Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  Since I’ve gotten sober I haven’t had to fight; I don’t enjoy conflict, and I absolutely despise violence, but if it is going to occur for whatever reason and I’m forced to engage in it, make no mistake about it—I will commit, and I will commit 100 percent. While I am in no way a pacifist, it would take some extreme circumstances to drive me to react with violence to a situation these days—I would have to feel threatened, or feel that my loved ones were in danger. I would rather walk away from a needless confrontation. I have nothing to prove to anyone—I am a grown man, not a high school bully. But prison was one long set of extreme circumstances I couldn’t walk away from. I automatically felt threatened just being there, so from the second I walked into Pankrác, I knew I might have to fight, perhaps for my life. This was very scary, but my mentality was such that I would rather take one good beating up front instead of a hundred on the back end. Or, even worse, be beaten up, judged easy pickings, and then raped.

  Rape. Now that’s something that truly terrified me about prison. I thought about it quite a bit during my first few days in Pankrác—who wouldn’t? I’ve known both women and men who have been raped, and they have survived, healed, and gone on to live full, productive, happy lives. It is possible to recover from such an unimaginable violation. I knew this. But I’d been through a lot in my life already, and I had no intention of having to experience recovery from being raped if I could help it. If it happened to me, it happened—and it does happen in real life prison. I knew this, and I knew I would survive it if it happened to me. But I was determined not to be anyone’s bitch, not if I could help it. Once again, this meant constantly keeping my guard up and being prepared for extreme violence, and once again, that’s not tough-guy talk, that’s pure, naked, shaking-in-your-boots fear. When I am really scared, and it’s either my ass or yours, I will do my damn best to make sure it’s yours, every single time without exception.

  I. Was. Really. Scared.

  After lunch my second day in prison, Tom Selleck came banging on our cell door, opened it, and motioned us out. Dorj explained to me that it was time to go out for our walk. According to my prison regulations, I did not have to go outside if I did not wish to; but, despite a healthy amount of fear, I knew it was best to go ahead and just get it over with. I had no intention of hiding in my cell the entire time I was in prison if I didn’t have to. It would have driven me nuts; after just twenty-four hours in Pankrác, I was already really sick of looking at the same four walls while Dorj whistled the hours away. We tucked in our shirts, put on our shoes, and walked outside the cell to be searched as we had been yesterday. After we had been frisked, we walked to the other end of the hall where most of the same men we had gotten drug tested with the day before were waiting. We walked single file up a short flight of stairs, the guard opened a heavy door to the outside, I took a deep breath, thought, Well, here goes nothing, and out we went.

  Outside, instead of the large open area full of prisoners that I was expecting to see, was a small, empty, enclosed square. On one side of it was an elevated walkway with two guards patrolling it on top. Beneath the walkway was a kind of open air concrete hallway with steel doors set in either side every twenty feet or so. We walked down the hallway until the guard told us to stop in front of one of the doors. He opened the door, we went inside, and he slammed it shut, sliding a heavy bolt home. Apparently we weren’t going to a prison yard today. This was nothing more than a concrete cage.

  The enclosure we were in measured approximately ten by twelve feet. The plain concrete walls stood about ten feet tall and were covered in graffiti, either scratched into the surface or written in pen, pencil, or magic marker. The open-air roof of the enclosure was capped with a grid of heavy welded rebar, and the floor was rough black asphalt. There was nothing else in the pen. It looked like something cattle would be herded into before being led off to the slaughter. There were about ten of us in this small area. This was where we were supposed to “walk”? Like most of the other men, I picked a spot against a wall with some sunshine and sat down. The sun felt good on my face, cigarettes immediately began to be passed around, and I began to relax.

  Dorj had brought his two rolled up cigarettes out with him, and he gave me one. I bummed us a light, and we sat smoking as Rene, the short gypsy I had met the day before, immediately began chattering away in between drags of his own smoke. He talked and talked, making odd sound effects to punctuate his words. He seemed to be telling an endless story, and when he would imitate another person talking, he always changed his tone of voice and said the same thing: “karfarnukee, karfarnukee, kee kee kee.” It reminded me of the muffled, indistinguishable voices of adults in the Charlie Brown TV specials. This recurring nonsensical phrase became Rene’s nickname—Kee Kee Kee. The other men in the pen listened, laughed at times, and there was general talking amongst everyone except Dorj and me as Rene finished his story. I noticed that all the Roma sat together, including a new one who looked like Al Pacino. He even had a nasty scar running down his face, so that is what I called him—Scarface (he was flattered when I mentioned this to him later). There were two other men who had not been with us the day before, a skinny kid with a tight buzz cut who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, and a slightly chubby man in his thirties with a goatee and the sides of his head razored down to the skin. As everyone sat around smoking and talking, the goateed man turned to me and spoke.

  “So, you’re the famous American that’s in all the newspapers, eh? My name is Felix. I heard you teaching your cellmate to count to twenty earlier—my cell is right next to yours. You should get a job teaching in Prague, haha,” he said in perfect English.

