Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

“Cigarette for me?” he whined.

  “No, still no cigarette for you,” I said, grinning as I pulled the bag of cheese out of my pants, “but I brought you this. Special syr.”

  His eyes lit up and he snatched the bag from my hands, scurried over to a corner, and began untying the knots that held the terrible smell of the cheese inside. Then Dorj, Ganbold, and myself stood transfixed, staring with appalled fascination as Chimpo proceeded to unwrap then cram all three bars of olomoucké tvaržky into his hideous mouth, chewing the unholy cheese with a look of pure bliss on his face. He swallowed the gooey putrid mess, belched loudly with great satisfaction, then began licking the foil wrappers.

  God in heaven, I thought, he’s not even human. George came over to ask me if I had anymore syr, but Ollie barked at him in Czech to go away. “Do not talk to him,” he said, throwing George a hard look, “He is a bad person in here. He is a délinquant sexuel.”

  Fuck, only the two creepiest guys in here like that god-awful cheese—maybe Chimpo’s a sex offender, too? I thought, No woman in her right mind would sleep with that ugly motherfucker; especially not with a load of tvaržky on his breath. Maybe the stuff is rapist fuel—is there such a thing as immoral cheese?

  The next morning a guard came by with the day’s mail, handing me a post card and a letter, both from lamb of god fans. A few letters from friends and family back home had made it to me thus far, but these were the first two pieces of correspondence I had received from strangers. One was a post card with the face of the Joker from Batman printed on it, his nefarious grin surrounded by blood-red letters reading, “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules!” On the back of the post card was a short message wishing me well, telling me to hang in there, and letting me know that my community was thinking of me. “This is going to make one hell of a story for ya when you get exonerated,” the neatly printed message read in closing. There was no return address, and it was signed simply “Metal Dave from Seattle, WA.” I read the postcard a few times, then stuck it to our cork board so that I could see the Joker’s face. The post card added a bit of color to our drab cell, and in that dark place with so many confusing rules, its bloody message brought a defiant smile to my face more than once. The prophetic post card sits in front of me on my writing desk as I write this, so thanks Metal Dave—I hope to see you down the road sometime.

  The other piece of mail was a lengthy letter from a man named Gavin Piercey in Canada discussing what was going on with the public reaction to my trial, wishing me well, and also just telling me about he and his wife Donna’s life. Gavin had even included a photo of himself and his wife, and it was immensely pleasurable for me to read about normal, everyday things. By the end of the letter I felt as if I had actually come to know the man a bit. Both the postcard and Gavin’s letter had cheered me up quite a bit, and I immediately began writing Gavin a reply. I did not take the kindness of these two strangers for granted, and the time they took to send me a bit of encouragement was not spent in vain, for their messages did me more good than they will ever know.

  That day at walk there was yet another addition to our regular group, an ancient and filthy Roma who had obviously been living on the streets before landing in Pankrác. As the man scoured the ground for cigarette butts, I was appalled by his pitiful physical appearance. He had dirt caked under his long finger and toenails, his skin was weathered and scarred, and his tell-tale shaking hands betrayed the discomfort of an alcoholic in the grips of withdrawal. The old man looked to be in his eighties (although hard living had probably added a few years to his appearance), and I wondered what he possibly could have done to have wound up in Pankrác, for he was very frail and looked utterly lost—he belonged in a hospital, not prison. Rene spoke to him quietly in the Gypsy tongue, but the man made no reply and continued looking for cigarette butts until someone gave him a half-smoked cigarette. He inhaled it in what seemed like one mighty drag; then someone else gave him another half cigarette, which he also made astonishingly short work of. Noticing me smoking, he teetered over to me and began begging me for a Marlboro. Although I felt sorry for him, I had no intention of giving this power smoker any of my precious few pre-rolled cigarettes. The old man was relentless though, so finally I emptied my Marlboro box of cigarettes and put them in my pocket, took some of the rolling tobacco I always carried outside to share and half-filled the box with it, threw in a few rolling papers, and handed it to him. He put the box in his pocket and, without saying thanks or batting an eye, began asking me for the cigarette I was smoking. This rudeness annoyed me to no end, so I firmly told him to kick rocks, which he eventually did, but not before asking me for my cigarette a few more times. After more fruitless attempts to weasel the smoke out of my lips he gave up, and soon realized I wasn’t going to budge. Then he changed tactics and began incessantly asking me for my lighter, and when the guard came to take us back inside, I gave it to him just to shut him up, as well as in the hopes that he would leave me alone the next day (he didn’t). At first I had felt sorry for the old man, for when I looked at him I saw what awaited me if I ever started drinking again: homelessness, delirium tremors, prison or the insane asylum, and finally, a painful, lonely, pathetic death. But his lack of gratitude and unremitting mooching had aroused my ire, and I was glad when he was gone a few days later. I am a patient man with those who suffer from alcoholism, even the ones in the midst of a good bender, for I have been there myself many times. But a blatant lack of manners from someone who isn’t currently plastered out of their mind, ancient alcoholic or not, offends me to the point of instilling coldness in my normally compassionate heart.

