Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  “When I open door, you must stand up!” he ordered.

  “Yeah, dude, whatever.” I said, returning to my book. Neither Dorj nor myself moved an inch.

  “You must stand up when I open door!” he repeated, agitated by our insolent non-compliance.

  “I heard you the first time. Are you done here now? I’m trying to read,” I said, peeking over the top of my book. Dorj rolled over on his side and closed his eyes.

  “For future, you must stand when I open!” he almost shouted. Bradley was getting worked up. This gave me immense satisfaction.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen if I were you. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” I said, then returned to my book.

  Bradley looked confused by my colloquial English. He cursed in Czech, then turned swiftly, stomped out of our room, and slammed the cell door shut. Dorj and I immediately burst out laughing. I knew Bradley could hear us, as he was still locking the door and we were howling quite loudly. There was no way I was going to get out of bed and stand up for that jerk. Actually, I had briefly considered hopping up, snapping to attention, screaming Seig Heil! and throwing him the ol’ Hitler salute while laughing in his face just to let him know what a joke of a tiny little wanna-be fascist I thought he was, but quickly thought better of it. I didn’t know if he would try and spread rumors that I was some sort of neo-Nazi (after all, the Czechs had had a pretty rough time of it with the Third Reich in the very prison I sat in); plus, just laying there seemed pretty darn effective at getting under his skin. As long as I didn’t physically attack him, I figured he couldn’t do too much to me or really make my life much worse. What was he going to do? Throw me in prison? Screw him.

  I spent the rest of the day reading Unbound and working on a second draft of my letter to the press. Every now and then, as he was prone to do, Dorj would snort his derision at my foolish bourgeois pursuits as I read or wrote. I asked him why he didn’t get a book to read—surely our ghoulish trusty could find him one in Czech, and by then I knew he could read Czech perfectly well. Or he could borrow one from another prisoner; I had seen several inmates exchanging books during walk.

  “Bah—book spatny (no good). Pure vodka mots doubri (awesome as hell)!” he said, then took a long, deep, satisfying imaginary slug of Poland’s best.

  I honestly could not grasp this mentality—even during my drinking days I read constantly, and as we had no pure vodka (or anything else, for that matter) to keep us amused, reading a book seemed to be the logical answer to the pressing problem of what to do with our abundant spare time. But Dorj never once touched a book the entire time I was in Pankrác, and to this day I honestly doubt he has ever read one, period. Dorj not only refused to do anything that might be good for him, he scoffed at me whenever I engaged in any activity designed to keep myself mentally and physically fit. I would do pushups, and no matter how many I would crank out, he would laugh at me when I was done and say, “You like girl! No strong, hahaha!” It was like having the world’s worst personal trainer in the cell—a fat, lazy, fiending alcoholic coach who offered no advice, no support, and no encouragement; only a terrible and monotonous whistling work out soundtrack and a harsh broken English critique of my performance once I was done. Dorj would crush me at a game of chess if I happened to feel like being further demoralized that day, or do the Sudoko puzzles sandwiched in between photos of topless women and the horoscope in Blesk; but that’s about as far as he would go when it came to mental exertion. Whistling, eating, making paper swans, and calling President Barack Obama a “chimpanz” was about the maximum distance he was willing to walk down his short and narrow intellectual alleyway.

  Dorj really had a hard-on for Obama for some reason—on the rare occasion we were given a banana with our breakfast, he would laugh, and hold out the banana to me, saying, “For Obama! Ahmurica president black chimpanz!!!! Ah hahaha! You President Obama chimpanz! Hahaha!” Then he would peel the banana and eat it while making monkey noises, saying, “I Obama! I Obama, hahaha!” On this particular day, after he had already been laughing at me for reading, Dorj started in with the whole Obama bit. I had had about enough of his racist crap, and so I yelled back at him in broken English/Czech: “Mongolian president chimpanz! You manelka (wife) chimpanz! You mother chimpanz! Dorj is chimpanz! All spatny Mongols, chimpanz, goddamn it!” Dorj just stared at me like I was an idiot.

