Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  I have been fingerprinted several times before, almost always drunk. One of my favorite games to play with the police back in my drinking days was “Let’s see how bad I can piss off the cops during fingerprinting before they kick my ass,” which entails swaying a lot, “accidentally” knocking over the ink pad they use for the prints, moving my hand just a fraction of an inch or so as they roll your inked up fingers onto the paper, or having a violent coughing fit as the press your palm onto the print paper. Needless to say, what is normally a five-minute process could stretch out to ten or even fifteen minutes, contingent upon a complex and ever-shifting algorithm consisting of a) how wasted I was, b) how belligerent I was feeling that evening, and c) how patient the cops were. I’m surprised I never had my anarchic phalanges broken by some night shift cop who wasn’t amused by my drunken shenanigans, but I honestly really did look forward to fingerprinting every time I went to the drunk tank.

  But tonight I was hungry, tired, scared, (and for a change) sober, so I was in no mood to play the fingerprint game with the Czechs. They were very, very thorough, inking prints on areas of my hands that I didn’t even know had prints. Then it was time to get my mug shot.

  If you’ve never been arrested, then you probably think the mug shot process is just a classic headshot, taken with a camera with a big flash bulb on it, old school like in the movies. We’ve all seen the photos in newspapers or online of scowling gangsters against the backdrop of a white wall with height measurements painted on it, or—even better—freshly arrested drunk celebrities, hair in crazy disarray, eyes pointing in two different directions like a couple of inebriated goldfish desperately trying to escape the toxic bowl of their head. These pictures look like the beautiful people have been propped up against the wall just long enough for the photo to be snapped before they collapse into a puddle of pills, booze, and hubris on the station floor. We look at these off-kilter head shots and laugh smugly to ourselves, thinking: Well, you don’t look so fancy now, do you, Mr. Big Shot? About time someone took you down a notch or two.

  What a sad bunch of voyeuristic assholes we are.

  When you have tattoos, weird birthmarks, and distinguishing scars (all of which I possess in abundance) the mug shot process doesn’t stop with the classic frontal and profile headshot I just mentioned. It involves stripping down to your skivvies and having the cops photograph just about every inch of your body, from different angles, while they critique your ink. The Czechs in the booking room were doing this, pointing at my tattoos and talking amongst themselves, when I began to get impatient and started to drop my boxer shorts so they could snap a picture of my ass—the alarmed photographer shook his head no and picked up the speed with which he was photographing me.

  When the photo session was finally over, I put my clothes back on and Alex led me out and down even more stairs to a room where a young guard in his early twenties sat behind a counter. There was some paperwork to sign, the exact nature of which I’m not positive, but I believe it was a list of my belongings that were to be kept until my release. I was weighed and measured like you would be at a doctor’s appointment, then told to strip down to my underwear. I handed my clothes to the guard; then Alex, the guard, and I went into a room where my clothes were put on a hanger, covered with a (I shit you not) burlap sack, and hung up on a rack. Then I was told to take off my boxers, squat, and cough. After they were sure I hadn’t smuggled in anything up the old poop chute, the guard told me in fairly good English that I could take a shower if I wished. He gestured toward a rickety shower setup in the corner of the room and handed me a bar of soap. Alex said he would see me tomorrow, and he and the young guard left the room, locking the door behind them.

  I was grateful that the water was hot and the pressure was decent. I scrubbed my body the best I could with the small bar of soap and stood there with the hot water beating on my back. Little did I know that this would be the cleanest and last solo shower I would have for over a month. I turned off the water and grabbed the towels the guard had left for me beside the shower. They were not cloth, but two gigantic blue paper towels that didn’t allow me to dry myself completely, but I was clean. I stood there in my underwear for a second, then knocked on the door.

  The guard reappeared by himself and opened the door. He handed me a pair of threadbare and ill-fitting faded blue prison fatigues and some slippers, which I put on, and told me to follow him. As we were walking I suddenly realized how hungry I was—I hadn’t eaten a thing that day, and although I generally do not draw comfort from food in stressful situations, I knew I would need some fuel if I were to think clearly in the morning. The guard told me I had missed dinner, but he rummaged around in a cabinet beside his desk for a minute, found a piece of bread with a thin slice of some sort of sandwich meat in it. Handing it to me, he said, “I saw you on television today.”

