Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  “Of course, man. Of course I can do that for you. I’ll start on it this evening,” Vinnie said without a second’s hesitation.

  I thanked Vinnie for agreeing to help me out, and two nights later in Kansas City, the entire tour, bands and crews, gathered onstage and did a shot for Dime (Hellyeah’s crew brought me a shot glass full of water so I wouldn’t be left out). And before I returned to the Czech Republic, I had a copy of Vinnie’s letter, which was later translated into Czech and read in court during my trial. The man had done me a great favor, and it was one that could not have been easy for him to do—that is one measure of a friend. True friends will help you even when it is not the most pleasant thing for them to do, because they really do care. Vinnie’s letter was brutal and to the point, and it still brings tears to my eyes if I read it. In the letter he described how he had witnessed his brother’s murder right before his eyes, then went on to explain how that incident had changed things for performers. He wrote of the necessity for increased security at gigs, spoke highly of our friendship and my character, and closed the letter asking the judges to take into consideration what had happened on December 8, 2004 when reviewing the facts of my case. I was extremely grateful to Vinnie for writing that letter, and always will be. (I love ya, Big Vin!)

  After the tour was over, I spent the holidays with my family, then began to pack my bags for my trip to the Czech Republic. As soon as I had been indicted, plans had been made for an early return to Prague to prepare for my trial, and the time of that return was fast approaching. A few days before I was due to leave the United States, I felt a great, formless fear that had been welling up inside of me for months finally take shape and burst to the surface of my consciousness. I realized that somewhere amongst my things, I probably had a journal with an entry dated May 24, 2010, the day of our show in Prague. I had felt this fear flitting around the corner of my mind for quite some time now, but it hadn’t shown its face yet. Or maybe it had, and I was repressing it, afraid of what I would find when I faced it. I don’t know. I do know that I was standing in my backyard when I was possessed with a simultaneously overwhelming and extremely frightening urge to find this journal, for I was certain it existed. I had even detailed how I had done some writing on that day during my interrogation by the Czech police. I knew if I found a written record of what had happened on May 24, 2010, it might jar my memory; and if that memory was one of me intentionally harming the deceased young man, I would have to plead guilty once I arrived in Prague. And even though I was 99 percent certain I hadn’t been drinking that day, if I had somehow been mistaken and the entry contained a reference to me being drunk onstage, I would have to plead guilty as well, or at the very least tell the court I had been intoxicated and honestly didn’t know what my actions had been. The thought of both of those things occurring scared the shit out of me, but I had no choice. I had sworn to myself I would do the right thing, and I would. I had to take responsibility for my actions, no matter the consequence, even if I didn’t remember performing those actions. So I went into my study, found the box I kept all of my old lyric notebooks and journals in, and dug around until I found one with entries from that time period. Sure enough, there were a few paragraphs of writing under the date of our show. I took a deep breath, sat down and read what I had written two and a half years previously.

  As I read the journal, I felt both immense relief and deep sadness. The first half of the entry detailed how sick and tired I was of being on the road, of the loud party atmosphere that surrounded it, and (most tellingly) of my own drinking. I had written it early in the day, drinking coffee and sitting in the doorway of the club as it rained, just as I had told the police. The first half of the entry concluded with a note that I was about to head into Old Town Prague with our drummer and merch guy, exactly as I had recalled during my interrogation. Overall, despite my exhaustion from the tour and with myself, the first few paragraphs were fairly upbeat; I was clearheaded, looking forward to going home, and maybe even putting a stop to my increasingly painful drinking. I got the feeling reading it that I knew my boozing days were coming to an end (as indeed they would roughly four months later). But the rest of that day’s writing was significantly darker in tone.