  “Holy fuck—you speak English!” I said, stating the obvious.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. How do you like our beautiful Czech prison so far?” he replied with a laugh.

  Being able to speak to someone actually fluent in my native language was like Christmas in July for me. It was as if Felix (not his real name, for reasons that shall be made apparent later) had suddenly been beamed down from outer space to assist me, the only other human inhabitant on a strange and claustrophobic planet filled with aliens who communicated in a series of karfarnukee kee kees. I had many questions, and Felix was kind enough to answer them all the best he could. The basement cellblock we were on was the entry point for all prisoners entering Pankrác, and inmates remained there for a month on average before being moved upstairs into general population; sometimes going sooner, sometimes remaining longer. The basement, which I came to think of as “The Dungeon” (since, aside from a brighter paint scheme, that was precisely what it was), was a place where new prisoners were monitored for signs of depression. This made perfect sense—if you want to find out if an inmate is feeling a little down in the dumps, naturally you should stick them in the dankest, darkest, most unhealthy, and depressing place in the entire prison and see how they do. Felix had already been in the dungeon for more than a month and a half, his extended stay the result of a fool-hardy bit of truth telling.

  “You will be sent to see the prison psychiatrist sometime soon. When she asks you how you like the place, tell her you love it. Tell her you couldn’t be happier and are making lots of new friends. Whatever you do, do not tell her the truth, or you will be stuck down here forever. I was supposed to be moved out of this shit-hole weeks ago,” he said.

  “Why are you still here then?” I asked, guessing the answer.

  “She asked me how I was doing and what did I think of the place so far, so I told her. How did she think I was doing, for God’s sake? I had just been arrested and thrown in prison with a bunch of criminals. This place is a rubbish heap. Was I supposed to say that I wanted to live here forever? I guess that answer did not satisfy her very much, so here I am,” he said with a shake of his head.

  I made a mental note to act happier than a baby in a barrel of boobies when I went to see the prison shrink. I just hoped she wouldn’t be asking me why an inkblot looked like a butterfly or showing me
anymore depressing pictures. Beyond advice on what to lie to prison staff about, Felix also filled me in on the nuts and bolts of day-to-day life in the Dungeon. The lights came on every morning at 6:00 a.m., except for Saturday and Sunday when we were allowed to sleep in until seven. We had to be up and with our beds made well before 6:30, which was when breakfast came, except on Saturday and Sunday when the first meal of the day arrived at 7:30. Lunch was at 11:30, dinner at four, with lights out every night at nine p.m. sharp. A few times a day, a trusty would come by with tea, or hot water if you had any instant coffee or your own tea bags. You could buy these things and many others (toilet paper, cigarettes, deodorant, snacks etc.) from the prison store by writing down your order on a sheet a guard would bring by your cell Wednesday morning. The guard would return for the sheet that evening during his nightly mail rounds, when he would pick up any correspondence the prisoner wished to have mailed, usually sometime before six p.m. The prisoner’s order would be delivered to his cell the next morning. No matter how much money an inmate had in his account, there was a maximum limit on how much he could spend per week at the prison store. I assumed this policy was intended to prevent those inmates lucky enough to have a lot of money on their books from becoming major players in the shadow economy that controls the population of every prison. This economy dictates the interactions of prisoners just as much as its guards (who are often involved in it themselves). Despite what my sheet of regulations said about goods bought from the prison store costing the same as on the outside, prices for things in the prison store were roughly double what they were in a normal store, except cigarettes and rolling tobacco, whose price matching was somehow ensured by the state because of a tax stamp on every packet and bag. I never understood this, as the state was making plenty of money off of everything else in the store, so why not smokes? Maybe the heads of the department of corrections and the Czech version of the ATF didn’t get along; I didn’t know and I didn’t care—the smokes were cheap in there, and I wasn’t about to quit while I was locked up.

  When I was arrested, I had a single US fifty dollar bill and about 200 Euros in my wallet, which I was told would be converted into Czech crowns and put into my prison account if I so desired. The prison would automatically deduct crowns for the toiletries that had already been issued me, and any money I had left over on my books would be returned to me when I was released from prison and any state mandated legal debts I had were paid. (The Czech government, as of this writing, has made no attempt to return any of the few thousand crowns I had left in my prison account. Hey yo, Mister Prison Accountant—I want my money. I know it wasn’t that much in the big scheme of things, but it’s still my money. Pay me, homie.) I didn’t know how long it would take to have my money changed into the local currency, but I figured it couldn’t be more than two or three days. (I was very wrong about that, in fact I’m not sure my money was ever converted or if it went into some prison clerk’s wallet.) As it was Sunday, I would just have to tough it out smoking-wise until Thursday morning, when I would immediately have cigarettes galore delivered to my cell. I began to imagine all the glorious packs of smokes that would be stacked up in my locker like bricks of gold in Fort Knox, and I began to feel magnanimous, asking Felix what brand of cigs the store sold and if they carried his, because come Thursday morning, I was going to hook my perfect-English-speaking, endless-question-answering, main-man-next-door up!

