Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  I don’t have the foggiest idea why I’m an alcoholic. To tell you the truth, I don’t really care—it’s not important to me in the slightest. Knowing what has made me this way has absolutely zero practical application in my immediate life. If I walked outside and one of the Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes that live around here lit me up, I wouldn’t stand around moping and staring at the snake for one damn millisecond, wondering, “Why has this happened? Could I have prevented this? Why, oh God, why me?”—my ass would be gone faster than a toupee in a hurricane and on my way to a hospital. Maybe I should have been more careful, but it’s a little bit late for that now, isn’t it? I can’t undo that snake bite anymore than I can undo my alcoholism, but I can treat both, survive, and live to be happy if I catch it in time. Booze in my bloodstream is just as deadly to me as Diamondback venom—it just takes longer, hurts more people, and makes me act a whole lot weirder. There has been a long-running nature vs. nurture debate on the topic of alcoholism and addiction; while that ever shifting dialogue may be of interest to scientists and sociologists (of which I am neither), it’s not much help in keeping me sober right in this very instant. Since my life has seemed to consist of one long connected chain of this-very-instants, many of them extremely drunken this-very-instants, I don’t have time to worry about the hows and whys of my alcoholism—I have to live in the present moment and think about what I’m actually going to do about my alcoholism. Besides, the academics haven’t been able to come up with a proven answer to the cause of alcoholism for as long as there has been alcohol, which is longer than we have had written language (what scientists and archeologists have proved is that mankind was fermenting alcoholic beverages as far back as the Stone Age). Maybe one day they will know why some people become slobbering belligerent Cro-Magnons after they drink while others can take it or leave it, but to my knowledge it’s still got them stumped. If the highly trained brainiacs busting up the human genetic code under their zillion-dollar terminator microscopes haven’t been able to figure it out, then why should I bother taxing what few brain cells I have left rolling around in my knotty head in a futile quest for the answer why?

  Of course I have wondered about it from time to time, but I don’t have any alcoholism that I know of in my immediate family, excluding my great-grandfather who blew his brains out on his front porch with a shotgun. I have been there myself, in fact have pointed a loaded twelve gauge at my head at time or two. I suppose I didn’t have the guts to do it, or some small sane part my sodden brain reached out through the madness and reminded me that someone would have to clean up the mess I had made. Perhaps some malevolent gene with a fondness for alcohol and firearms came down from my Irish great-grandfather, perhaps not. My brothers don’t seem to have a problem with booze. If it’s genetics, then I suppose I won the lottery. I was not abused as a child, I did not grow up in an alcoholic home, and although I have suffered some pretty extreme trauma in my life, I was already drinking alcoholically before the heavy-duty shit really hit the fan. Plus, I know people who were severely abused as children, did have alcoholic parents, grew up in an insane environment, and have gone through things far worse than I did before they ever hit puberty . . . yet they can enjoy a drink without becoming a menace to themselves and others. They can take it or leave it. They can drink just one or two beers, then walk away with an enjoyable feeling and not need more.

  I do not understand this way of thinking or being. Not at all.

  I always need more.

  Always.

  Admittedly, the business I am in is very conducive to nurturing a good case of alcoholism. Booze and drugs are plentiful and often free. And fans often want to buy you a drink, or give you drugs, so that they may experience your company for a while. While the vast majority of these fans are just cool people who want to show you their appreciation for your music with a cold drink, maybe a joint or a bump of the old booger sugar, some are psychic vampires who will do anything to say they hung out with you, to try and worm their way into your life. They do not care about you, if you live or die—they just want to live vicariously through you for a bit. These are the worst sort for an alcoholic or drug addict musician, because you will do anything to get what your addiction wants, including letting these people into your life. These are not your friends, these are not your true fans, they are cancer to people like me.

  So the music industry has a lot of partying, easily accessed free drugs and booze, and very little restraints on behavior, and almost no level of accountability to any sort of boss. As long as you can get on stage or into the studio and still do your job, no one in the business really cares. You are a cash cow. Milk ’em ’til their dead, cut ’em up, grill the remains on a barbecue of re-releases, and move on to the next young calf. So party ’til you drop, right?

  If the music industry is such a bad environment, then why isn’t everyone who ever stepped on a stage a rampaging drug addict or drunk? Because despite the fact that this book is being written by an alcoholic musician, and despite the fact that many books written by my musician friends deal with alcoholism and addiction, not every musician is a booze-soaked drug addled mess. I know many folks who do this for a living who can drink normally, and I don’t think there is a single thing wrong with drinking if you can do it normally and in moderation. Hell, I don’t think there is anything wrong with getting rip-roaring drunk and making a jackass out of yourself every now and then, as long as you don’t drive or hurt anyone else while you’re doing it. Sometimes a proper, good-old-skull-splitting-dry-heaving-oh-god-I-swear-I’ll-never-drink-again-if-you-just-make-this-stop hangover is actually beneficial to normal folks—they get painfully reminded why they can’t party like that every night, they feel like crap for a couple of days, so they do the logical thing and take a break until next year’s National Amateur Hour rolls around (St. Paddy’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, New Years Eve, etc.) and maybe, maybe they cut loose again. That sort of drinking behavior (moderately sensible) sounds pretty painless compared to the way I guzzled almost daily. But since the laws of good literature require a story to have some sort of conflict, and I suppose since we have become a society of casualty vampires who love nothing more than watching a good train wreck, no one is interested in reading a book by a musician who writes “I have two beers every three days or so on average. I don’t wreck my car, get arrested, or try to catch my girlfriend’s house on fire at least once a year. I’m a mellow, well-adjusted guy.”