  I had taken pen to paper again several hours after the show, right before we were about to pull away from Prague and head to Poland. I wrote of how I had just come off stage that evening when I had received the phone call from our publicist Maria informing me that Paul Gray had died. I wrote about how I hadn’t even felt like drinking at all that day, until after the show when I got the sad news my friend was gone. I wrote of taking a few shots in his honor a few hours after the show was over, and about how sour they had tasted in my mouth. I wrote about how awful the show had been, how crappy the club was, about how there was no security. I angrily detailed how there had been kids onstage throughout the show, and about how they flatly refused to take the hint that we didn’t want them onstage. In very foul language, I wrote about a young blond man who kept on jumping on stage again and again, until I finally put him down on the stage, my hand around his throat. I wrote of how I had watched him fly from the stage a few times during poorly executed stage dives. Finally, I wrote of how glad I was that that terrible, terrible day was finally over. I wrote it all sounding very, very disgusted with the crowd, the show, and life itself. It was not a pleasant journal entry.

  Reading the entry, I was relieved that not only had I not been drunk that day, but hadn’t had a drink at all until well after the show. Looking over the small, tight, block letter handwriting that spelled out my emotions of sorrow, disgust, and anger at the senseless death of my friend Paul, sadness came again into my heart as I thought for the hundredth time of how I would never get to see him again. But reading the journal did not jar my memory in the slightest. I did not suddenly recall pushing anyone from the stage. The journal had not solved any mysteries for me.

  On January 19, 2013, my wife drove me to Washington DC’s Dulles airport. I met Jeff Cohen there, and we flew to Frankfurt, Germany, from there catching a connecting flight to Prague. In two and a half weeks, my trial would begin.

  It was time to get ready.

  chapter eighteen

  I could write another entire book about the month I spent in Prague preparing for court then going to trial, but it would not be a volume recounting the exhaustive preparations my lawyers and I made, nor would it be a detailed, blow-by-blow record of the actual court proceedings. This sort of writing is beyond both my interest and my grasp, as I am not a fan of courtroom dramas, nor did I understand much of what occurred as it happened—to a degree, I still do not. The process of getting ready for the trial, then the six days I spent in the Prague Municipal Court building were exhausting, boring, frustrating, terrifying, and (for the most part) very, very confusing. In fact, if I had to use just one word to encapsulate the entire experience of my legal ordeal, it would be just that: confusing. It was like watching a very scary movie being made about my life, except that the scriptwriter had penned all the expository dialogue necessary for plot comprehension in the incomprehensible Czech tongue. Listening to judges, witnesses, and attorneys speak in the courtroom, every single English word I heard was layered over a simultaneous and rapidly moving foundation of Czech, since all of my information was first filtered through a translator’s brain. Over and over I would interrupt the translator to ask, “Wait, what did he just say?” following an unsatisfactory explanation of some potentially crucial statement made. Meanwhile, as the translator re-explained things to me, the judge or witness or attorney had already moved on to the next topic. Things got lost in the mix all the time. It was immensely difficult to follow along without constantly asking for clarification from my translator, and I was only able to catch the general gist of the trial proceedings as they occurred—at the end of each day, my Czech attorneys would explain to me what in the hell had just happened in there. In order to write a legal thriller based on my trial, I would need a complete tra
nscript of the entire thing translated into English, hundreds of pages long. I do not have one of those, so that sort of book is off the table (thank God). But I could easily fill pages and pages with my perception of Prague itself, formed as I researched its history and learned my way around during hours of solo wanderings through the city’s labyrinthine heart. The time I spent wandering the city’s snow covered streets, alleyways, riverbank, and innumerable squares was pure magic. I fell completely in love with the city; for it is, indeed, a magical place.