  The next day brought a disheartening visit from Martin, who informed me that the merry-go-round with the prosecutor was continuing. Martin’s partner Vladimir had been at the police station earlier that day on business concerning a different case, and had been talking to Lucie (the detective who had arrested me) in her office when the prosecuting attorney happened to call. Vladimir overheard him asking Lucie when the police would need me again for interrogation, and she told him that they didn’t. Then he asked her what kind of a person I was, to which she said, “He’s a normal guy.” Apparently he wasn’t too happy to hear that I was no longer needed for questioning, or that I wasn’t some frothing-at-the-mouth psycho-killer. From listening to Martin, I had a hunch that to Musik, the prosecutor, I was not a human being. I was a notch he could put in his belt; a high profile case he wanted to win in order to advance his career, not a man looking at five to ten years of his life vanishing behind a prison wall. Musik would prove my theory correct again and again throughout my incarceration and trial, playing the system the best he could to keep me behind bars and even showing a callous disregard for the opinion of the officer who investigated my alleged crime. (I was later made aware that upon reviewing the available evidence and testimony, the investigating detective recommended in their report to Musik that I be charged with a lesser crime than manslaughter. The prosecutor ignored the report, refused the recommendation, and told them to charge me with manslaughter.)

  Martin also informed me that the prosecutor had until midnight the next day (which was a Friday) to appeal my new (and now paid-in-full) bail, and that he would most likely wait until the very last minute to do so. Then I would be stuck in Pankrác through the weekend until Monday or Tuesday, when a second appeal court might convene in order to review Musik’s complaint and maybe make a decision on whether or not the eight million Czech crowns my band had paid were a sufficient enough reason to release me. And even then, Martin told me, the prosecuting attorney could write a brand-new arrest warrant for me in order to keep me in prison, saying that the police needed me for further questioning. I could appeal that, then he could appeal my appeal, and so on and so forth.

  “But the police told Musik I wasn’t needed for questioning anymore!” I said to Martin, trying to keep my temper.

  “I do not think he will tell the court that,” Martin said.

  A
s hard as I was trying to keep my chin up, I was slowly being ground down by this constant stream of conflicting good and bad news. It seemed like every time it started to look like my situation had taken a turn for the better, things suddenly got worse. The silver lining peeking out from behind a lifting dark cloud always turned out to be a patch of acid rain, and despite my best efforts to not develop any expectations, I was becoming demoralized. I began to wonder if it wasn’t best for me to simply not know anything that was going on with my case at all—every time I tried to make sense of it, it just got more confusing.

  Finally, to make things even weirder, Martin told me that another young man had come forward and had been interrogated by the police as a witness, but not in regards to seeing me allegedly pushing the deceased fan off the stage. This young man was claiming that he was the one I was seen wrestling with onstage in the photos that all the Czech papers had printed, he was the one who was in the video that was circulating on the internet. I didn’t know what to make of this strange new development—was this guy just some attention-seeking crazed fan? Or was it possible that he really was the guy I remembered tussling with onstage? I hadn’t seen the video yet, but I remembered the disconnect I had felt when I had tried to match the photo of Daniel in his practice space Martin had shown me with the hazy memories of what occurred that night. Something had been off, something hadn’t quite lined up correctly. Martin didn’t have a photo of the new witness yet, but when I would see it later I would understand why I couldn’t connect the dots when I had first seen Daniel’s picture.

