I also asked Tomas about how the story of my arrest was being handled in the Czech media; he hesitated: “Not so good, I do not think.” I later found out that “not so good” could be roughly translated as “Murderous American singer comes to Prague to destroy the youth of the Czech Republic, hide your children.”
After we were done talking, I was taken back to the hole and given a sandwich for lunch. I did some pushups in an effort to exercise my body and tire me enough to go back to sleep. I worked up a nice sweat, but slumber eluded me. After another bit of undeterminable time, the guard opened the door again, this time calling out what sounded to me like “See call old g’s.” I knew a few OGs I would have loved to have called at that time, but he didn’t seemed to offering me a phone. I stared at him questioningly, as I had no idea what he wanted, then he motioned impatiently for me to follow him. We returned to the room I had sat with Tomas in earlier. Inside were seated a mousey thirty-ish looking woman in glasses with a MacBook on the table in front of her, a man in a button up shirt and tie about the same age, and Johana, my diminutive translator from the day before. I said hello to Johana and sat at the table next to the man.
“These people are a psychologist and psychiatrist,” she began effortlessly in her slight Czech accent. “They are here to talk to you and perform some tests concerning your mental condition. This is to see if you are mentally stable enough to appear in the court.”
Oh boy. The shrinks have arrived, I thought, This should be interesting. Be careful.
The duo of dome doctors proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions, what I took to be fairly standard shrink fare. First of all, how was I feeling? (Not so hot, my friends. I was just arrested two days ago by a bunch guys in masks toting enough artillery to wipe out a small country and told I had killed someone. Now I’m in jail in a foreign country. How do you think I feel? Got any other head scratchers for me?) Did I know why I was in jail? Was I married? What was my family like? Did I have children? What was my history with alcohol and drugs? Did I want to hurt myself? Did I feel like hurting others? Had I ever been arrested before? Had I ever been institutionalized before? Did I suffer from depression? The woman typed in my answers in her computer, and the man made brief notes on a clipboard. The whole process felt very . . . dry; like I was an over-heating toaster oven they were dissembling in order to find out which parts were still in working order.
I answered these questions honestly (and perhaps a bit too cavalierly), except the one about being institutionalized. I did not deem it wise to fill them in on my little weekend jaunt to the psych ward in my twenties. In retrospect, I believe that was the correct choice, for I could see in their eyes and tell by their mannerisms that they were straining to figure out what little boxes to tick on whatever standardized personality type evaluation test form they were filling out. Telling them about that particular bit of stupidity would have in all likelihood led them to immediately brand me as unstable, or at the very least inherently inclined to violence towards myself or others. It seemed as if they wanted to hurry up and compartmentalize my entire psyche so they could wrap me up in a neat little box and present me to the court like a re-gifted damaged birthday present. I was hugely annoyed by this, to be truthful. Humans are complex organisms, complicated in so many ways that we don’t understand yet; not one-dimensional characters in an old comic book. I believe the fields of psychiatry and psychology have been of immense benefit to our race (myself included, so no offense to any shrinks reading this—y’all do good work), lending valuable insight to the cognitive process, condition of the human personality, and the often highly convoluted exertions taking place in the murky depths of the subconscious. But it should also always be remembered that any test administered to evaluate this stuff is, at its root, subjective. That means any conclusions drawn from these tests are inevitably influenced by the very non-objective mind of the tester. No person is completely objective, not even close. We’re humans, not Vulcans. All humans, even highly trained shrinks, are prone to errors of judgment, as I would find out soon.
After a while, the psychiatrist spoke to Johana, who told me that he had no further questions. I looked at him.
“So, doctor, do you think I’m crazy?” I asked with a grin.
“No. You are not crazy,” he replied flatly, and left. I didn’t much care for him anyway. The psychologist woman began asking me question after question about the show, the exact same ones I had answered two or three times already, so asked her if she just wanted me to tell her the whole story. She did, so I told the tale again, exactly as I had the day before, Johanna translating my words almost simultaneously. The psychologist typed out what I said at a decent rate of speed, but I began to wonder why they didn’t just tape record the whole thing for accuracy. After I was done telling my story, Johanna told me that the psychologist would now administer some tests, and out came the Rorschach ink blot cards.
I actually got kind of pumped up when I saw the Rorschach test cards in person for the first time, as I had been hoping that it would be one of her methods of evaluating my personality. After hours in my cell, anything would be more interesting to my stimulus-starved brain than staring at a dirty wall in the dark. I shouldn’t have been so excited about it, because all the test did was try my patience (or rather, the person administering the test did).
“What does this look like?” she asked.
“A butterfly,” I replied.
“Why?” she queried again.
“Uhm, because it very obviously resembles a butterfly. Don’t you have butterflies here?” I answered.
“Yes, but why does it very obviously resemble a butterfly?” she persisted.
“These look like wings,” I sighed, pointing out the wings. She didn’t seem too satisfied, but typed a few notes.
“What about this? What do you see here?” She held up a different card.
“A bearskin rug,” I said.
“Why?”