  “No! No chimpanz Mongolia—Mongolia, zima (cold)! Chimpanz, no zima. Ahmurica, teplo (warm). Teplo, yes chimpanz. Ahmurica, teplo. Ahmurica many chimpanz, okay?” he said, scowling at me. Clearly, I was a moron with no knowledge of global climates or simian temperature preferences. For all I knew, Dorj might actually have thought we had wild chimpanzees running around in America, so I just shook my head and gave up. I couldn’t believe I was in a European prison, having to defend my President’s honor from racist remarks, and reduced to counter-attacking by calling my Asian cellmate’s mother a chimpanzee. It was too ridiculous to actually get riled up over, so I did what I always did whenever the absurdity of my situation struck me—I laughed. Even if Dorj and I had spoken each other’s languages perfectly, he seemed pretty set in his ways. I didn’t harbor any delusions about him suddenly embracing a broader, more enlightened way of thinking just because I yelled at him that my President was not an ape, which was about the extent of my linguistic rebuttal powers in our shared crude English/Czech/Mongolian patois. I couldn’t even get him to accept that reading a freaking book was a worthwhile activity for me, much less convince him to open his mind a bit on the topic of race relations. Plus, Dorj’s skin was a few shades darker than Barack Obama’s, so it was especially funny when he would yell about my “black” President. I had no choice but to laugh at his ridiculous gibes.

  Dorj did perform one valuable service for me later that day, bestowing an honor usually reserved for academics who have to spend phenomenal amounts of time and money to achieve what I did in just two short weeks as a jail bird: he gave me my doctorate. As I sat writing, Dorj came over and leaned on my shoulder, peered at my writing, then picked up Unbound, thumbed through it, slammed it back down on the table, then started pointed at me and laughing. Christ, that guy was getting on my nerves.

  “What?” I asked, “What’s so damn funny, lard-ass? Is it the reading? The writing? My black President again? What?”

  “Ahahahah! You doctor now! You doctor!” he said, imitating me reading and writing.

  “No Dorj, I’m not a goddamed doctor. I’m a singer and a jail bird, just like you,” I said.

  “No, you doctor now! You read book, you write, you in Pankrác! Amurica, Hahvad University. Czechy, Pankrác Academe! You doctor, Pankrác Academe! You . . . Doctor Pankrác! Ahahahahahaha!” he hooted, and fell back on his bed, convulsing with laughter and blurting out “Doctor Pankrác!” every now and then.

  And that is how I became a doctor, and Doctor Pankrác was how Dorj referred to me from there on out, until after a particularly bad case of gas, when I earned my second doctorate, and he began calling me Doctor Bomba. After I asked him what the Mongolian word for swan was, he became Doctor Khun (pronounced hoon), since he made swans just about as much as I read and wrote. Every morning immediately after waking up, he greeted me as I had taught him to: “Good morning, Doctor Pankrác, how are you today?” “I’m fine, thank you for asking, Doctor Khun. Would you care for some moldy hleb (bread)?” I would reply. As a doctor, I figured it was my duty to teach my fellow doctor some etiquette so that he could behave in a dignified manner suited to a man of such high scholarly distinction, but Dorj never got past saying good morning. You can only polish a turd so much.

  The next day a few hours before lunch, I heard Felix calling to me through his cell window. I climbed up to my own window so we could chat, and he told me that he had just heard the guards talking about me. They were saying that the police were coming for me later in the day. I asked him what for, and he told me he didn’t really know for sure, but thought
that maybe they would be taking me somewhere for further interrogation. This immediately sent the wheels in my head to spinning—I didn’t know what they wanted, but I was damn sure not going to say a thing until Martin Radvan was in the room with me. The presence of my attorney during any questioning was my legal right under Czech law, and I began to imagine myself arguing with whoever would be interrogating me this time, insisting that they summon Radvan or I wouldn’t say a thing. Despite their threats, I would stonewall them, I would be as stoic as Marcus Aurelius, I would remain calm like the eye of the storm—the hatch in our cell door opened and Bradley peeked his head in, just as I was telling my imaginary interrogator that I would have his head on a spike in front of Prague Castle if he didn’t summon my lawyer immediately.

  “Good news for you!” Bradley said through that crappy bleached smile of his.

  “Oh yeah? You tested positive for syphilis?” I asked.

  “Lunch is here!” He laughed.

  “That’s great news, because I’m starving. I can’t wait to see what delights the cooks came up with today,” I said, smiling right back at him.

  “Oh yes,” he paused. “And the police are coming,” he added, obviously excited at the thought of me being questioned more.

  “I already knew that. I asked them to pop by and bring me a hooker,” I said.