  “The news?” I replied.

  “Yes. You are very famous in Czech Republic now,” he said, not unkindly, and gestured me to follow him down a dim hall toward a row of cell doors.

  Great. Just what I always wanted to be known for abroad—manslaughter.

  As we were walking, I couldn’t help noticing how young this guy looked. I assumed he had to be at least twenty-one to be a guard at the city jail, but he could have passed for seventeen. He wasn’t a big man, and he didn’t have a gun. All I could see in the way of a weapon was a nightstick. My animal brain, the primitive part of me concerned with fight and flight, began to quickly assess the situation in that dark hallway. It was screaming at me that I could overpower this young man, that I could throttle him to death with his own nightstick very easily, and then I would be free. He looked soft, I was behind him, no one else was around, and I would move swiftly and without mercy. It would be over in seconds.

  Free.

  Then the part of me that lived in the twenty-first century, not the Middle Ages, took over and let me know that it would be both wrong and pointless. He seemed like a very nice young man who was just doing his job. I had no real desire to hurt him. I don’t like violence, but it lives within me, as it does within every human. I believe we would have perished as a species long ago if we were not born with this fighting instinct, the burning inner directive of kill or be killed. Within the constraints of a civilized social order, this brutal survival instinct is not necessary most of the time. The need to implement it almost never arises. But I was alone in a foreign jail, not an over-priced spa/meditation retreat with a few hundred other rich Americans with nothing better to do with their time and money. My lizard brain was automatically erecting the defenses that survival in captivity necessitates. The trick in jail is to know when to use the beast, and when to subdue it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it at all, but I knew I would be ready.

  Always ready.

  We stopped in front of a battered looking door with multiple heavy locks and a small eye-level hatch. I looked at the number painted on the scratched steel door and smiled.

  Thirteen. My lucky number. This was a good sign.

  I walked into the cell and the guard shut and locked the door behind me. I heard his footsteps echoing as he walked away down the hallway. By the light of single dim bulb set into a metal cage-like socket covering in the ceiling, I could see two metal slabs bolted to the floor and opposite walls, a thin plastic mattress on each one. There was a metal commode with a metal sink bolted to the wall next to it in front of one of the beds. A small barred window sat high in the wall opposite the entryway. I stood on one of the beds and looked out the window, only to see a cinderblock wall a few feet away. I was alone in the small room.

  I sat on one of the beds and ate my sandwich, then lay back on the plastic mattress, trying my best to cover up with the thin blanket that had been provided with my bed. Despite my mind attempting to race in circles fast enough to keep me awake, my exhaustion overtook me, and I quickly began to fall asleep. Right as I was on the edge of a deep slumber, I heard a knock on the door. I bolted upright, immediately thinking
that perhaps the Czechs had come to their senses and decided it was a mix-up and would let me go. I sprinted the few feet toward the door as the guard opened the small door set in the hatch cut into the steel. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen.

  “May I have your autograph?” he asked.

  Lord have mercy. Here we go.

  chapter six

  The first morning you wake up in jail after being arrested is always a) very, very disorienting, and b) very, very, disappointing. Your eyes crack open, the ugly paint job of your new home (always a bland institutional color, normally some atrocious shade of pink, yellow, or green some shrink somewhere determined was “calming”) hits your bloodshot peepers like a bucket of vomit tossed in your face, and you think to yourself: Where in the fuck AM I? Then you realize that you are back in jail, and try to remember the day before, up to the point where the details get fuzzy and finally lost (Okay, so I left the bar to go get a pack of cigarettes, and then I . . . then . . . well, then I guess something must have happened); or, if you weren’t completely hammered, it all comes flooding back in a painful wave of recall (You IDIOT—why, why, why did you do that?), and then the usual anger and shame swiftly sets in. I am by no means a hardened career criminal. But I have been arrested enough times, almost always over some alcohol-related incident, that I when I used to wake up in jail, I didn’t panic. I’m wasn’t scared, and I didn’t start freaking out, thinking OH MY GOD! I am in JAIL! What have I done to deserve this, this place is not for me, please God, get me out of here! I would sit up, look around, shake my head, and say to myself:

  Well Einstein, looks like you’ve done it again. Good job, dummy—I hope you enjoyed yourself.