  Exiting the plane after Jeff and I had landed in the Czech Republic, I looked to the end of the creepily familiar glass-walled jetway, half-expecting to see a phalanx of machine gun–toting masked men waiting for me. Thankfully my arrival into the country seemed to have gone unnoticed by the authorities this time, and we gathered our luggage from the baggage pick-up area without incident, then hopped into a pre-arranged sedan driven by a pleasant faced Czech man who spoke passable English. Leaving the airport, I noticed that everything was covered in a blanket of fresh snow, and as we made our way towards Prague proper I saw heavily bundled people on cross country skis zipping along through the fields that ran beside the highway. Winter was in full effect in the Czech Republic, and it wore a much different face than the relatively mild months of cold I spent as a native of the Virginia and North Carolina lowlands. Stepping out of the car to pick up our apartment keys from a rental agency situated on the Vltava River just outside Old Town, I could see my breath thick as pipe smoke in the air, and I was glad that I had dressed for the frigid climate accordingly. I was well insulated in a scarf, long underwear, Adidas tactical boots, ski gloves, a woolen knit cap festooned with penguins from Phillip Island, Australia, and a heavy German army parka I had acquired in Berlin on one particularly frigid tour. Except for the gray penguin cap, everything I had on was black. Not that this was out of the ordinary for me, but I always felt less conspicuous in black, better able to fade into the shadows. This was a feeling I highly desired at the time—I wished to remain unnoticed by both authorities and press until the trial started. Then I would have no choice in the matter.

  After collecting the apartment keys, we jumped back into the car, and riding through the impossibly narrow streets towards the center of the city, the magic atmosphere that hangs over Prague began to take hold.

  “Jesus Christ, this is crazy. Look at this place—I feel like we’re in a James Bond movie or something,” Jeff said as we made our way down the winding, high-walled cobblestone streets. Looking around at the famous city so vastly different than my own, I had to agree. The roadways were clogged with local pedestrians hurrying to reach their destinations, as well as large numbers of slow-moving tourists. The locals seemed to sense our vehicle approaching from behind, seamlessly stepping out of the way without breaking stride; the tourists often required a honk of the very European-sounding car horn. They stood awkwardly in the middle of the street as tourists do in every destination city across the globe, consulting guidebook maps wet with snow, and gawking at various pieces of the ubiquitous historical architecture that make up the body of Prague. Prague is a year-round tourist destination, for her grandeur is protean and not diminished with the passing of any one season. Like a classically beautiful woman, picking her outfit from an immaculately appointed wardrobe according to the weather, Prague wears the seasons equally well. Recognizing a few landmarks from my one walk through the city a few years previously, I could clearly remember how lovely the town had been in the early summer, and it was just as breathtaking in the middle of winter. It is a testament to Prague’s magnificence that even though my reason for being in the city was one of the worst possible, and despite the constant bone-chilling cold and slate gray skies (I remember seeing the sun come out a total of three times), I never once tired of walking her streets during my entire month-long return. During that time, I came to realize a person could easily spend a few lifetimes within the city limits and still not learn all her secrets. Prague has served as muse to countless artists, musicians, and writers over the centuries, and I would heed her gothic call, attempting to capture some of her mystery through the lens of my camera on my nightly sojourns through her frost coated byways.

  The claustrophobic streets of one of the great capitals of Europe surrounding us were not the only thing that made Jeff’s Bond movie comment ring true. The last time I had ridden through the streets of Prague, I had been on the way to the airport, fleeing the country before the prosecuting attorney discovered my release and had me thrown back in prison. Now I was back, once again attempting to move through the city unnoticed, and the furtive nature of my return gave the whole trip an air of espionage. I felt like a hunted man on a dangerous mission, one with a high probability of a disastrous outcome—and of course, when I thought about the nature of our trip and the stakes at hand, I was. I wanted to remain invisible, lost in the city’s million or so souls, but soon people would, in fact, be hunting me—not long after we arrived in Prague, Martin would inform me that people from the newspapers had started to call him after hearing rumors that I had been sighted on the city’s streets. He told the press that I would not be in the Czech Republic until my trial began, but it is the business of reporters to dig and to snoop; and if they are any good at their jobs they remain skeptical and open-eyed at all times. I did my best to maintain a low profile as I went about town, but every second I spent outside during the daylight hours held anxiety for me. The last thing I needed were reporters yelling questions in broken English as they followed me to my apartment, taking photos of where I lived, and generally drawing attention to my whereabouts. I didn’t think the prosecutor would have me jailed again now that I had returned for trial, but I couldn’t be certain. Plus, the added stress of paparazzi during a time when I needed to remain absolutely focused was something I hoped to avoid altogether. Better to be safe than sorry, so when I walked around the city in the daytime, I kept my scarf wrapped around my face and my cap pulled down low—luckily, even during the warmest part of the day, the weather warranted both most of the time.