  Bradley smirked at me, then slammed the hatch shut. Man, that guy sucked, but he had actually done me a service by interrupting my ridiculous interrogation fantasies. Smart-assing off to him had made me stop predicting worst-case scenarios, one of my most unfortunate mental traits that I couldn’t afford to let run rampant in prison. Being prepared for hard times is one thing; actively sketching out insanely detailed blue prints for structurally unsound buildings and erecting them on mental fault lines is another. Most bad things I imagine simply do not happen—if they did, life as we know it would have been wiped from the face of the earth decades ago. I did not have to wait long to find out what the police wanted anyway, as they came for me shortly after lunch. A guard took me upstairs to the laundry room where I had handed over my street clothes, and a trusty gave them back to me. The trusty and the guard led me into the office area of the laundry section, and told me to change out of my prison duds. As I changed in front of both men, I began laughing. Everywhere I looked, I saw a familiar face.

  The walls of the office were covered with pictures of my friends.

  Apparently the guys who ran the prison laundry were metal heads. Above the desk were posters of Machine Head, Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, and Metallica, all bands I had toured with several times and dear friends. Over in a corner beside an industrial sized tub of detergent I saw Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osbourne’s old guitarist and frontman of Black Label Society—I’d known him since 2004. I’d put down some road miles with Dimmu Borgir, and there they were, sneering above a pile of dirty towels, adding a comforting bit of homey Nordic evil to the dark faux-pine paneled walls. And on the wall right beside me was a large poster of Slash from Guns-n-Roses, ripping away on his guitar—I had been stage right shooting pictures of him playing with his current project and rapping with him afterwards backstage just a few weeks ago in Belgium. It felt like I was back on tour, backstage with the bros at a festival for a moment.

  “Dudes!!! What’s up?!” I said to all my guys on the walls. The guard looked at me like I was crazy, but the trusty I handed my prison clothes to shot me a smile. He understood why I was happy—he was obviously one of my people. Just seeing all these faces I knew personally in such a depressing and unexpected place did me a world of good. On the way out I passed Lemmy from Motörhead, standing on stage with one arm raised. I smacked my hand against the wall and gave him a high-five—I didn’t know Lemmy, but I figured he wouldn’t mind.

  Downstairs at the prison entrance where I was first admitted to Pankrác were three plain-clothes detectives—one was the speed demon who had taken me on such a terrifying ride through Prague to identify my medicine. I hoped he wouldn’t be driving us wherever we were going (he did, of course). Another was a gigantic grim-looking ball of muscle whose name I never got—I don’t know if he could speak. The third detective, a fit and pleasant looking man with short dirty blond hair walked up to me, introduced himself as Charlie in excellent English, and told me they were going to carry me to an eye doctor, as there was something wrong with my eyes.

  “I don’t have any eye problems,” I said “I just wear glasses.”

  “Yes, but the police want you to go get your eyes checked. We have to go to a doctor about 100 kilometers away—this is the only doctor in the Czech Republic authorized to do such examinations for the police,” he said.

  “100 kilometers away! I’m going to miss my one hour of going outside—it starts soon,” I said.

  “Yes, but I think it is better than being in prison, don’t you? It is a nice drive,” he said

  I couldn’t argue with him there, so off we went, me and the hulking silent detective in the back seat. After being locked up in prison for a couple of weeks, it was quite strange to see people walking the streets in regular clothes, headed wherever they wanted to go, not herded down dingy hallways in ill-fitting prison pajamas like a bunch of miserable cows. We sped through the outskirts of Prague and into the sunny Czech countryside, which was quite beautiful at that time of the year. Mile after mile of rolling fields full of corn, wheat, and other crops passed; I saw thousands of sun flowers taller than my head planted in orderly rows. I rested my head against the window, looking out at the fields and forests passing by—the landscape reminded me very much of Southampton County, Virginia, an area I had spent much of my childhood in, roaming the woods and peanut fields of my Grandmother’s farm land. For a few moments I tried to forget about the handcuffs around my wrists and just enjoy the ride. Not too long after we had been in the countryside, Charlie asked me if I would like something to eat, perhaps some cigarettes and a coffee? I told him I had no money, and he said not to worry—these things were not very expensive, they would buy them for me. We would stop at a gas station soon for smokes, with an adjacent McDonald’s for food and coffee.

