Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  Stay calm. Stay calm.

  “I believe that,” she continued in a flat voice. “Tomorrow you will be interrogated. Your friends will come here in the morning to answers questions as well.” This woman wasn’t trying to intimidate me. She did not have to.

  “Where are my friends? Are they under arrest, too?”

  “No, they are not under arrest. They are at a hotel. In Prague.”

  “So I am spending the night here, correct?”

  She nodded.

  “When will I be released?”

  She shrugged.

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  Like Alex, she looked slightly amused that I would bother to ask her this question.

  “Lucie.”

  “So, Lucie, am I being charged with murder?”

  “No, you are not being charged with murder.”

  “Do you know the word manslaughter?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Yes, I do. It is something like this.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly. There was not much else to talk about until I saw a lawyer. This was pretty bad. This was very bad.

  Lucie stood over me looking down. She stared into my eyes for a second and then spoke softly.

  “Would you like to know the penalty for this crime?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Time slowed down again as I stared right back in her eyes.

  Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm.

  “Five to ten years,” she said through a slight smile, then turned and walked out of the cell.

  It was the first hint of emotion I had seen her display.

  Fuck.

  chapter four

  As I sit here at my writing desk in my rented house by the sea, remembering the sad chain of events that led me to write this book, I can look out the window on a clear day and catch a glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean that I love so much. Literally as far back as my memory goes, I have cherished my time near her, and longed to navigate her currents and ride her waves when I am away. Two islands over from the one I sit on writing this, I saw the ocean for the first time as a very young child. My family went there after church one Sunday, and my mother says that as soon as I laid my four-year-old eyes on the huge swelling blue landscape in front of me, I charged fearlessly toward it, still in my tiny polyester church clothes, and crashed laughing into the waves. Nothing has changed in my forty-two years; I always feel the most serene by the shore, for the ocean is the eternal healer to me. I love to walk the beach at night, alone or with family or friends, especially my mother, who loves it as much or more than I do. We walk and listen to the tides, discuss our lives, look at the stars and wonder at the immensity of the heavens, and breathe the salt air, grateful to live near nature’s most magnificent creation. The ocean is life itself, and to lay footprints in its sands is an act of prayer.

  The last few days have been very foggy here. Even when I step onto my front porch, I can see nothing but the low white mist that covers this island. The row of houses across the street is partially obscured by a diaphanous shroud, and the immense sea a block beyond them has completely disappeared into solid fog, like a dove folded beneath a magician’s handkerchief. On my porch in my rusted thrift store rocking chair, I can still hear the waves rolling as the tide goes out, and if I sniff the air I can smell the salt on the winds of a nor’easter as they blow against my skin. I can smell the rich loam of the salt marsh behind my house where I throw my cast net for bait fish and shrimp to put food in my belly. I am surrounded on all sides by water, water that soothes my soul, water that can provide me with all I need. I can hear it, feel it, smell it, and if I cook the shrimp waiting in an iced bucket in my refrigerator, I will taste it. But today I cannot see it at all—it might as well not be there, unless I get up from this chair, leave this house, and walk to it. My ocean is a vanished lover, hiding through the fog just two blocks away, calling to me to walk to her for relief, even as I sit here in sadness and write.

  For many, many years, my life as an active alcoholic was just like today. I was surrounded by life, things and people that could have brought me great joy, grand opportunities I wasted because I sat in a haze of alcohol, drugs, and sadness. I simply would not and could not get up and walk a few blocks through the fog back to freedom and life. Often when I meet people for the first time today, they tell me how glad they are I am finally free and clear after all my experiences in the Czech Republic. They usually say something along the lines of “Thank God you are done with all that. That must have been hell, man.” These experiences humble me, and I feel a great swell of love for these people. I am grateful for their kindness, but I often want to tell them:

  “That was nothing. I have been to hell before. I kept an apartment there for a few decades. Getting arrested, going to prison, the trial—all of it—was like a vacation compared to a couple of other things I’ve lived through.”

