Copyright © 2015 by D. Randall Blythe
All photographs and journal entries by D. Randall Blythe.
Illustration on page 174 courtesy of Ganbold.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.
Set in 11 point Giovanni
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-306-82315-2 (e-book)
First Da Capo Press edition 2015
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This book is dedicated to anyone who tries to do the right thing. There are those who talk a lot of talk, and then there are those who walk the walk. To the ones who still put in the hard yards, even when it’s scary: I salute you.
This is also for anyone struggling with alcohol or drug addiction. There is a better way, trust me—you don’t have to live that way anymore if you don’t want to.
Contents
part 1
PRAGUE
part 2
PANKRÁC
part 3
THE TRIAL
EPILOGUE
acknowledgements
part 1
PRAGUE
chapter one
Until the handcuffs snapped around my wrists, I still thought I might be dreaming. Ratchet-arm teeth clicking into a receiving pawl make a very distinct sound. Like a pump-action twelve gauge being racked outside your back door, or a tree limb cracking beneath your weight, it is a sound that swiftly wakes you up to the reality of your situation. It is a sound that says:
You’re screwed.
This was not the first time I’d heard that particular noise, but it was the first time in my forty-one years that I had ever been truly scared by it. The rest were mere speed bumps on the way to my next drink. Laughing with a bunch of filthy punk rockers as we were hauled out of a squat into the rainy San Francisco night, a fine spray of mace shutting us up as it filled the back of the paddy wagon on the way to the station. Dropping my scooter in front of a police station then slurring insults at an officer as he cuffed me three blocks from my house, my jacket full of punctured cans spraying cheap lager like a human beer fountain. Good-natured ribbing with a cop as he waited for my girlfriend to return with a carton of Marlboros before taking me off to Richmond City Jail after failing to do sixty-five community service hours for taking a leak in an alley.
A night or two in jail, then back to the bar with a colorful story to tell and a little more street cred to hang on my spiked leather jacket. Another load of 100 percent pure uncut punk rock John Wayne horseshit.
Taking three boxes of over-the-counter sleeping pills and drinking a bottle of cheap wedding champagne in an ill-informed attempt to kill myself after the girlfriend had left me for another man yet again. Waking up insanely wasted because I didn’t know over-the-counter pills won’t do the trick, then stacking all the furniture in the house on the stove and catching the house on fire. Laughing maniacally and swinging from a tree in the back yard like a clumsy chimp as the house billowed smoke and the police and fire department arrived. Spitting in the cop’s face and calling him a pig as he slams me onto the brick sidewalk and starts in on me with the stick before my neighbor runs out and stops him. Laughing and laughing and laughing on the way to the mental ward to have my stomach pumped because I knew the joke was on him—he couldn’t hurt a dead man.
Laughter and hate and pure joy when your booze-and-drug-addled brain is convinced you are finally leaving this terrible life. Free at last, free at last; no more of this bullshit world with its bullshit people who make you drink so much. Click, click, click. Off you go to the cell or the loony bin, but you are too wasted to care. Sometimes it’s really funny. Sometimes it’s a relief.
This time was very, very different than those others. This was scary. I was almost two years sober, far from depressed, and I certainly wasn’t laughing or even cursing. Cussing out the officer cuffing me would have been futile. He didn’t speak English. I wasn’t even on my home continent.
Our plane had touched down at Prague Ruzyne International Airport about five minutes before the cuffs encircled my wrists, and I was positively ebullient. It was the rare time when my band and crew did not pile into the tour bus for yet another long, cramped drive—instead we had flown to the Czech Republic from Norway. This meant we had what was left of the day to roam Prague, a rare luxury I planned on making the most of. Touring bands grinding out the European summer festival circuit don’t see much except for one muddy backstage parking lot after the other. The rest of the time is spent driving from one country to the next, making mostly futile mental notes to come back one day and actually visit some of the beautiful countryside that’s glimpsed through the dust-coated windows of a rented night liner as it ferries you to the next show. Being a tourist doesn’t pay too well, but you can make decent scratch driving through all that gorgeous scenery if there’s a 40,000-person gig at the end of the day’s road. European travel for most professional bands isn’t full of sight seeing, it’s full of actual travel. Overnight drives, gigs during the day, and on “days off,” really long drives. There are worse ways to make a living though, and every now and then, like this particular day, you luck out and get to actually explore a bit.
As is the custom on the continent, before the plane had even come to a complete stop overhead bins were opened and people were grabbing their bags. Passengers poured over each other and into the aisles to begin the rugby-like skirmish that is European plane deboarding. No matter how many times I fly in Europe, this ridiculous display of self-important savagery never fails to piss me off, and often my bandmates, crew members, and myself will bring the stampeding herd to a complete and extremely aggravated stop. Ignoring what is undoubtedly furious, unintelligible cursing from the people behind us, one or more of us will strike a linebacker’s pose, blocking the aisle while we politely defer to the elderly people, children, pregnant women, and anyone else who wishes to get off the plane unmolested and needs help with their baggage. Call me provincial, an uncultured American, or even a redneck, but Southern manners were a big part of my upbringing.