Jesus Christ. I pointed out the area that looked like a bearskin rug. She was typing slowly when I said:
“OR . . . it could be a vagina. In fact, any of the Rorschach cards could be a vagina, unless you’re about to show me some I’ve never seen. Is that the sort of Freudian response you’re looking for?” I asked.
She typed furiously, but didn’t ask me why the card looked like a vagina. The questions continued, my answer always followed with a “why?” from the psychologist. I saw a wizard on one card, an old man falling head first on another (this made me very sad, and I wondered if my subconscious had conjured that image due to the charges against me). For the most part my answers were food related: steak. Eggs. Blue crab. Shrimp. Man, I was starving, and worked that into my replies in the hopes that the psychologist could somehow rustle us up some grub. (Q: “Why does that look like a sunny-side up egg?” A: “Because I’m freaking hungry, that’s why. Can we order a pizza or something?”) One card looked like a Jackson’s chameleon to me (although I found myself wishing it was an iguana, because I hear those can be quite tasty if prepared correctly). This excited Johana to no end, who whipped out her iPhone and showed me pictures of her very own pet Jackson’s, fantastic and prehistoric looking reptiles I have always been fascinated by. We began chatting about the chameleons until the psychologist cleared her throat and threw Johana an exasperated look. The final card I saw reminded me of two squatting Shaolin monks giving each other a high-five, and made me think about the Wu-Tang Clan, but I somehow refrained from slipping any mentions of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, or the RZA into my answer.
After the Rorschach test was done, the psychologist produced a set of two-tone plastic blocks, each cube diagonally split into equal halves of red and black. She set them on the table in front of me, pulled out a card with a red and black design on it, and asked me to reproduce the design with the blocks, timing how long it took me to replicate the picture. This was a standard IQ test I had seen before, and was actually kind of fun, especially compared to the Rorschach
test. My brain was so happy to have a problem that it could feasibly solve, something to concentrate on other than a situation I was currently powerless to change. I found myself quite absorbed in the test, especially the cards she gave me that dealt with negative space. After attempting to reproduce ten or fifteen designs with varying success, she put the blocks away and Johana told me that there was one more test.
The psychologist pulled out a set of ancient looking yellow cards, held one up to me, and asked me to make up a story based on the illustration printed on the card. I looked at the card. It appeared to be originally from a 1940s detective magazine, and was a pen and ink drawing of an old woman collapsed beside a couch, her face buried in her arm, her keys laying on the ground beside her. It was not a happy drawing; obviously something very bad had happened, and in my current state a dead or dying old lady was the last thing I felt like making up a story about. I was tired, hungry, and had had more than my fill of thinking about sad things, so I decided to take control of the situation.
This woman had severely fucked up by giving me this archaic test. She had stepped to me on my home turf: the creative domain inside my head, a limitless place of endless possibilities. Here I rule with iron-fisted vision; for it is the realm of the story teller, the arena of unfettered imagination, and what I construct there is Holy Writ. I decided that no matter what each picture she presented me with actually reminded me of, I would spin a long, elaborate, and obnoxiously heart-warming tale; concluding each story with a picture-perfect happy ending worthy of the sappiest of romance novels. I was tired of her thinking she could evaluate my personality with some ridiculous inkblots or old magazine illustrations, and I didn’t care what she wrote down anymore. I was offended by the simple and highly subjective methodology she was applying to a subject (me) who was obviously in no mental shape to be evaluated with any sort of accuracy, and I began to think of her as the enemy. In short, I was depressed, tired, and hungry, but this woman had pissed me off; I wanted to wear her down, to break her. So I did.
The old lady collapsed by the couch was a renowned Finnish molecular biologist who had just won the lottery, who, in a fit of gratitude, had sank to her knees to thank God for unexpectedly delivering her the money she needed to fund the last part of her research, research that delivered an incredibly cheap, globally available, multi-disease cure; eradicating AIDS, cancer, and hemorrhoids on every corner of our planet within a week of its discovery, while leaving her enough cash left over to start an orphanage and still take a nice vacation to Papua New Guinea, where she discovered that her American husband (long presumed dead at sea after his research vessel, the USS Egghead, had sank after hitting a reef while attempting to save a pod of baby orcas separated from their mothers by an aggressive oil slick) was in fact living as a full member of an up-until-now undiscovered tribe, the Tooty-Toot-Tootas, a tribe whose spiritual practices had resulted in a perfect society, a place where war and hate did not exist; and after a joyous reunion with her husband, returned to Helsinki, whereupon a lecture by the husband and wife team on the Tooty-Toot-Tootas’ way of life was globally broadcast free of charge from Nokia headquarters, and world peace immediately ensued.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, lady.
