Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  As the title suggests, Letters and Papers from Prison is a collection of personal correspondence and essays written in prison by a German Lutheran minister named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book was first published posthumously, as Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi Party in 1943 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler (which he was), and subsequently executed by hanging in 1945. Bonhoeffer was a man with a steel backbone and superb moral character; an outspoken critic of Hitler and his persecution of the Jews, he died naked at the end of a rope after climbing the steps to the gallows proudly, silently, and completely composed. Although little known during his life, Bonhoeffer’s works became hugely influential in later years, the story of both his dissidence and eventual martyrdom in the heart of Nazi Germany a great source of inspiration for those who struggled through the Civil Rights era in the United States, anti-Communist factions in Eastern Europe fighting to throw off the oppressive weight of the Iron Curtain, and those on the front lines of the anti-Apartheid movement during their brutal struggle for freedom in South Africa. My father would have known that a work by a man such as Bonhoeffer would greatly help me, and it did—I plowed through it rapidly in prison, completely entranced after reading the first passage I randomly thumbed to.

  In a letter to his parents dated May 15, 1943, Bonhoeffer writes: “Of course, people outside find it difficult to imagine what prison life is like. The situation in itself—that is each single moment—is perhaps not so very different here from anywhere else; I read, meditate, write, pace up and down my cell—without rubbing myself sore against the walls like a polar bear. The great thing is to stick to what one still has and can do—there is still plenty left—and not to be dominated by the thought of what one cannot do, and by feelings of resentment and discontent . . .”

  If there has ever been a more magnificent and useful piece of advice written on how to maintain one’s emotional sovereignty and a positive mental attitude in prison, I have not read it. In fact, I would whole heartedly recommend the entirety of Letters and Papers From Prison to anyone who is incarcerated, or suffering under any form of real oppression. Bonhoeffer was a product of his time, and as such his views on some subjects (such as the role of women in marriage) are a bit dated (to put it mildly), and some readers may not enjoy the theological slant of the book, but it is an undeniably remarkable work produced by a human will working at its best and highest level; a well-written record of immense internal fortitude in the face of a world gone mad with unthinkable atrocity. To read of Bonhoeffer’s stoic life as a prisoner of the Reich made my current woes seem trivial at best, and I would often turn to his dying work for inspiration and solace in times of despair. This is what a good book can do for you that no insipid television show or inane Internet video will ever come close to achieving; it can reach down through the ages, hurtling past the clutches of death itself, to prop you up when you are alone and at your lowest. If you don’t believe me, try watching re-runs of whatever your favorite television series was ten years ago the next time you are faced with a potentially life-altering dilemma and see how much wisdom you can glean from that drivel. I’ll take Ernest Hemingway, Rick Bragg, Helen Keller, Pat Conroy, Vacláv Havel, Malcolm X, and Mark Twain. I’ll take Dietrich Bonhoeffer, thank you very much.

  I spent the rest of the evening smoking as many cigarettes as I wanted, drinking instant coffee, reading books and letters from my loved ones, and trying not to eat all of my candy at once. To have at my ready disposal these normal, everyday things that I usually took for granted gave me great pleasure, and I fell to sleep more content than I had in quite some time.

  The next morning, I awoke from a wonderful dream about hanging out with my brother and a still-alive Bob Marley. Oddly enough, almost all my dreams in prison were really good ones; I believe that it was my subconscious’s way of protecting my psychic health. To pass the sleeping hours in Pankrác suffering through nightmares would have undoubtedly made it harder to remain positive while awake. The whole thing already felt like a bad dream at times anyway, so getting a sound night’s sleep without doing battle with the strange demons that lurk in the human subconscious was a blessing. Often I would be with my wife, family, or friends in my dreams, doing things I enjoyed, almost always outside in nature. (Not to mention the occasional random crew of topless hot chicks who would sometimes inexplicably suddenly appear and briefly go jogging by—why can’t this happen to me in real life? It seemed a perfectly reasonable occurrence and not out of place or odd at all in my dreams.)