But today, June 27, 2012, I didn’t care. Let them pummel each other to death in their senseless rush for the door. The long tour was just four days from being over, and a real day off awaited. As I gathered my things, I took the opportunity to snap a photo of our monitor tech, Brian, asleep across the aisle from me with his mouth wide open. I put my camera away and entered the fray. When an overweight balding Italian man nearly knocked me over in his charge down the aisle for the door, I just laughed. Ciao, bello! It was going to take a lot more than briefly being a pin for a human bowling ball to ruin my mood.
Dark history beckoned to me from just a few kilometers away in Prague, and I looked forward to seeing it with relish.
Nothing fascinates me more than visiting sites where tragedies, biblical in their scope, unfolded, and I was excited to continue on with the Nazi Death Trip that had held me in its iron grip as this tour’s theme,
starting with a solo photography expedition to Auschwitz One and Birkenau a few weeks earlier. As I walked alone through the sodden killing grounds, a small knot of Hasidic Jews, who stared silently at the ruins of the crematoriums, trailed me. In the darkened bathroom corral, I heard them mutter in Hebrew as they gazed at the remnants of the communal toilet, a long and rough concrete plank with holes punched in it at one-foot intervals for defecation. I turned and took a picture of them walking beneath the infamous wrought iron gate that reads Arbeit Mach Frei, entering Auschwitz One of their own volition as raindrops dripped from their wide brimmed hats onto their beards, their heads craned skyward to see the words that spelled doom for so many. The sky wept with the Jews that day, and it had been a cold, wet, and emotionally exhausting journey. But my great uncle had died in a snowy French forest fighting the men that had built this place, and I wanted to feel why the blood that runs through my veins had been spilled in the Ardennes.
During the German occupation of Prague, the river Vltava had literally run red. Snaking through the city, the Vltava was stained crimson with the blood of Czechoslovaks as the haughty Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Butcher of Prague, the main architect of the Final Solution, brutally annihilated the Czech resistance during the Reich’s reign of terror. Heydrich’s well-known hubris was his undoing, for he hadn’t completely crushed the Czechs’ will, and died at the hands of two young Czechoslovakian paratroopers trained as assassins by the British. But the Butcher had lived up to his namesake before fragments from a grenade had poisoned his mad blood.
I wanted to wander Prague’s dark and winding streets after the sun had set, listening for the echoes of jackboots on the Charles Bridge, the screams of Sieg Heil in Old Town Square, and perhaps even a whisper of resistance on the wind, the sharp ghost reports from a contraband revolver as a long dead fiery young Hasid took a few pot shots at Nazi stormtroopers clearing the Jewish Quarter. As the Jews were being shipped off to Terezin internment camp to await eventual extermination, Hitler was said to have ordered the Jewish ghetto left intact, planning for it to be a future “Museum of an Extinct Race.” Prague was a treasure trove of tragedy indeed.
Some people avoid these places, the Auschwitz’s and Choeung Ek’s and Wounded Knee’s of the world, saying they do not wish to think of such things. I am drawn to them, not as some morbid casualty vampire, but to bear witness with a respectful curiosity. I feel a deep need to listen to the remnants of history’s saddest songs, to keep their mournful melody alive on my lips and in my heart. My psyche craves the lessons humanity’s blood-rusted fissures have to carve into my soul, and maybe, just maybe, if I soak up enough of them, one day I will begin to make sense of today’s ongoing global hostilities.
So it was with a cheerful eye towards catastrophe that I finally stumbled off the plane, hauling my camera gear and dragging behind my rolling laptop case that bulged with my requisite ridiculously excessive amount of books. About midway up the glass-and-steel exit ramp, a blond woman with some sort of badge on her blue uniform asked to see my passport, inspected it carefully, and motioned me onwards. Normally any sort of passport check occurs at customs, located within the confines of an airport building itself, not on a moveable jet bridge. I didn’t pay too much attention to this mildly curious event, figuring it for some sort of random check.
I beelined towards the jetway’s exit doors, eager to get through customs and out of the airport for a cigarette. Arriving at the top of the jetway, a nervous-looking man in uniform gestured me towards a small glass enclosed room. I saw all the other passengers walking in the opposite direction and out into the concourse. Perhaps they were all EU citizens and went a different way than us Americans. I shrugged and walked into the room, seeing my bass player, John, already inside and looking pretty freaked out. The blond woman who had inspected my passport reappeared beside me and asked for my passport again, keeping it this time. John looked even more worried.