  That may sound overly dramatic, but I mean those words with every fiber of my being. I’ve been through two particular circles of hell before, and while I didn’t emerge unscathed, I’m still here to tell the tale, so I think I will just in case my experience can somehow help someone roasting in my old subterranean stomping grounds have a little hope to get out. The first circle of my hell is my alcoholism, or as I like to oh-so-delicately call it when I personify it, The Motherfucker. Let’s have a gander at that charming bastard, shall we?

  As I wrote earlier, my alcoholism is a far more important part of my life than my occupation. My alcoholism defines me in a way my job could never even hope to. My job is not me, despite what a lot of people seem to think. I can, and one day probably will, walk away from my job when it’s run its course to a happy, dignified end. Or, like a very loud, very hairy, very unsexy group marriage gone terribly awry, when I decide I can no longer tolerate being married to four other men whom I love but can’t be with anymore because I am planning to smother them all in their sleep. Then I will storm out after one final epic fire-breathing conniption fit, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah. Either way, once I’m done with my band, whether it be amiable (and I hope it is) or during one of our famously turbulent moments, I will no longer be the singer of lamb of god. I will do something else; re-invent myself in whatever image I wish, hopefully something a whole lot quieter and a great deal more peaceful.

  I can’t wait for the day when a long-haired kid in a black t-shirt with some band’s name printed on an illegible font on it comes up to me and says, “DUDE! Aren’t you Randy from lamb of god? Holy fuck, it is you! I freakin’ love ‘Sacrament,’ why don’t you guys write more songs like ‘Redne-’”

  “I’m sorry, my son, but you are mistaken,” I will gently interrupt with a far away look in my eyes, stroking my greying beard in a soothing manner, “It is true, I was once that man, but that was many moons ago. Now I am but a simple fisherman, quietly living out the last of his days by the sea, listening for the wisdom the trade winds whisper to those with open ears. Now I must bid you adieu, but here—have a tomato from my garden. Go in peace, my son, and make your own metal, for I am no longer of that realm.” Then I will turn, gather up my robe (because every wise old man wears a robe) and hobble slowly away down the beach, leaning heavily on my extremely ornate driftwood walking stick. That will be nice. So nice.

  Regrettably, I can’t just gently inform my alcoholism that I am no longer an alcoholic, hand it a ripe tomato, and walk away down the beach. I can’t break up with my alcoholism when the romance is over—that died ages ago, and it will never sign the divorce papers. I can’t even get all pissed off at it and say, “Look here, you motherfucker, listen up: I’ve had enough of your bullshit, I’m done with it; so adios, you soul-crushing, pernicious sumbitch!”, flick it the bird, then ride off into the sunset in my truck, blasting Black Flag’s My War and feeling pretty damn awesome. I never get to be a “not-an-alcoholic.” I will always be an alcoholic. Always. I view everything through its bloodshot eyes. Everything. My alcoholism will be wit
h me until the day I die, and it will go to the grave with me. My band, my friends, my family, my wife—none of them will be there, peering up at the coffin lid, waiting for the worm party to begin, but my alcoholism will be, finally asleep forever just like me, resting in my pickled bones. I haven’t had a drink in a hot minute, but if I do not keep my alcoholism in remission, simply by abstaining, it will put me in that grave a whole lot sooner than I wish. It will kill me—of this I am absolutely certain. I am not certain I will remain sober the rest of my life, because my alcoholism is a sneaky bastard, but I am certain that if I drink, I will die.

  My health, even while I was drinking, has always been pretty robust. I have a rather large tolerance for pain. This is a blessing and curse. Because it wasn’t until I was in so much pain it was either kill myself or go on drinking to my death that I finally got sober. It took me twenty-two years of drinking and drugging to finally get enough of that pain. Twenty-two years of fighting a nebulous foe that I just couldn’t beat. I drank a lot. A whole lot.