  After I cleared the cobwebs from my head, I sat down and finished the final draft of my statement to the press, then ate breakfast in our hot cell. Along with our usual hunk of bread, Dorj and I had received a couple of oranges in perfect condition. The oranges were a rarity in and of themselves (most of the time we got mealy apples if we got fruit at all), but to get fruit that was unbruised, not overripe, and without critters of any sort crawling inside was truly an uncommon treat. After we had enjoyed the oranges, I took the peels, scraped what stringy rind was left on them off, then set about very finely julienning the peels with our razor blade before finishing them with that most precise of cuts I had learned during my kitchen slave years, the brunoise. I took the diced peels, put them on a scrap of newspaper, and sat them out to dry in our dusty window sill. After they had dried, I placed them in an empty yogurt container and sat them between Dorj’s bed and mine as a ghetto air freshener. Aside from our toothpaste and lone bar of soap, the orange peels were the only thing in our stifling cell that smelled good—the rest stank of sweat, mold, and dusty decay. And while they did not provide a very powerful aroma, the act of creating something, anything, that improved my circumstances in the slightest bit cheered me and gave a sense of purpose to a listless, hot morning. Anything I could do rather than sit and worry over my future (something I currently had absolutely no control over) improved my morale.

  Another thing that always cheered me up was the simple act of laughter. I made sure I found something funny in my grim surroundings every single day without fail. This was perhaps easier for me than it would have been for many, as I had spent much of my adult life living in filthy punk houses with alcoholic and drug-addled roommates. These were men and women who had mastered the fine art of finding humor in living in squalor. Once you have paid rent to rest your head in a hovel known affectionately as “Dirtbag Manor” (a truly disgusting place), the blow of living in a crumbling century-old prison doesn’t land as harshly as it probably would for a child of privilege who had never had to hand-wash piles of mouse turds off his plate before using it every single time. My old roommates at Dirtbag Manor, Steve and Matt, would burst into uproarious laughter any time one of us would look at our filthy house and say, “Can you believe we are stupid enough to actually give a landlord rent to stay in this shit hole? My God, we are paying good money to wallow in freakish misery! Fuck it, hand me another beer, bwuahahahahaha . . .” It was absolutely hilarious to us that we were living out our lives in a place that would give anyone with an ounce of sense the creepy-crawly heebie-jeebies just walking through the living room—of course the massive amounts of shitty beer and high quality drugs we were ingesting probably did their bit in lowering our standards to the point that life in Dirtbag Manor seemed not only not completely insane, but acceptable, and yes: very funny.

  Even now that I’m sober, have money to pay my bills, and no longer live in a house that resembles a cockroach’s wet dream, I often laugh when I find myself in a really depressing situation. I’m not talking about bitter gallows humor, or chest-beating chuckles of bravado; I actually find acute misery hysterical at times—as long as it is my own. I can’t laugh at other people’s pain (as long as they aren’t complete assholes); I find people who do so distasteful and weak. Very, very weak. But I have a finely tuned sense of self-deprecation, and I enjoy laughing at myself—when things in my life go awry, I think my automatic defense mechanism is laughter. Laughing in the face of a bad situation tends
to do me a whole lot more good than getting angry or crying. Pankrác, with the exception of one other truly horrific occurrence, was the worst situation I had ever been in. So I laughed—a lot.

  My wife and family know that I love to have a good laugh, and I am constantly joking around with them when we are together. But since I had been arrested, I worried incessantly about them worrying about me. Sitting at the table in our cell after breakfast, I had a sudden flash of inspiration—I would write them a very humorous letter. If they knew that I was still laughing, that I still had a joke on my lips, then they would truly know that I was doing okay in there. I grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper and began the letter, deciding I would take all the bizarre happenings and weird stuff I found funny about Pankrác and cram it all into one twenty-four hour period, a sort of gonzo version of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I wrote about two pages of stuff that made me laugh out loud when I re-read it (if I am laughing at what I write, then it’s generally a safe bet that others will, too), then stopped because my hand began to cramp (I was writing in very small block letters in order to conserve paper). As I was putting away my writing materials, Tom Selleck opened the cell door, yelled, “You clean cell now!” in his usual cheery voice, and a trusty pushed in a small throw carpet made of rags just like the one underneath our sink, emptied our galvanized steel bucket that functioned as our trash can, and filled it with hot water. Dorj and I put our stools on top of our table, then I used our small hand broom and dustpan to sweep the dirt from our floor the best I could. Dorj motioned for me to sit on my bed, then he took our old throw carpet, dunked it in our already filthy bucket of water, and began furiously scrubbing our floor with more vigor and speed than I had previously seen him display during any other activity besides eating. After he had worked up a good sweat, I took a scrap torn from one of our foam couch cushion “mattresses” and scrubbed the table, then the sink, and finally our toilet the best I could. When the trusty came and took away our old throw carpet, Tom Selleck poked his head in the door, briefly looked around, and said, “good,” before slamming the door shut.