  My first morning incarcerated in Prague was very different than those cheery rise-and-shines as a guest of the fine gentlemen of Richmond’s Fraternal Order of Police. First of all, my cell was dark, still only lit by the single bulb in my room. The American city jails I had been in before were always obnoxiously lit by 6:00 a.m., all the better to highlight their vomit-hued paint scheme. My cell was so dim I couldn’t make out what shade of puke the jail’s interior decorator had chosen; this was pretty unsettling. It felt like a medieval dungeon, or at the very least a communist gulag (after all, I was in the former Eastern Bloc), not that I had done any time in either. I was alone in a dark, locked, subterranean cubicle in a foreign country—I might as well have been at the bottom of an abandoned well or remote ghost town mineshaft, unable to climb out with no one around to throw me a rope. It was a hole, and that is what I began to think of it as: the hole.

  Second, I wasn’t hungover and I wasn’t filled with anger and shame—I remembered everything about the previous day in great detail, and to my knowledge I still hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Third, I was pretty damn scared. Although I have had brief moments of panic and dread after waking up in an American jail, wondering if I had accidentally (or not-so-accidentally) killed anyone the night before, it was never long before I figured out that I had merely gotten drunk and had done something that was, to some varying degree, shameful. While that certainly isn’t the greatest feeling to greet the new day with, I’m sure it’s a truck-load better than waking up and realizing you are a newly minted murderer. Plus, once I sussed out that I hadn’t killed or injured anyone too badly, I knew I would be able to get out on bail or my personal recognizance within a day or two at the most. On this morning, I had no idea what had happened, or what was going to happen, other than the overwhelming feeling that I was in some deep doo-doo.

  Four, while I was indeed rather terrified, I wasn’t thinking Good Christ, I need a drink, which was always my first thought after I had sorted out why I was in jail in the first place. During my previous arrests, that was the thought that stayed with me from the moment I woke up in the clink until the second I bellied up to the bar and slugged down a cold one. The nearest bar was, of course, always my very first port of call upon sailing out of the drunk tank I had blown into the night before on the fetid beer-breathed winds of my alcoholism. (See, I told you us drunks are crazy—sane people try to avoid repeatedly taking wrong turns that wind them up in bad neighborhoods where they could possibly be severely beaten up, robbed, raped, or killed—which is exactly what Richmond City Jail is, a bad neighborhood on steroids. Drinking for me was like losing my road map and saying, “Screw it! Let’s ride!”—I never knew where I would wind up, but surprise, surprise, a time or two it was in lockup.)

  Luckily a drink was the last the thing on my mind this particular morning. And as long as I am not thinking about taking a drink, I can actually think, so I realized I was starting to freak out, and centered myself the best way I know how—I said a quick prayer. I asked the being I refer to as God to give me the strength to handle whatever was going to come my way that day, good or bad. I didn’t ask for a specific outcome, I just asked for some extra-juice to help me act like a dignified man. Praying calmed me down, and soon a guard brought me breakfast.

  As I’ve previously stated, I believe in a God—don’t worry, I’m not going to get all nutty and religious on you, I’m not on a mission to “save” anyone, and actually I could care less whether or not you believe in God—it’s really none of my business, just like my spiritual beliefs are none of yours. I normally don’t discuss my relationship with the divine with strangers (I find it gauche to run around professing my deepest personal beliefs to any who would listen, plus my God doesn’t need me to convince others to believe in him/her/it), but since I am writing a book about how I got through all this stuff, about how I tried to maintain a positive mental attitude in the face of adversity—well, what I consider to be God was a huge part of that.