  But that is not what makes me an alcoholic, I believe. What makes me an alcoholic is the fact that when I take a drink, just one drink, I have absolutely zero idea of what is going to happen next, except that I am going to drink more, and I am going to drink until I’m done. Anything else I may or may not do is a mystery to everyone, especially me. Some people have very fond memories of partying with me, because I could be a whole lot of fun to drink with at times. I could be pleasant and funny. I could be very charming and generous, generally to a fault. I could certainly make a lot of people laugh, both with and at me. Or, alternately, I could suddenly decide that someone was looking at me funny, and decide to punch them in the face. I could suddenly become argumentative over apparently nothing. I could decide that it was a good idea to steal something for some odd reason. I could decide to start breaking things. I could decide that I could jump from some insane height and be okay. I could decide that even though I was seeing three of everything, I was fine to get behind the wheel of a car and endanger my life, the life of anyone stupid/drunk enough to get in the car with me, and the lives of anyone unlucky enough to be on the roads near me at that time. I could decide to become suddenly very cruel, emotionally and even physically abusive, treating you lower than whale shit, especially if I love you, romantically or otherwise.

  I could decide to do all of these things, and in fact I have, over and over again. I am not proud of many, many things I have done. I do not deny them, but I sure as hell do not sit on my weeping ass in a useless ball of self-loathing remorse anymore, either. Why? Because I cannot help anyone else with this same problem that almost killed me if I am consumed by guilt over my past, the key word being my. How egotistical and self-absorbed! To not help others who are lost and suffering, because I am too busy wallowing in shame over the past like a pig in shit inside a filthy pen with an open door. The past is the past, and what’s done is done. I can’t change that, but I can try to help someone else like me, and part of helping that person is letting them know I understand them, because I do—I understand every single alcoholic and drug addict that has ever walked the face of the earth, no matter what their circumstances are, because in our particular illness, we are all the exact same. I understand them in a way that the smartest addiction expert with a million Ivy League degrees hanging on his office wall will never know, if he is not of my tribe. I know the alcoholic and the addict like I know myself. To help them (because we are a very closed-off bunch), I have to let them know that I was just like them or worse. I must never forget or deny where I come from.

  So I remember, and I talk about it to people like myself.

  Always waking up with a terrible hangover and dread, a horrid feeling of impending doom hovering like a kamikaze pilot circling over my head. After a certain point in my drinking career I knew something was wrong, that I was not living correctly, yet I continued to drag myself into the worst places and create the worst situations I could. I had no real regard for anyone’s wants or needs but my own dark impulses. And I fulfilled those impulses, even though I hated myself for doing so and hurting the people who cared the most about me. I did these things over and over, and I hated myself for years because of it. Why in God’s name would any intelligent person in their right mind do these things? Or even a complete idiot who was relatively sane?

  The fact of the matter is that when I drink, I am 100 percent certifiably insane. Hopelessly, utterly, undeniably bat shit crazy. I do things that are abhorrent to me; anathema to my nature, my morals, and my upbringing. And once I start, I cannot stop the craziness. It just spirals on and on, ever downward, until I die or hit rock bottom. And even at rock bottom, despite all evidence that I should stop, I will grab a cold beer and a pick ax and keep digging deeper. It’s insane. The only way I know to not be crazy is just not to drink. It’s amazingly simple, yet it is something I must remind myself of on a daily basis. I don’t like the person I became; I don’t ever want to be that man again. And I don’t have to.

  My alcoholism is no way any sort of excuse for any of my past behaviors. Just because I quit drinking, my life was not suddenly transformed into a tabula rasa—if I have wronged someone, drunk or not, then the responsibility for this lies squarely with me. And I must do my best to set things square with that person. Sometimes that means never contacting that person again. Some people just don’t ever need to hear from me again. I do not blame them. I was an asshole sometimes, there’s no two ways around it.

  And just because I am sober now does not mean anyone else should care. I do not deserve a cookie for finally trying to act like a decent human being. I have been very lucky that most people I have talked to have just said “We are just happy you are okay now, man. Just don’t drink, okay?” I have been told by these people that even in the midst of my craziness, they could see a good person hiding inside me, being beaten down by the booze monster, but struggling to stay alive. I don’t know if that’s the case or if I just picked very kind and forgiving people as friends. Regardless, today I accept responsibility for my actions. All of my actions, past and present. If I hide from this responsibility, then I am being dishonest with myself. And if I can convince myself that I am not to be held accountable for my actions, then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to convincing myself that I can take maybe just one drink.

