ROCKIN' ROLLINS

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His arms folded like a nightclub bouncer's, his eyes staring through you like twin barrels of dark matter, Henry Rollins looks as implacable as a hewn-rock statue graffitipainted with tattoos a solid hunk of muscle rooted to one spot, one role. But since squeezing a hand mike in a death grip as the lead singer of the West Coast punk band Black Flag, Rollins has revealed the versatile range of a Renaissance dharma bum; he has been an author, a spoken-word poet, a book publisher, a cable talk-show host, a blogger (at Vanity Fair's Web site), a newspaper columnist, a radio D.J., a film actor (shoved through a sliding glass door in Heat), a TV actor (dying nobly in a toilet stall in Sons of Anarchy), and even a sitcom guest star when we spoke, he had just shot an episode of Paul Reiser's upcoming NBC series.

"I show up for almost anything thrown at me," Rollins says, his receptivity and work ethic keeping him on the restless move, avoiding rust and stagnation. Between rent-paying stints, he's a solitary traveler (you can always tell Americans overseas, he says they clump together, forming a slowmoving huddle), his backpack stuffed with camera, laptop, peanut butter, and protein bars. His lone-wolf status enables him to explore the world along the fringes "That's where you get revelations, epiphanies." Having turned 50 this February (which in punk years makes him a sequoia), Rollins will be performing at birthday bashes in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles, and creeping out ophidiophobes in a National Geographic Wild special on snakes and the freaks who dig 'em. Which should not be interpreted as a "value judgment" as the gospel of Henry teaches, we are all freaks, in our own freaky way.

JAMES WOLCOTT