BW: I've been reading much of your work lately, and there are the constant themes of...

Rollins: Death, angst, depression.

Alienation.

Well yea, there's that one too. They run together.

Alienation and discipline as a means of pushing away the things that can get in the way of ones goals in life.

For me, I've always felt very alienated from the public at large, not out of any feeling of superiority, but more out of disappointment or fear, not wanting to go that way. So I use alienation and discipline as tools to focus myself, to do what I wanted to do. If you are not in the main stream and involved in all the rituals and rights of passage that all these people are, you avoid a lot of the pitfalls that they do, and you get a few more interesting pitfalls.

How does this relate to discipline?

I've always been very disciplined. I've been very ambitious-to get things out, to do a lot, and work very hard. For someone like me there are always lots of things in the way. So to get a record out was very hard, there was never enough money. If you weren't disciplined and very sturdy, you weren't going to accomplish the tasks, because you were playing outside of the mainstream. The road is rough, and the rougher the road, the more you have to get up in the morning with a lot of backbone and just apply yourself, because no one was exactly glad that I was around.

So discipline is almost a mode of being that allows one to keep goals. But in another sense it allows us to come to our true self, for the lack of a better term, and avoid self-deception.

Self deception is very easy, it's very easy to lead your self due to your ego or lack of it. Your dreams cloud your limitations, which is sometimes a good thing.

Dreams cloud limitations?

Sure, you think you can do way more than you really can and you end up very disillusioned when you discover it was only your ego tripping that didn't allow you to see the ceiling. Sometimes it's good to bump your head on the ceiling. Maybe it was Goethe that said when someone works inside his limitations, the master reveals himself. If you know where you're at, and where you can go, you can do a lot. I know sometimes I've shot too high. I was very angry at the results, but my anger was not all that logical. It was almost mechanical; what did you expect to happen? If you want two and two to equal six, your always going to be pissed off.

When you recently appeared on the Greg Kinnear Show you talked about the big wrongs in life. One of them was racism. Could you elaborate on that?

The idea of right and wrong is very subjective. What's right for you is wrong for someone else and vice versa. For some people homosexuality is wrong-like really wrong. They have an opinion that you shouldn't do that. You know, Come on, shape up, eat right, get it together, get in line. But for some other person that's the only thing they know. Right and wrong is a pretty up in the air concept. But I think there are a few things that are flat out wrong. Like racial intolerance. There's no argument you could make with me that you're going to win, you'll never change my mind on that. Racism or homophobia, I don't care what your religion is, or what you've seen, or what was done to you. I was discriminated against all my life growing up in Washington D.C., I heard `you chicken shit white mother fucker' and all kinds of shit for years! Never once did I ever buy into any of that. Any kind of homophobic thing is hilarious. It's so ignorant that anyone would have an opinion about who puts what where. Get a life you know? It goes beyond a moral judgment. I've never been racist or homophobic, I've never cared, about skin color or sexual orientation. It's all cool for somebody. If it offends you, either expand your mind or move over a seat. But don't complain, don't try and change things. Like ethnic cleansing. This blows me away, these guys in Bosnia. These are adults, can you believe that an adult would do this? It's so disappointing. Wow! How can you still be thinking like that?

It's a funny thing that we have all this Holocaust awareness around us, when there are things like that going on, and we're not pointing to the current events.

Schindler's List, to me, was a nice piece of cinematography, but that was it. Spielberg, you didn't kill Adolf Hitler, you weren't there. Instead of dealing with the problems that are spitting in our faces right now, let's go beat up Hitler again. Boy we sure know he's bad, so that's easy. It's a like no brainer. I'd much rather see something way more contemporary, that some young person could see or old person, any person could see it and go outside and say wow, that's talking about right here right now, we've got to change this.

What about movies, you've been in three?

Yea, I've been in a few. The movie thing isn't really a high priority to me. I try and do a movie a year if I have time. I just finished a film a few weeks ago with David Lynch. It's called Lost Highway, I had about a weeks work in it. It was fun. David was the coolest. I did a lot of my scenes with Bill Pullman, who is a fine actor.

In your last movie, Heat, you were beaten up by Al Pacino and then thrown through a sliding glass door. How was that?

They wouldn't let me do it. I said, `Come on, Coach. Let me go.' But he said `you don't know how to do it and you're not insured.' I said, `I won't sue you.' He said, `You could loose an ear if you go through wrong.' It was real glass. So the stunt man went through, and he even had to get stitches. I got to lie in a pool of glass. Unfortunately the take they used with Pacino was the light weight one. The four other takes before, he was slapping the spit out of my mouth, whacking me around, calling me every name in the book, it was a little to strong. That's why they used the last one, that was the one where he went steaming by the director to grab me and Michael Mann said, `Don't hit him this time.' Because he was just whacking the shit out of me all the other times, I think I was getting this look on my face like `You hit me one more time I'm gonna smack you back.' But he was really cool to me, Pacino. It was a great experience to be a total non-actor, totally scamming in the movies. Looking up and having Tony Montana [Pacino's character in Scarface] spitting in your face. He was really cool. You always hope those guys will be cool because you dig them so much. Its a drag to meet someone you respect or whose records you have and they're dicks.

How about De Niro?

I wasn't even on the set with him. The way the movie is scripted you're on his side or the other guys side. I was in the third party, the very confusing subtext. That was my part, which made the movie a little too long and a little too confusing. In fact, they could have edited out every part I was in, and it would have been a better film.

You do your thing, students go through years of college and who knows if there will be a job once they get out. What do you think of the whole college experience?