  Then, from there, after doing as much damage as possible to everything and everyone around me, I will die.

  Today, I do not want to die.

  It has been one of the greatest unexpected joys of my life as a sober man to talk about my past life to friends I have made in sobriety, like I did with my dear buddy Bubble not long ago. I loved hearing him say, “You know, people have told me all these crazy stories about you for years, about what a lunatic you were when you were drinking. I just can’t imagine you being that way. I know you were, but I just can’t see it. I only know you this way, as good old Randy.” I have heard similar words a few times, and while I don’t run away from my past or people in it, it’s nice to start off a friendship without the other person wondering if I am going to do something abominably insane at any second and try to drag them along with me for the ride.

  I am not unique in my alcoholism. No one is. It’s all the same, and I am a garden variety drunk. If you have no understanding of alcoholism or addiction, then you cannot even begin to understand the level at which that all of us are crazy. Absolutely out-to-lunch, call-the-men-in-the-white-coats crazy. If you are unlucky enough to have an active alcoholic or drug addict in your life, you probably don’t understand why your husband or wife or father or neighbor or whoever will not just stop drinking. Or taking pills. Or snorting cocaine. Or shooting dope. Or doing whatever substance it is they are doing that is killing them and killing you, that has changed them into this awful person, that makes them do such strange, self-destructive things. I can tell you why—they are insane. One hundred percent certifiable. And their addiction’s need for drink and/or drugs has twisted their perceptions t
o the point where they do not even know that they are unhinged, that the problem (if they even recognize that they have one) is their addiction. They may even pay it lip service, but they don’t truly know yet, know it in their soul—because if they knew, they would stop. I didn’t know, as ridiculous as it seems. I always used to laugh, “Oh yeah, I am an alcoholic, big surprise—look at what I do for a living, hahaha.” Everyone around wasn’t laughing after a while, though. I was pathetic, just like all the rest of the drunks and addicts. I made it out, but many, many, many of them won’t, and they will die. It happens every hour. That is just a fact.

  I made it out because I finally accepted help when it was offered. I had been offered help before, but I didn’t deign to take it, for I had not had enough pain yet. Pain is the great motivator for me, and I’ve learned all the important lessons in life the hard way. This is because I am bullheaded, and want to do everything on my own. But someone reached out when I was finally hurting bad enough to listen, and I slowly got better with their and many others’ help. I could not get sober on my own, I had to have help, as most of us do. But I had to go through an immense amount of pain first. I’m pretty tough physically and mentally, and I fought a long and bloody battle, but in the end the alcohol beat me like a rented mule. It beat me until I cried out to the universe for mercy with every atom in my being. Then I started to get better.

  I do not know why I was finally able to reach a level of pain that allowed me to quit drinking before I died, yet people I love are still killing themselves all around me. In the last few years I have lost many friends, the majority of whom were in my business, from drinking and drugs. All of them were very nice people. Why did they have to die while I stay alive? Why couldn’t they get the chance to understand what I understand now? Many of them were as smart or smarter than me—couldn’t they see what they were doing to themselves? Probably not. They were crazy, but I was just as crazy—I don’t know why I’m still alive. I should be dead a thousand times over. All I know is that I am here now, so I had better make the most of it and be ready to help my friends when and if they want to get sober. And if not, I will be there to bury them and try to be of some small comfort to their loved ones. Many more people I know will die from drug and alcohol abuse. I know this to be true, because I know a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts, and their odds are not good. I also must help any person that I can who is willing to accept help that I am capable of giving, because people who had never heard my name, who didn’t know me as some rockstar, just as a drunk in pain, helped me to get and stay sober. I owe those people, and I will pay it forward. Otherwise I would be just another self-centered asshole, and I might as well go get drunk and try to forget everything until I kill myself.