  Boring. But these guys do exist. Lots of them. I know plenty of them, and they do the same thing I do for a living. There is a world of other people in occupations far more stressful than mine who can drink normally too. But some people who will never have to work a day in their life, who grew up lacking nothing, are just as crazy and miserable on the polished teak deck of their yacht once they climb into a thousand dollar bottle of Merlot as the dirtiest bum sipping a pint of Thunderbird in a piss-stained trench coat under a bridge. They are one and the same, and they are just like me. Alcoholism does not discriminate due to race, color, creed, religion, economic status, age, sex, sexual preference, political inclination, spiritual beliefs, upbringing, morality—none of it. Alcoholism descends on murderous black wings upon whomever it so chooses. It’s a mystery.

  So, if I can’t blame my genetics, my parents, my job, my wife, or even God (yes, I believe in God, for lack of a better term; but the God I believe in doesn’t want me to kill myself with booze) for my alcoholism, then who do I blame?

  No one. It just is. I can’t even sink into a good session of self-loathing and blame myself, because I don’t believe I made myself this way. I certainly drank myself to a point where I was completely out of control, and I have no one to blame for that but myself. But I would have stopped far before I did if I could have—God knows I tried and failed for years. Years. As a child, I never said, “I want to be an alcoholic and fuck my life all to hell when I grow up.” I never wanted to be this way—but I am.

  We do the best we can with the car
ds we’re dealt. I got cut a bad hand with a pickled joker in it, and I held onto him for way too long. I finally folded, cut my losses, and left the table. But the deadly game goes on, and it’s a game I can’t win, so I better not gamble anymore, not if I want to live. I told my wife the other day that if I ever start drinking again, she should leave me as fast as she can, and don’t ever look back. I also told her that if I die from drinking, I want her to tell anyone that asks what happened to me this:

  “He was a drunk. He used to be sober, but he decided to screw it up, so it killed him. He knew better.”

  That’s how I want it to go down if things go South. That’s the uncut shit right there, the raw truth, and now y’all know it, too. Today though, I don’t think I’ll die. Today, I think I’ll live.

  How about you?

  chapter five

  As soon as Lucie, the blond-haired police woman, was out the door I lit another cigarette and started doing the doomsday math. Five to ten years. I was forty-one years old. Assuming the worst happened and I wound up serving ten whole years of my life, I would probably be fifty-two by the time I got out of prison—I tacked on a year for the time it would take for this thing to get through trial. Fifty-two years old—I could do that. I could do ten years in prison. I know men who have done a lot longer, and have a good life now. Assuming I survived prison, I wouldn’t be a senior citizen by the time I got out of jail. I could write in prison, the endless touring cycle would be over for a while, I would have plenty of time to churn out a few books. I could do this. I was tough enough.

  I began to think about what my life would be like as a fifty-two-year-old ex-con, freshly released from a Czech prison. Would I have sketchy tattoos, maybe a knife scar down the side of my face? Would I have somehow developed a limp or a bad Czech accent? Would my singing voice still be there, beaten to hell no doubt by ten years of hand rolled Czech cigarettes, but serviceable enough to do a reunion tour and make a little cash to start my life over with? Would my band still be in any shape to play, much less interested? What in the hell would the music climate be like in ten years anyway? Would our fans still even care enough to show up to see a bunch of old men with a freaked out jail bird front man wheeze through a set? What about my mind? Would being institutionalized that long break me? Would I walk out of prison a shattered, bitter man, unfit for society? I had just started to become a whole human being in the last two years—what would prison do to that man? What about my wife? Oh, God, my wife. Ten long years waiting on a husband in a prison on the other side of the Atlantic. I couldn’t ask her to do that, no way. She was still in her thirties, she could meet someone else, and maybe they could build a new life together and have children. I didn’t want her to turn into a lonely resentful woman after all the hell I had already put her through with my drinking. I wanted her to be happy, she didn’t deserve anymore pain because of me, I would have to let her go, it was the only right thing to do . . .

