Henry Rollins - I Know You

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This is from Henry Rollins' The Boxed Life. The track is called I Know You.

"I know you. You are too short. You have bad skin. You couldn't talk to them very well. Words didn't seem to work. They lied when they came out of your mouth. You tried so hard to understand them. You wanted to be part of what was happening. You saw them having fun, and it seemed like such a mystery--almost magic. It made you think that there was something wrong with you. You'd look in the mirror trying to find it. You thought that you were ugly and that everyone was looking at you. So you learned to be invisible, to look down, to avoid conversation. The hours, days, weekends.

Ahh, the weekend nights alone. Where were you? In the basement? In the attic? In your room? Working some job, just to have something to do, just to have some place to put yourself, just to have a way to get away from THEM. A chance to get away from the ones that made you feel so strange and ill-at-ease inside yourself.

Do you ever get invited to one of their parties? You sat and wondered if you would go or not. For hours you imagined the scenarios that might transpire. They would laugh at you. If you would know what to do. If you would have the right things on. If they would notice that you came from a different planet. Did you get all brave in your thoughts? Like you were going to be able to go in there and deal with it, and have a great time. Did you think that you might be "the life of the party?" That all these people were going to talk to you and you would find out that were wrong. That you had a lot of friends and you weren't so strange after all. Did you end up going? Did they mess with you? Did they single you out? Did you find out that you were invited, because they thought you were so weird?

Yeah, I think I know you.

You spent a lot of time full of hate. A hate that was as pure as sunshine. A hate that saw for miles. A hate that kept you up at night. A hate that filled your every waking moment. A hate that carried you for a long time. Yes, I think I know you. You couldn't figure out what they saw in the way they lived. Home was not home! Your room was home. A corner was home. The place THEY weren't, that was home.

I know you. You're sensitive, and you hide it because you fear getting stepped on one more time. It seems that when you show a part of yourself that is the least bit vulnerable someone takes advantage of you. One of them steps on you. They mistake kindness for weakness, but you know the difference. You've been the brunt of their weakness for years and strength is something you know a bit about because you had to be strong to keep yourself alive.

You know yourself very well now and you don't trust people, you know them too well. You try to find that special person, someone you can be with, someone you can touch, someone you can talk to, someone you won't feel so strange around. And you found that they don't really exist. You feel closer to people on movie screens.

Yeah, I think I know you.

You spend a lot of time day dreaming and people have made comment to that affect telling you that you are self involved and self centered. But they don't know, do they. About the long night shifts alone. About the years of keeping yourself company. All the nights you wrapped your arms around yourself so you could imagine someone holding you. The hours of indecision. Self doubt. The intense depression. The blinding hate. The rage that made you stagger. The devastation of rejection.

Well (sigh), maybe they do know. But if they do they sure do a good job of hiding it. It astounds you how they can be so smooth. How they seem to pass through life, as if life itself was some divine gift. And it infuriates you to watch yourself with your apparent skill in finding every way possible to screw it up.

For you, life is a long trip. Terrifying and wonderful. Birds sing to you at night. The rain and the sun, the changing seasons are true friends. Solitude is a hard-one ally--faithful and patient.

Yeah, I think I know you."

For what it's worth, I read an interview of Rollins years ago, in a mag called MAXIMUMROCKNROLL (1987, between April-Oct, don't remember the exact issue) where Rollins stated that he was diagnosed either ADD or ADHD when he was a kid and subsequently placed on Ritalin.

Although I doubt he's aspie, I guess it goes to show that probably most outsiders perspectives (especially if they try and aren't real ego centered) are a hell of a lot like ours and that its a crock to be thinking AS vs. NT.

Sounds a lot like he had some of the same double edged swords in his life - parents who were too nice who raised him to be too virtuous a person, he had too much of a moral conscience because of it, cared too much about other people, and paid the price for it for a long time just like I did. I guess that may have more to do with it than AS at times...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tc9hWzf8a84

He might not be a clinical Aspie, but he's a brotha of some kind.