  I can’t recall exactly what they gave me for breakfast that morning, but I would bet good money that it consisted mostly of a white, semi-sweet, knot roll-like piece of bread, because that’s what they gave me almost every morning for the next thirty-six days, with slight variations. It sure as hell wasn’t Eggs Benedict, smoked salmon, and crispy bacon on a fine china plate; nor was it that far simpler, but most divine of all breakfast foods—grits with cheese, salt, pepper, and Texas Pete hot sauce—but it was better than nothing. After I ate and brushed my teeth with the flimsy toothbrush I had been issued with my clothes the night before, the door opened, Alex appeared, and we went back upstairs to the holding cell from the day before. I was out of cigarettes, so I asked Alex if he would bum me one, and he did, even making me a coffee. Despite his clumsy and bizarrely schizophrenic attempt at good cop/bad cop the day before, I could tell Alex wasn’t a bad guy; just like everyone else I dealt with in the Czech Republic legal system (with a few glaring exceptions), he was just trying to do his job the best he could, and I can’t fault anyone for that.

  I asked Alex if he could give me one of my antidepressant pills, and he hesitated, saying that a doctor needed to look at the medicine to make sure it wasn’t some sort of narcotic. Apparently none of the Czech police could read the label on my pill bottle, or would to do a simple Google search. Alex must have seen that this made me slightly nervous and felt sorry for me, because he got me a Lexapro and told me I could have just one for now until a doctor figured out what kind of pills they were. I thanked him and told him I only took one a day anyway. Technically, Alex probably shouldn’t have given me that pill, but he could easily see I wasn’t behaving like a drug addict in withdrawal (as a policeman, I have no doubt that he had arrested more than one dope sick junkie and watched them kick in a cell—it’s not a pretty sight; one I would witness shortly) and was probably telling him the truth. Plus, as I said, he seemed like a pretty decent guy overall.

  Soon after taking my pill, two neatly dressed women were led into the holding cell, one an attractive young blond and the other a middle aged lady with a kind face and salt-and-pepper hair. I stood up from the bench I was seated on and shook both their hands, and the blond introduced herself as being an officer from the American Embassy with the perfectly astonishing name of Sonnet Frisbie.
This was my embassy guy? Sonnet didn’t look a thing like the middle-aged, harried, chain-smoking, probably alcoholic, prematurely graying-from-too-much-clandestine-activity embassy guys in the movies. She didn’t have bags under her eyes, and she didn’t appear particularly rattled by much of anything, including my current predicament. Wasn’t she supposed to at least be sweating a little, like the embassy guy in Midnight Express? (I know in retrospect that in a situation like mine, the very last thing you want is some nervous-looking, slightly disheveled man in a suit smelling of the local gin and Pall Malls as he rolls up into the jail as your embassy’s representative—you want someone cool as cucumber, and Sonnet was just that.) Oh, well—at least she had an awesome name.

  Sonnet Frisbie—that’s the type of moniker I would give a femme fatale character were I writing some sort of hard-boiled spy novel, or bestow my child if I were a more poetic, less talented, metal version of Frank Zappa. What a great name, and I didn’t even have to think it up for this book! If I ever meet Sonnet’s parents, I’ll thank them for doing the heavy lifting for me here. Anyway, Sonnet and her companion Hana (whom I believe was a Czech national acting as a translator between her and the Czech authorities) were there to check on me, make sure the cops weren’t torturing me, and have me sign some paperwork concerning what information could be released by my embassy to the press.

  I thought about the press and my situation for a moment, then put down the names of my family, my attorney, and my band’s manager. I would try to contain as much information about my arrest as I could for as long as I could, for I guessed that the Internet, particularly the heavy metal news sites and message boards, was already ablaze with wild rumors. Undoubtedly, some of the more troglodyte-like dwellers of these virtual gathering places, having already tried, convicted, and hung me in their tiny little pinheads, would be pressing the return button on their generic “Fuck that murdering asshole, I hope he gets raped in prison (plus lamb of god sucks)” posts as fast as their fat little pizza-stained fingers would allow (I was, of course, correct). I didn’t want to give these assholes anymore fuel than they already had to post speculation that could possibly confuse or cause concern for anyone who cared for me—family, friends, fans, and well-meaning strangers. Besides, these mouth breathers would undoubtedly write whatever “news” they wanted anyway, accurate or not. For me, the truth is not malleable. If I don’t know the whole truth of a story, even mine, especially mine, I won’t tell any of it until I know what the hell I’m talking about. This one was still unfolding, it was my tale, and I decided that I would be the one to tell the whole story, and not until I was damn well ready. Let the rumors fly, but I wouldn’t add to them if I could help it.