  After a minute I realized that I was doing exactly what I wasn’t supposed to be doing in my current situation—freaking out. I have a terrible tendency to awfulize things. My mind loves to predict horrific outcomes to events that have yet to happen, and in reality will almost certainly never occur, at least not in the order of the ludicrously self-centered chain of events that unfold so rapidly in my head. Almost anything can set my mind racing towards an ego-riddled doomsday. Within a matter of seconds, I can mentally chart a progression starting with me neglecting to cut my front lawn and ending in global nuclear catastrophe—and I do mean within seconds. Having a highly active imagination is not always a blessing, I assure you. Despite the fact that there was some very real, very heavy-duty negative stimulus at the moment, I knew that if I let it run the show in my head I was done for. It would only be a matter of time before I would say or do something stupid and my prophecies would become self-fulfilling. I quieted the doom monkeys in my head by silently saying the words I would repeat more times than I cared to remember in the course of the next year:

  You better square yourself away, and you better do it PDQ, soldier. People have been through a lot worse than this and come out okay, so stop whining, shut up, pay attention, be patient, and we’ll see what your next move will be.

  I took my own advice and looked over at Alex. My face must have betrayed the shit show running through my head, because a sly smile painted his lips. So far the Czechs didn’t seem too big on displays of emotion, but his tiny smirking grin was enough to light a fire under my ass. Fuck him—he wouldn’t see me freak out again, no way.

  “Hey, chief, I need to call my lawyer. Can I have my cell phone for a minute?” I said.

  “Chief? That is not my name,” he said, looking confused and slightly annoyed.

  “I know that. I just need my cellphone, if that’s okay. I need to call my lawyer back home.”

  Alex sighed and handed me my phone.

  “Thanks, chief.” I was gratified to see his puzzled scowl return.

  I hit the power button on my phone and looked at its screen. My battery was almost dead, showing a 10-percent charge. Crap. This was going to have to be fast and efficient. I opened my address book and dialed my band’s lawyer, Jeff Cohen. Jeff is an entertainment lawyer who has been with us for most of our career. He is not a criminal attorney, but he is an extraordinarily smart man and I knew he would set the ball in motion to get me competent representation. Jeff picked up on the first ring and I heard his rapid voice come blasting through the phone.

  “Okay, Randy, what the fuck is going on over there? Are you all right?”

  “Hi, Jeff. I’m fine, but I’m in jail in Prague, and from what I can gather, they are going to charge me with manslaughter. I need a lawyer, and I need one now.”

  “I’ve already called the embassy, they gave me a list of names, and I’m working on getting you an attorney right now. I’ll call you back in five minutes,” Jeff said, “Don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t, bro. Call me.”

  I hung up the phone. Thank God someone else was trying to do something, because at the moment all I could do was sit there with Alex staring at me while I smoked my last few cigarettes. I looked at him.

  “Well, my lawyer in America is making some calls to lawyers here—he’s trying to contact them right now. He will call me right back.” I said.

  “This advocate, he speaks Czech?” Alex asked.

  “No, but he will find a lawyer who speaks English.”

  “Czech is very difficult language. Perhaps you should let soud give you advocate.”

  “Soud? What is a soud?” A suspicion rose inside me—whatever a soud was, it probably wasn’t my best source for an attorney referral.

  “The soud. The people who will hear what you will say about this incident,” he said, mimicking a person sitting behind a desk and banging a gavel.

  I did laugh in his face this time—I just couldn’t stop myself. My pal Alex wanted me to accept a court appointed lawyer. For a manslaughter trial. In a foreign country. Every time this cop spoke, I felt better and better about the situation, because he provided soothing, if unintended, comedic relief.

  “A court-appointed lawyer? For this? No thanks. I’ll wait for my attorney back home to hire me one.”

  “You must have advocate by 8:00 tomorrow morning, or soud will give you one.”

  Being unfamiliar with the Czech legal process, I could only assume that Alex was telling me the truth, and that I had better get my own lawyer asap or else God only knew what kind of attorney I would wind up with. I looked at my phone and its rapidly shrinking battery indicator. Jeff had better get back to me soon.

  “My American lawyer will have someone for me by 7:30, no problem. He’s making the calls right now,” I assured a skeptical-looking Alex.

  “This will be difficult, very difficult; but it is your time. You are supposed to be in Germany for concert in two days I hear. To not have an advocate . . . this could make this impossible, I think. The soud will give you advocate very q
uick. It will be very good advocate. Then you can go to Germany,” he replied.

  “Yes, you’re right; it is my time, and I think I will wait until I get my own lawyer. And I don’t believe I’ll be going to Germany anyway, so let’s just forget about that.”

  Soon an officer came into the holding cell with a cordless phone in his hand, and gave it to me. It was a man from the American embassy.

  “Hello, David, how are you doing?” he asked.

  “Not so great. I’m in jail and I’m not really sure what’s going on. Are y’all going to send someone over here?” I asked. That seemed to be what always happened in the movies—some sort of representative from the embassy eventually arrived to visit the frightened Yank who happened to wind up in some dingy Third World cell, either by accident or due to getting busted at the airport after foolishly taping a few kilos of high-quality, low-cost, locally produced narcotics to their belly. The embassy person always reassured the imprisoned American that they would have them out of there quickly, as soon as the appropriate palms were greased or whatever. I wondered what my embassy guy would look like.