Depressing image after depressing image was presented. There were lots of lonely people weeping in dim-looking rooms; there were several fearful looking women, crouched and staring pensively at shadowy figures through a half opened door. There were anguished, guilt-riddled looking men and women standing with an arm thrown dramatically across their face, towering over what appeared to be the naked (and possibly dead) body of their latest lover laying in a messy bed, one lifeless arm flopped off the side. These illustrations would have reduced the Dali Lama to a fit of weeping despair, but that’s not how this was going to go down. My brain took in each of the obviously despondent people pictured on each card in turn, and then proceeded to twist their appalling dead-end circumstances into exceedingly complex and insanely detailed journeys. These long, meandering narratives all victoriously concluded in saccharine triumphs so sweet that any diabetic within earshot would have immediately gone into a fatal state of high glucose shock. There were only two cards depicting people who didn’t appear to be writhing in the throes of the deepest of miseries; one was a farming scene showing what appeared to me to be a few Amish toiling righteously in a field—these folks had all just returned from a magnificent and sexually liberated spring break at Cabo, ending their globe-trotting Rumspringa on a very high note (my explanation of the Amish and Rumspringa alone took up a good ten minutes).
The other card, the only possibly happy looking one, had a hot rock-a-billy looking chick staring longingly at a ruggedly handsome, Clark Gable-esque, man who appeared to be about to spring into action of some sort. Things obviously not being what they seemed in my world, these two love birds’ marriage was currently ending in a hideous divorce, as the action the man (who just happened to be the President of the United States’s brother) was about to spring into was gender reassignment surgery in order to work undercover for Al Queda; a medical procedure which would, of course, fail spectacularly due to a relapsing alcoholic plastic surgeon, resulting in a highly publicized murder/suicide that brought disgrace to the entire nation.
Show me sad, I give you happy. Show me happy, I give you the apocalypse. Screw you and your test results, lady. This is my house.
I was having a hard time not laughing as the psychologist dutifully typed out all this nonsense I concocted, because every time I would bring each interminable tale to its seeming conclusion and she would sit back from her laptop with a look of relief, I would add something else. “Oh wait, I almost forgot,” I would blurt “this is the best part!” and send my miserable looking character happily tromping off on some bizarre mission to rescue the lone surviving descendent of Gautama Buddha from terminal flatulence, thereby saving the world or some such crap. After about five of these tales, Johana said to me, “She wants to know if you could please make the stories shorter.”
“Well, can she show me some pictures that aren’t so tragic looking? For fuck’s sake, if I wasn’t already depressed about being here these pictures would drive me to it, you know? Ask her why she’s only showing me sad pictures, would you?” Johana spoke to the psychologist, who didn’t deign to reply, but merely held up another dreadfully drawn woeful woman who looked to be on the verge of suicide. Okay, be that way then, I thought.
She finally cut me off in the middle of a horrendously cheerful plot twist involving angels, the quest to bake the perfect lasagne, and a genius-level IQ talking pomeranian who was about to reveal the meaning of life live on the BET network. “Okay, okay,” she said in a drained voice, and began to put away her cards and shut down her computer. I had won. I got the feeling that I had been like an exotic pet to her; very interesting at first, but not so cute after I refused to be house broken and started crapping all over the living room carpet. She left the room, and it was back to the hole for me. (After I was released I did some research and found out that the test she had given me was the Thematic Apperception Test. The TAT was designed in the 1930s after an undergraduate student told her professor about her homebound ill son making up stories based on pictures he saw in magazines. The stories a subject tells are supposed to reveal sensitive personal information he or she would not otherwise disclose, in fact doesn’t even know he or she is revealing since it’s contained in a story. My stories should have revealed that I was about to become the Mother Theresa of Metal if the shrink took them seriously at all, which I seriously doubt she did. Just for shits and giggles, Google “1930s/40s Thematic Apperception Test pictures” sometime, and you’ll see several of the pictures I did. They haven’t changed in three quarters of a century, yet in court this woman would claim that she had given me the latest, most scientifically reliable tests. Ridiculous.)
After eating some “dinner,” my cell door opened and in came another young inmate. I said hello to him, but just like my
previous cellmate he didn’t appear able (or was unwilling to) to speak English. At least he acknowledged my presence with a small wave before crashing out. I was wiped out from my day, and almost immediately fell asleep.
I awoke in the hole, dark as usual, and ate the breakfast the guard brought me. Shortly thereafter a guard took me to the room where my clothes were stored, and I changed out of my jailhouse threads and into my street duds. I was handcuffed and led to a paddy wagon sort of van and placed in a back seat. An iron contraption was lowered over me and firmly locked in place, sort of like the metal safety harnesses on roller coasters, but without the padding. We pulled out of the police station and drove a short while to the courthouse. As we slowed down, through the windshield of the paddy wagon I saw fifteen or so people with cameras and television gear standing outside a locked rolling gate on the side of the building. As soon as they saw the van, they all turned their cameras towards us and began filming and snapping shots. The paparazzi had arrived in full force, and I leaned back away from the windshield to give them as little of a shot as possible. A guard opened the gate, and we drove in and parked. I was let out of the van, and I walked into the building, making sure to hold my head high and keep my back straight, not looking at the paparazzi who were yelling and trying to film through a crack in the gate. I wasn’t happy about the cameras, but whenever I couldn’t avoid being filmed, these people sure as hell wouldn’t see me defeated looking and skulking along like some whipped dog.
Dark Days: A Memoir Page 13