  I was glad we had passed muster, but in reality all we had really done was move around the dirt in our cell. This frustrated me to no end—you can’t clean something when you don’t have clean things to clean it with—but the place did look a tiny bit more tidy. Dorj had really busted his ass scrubbing the floor, and I was grateful to have a cellmate who at least valued cleanliness, no matter that we had absolutely zero way of attaining it. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then Pankrác must be Satan’s Siamese twin—the only way that place will ever be truly clean again is if they drop an atom bomb on it.

  The next day I read quite a bit and worked some more on the first draft of my letter to my family. Before lights out, I sat re-reading what I had written, making a few small notes in the margins, and laughing hard out loud at times at the high weirdness I was trying to relate to my people. My second week in prison was coming to a close—I didn’t know when or if I would be let out, my band was in debt for paying an expensive bail that seemed to be worthless, the prosecuting attorney was a rampaging asshole determined to play the system and keep me in prison. I was stuck in a tiny filthy cell with a fat whistling Asian from hell, and I hadn’t had a solid meal in quite some time. But I was laughing my ass off on my shitty bed, and I knew I would laugh tomorrow, too.

  But the guards would be having a laugh as well the next day.

  chapter thirteen

  Although my wife was still in Prague for a few days after our visit, she was not allowed to visit me again, nor was anyone else, besides my lawyers. Luckily my lawyers still included Jeff Cohen, who came to see me on an almost daily basis while he was in the Czech Republic. There was no real news about my case other than what we already knew—my bail money was sitting in some government bank account, I was sitting in jail, and the prosecuting attorney wanted to keep me there. But it was still nice to see someone from home, and it did my heart good to know that Jeff was in constant contact with my wife and family during this time, giving them updates on my unchanging status—at least they knew I wasn’t being tortured or hadn’t been killed by another inmate.

  On the first day of my third week in Pankrác, Tom Selleck was returning me to my cell after a visit with Jeff when I noticed that he seemed to be in an unusually good mood. Normally Señor Selleck had a sour-puss grimace seemingly permanently grafted to his face, as if he were constantly just catching a whiff of a really smelly fart, but today there was what could only be described as a twinkle in his eye. I even saw him throwing me a sly sideways grin from time to time as we walked towards my cell. He looked like a man trying to hold in the punch line to a really funny joke. I began feeling slightly nervous, as I had an uneasy feeling that whatever was giving old grumpy pants Selleck a case of the yucks probably wouldn’t be quite so amusing to me. As we stopped in front of cell #505, Bradley walked over, stepped in front of me, and casually leaned against the door. He looked like he had been granted an extra portion of shit to stuff into his usual shit-eating grin. Uh-oh.

  “Ah, Blight,” he said. “It is very happy day for you! It is moving day!”

  Tom Selleck actually gave out a chuckle as Bradley moved to the side so he could open the cell door. It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh, and I did not care for it one bit. Stepping into the arid air of #505, I saw a sweaty Dorj bent over his stripped bed, stuffing his belongings into a make-shift pack he had fashioned from his wool blanket. He had already stripped my bed, and had put my sheets into my own folded up blanket. Most of my belongings had already been placed neatly beside my bedding.

  “We come back in ten minutes. You will be ready for moving then,” Bradley smirked as Tom Selleck shut and locked the cell door.

  “Dorj, what the fuck?” I asked. “Where are we going, Doctor Khun? Upstairs?”

  Dorj shrugged his shoulders, cursed in Mongolian, and kept on packing. I got the distinct feeling that we would not be moving upstairs, as Bradley had seemed entirely too chipper about us leaving #505. Upstairs we would have been out of his jurisdiction, beyond his range of operations, and safe from his infantile attempts at making our lives miserable. No, there had to be something else going on, some sort of hideous surprise Bradley could barely wait to spring on us. I sighed, and carefully packed my books and other things into my make-shift knapsack. Well, at least they can’t move us down another floor, I thought.