  I did most of my wanderings at night though, when the streets were less crowded, and the few people walking them would be more inclined to steer clear of a grim-looking six-foot-tall man dressed in black. Many people are afraid of the streets at night. I am not; I actually feel safer in the city after dark, able to maneuver easier without the crowds (and disappear quickly if need be). Plus, I do not look or move like a rich and clueless tourist wandering lost somewhere he shouldn’t be at night—I look and move like the guy the tourist should be worried about running into, so people generally avoid me at night. This made for some very peaceful walks, which greatly helped to clear my head after a long and confusing day of going over the myriad aspects of my case. In most any city, what often looks banal under the light of the sun takes on a dark majesty at night, but in Prague, this effect is amplified a thousandfold. It’s like the city’s architects had drawn their plans with intent to maximize the city’s otherworldly nocturnal ambience. Prague would make the perfect setting for a vampire novel, and there are many legends of them in the Czech Republic; even a few medieval-era “vampire cemeteries” have been discovered, filled with corpses dismembered and weighted with stones to prevent the (unlucky) suspected vampires from rising from their graves. Although I didn’t happen upon any undead in my travels, the spooky atmosphere of the city at night heightened the enjoyment of my walks, and I treasured the solitude these journeys provided. No one recognized me in the night, even after my trial had begun, and I was relaxed most of the time as I strolled the dark streets.

  However, I was recognized within my first hour of being in the Czech Republic, instantly setting the tone for all my daytime paranoia that was to follow. As we pulled to the end of a narrow side street named Karlova, two blocks west of Old Town Square, our driver announced that we had arrived. As we removed our bags from the car, he turned to me and said, “You are Randy, yes? I wish you good luck with the court.” This immediately
freaked me out, but I thanked him as Jeff slipped him a very healthy tip in the hopes of ensuring our anonymity in the city. The man seemed sincere, and I was touched by his kind words despite the case of the jitters they gave me. Although I was pretty wound up over getting recognized so quickly, I soon calmed down for the most part—I should have guessed I couldn’t expect to get away with going totally unnoticed in a country where my face was on the front pages of newspapers throughout the land just a few months prior. Still, the encounter had put me firmly on edge, as I had no idea of what public opinion was concerning my case. I could only hope that the people would pay attention to the fact that I had returned and was a man of my word, not whatever drivel Blesk would print once they discovered I was in the Czech Republic.

  It is an odd and horrible feeling to be a well-known foreigner living in a country as you await trial, charged with causing the death of one of its citizens. For the most part, the general population only knows of you in one capacity—as the accused killer of a native son. You are an unfinished news story, and a very unpleasant one at that. A simple trip to the grocery store or coffee shop is riddled with unease and paranoia. Every person that looks your way in the check-out line, however innocuous their glance may be, feels like judge and juror. The court of public opinion has no physical seat, and the only way to avoid feeling the sting of its judgment is to remain out of view. I suppose I could have remained secluded in our apartment the entire time until my trial began, but it is not in my nature to submit to agoraphobic fear and hide from the world, so I came and went as I pleased. I did not have a single problem with any Czech citizen, even the few that did recognize me when my scarf happened to be pulled down from my face, but it was a constant test of my nerves every time I left the apartment. As in prison, I did not know who would have already decided I was a guilty man, take exception to my presence, and decide to express their displeasure, in a physical manner or otherwise. I wouldn’t hide, but I was prepared for anything to happen every time I went out in public. It was a long and heavy month.