  While you may allow further appealing character traits into focus, you are quick to ignore or rationalize observations that don’t jibe with who or what you want to see.  You do not wish to pull back for a clearer look at the actual person or, in the event that such a one is wholly unknown to you, a look into that vast chasm of everything you do not know.  Being infatuated is the act of the lover and often has little to do with the loved.  Thus I am honest in saying that I was totally infatuated with Henry.  I didn’t need to know him in order to objectify him—it was probably more convenient that I didn’t.  He had no opportunity to mar my picture of the man I found it convenient for him to be.

And what did I latch onto in the first place, you might wonder.  What got me so excited about Henry?  He talks hard.  He’s an autodidact with a phenomenal vocabulary and not only does he know how to tell a story, he’s got a seemingly bottomless cache to draw from.  He’s aged exceptionally well.  Being Straight Edge, he hasn’t smoked, drunk, or drugged his looks away.  In fact, he’s easier on the eyes at forty-something than he was in his twenties.  When he talks about women, though it’s clear we represent to him an uneasy balance in the crosshairs of perturbation and desire, he never underestimates our sex.  “There is nothing more intense—in the world—than a female anything.”  Interpret that as you like, but remember it comes from Mr. Intensity himself.

That was the spark.  Any Psych 101 student will tell you that this is simply projection.  Like seeks like and people look for signs of themselves in others.  Language is my instrument.  Even more, I fancy myself a raconteur.  I would like to deny it, but all facts point to decided vanity on my part.  I desire the good company of men without pretending to completely understand them or their drives.  These facts about me mesh neatly with what first drew me to Henry.  And, in the world, I accept this explanation for the expedient tunnel vision that facilitates one person bonding to the idea of another…to an extent.  But when it comes to the fantasy future ex game the delusion runs deeper and, I think, it can be more revealing than mere projection.

My infatuation with Henry was drawn out over three decades of monologues.  In the recordings made in his twenties (The Boxed Life, Big Ugly Mouth, and Sweatbox) we got a fairly coarse Henry.  He was angry.  He hated U2, Edie Brickell, and all cops with a passion that overpowered any potential pause for explanation.  Except for the opportunity to make himself, or men in general, the butt of the joke, he was painfully uncomfortable on the subject of women.  Masturbatory technique was covered at length.  While you sigh and say to yourself, “Who hasn’t heard this before?” I answer that Henry does it better and I raise you the little flashes of brilliance interspersed throughout: TV ads for condoms, the Charles Bukowski postage stamp, and method-acting what he thought he was like the last time he’d gotten a full night’s sleep in order to carry on a coherent conversation with a suit from his record label.

In his thirties (Think Tank, A Rollins in the Wry, and Live at the Westbeth Theater) Henry mellowed…a bit.  This is when his role as Boy Scout came to the fore.  He didn’t want to pick a fight exactly, but there was some seriously asinine shit going down all around and he just had to point it out.  From mutant-monitoring at the Rite Aid to pining for literacy to the point that he advises teaching Clintonese in public schools…from learning secondhand that he was supposedly on the verge of coming out to Kennedy on MTV to knocking himself out cold on stage in front of thousands of people with his own microphone…from forcing himself to accept the entirely emasculating ritual of shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond to the similarly dire stakes of dating women, now that he’s a man, rather than girls.  What can I possibly say?  The one where he harasses his doctor, who also happens to tend to the throat of Michael Bolton, via facsimile from all corners of the world had me in tears I was laughing so hard.  It’s replaced Dennis Miller’s The Off White Album as my social litmus test.

In his forties, before he started his show on IFC, his spoken word material (Nights Behind the Treeline, Talk is Cheap I-IV, and the Shock and Awe tour) just about doubled.  He was talking all the time and in the era of W and the war his mellow side took a back seat.  The asinine shit was going to swallow us and Henry was our self-appointed defender, cultivating a rage in us to match his own and hopefully catapult us out of our comfortably entrenched American apathy.  This included downloading a transcript of a state of the union address from the Washington Post to better mock our president…to take it to a literal level.  You want a recipe for getting my panties twisted—that’s it.  On top of that, Henry’s wistful longing for the materialization in LA of women he could relate to was akin to my own practice of waiting, earnestly, for the perfect man to show up on my doorstep.  There’s an added allure in the idea of a man with so much appeal not being able to make a long-term connection.  I think it’s because, until we do, who of us doesn’t feel like the most extraordinary overlooked soul there ever was.  If Henry could fuck up the whole intimacy thing and still be cool, I was in no danger.  Even if I was infatuated with a man I’d never meet.

Most people, when they date real people, get to a point where they realize they’ve got to fish or cut bait. They wade through posturing and psychological gambits to see if the more they know about this mysterious other actually suits them.  In the fantasy future ex game you either meet a real guy, catch Jemaine Clement on TV one day, or for some other reason your crush fizzles out.  My love for Henry was starved to death when my consumption of his persona outpaced his ability to provide me with new material.  He had his radio show, his touring, a reprint that deserved a new edition, a small part in a film, and he was prepping his IFC show.  There simply wasn’t time to flirt with the world at large for a while.  Too bad for me.  Or maybe not.  With a little distance working to my advantage, I see now what I didn’t see then about Henry…and what I was really seeing in him.