  Over an hour later, Bradley and Tom Selleck reappeared, both looking as if they were about to burst. Dorj and I gathered up our pathetic bundles and walked out of the cell, following Bradley and Tom Selleck as they turned left and headed down the basement hallway. We had passed a mere six doors when they stopped in front of cell #512. Tom Selleck unlocked the door with a huge grin, and Bradley made the same grand sweeping gesture he had when first putting me into #505. “Your new home!” he said, choking back a laugh. Tom Selleck stood beside him, his hand held over his mouth to cover his own mirth. I looked into the cell.

  The cell looked to be slightly larger by a few square feet than our last one, and was furnished exactly the same, except for the addition of a two-level bunk bed on one side of the cell across from a normal single level cot. On the top bunk sat a stocky Asian man of a lighter skin tone than Dorj, his chiseled facial features sharper than Dorj’s dough-boy mug. He hopped nimbly down from the bunk and said something in Czech. Dorj immediately burst into a rapid fire barrage of Mongolian, to which our new cell cellmate replied in kind. I heard the cell door slam shut behind us, then Bradley and Tom Selleck exploded into laughter outside in the hallway. In between guffaws I heard the words “Americansky,” “Mongolsky,” and “dva,” the Czech word for two.

  In 2012, the number of people living in the Czech Republic was approximately 10.5 million total. Of that number, around 6,000 were Mongolian, Mongolians comprising .057143 percent of the Czech Republic’s population. That means that for every 1,750 persons in the Czech Rep
ublic, one would be a Mongol. One in 1,750—supposedly there weren’t even 1,750 inmates in Pankrác, so the chance of getting a Mongolian cellmate was pretty slim to begin with. The odds of winding up in a cell with two Mongolians? Astronomical.

  I had two Mongolians.

  I put my stuff on the single bed (Dorj had immediately tossed his on the bunk below his countryman) and sat down, listening to the two Mongolians talk. Actually, I listened to Dorj jabber at the other Mongol, who tried to reply every now and then, only to be cut off by our chubby cellmate, who had been transported to a state of ecstatic verbal bliss now that he had someone he could blabber to in his native tongue. Dorj spoke Mongolian in a high-pitched voice I hadn’t heard him use before, starting each sentence in an excited girlish tone and finishing in a sibilant hissing whisper. Every three or four sentences he would burst into a fit of high-pitched giggling before continuing on. His new manner of speaking immediately began to grate on my nerves very badly. I looked at the other Mongol, whose eyes were starting to glaze over under the force of Dorj’s vocal barrage, and decided to come to the rescue and introduce myself. I hoped he wasn’t a whistler.

  “Dorj! Give it a rest. You’re burning the dude’s ears up,” I said, interrupting him mid-giggle. Dorj glared at me, but shut up for the time being.

  “Hey bro, my name is Randy,” I said, extending my hand for a shake “You speak any English?” I asked our new cellmate.

  “I am Ganbold. Yes, I learn some English from my son. I not very good at English, but some little learnings,” he replied, shaking my hand.

  “Your English is way better than my Mongolian,” I laughed, and we began to rap.

  Ganbold was a businessman one year my senior who had been living in Prague for well over a decade. He had been arrested the day before by the Czech police at the request of the Mongolian government, and was being held in Pankrác until the Czech government decided whether or not they would deport him back to Mongolia. According to Ganbold, he had been running an employment agency for Mongolian people in Prague, finding job placements for them as work was scarce in his home country. Apparently he had a business partner back in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator, but something had gone sour. Suddenly he had received several massive bills for back taxes from the Mongolian government, taxes he claimed to have already paid through his business partner, who had (conveniently enough) recently seemed to have disappeared. He had been writing the Mongolian government, emailing scanned receipts for the taxes his business partner had provided him when the Czech police showed up at his office, arrested him, and whisked him away to Pankrác. Now he was frantically trying to figure out a way to avoid being deported, as according to him, a Mongolian prison was an excellent place to get one’s throat slit while sleeping. This was confirmed by a few emphatic and theatrical hand-to-neck motions from Dorj. The government of Mongolia was rife with corruption, and Ganbold had a suspicion that the tax dollars he had sent to his business partner had made their way into not only his partner’s pockets, but into some crooked government official’s as well. He had a bad feeling that if he went back to Mongolia, he might just disappear while in prison—apparently not an uncommon occurrence in a country that still had a significantly high percentage of nomadic people in its population, and a shaky national head count as such.