I did a semester. After using my ninth grade math book for the math class, and being in English class with people who couldn't read all the way, I realized I was not going to spend four years in this place. I was hungry for the world. I really wanted to go out and get an apartment, and do that thing. Get out there and get into it, because my high school was a very restrictive, very oppressive military school. I went to Naval Prep school. Uniforms, sit down, shut up, all boys, seven years of it. I got a great education and learned a lot about discipline, and I never wanted to go back to a classroom again. So I went to a semester of college, more out of fear of the real world than anything else. Oh, I better go to college. OK, so I went. Nope, I'm not doing this. I didn't even show up to some of the finals or to get my grades. It took me years to pay back the student loan. I'm very much in favor of an education, I think dumb people are a drag. I would encourage any student while they're at college, burning all those bucks, to really get an education and strive to learn outside of the normal school curriculum. Showing up to class isn't a great lesson in the ways of the world. The first thing I would do when I got out of college would be to move to the biggest, noisiest, most dangerous city I could, spend a year there and learn how streets work, how commerce works, how retail works. About crime violence in an urban setting, to get a taste of the country you're living in because, you're what late teens early twenties? By the time you're my age this country is going to be a pretty intense place, because the resources are running lower. It's not getting better it's getting worse. That's why I stress and always say fuck drugs, fuck alcohol, fuck smoking, it's all poison. You're basically playing into the hands of the people who want to incarcerate you, make you stupid, make you mediocre, and have you sit down, shut up, and toe the line. It's a very right-wing thing to do. Keep people neutralized, full of fear. Because when they're full of fear, they're conservative. Like any population, when you fill them full of fear they will go to the right every time. So in your time here, do all the classes but make it four years where your going to learn a lot of things. Read some cool philosophy. Read some of the great Germans, the great Russians. And learn about learning. That's what I would do. Having gone out in an extremely brutal way to make your dinner, which is what I've done for the last fifteen sixteen years, I went into the world with not a classic education, some job skills. I went for the art shot instead of the conventional shot. So I did a lot of years of starving and shoplifting, and living in abandoned vehicles and abandoned houses, and really living by my wits. Like a lot of my friends and a lot of people do. That was more an education than anything I learned in high school. I don't remember any Spanish, Mediterranean History, or much of the grammar I learned. I know how to see a problem happening on the street before it does, and I think I know when someone's ripping me off. I know how to make money. I know how to keep it. I am in favor of education and not squandering the time. That's what I see a lot of students do. I meet so many students, and so many of them are so boring and so dull and almost listless. It's like, what are you doing? You'll see when you get older you will not have the energy level you have right now. You can stay up all night and go to school the next day, and it sucks, but you can do it. It will wreck you at my age. I'm not trying to say that I'm eighty or something. You really need to take advantage of the age twenty-two to thirty to establish yourself in whatever it is you think you're going to do. A lot of people get scared, they keep looking at the person ahead of them in line to figure it out for them. Or they get into this real traditional thing; I'll get this education and that job will be waiting for me. Will it? I don't know? A lot of people don't confront their fears early enough in life, they're acting eighteen and pushing forty, and still in that infantile thing. Still calling their moms, so very tied in, and probably in debt and in all kinds of financial distress. They didn't cut enough of the shit loose early enough and get really busy on figuring out how to survive. Just not growing up. I learned to grow up the hard way and I'm still learning. Growing up in the public eye. Any mistake I made usually got a write up in the newspaper. I learned out loud. A lot of people don't get it. They don't learn kindness, tolerance, real strength, and the value of honesty. And I'm not some Christian morals guy, this is basic stuff. I have met so many cheap shit people who are older than me. Wow. How did you get through? By screwing people. You can go a long way by screwing the guy above you, next to you-you really can. And that's the difference between ambition and resolve. If you read the Tao Teh Ching, they talk about how resolve is better than ambition. In ambition, it's just me, me, me. Resolve is not quitting. That, to me, is the most incredible thought. I'm not going to quit, knock me down, whatever. I'm getting back up, going back up there tomorrow. If a storm comes, it knocks me back a few. And that's what's gotten me through. I've built a few companies, I used to live on a dirt floor with a carpet. I started a book company, and it turned into a record and video company just by resolve. I don't do any of the stuff to make money, I do it to get art out. That's my project. Get books and CD's and videos out to people so they can dig it.

You've gotten away from that labeling of being a poet or even a writer.

Because I'm not good at any of it. But I'm giving it the best shot I can. I show up to work on time and I'll give you everything I've got. Whether I'm good or not? Ahh, I don't know. That's why I've never been really interested in the titles, because all my heroes were people who never had much regard for convention. A guy like Man Ray a tremendous artist, if you want to call him that. He took photos, he sculpted, he painted, he drew, he wrote. It was all cool. His whole thing was about not putting walls up. He wasn't just going to paint. If there was a way to express himself he was going to do it, that's why Man Ray was such an inspiration to me. A woman like Frida Kahlo, the great Mexican painter. She started her career and promptly got into a car wreck, and destroyed her body. And she turned out this incredible body of work. For the rest of her life in great pain she worked. These are the people who inspire me. It's the resolve thing. I've always wanted to get up on stage during a talking thing and be able to say one thing that would be of good advice. Because advice is something you have to hand out really carefully, because all of a sudden your put in the position of: Oh yeah, I think I know something. Which can be dangerous. You can get humiliated and have your shit torn up. The one thing I figured that was the one good thing I could say to all these people was confront your fears early on, vanquish them because their so full of air, nothing but paper tigers. Strengthen your resolve rather than strengthen your ambition. With your self-centered-ness, there ain't room for it any more, there is simply not room for it. The resources aren't there. Your grandparents, my grandparents, they had more room for ambition. Way more frontier, cleaner air, more water, and not so many people in all these cities.

A portion of this interview appeared in the NM Daily Lobo