  I went to bed that evening with a head full of confusion, anger, fear, and sadness. I lay there in my bunk, trying not to be overwhelmed by what was happening to me, but it was very hard. I asked God to give me the strength to get through whatever was coming my way with some dignity, and if he was feeling extra-generous at the moment, to grant me a little understanding of what in the hell was going on. I wanted an answer. I wanted to know what had happened so badly I could taste it. It is a very odd feeling to go to sleep wondering if you killed a man or not. I would get my answer eventually, but that night God was silent, as he had been every night since I had been arrested.

  DUDE! Come on! Kick down a little insight, would ya? I’m not asking you to get me off the hook here, I just want to know what I’m dealing with, okay? I could handle this a whole lot better if you would just somehow let me know what happened that night. Is that too damn much to ask? Help a brother out, okay? I prayed. I don’t have to use flowery language for my God to get my drift, and I’m sure he understood me that evening.

  He just wasn’t talking.

  From my first day in Pankrác, I had done my best to remain fully grounded in the reality of my situation. Following the advice of Zen Buddhist monks and recovering alcoholics everywhere, I tried to “stay in the moment.” This very second is all that truly exists, and I have heard it said that if you have one foot in the past, and one foot in the future, you are pissing on the present, so I clung fast to each moment as it occurred. I had bolstered this effort with a bit of philosophy stemming from my punk rock roots, fiercely embracing the concept of P.M.A. (positive mental attitude), a gift given to me by the seminal Washington, DC hardcore band, Bad Brains, in their song, “Attitude”: “Don’t care what they may say, we got that attitude! Don’t care what they may do, we got that attitude! Yeeeeeeeah, we got that P.M.A.” I would screech through the small square hatch in our cell door, drawing confused looks from Uncle Fester as he shoved cracked plastic trays bearing approximations of food into our home.

  “Stay in the moment, maintain a positive mental attitude, and you will get through this. Stay in the moment, maintain P.M.A., maintain P.M.A., maintain P.M.A. . . .” I told myself over and over. Be present. Observe strict mental discipline. Do not lose hope.

  But unless you are a one-hundred-year-old Zen master and have spent your entire life in a cave meditating in a heightened state of mental, physical, and spiritual awareness, this is the hat trick that is almost impossible to pull off, especially in prison. How do you maintain a hyper-vigilant awareness of each second, trying to squeeze the most out of it, while still retaining P.M.A. manifesting as hope for a better tomorrow, the whole time trying not to think about the future too much? Especially when a lot of the “moments” you are attempting to stay in just flat-out suck?

  I thought I had learned my lesson after my bail was appealed the first time. Don’t start thinking about home. This is your home now. Make the most of it, because it hurts too much to build expectations up, only to have them crushed beneath the heel of a bureaucracy you cannot hope to understand. You had better square yourself away and PDQ, soldier, because this is reality, and bellyaching about it is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

  But in prison, as the minutes, hours, and days stretch on, you can easily start to lose track of time and any sort of rational perspective. If you don’t watch it, you can easily venture into the forbidden realm of the overly cerebral. This is a dangerous place to go, at least for a man like me, someone who, as I’ve said, can envision the complete annihilation of the entire human race at the tiny microbial hands of some catastrophic nonexistent virus given thirty seconds and sufficient negative stimuli, say blowing a flat tire on my bicycle on the way to the coffee shop.