John is always happy to research the worst aspects of any given country we are traveling to, and then inform us that in all probability we will be kidnapped by drug cartels for ransom money or decapitated by fundamentalist religious nuts soon after landing in said country. But perhaps this time he had a right to be a tad bit nervous. In the room with us were three heavily muscled plainclothes officers with badges slung around thick necks holding up their severe Eastern Bloc–style haircuts. Behind them were five even larger, very heavily armed men decked out in SWAT-style tactical gear: Black combat fatigues. Body armor. Loaded submachine guns. Pistols and large, pointy knives that obviously weren’t designed for the dinner table strapped to their waists and legs. They had black ski masks pulled over their heads, only cold eyes and pursed lips visible through holes in the fabric.
They appeared to be on some sort of mission to apprehend and execute a highly sought after international terrorist right on the spot.
I saw this fierce display of force, laughed out loud, and began to sing the beginning verse of “Celebration” by the almighty Kool and the Gang. There’s a party going on right here . . .
I didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it was I knew it couldn’t have anything to do with me or my band. Who the hell would send an anti-terrorism squad loaded for bear after five smelly rock-n-roll long hairs from a small Virginia city?
“No, there is definitely no party here,” John said. “This is something serious.”
The tone of his voice wiped the grin right off my face. My mind cranked into overdrive, old behaviors from my drinking days immediately rising to the surface as I furiously searched for someone to blame for this delay. Which idiotic band or crew member had some illegal “dry goods” in their luggage? For once, I knew it wasn’t me—my days of smuggling drugs over international borders had long been over. Maybe someone had stupidly accepted something bad in the guise of a gift in the Norwegian airport, something you never do in any airport. Or perhaps our manager or the promoter of the next day’s show hadn’t remembered to fill out some form and our work visas were not in order. Yes, that was probably it—thanks to someone’s foolish oversight, we were going to be denied entry into the Czech Republic. The guns and masks seemed a bit heavy handed, but maybe they took deportation seriously in the former Eastern Bloc. My anger intensified thinking about the hole I was going to chew in whoever’s ass had screwed this up so badly, costing us time, money, a show, and a day off.
I suddenly realized I was letting that cunning old anger monkey back into my mind, the one I fed with booze for so long until he shrieked so hard it nearly tore my head off and killed me. I calmed myself and began to look on the bright side. Oh, well. Norway was a great place for a night off, and the flight back to Scandinavia was fairly short. I began to wonder if Hitler had ever visited Oslo.
Within two minutes of deboarding, my entire band and crew had joined John and me in the room with the cops. As we stood there asking each other what was going on, the woman who held my passport walked up to me and in heavily accented English said my name.
“David Blight?” (No one ever says my last name, Blythe, correctly. The the is silent, so it’s pronounced BLĪ, like “fly” with a b instead of an f.)
“That’s me,” I answered.
“This is for you,” she said, handing me a few sheets of official-looking paper bound together with red, white, and blue twine, “You will come with us for some questions. Please gather any medicines you may need in the next few hours.”
I looked at the paper. In convoluted, very poorly written English, it read that I was responsible for the death of young man whose name I’d never heard of before this instant, apparently a fan of my band who attended the one concert we had played in Prague two years previously. From what I could gather, the paper said that I had knowingly and with harmful intent assaulted this young man, somehow throwing him from “the podium” (which I took to mean “stage”), after which he had sustained a head injury, gone into a coma, and died a few weeks later in a military hospital in Prague. I was to be
charged in court with killing this young man.
Time slowed to a surreal pace as I tried to process this unexpected information. This obviously isn’t reality. I have never killed anyone in my life, I thought, this is some sort of crazy mistake. I must be dreaming.
As my band and crew gathered around me, my guitarist Mark snatched the papers from my hands and read them.
“Ooooooooh. Someone must have died at the show,” Mark said, looking up from the papers and handing them back to me. His soft voice seemed to echo a bit and then begin to slip away, like a fader being slowly pulled down on a soundboard’s vocal track. As I took the papers, it felt as if a strange distance suddenly grew between us, imposed by these large war-like policemen and this bizarre situation.
“It is time to leave now. We must go,” said the largest of the plainclothes officers, his Czech accent forcing the words into an unfamiliar cadence.
“Gimme a second,” I replied. I bent down and unzipped my computer bag, looking for my cell phone charger and bottle of Lexapro, a mild anti-depressant I had been prescribed for the last year or so. Through the weirdness of the moment, other, more practical, behaviors from the drinking days arose as I rummaged for as many extra packs of cigarettes as I could find. In some corner of my mind it was dimly registering that I was probably going to be locked up for a few days. Cigarettes are valuable currency in jail, but apparently I had left my extra packs in my checked luggage. I had seven Marlboros in the pack in my pocket.
“We must go now. You must hurry,” the big cop said again.
“Hold your horses. I’m almost ready,” I said. I was getting annoyed by this pushy cop, and I was ready to wake up as well. I had had enough of this particular dream. I closed my bag and straightened up.
“Call my wife and let her know I’ve been arrested,” I told Mark as the over-anxious cop and another of the plainclothes officers gripped my biceps tightly and began leading me away from my band and crew.
Dark Days Page 1