Another good tip-off is the flagship song from his first solo album:

Black and White

"
...
all the colors lie
I'm an only man
the lies hurt my mind so I think you understand
color-driven madness was all I used to see

living in the black-and-white
breathing in the black-and-white

being what there is to be
seeing what there is to see
is the only thing left for me
I'm living free

in the black-and-white"

I'm quite familiar with Rollins. I was a fan of Black Flag back in the 80's, I've read a lot of his books (up to a point) and I've actually met him twice. He's a class A a**hole, clearly has some sort of personality disorder going on, an intensely angry man with severe self-esteem issues. He has a long history of social dysfunction and conflict-seeking behavior that's legendary. But autistic? Eh. I am very, very doubtful. If you read his interviews and writings, he seems far more like a borderline personality - people to him are either saints (like Ozzy, James Brown, his murdered friend Joe Cole, even ex-bandmate Greg Ginn who hates Rollins' guts) or they are worthy of nothing but contempt (and that's pretty much everyone else). He's also very narcissistic and ego-centric, being rather obsessed with making himself "better" than people he loathes and "worthy" of the people he idolizes. It's his compulsive need to constantly judge others and compare them to himself that seems to me to exclude him from the autistic spectrum and see him on the personality disorder spectrum. If you've ever seen one of this "spoken word" shows, you can literally see him get a high off of telling people how much he hates or adores such and such people. Emotional detachment has never been one of Rollins' strengths. In fact, he can rage on a emotional grudge against someone for decades, and sometimes for seemingly small, petty things in the course of a social interaction, the kind of things an autistic would likely not even notice.

I can see him being neurologically atypical, but that doesn't mean he has to be autistic. He was treated from being "hyperactive" as a child (he will curtly correct you if you say "ADD" or "ADHD" - he was dx simply as "hyperactive" back then). He has talked very openly about being on Ritalin until high school, when he stopped taking it in favor of lifting weights to cope with his problems. He also comes from a broken home. Plus, his mother was addicted to prescription drugs and physically abused Rollins, and his father was an alcoholic and only marginally involved in Rollins' life. Another thing apparent from his writings is he suffers from PTSD and depression, although he'll become hostile if you ask him about this directly. Clearly, he also struggles with denial.

I think Rollins has experienced a lot in his life that someone with HFA or AS might see as common ground. Rollins is also a pretty intelligent man - he is very curious about things, likes to be an "expert" about things he's intereted in, and has an impressive memory, not unllike someone with. There was a time I thought he probably was autistic, but I think I was looking at things to shallowly. Now that I've followed Rollins over so many years, I think that Rollins is simply a very sick man profoundly damaged by his childhood and by years of a lifestyle and career that has brought him more hostility and conflict.

Curiously enough, I do think his former Black Flag band mate Greg Ginn is autistic, as too Greg's brother, Raymond Pettibon. These two's behavior is more autistic - unlike Rollins who loves to get on stage and talk ad nauseum about how he feels about people, these two are very reclusive and dislike talking about personal things. Rollins will stare you right in the face and remember you 10 years later even after meeting you once (seriously - no exaggeration), whereas Greg is known to avoid eye contact and has trouble remembering people an hour after meeting them. Raymond flat out avoids meeting people, and virtually does not socialize outside a very small circle of family and friends. Greg was notorious for his poor social skills and lack of communication during his Black Flag days, a problem Rollins himself tried to compensate for before giving up. Raymond has gone though periods of being very withdrawn and noncommunicative, not talking to anyone (Rollins records one of these episodes in Get in the Van). Greg has long been obsessed electrics, while Raymond has been obsessed with art, especially drawings and cartoons, some of which ended up on Black Flag and other bands' albums. Both Greg and Raymond's respective careers have been stymied by their poor abilities in navigating the tricky, ever-changing music business. Rollins, on the other hand, did pretty well moving with the changes until people simply got sick of him. And he's still managing to get people to give him a gig now and there. So Greg and Raymond - yeah, autistic. Rollins, nah.

i have the highest respects for sir rollins, he really made a name for himself by just being well real and not giving a F%#@ about what anyone else who disagreed with him thought! all of his spoken word performances are great, and his books are worth their weight in gold. but to say he is autistic, maybe, but to the smallest degree. i think what made him the way he is today was the combination of society and how he was brought up, not something genetic.