  A wise man once told me “Son, don’t go up in your head without adult supervision,” advice I had stupidly ignored the night before, after Martin’s visit, much to my detriment. It was a terrible idea, but I began to think. The new witness who was completely disrupting any of the accepted ideas about my alleged actions. The prosecuting attorney’s endless manipulations of the strange Czech judicial system that continued keeping me in Pankrác day after interminable day, one last minute protocol filing after the other. I had finally begun to let this (by now) entirely predictable course of events get to me, and became angry and resentful over the games being played with my freedom. My inner self-pitying squalling brat surfaced, and I let him run free through the chambers of my mind. Mommy’s little monster cursed his fate, despaired his present living conditions, and pined for his wife and home. I decided to throw a very quiet, completely internalized, utterly berserk mental hissy fit. This was a deadly mistake, and I paid for it by falling into a deep funk on my cot, staring at the crumbling ceiling until lights out. I had prayed to God for some guidance, had received none, and promptly blew a mental gasket. Laying there full of bitterness over an answer I was not hearing, I tossed and turned and cursed the screaming Ukrainians on the floor above me until I passed out.

  That same wise man who had let me know my mental playground required a responsible chaperone had also told me, “You can start your day over anytime you want to,” so I woke up the next morning and swiftly jumped off the pity pot, determined to start again.

  Screw Musik, and screw this shit hole of a prison. This place cannot break me, this place cannot break me, this place cannot break me . . .

  Over my first cup of instant black coffee, I remembered that it was shower day. This thought completely banished my dark mood of the night before, since my twice weekly shower had become one of the highlights of my existence in prison. Not that I was in a hurry to get into a steamy room with a bunch of naked men, but I was always pretty ripe after a few days in that ancient dump with no shower. Since the Playmate of the Year hadn’t shown up to scrub my back yet, and since Bradley and the Sellecks simply refused to have the jacuzzi installed that I had repeatedly requested since my arrival in Pankrác, I was more than grateful for the opportunity to scrub my body, with or without nude convicts. When you live in a 123-year-old, moldy basement that has zero means of air circulation in July for days on end, even in the relatively cool Czech Republic, things can get . . . tart. We all just wanted to get clean.

  Disease and infection flourish in dirty, unsanitary places, and make no mistake about it, Pankrác was (and I’m sure still is) a filthy, filthy place. Whenever there is a natural disaster with long-term effects, publi
c utilities are cut off. People always die during the aftermath of these emergencies due to lack of proper sanitation. Pankrác was an unnatural disaster, and it was hazardous to let us shower as little as we were allowed. I had gone for up to two weeks without a shower back in my freight hopping days, but that was only because one was not available. The prison shower wasn’t as good as most dressing room showers in the crappiest of rock clubs (and I have washed the show grime off of my body in some sketchy backstage showers), but it meant hot water. Hot water meant I could shave, and there would be a few minutes of feeling like a human being again before the sweat and dust covered my increasingly skinny form.

  When Bradley or the Sellecks had a day off, there were a few fill-in guards who only seemed to be on the cell block for a single day at a time. One of these was a short fat man I called Archie Bunker due to his age, rotundness, and temperament. On this morning, Archie Bunker showed up shortly after breakfast, yanking open our door and yelling “Sprcha!” (shower) in his normal charming fashion. I didn’t much care for Archie; so far he had been nothing but grumpy around me, throwing me a wrinkled stink eye whenever he had to let me out of my cell for walk or a visit from my lawyer—as if it was my fault that he was at work in this depressing relic instead of reclining in his la-z-boy, shoving knedliky (Czech dumplings) into his pie hole and tipping back a few pilsners. My personal opinion of Archie wasn’t on my mind, though, as I grabbed the three gallon ziplock bag my wife had so smartly packed my Marlboros in (it served as a great shower bag) and held it behind my back with both hands, per prison regulations. I followed his lumpy squat form the short distance to the shower cell, and I could hear voices echoing from inside the cell as Archie unlocked the heavy steel door.

  You never knew who or how many men you would be showering with—the number varied at the seemingly random whim of whichever guard was running the block that day. Sometimes it would be just you and your cellies, a rare, luxurious, occasion where you could take your time and really scrub yourself clean. Most of the time there was a lot more man ass to deal with, though. On one particularly bad day there were nine of us in that two shower head cell, everyone taking turns getting wet, jumping from underneath the shower heads, soaping up, lathering, and jumping back under to rinse off. On this day, it didn’t sound too loud from behind the closed shower door though. Good—we can actually shower in relative peace today, I thought.