  “Thank you, but there is a slight problem. This Thursday is a bank holiday in the Czech Republic, and the prison store will be closed. Orders for this coming week were already taken two days ago, and will be delivered Wednesday instead. You will not be able to have anything delivered until next Thursday, I’m afraid,” he said.

  A bank holiday? You gotta be kidding me, I thought. We were prisoners, not accountants. Where in the hell would the prison store clerk (whom I assumed was a trusty) go for a bank holiday? To their vacation cell on the other side of the prison? Besides the cigarettes, I had hoped to get some writing paper, a pen or two, and some envelopes and stamps to write my family and band. I had nothing to read and I needed to exercise my mind somehow. Felix told me he had some extra paper he would give me tomorrow during our walk, which I was very grateful for and promised to repay him. What about books, though? I had read something about going to the prison library; did they have a selection of English books I could check out? When would we get to go to the library?

  “Oh, we don’t go to the library. Once or twice a week the trusty comes by with a cart and gives you two or three books, whatever he feels like. You can ask him if the library person will look for some English books for you though—he might do this for you if he is in a good mood. I think they might have a few. You can have a newspaper delivered to your cell everyday if you like, for a very small fee. You have to submit a request in writing for this during the morning report, though,” he said.

  Things were looking worse and worse by the second. No cigarettes for at least a week and a half. No trip to the library. A ghoulish trusty who didn’t speak English who may or may not try to find me some sort of book I could read. This completely sucked. Well, what was the morning report, and what kind of newspapers did they have to order?

  “Every morning you can give the guard who comes by after breakfast a written request for anything you may need—a trip to the doctor, permission to use the telephone, scheduling a family visit. You have to write it out and he will turn it in to the office where someone will review your request. As far as the newspapers, the prison has all the major Czech papers. I think you can order foreign ones, but you must write a request out for this and turn it in during th-”

  “Morning report. Right. So, I’m assuming the morning report needs to be written in Czech,” I said.

  “Of course,” Felix replied.

  Getting anything done in Pankrác, as I would find out, was tedious for even the most experienced of Czech prisoners. Everything seemed to require some written form or the other, none of which I could read, which then took forever to be reviewed. With the exception of robot, I couldn’t write a single word of Czech. The prison regulations I had been given had not been updated in years, and policies and ways of doing things had changed. Getting things done often depended upon the mood of the particular guard you were dealing with, who may or may not make sure anything you had requested was sent through the appropriate channels in a timely fashion, perhaps even bending a rule or two for you from time to time. Actually, I had no idea of what many of the actual rules really were, as each guard behaved completely differently, some changing in attitude from day to day and situation to situation. The only guard in the Dungeon whose actions and attitude was ever 100 percent consistent with me was also the only guard who spoke more than ten or twenty words of English. This would have been a lucky situation for me, except for the fact that that guard was Bradley. Bradley was consistent all right—he was consistently a dick. While I’m sure every prison has its fair share of bureaucratic hoops through which prisoners attempting to get something done have to jump (as well as jerk-off guards like Bradley), Pankrác seemed particularly inefficient, random, and down right crazy to me. As I have nothing else to compare it to, I could very well be wrong, although any prison that would make Pankrác appear efficient would have to be a complete clusterfuck. The language barrier certainly didn’t help me figure out how to accomplish anything.

  After we had been in the cage for an hour, the guard returned to bring us back to our cells for the next twenty-three hours. On the short walk through the yard, I noticed many men turning and craning their heads to look at an ancient clock tower that had been obscured from our view in the pen. I turned and looked at it, too—an hour had passed. The tower was the highest point I could see in the interior of the prison, and the clock face on the side visible to me had seen better days—the whole thing looked as if it had just barely survived a bombing raid. The hands of its clock were rusted, its face peeling and missing chunks in several places, entire numbers ripped
away to reveal its plywood subsurface. It was a sad looking clock, but I would come to love it more than any other, since for an extended period it was my only way of telling time.

  For a few weeks, time as a unit of measure with which to judge my passage through each day simply did not exist for me in Pankrác. The usual concept of time becomes meaningless in prison, especially in a basement cell with one small window facing a concrete wall. Humans both love and despise time. We love it when we have enough of it to finish the things we need to do, or “free time” to do as we wish. We also loathe it when there is an abundance of it, such as the start of our shift at a crappy job, or a particular long and brutal winter. We also detest it when we do not have enough of it, such as when a relative or friend dies “before their time.” I have done both, alternately loving and hating time, throughout my life. But love it or hate it, I could always tell my “place” within a twenty-four hour period simply by looking at my watch, and thereby know I was moving forward from minute to minute. The police had taken my watch when I was arrested, and I could not see the passing of the day with the sun’s journey across the sky; there were only varying levels of indirect light fading into darkness. Without a watch, time became endless and even more amorphous than it already was. The small marks I made on our cell wall each evening and the moldering clock tower I caught a brief glimpse of once a day became the only way I could tell how long I had been in prison, until my wife brought me a cheap watch during her one visit. I had already been incarcerated for more than two weeks at that point, so my concept of how long I had been away from the outside world was severely askew. I had experienced this feeling before, albeit in a much more pleasant location.