  McDonald’s—yuck. “The American Embassy” as I like to call it (you will see those familiar Golden Arches rising like two high-cholesterol boils from the city streets of just about every country on the planet) had terrible coffee, and I’m not too fond of their food either—it’s garbage designed to make people as fat as possible while providing minimal nutritional value. But as the old saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers, so I graciously accepted his offer, all the while mentally cursing that clown Ronald for conquering Europe far more effectively than any imperialistic despot ever had. Soon we were parked at the gas station next to McDonald’s, and Charlie and the driver left the car to go get us food and smokes. I looked over at the huge man crammed into the back of the Skoda next to me and gave him a smile. He gave me his version of a smile back, which resembled his cheeks dead lifting about five hundred pounds—even his face looked like it worked out. He didn’t seem mean, just . . . big. I guess Charlie and the driver felt better protected against the might of my 165 pounds of fury with an elephant in the back.

  Soon they returned with coffee, a water, a pack of smokes, and a brand-new lighter for me, and burgers for themselves. Despite the awfulness of Pankrác’s cuisine, I politely declined their offers of food—I couldn’t bring myself to eat Mickey D’s that day, but in retrospect that was highly foolish of me—I just hadn’t been in prison long enough. Had it been a week later I would have gorged myself until I had a Big Mac heart attack. As Charlie gave me my coffee, he told me he was going to remove my handcuffs and open the car door so I could smoke while they ate, but that I shouldn’t go anywhere. I told Charlie not to worry, I wasn’t going anywhere, and thanked him for the coffee and the smokes. I lit up a cigarette, careful to blow the smoke away from the eating detectives (manners are manners, y’all), and took a tentative sip of the dreaded McDonald’s coffee.

  I nearl
y went into shock after just one taste—it was absolutely fantastic. Strong, dark, aromatic, and full of flavor, but not burnt or bitter. I took the lid off the coffee and looked—yes, the brew even had a slight crema resting beautifully on its black surface. I stopped for a moment and reminded myself that I hadn’t had a decent coffee for a while, just in case I was overreacting, then took another sip. Nope, it really was that good. If McDonald’s had coffee that delicious in the States, I would go there everyday, and Ronald’s unholy plan for obesity-based global domination be damned. I finished my cigarette and drank my coffee as slowly as I could while the men ate, then we hit the road. Charlie did not re-cuff me. I thanked him for that, and again for the cigarettes and coffee.

  “It is no problem. And it is not like I enjoy having to handcuff you,” he said with a kind smile. “My policy is that if you are reasonable, then I will be reasonable.”

  Charlie really did seem like a reasonable man, a guy just doing his job. As sad as it is, the world does in fact need homicide detectives—I know that if a friend or relative of mine was murdered, I would want someone trained in police work to help me find out who had done it. I have had many, many run-ins with cops over the years, and a lot of them have been unpleasant. I have known racist cops, sadistic cops, power-tripping cops, and straight-up criminal cops who got a piece of the action wherever and whenever they could. But I have also known some very, very cool cops who honestly just want to help keep people safe.

  Don’t get me wrong—I still avoid the police whenever possible. Cops make me nervous, because I know what they can do. I’ve felt the end of a nightstick in my ribs more than once. But only a complete idiot would hold on to the knee-jerk idea that all cops are bad people—I know, because I was that complete idiot for a long time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to learn not to throw a rock at every bird I see just because a seagull pooped on my head once at the beach. And since Charlie was treating me like a human being, just taking me to get my eyes checked as he had been told to do by his boss for whatever reason, I did my best to act reasonable. We actually had quite a good talk on the way to the optometrist, discussing how he came to be a detective (all detectives in the Czech Republic have to be regular beat cops for several years before they can move on to their area of law enforcement), and how I had come to be a professional heavy metal musician. Charlie’s favorite band was Metallica—he had seen them at least fifteen times, he said, so I told him a few funny tour stories about those guys, and we even argued a little bit about which record of theirs was the best (my overall favorite is Ride the Lightning). As we were riding and talking, I began to notice how badly I smelled in comparison to the three men in the car with me. Normally, when I am stuck with a bunch of dudes (i.e., on tour with a bunch of other unwashed heathens), I only notice how clean and different women smell (I would describe it as “delicious”). But I was so ripe I could really notice the smell of freshly washed clothes, clean skin, and shampooed hair of the men surrounding me. That I stank made me feel self-conscious, so I apologized to Charlie.