“Thirty,” I said.
“Lurty,” Dorj repeated, a smug, implacable look plastered across his round, brown face.
“Let’s try that again. Thir-ty,” I said, leaning forward.
“Okay . . . lur-ty,” he replied, leaning forward himself, mimicking my movements and intonation perfectly while neatly neglecting to match my pronunciation.
“No! Thuh thuh thuh! Th! Thhhhirrrr-ty!” I said, getting irritated.
“Yes, lurty. Luh luh luh Luuuuurrrr-ty!” Dorj replied with a grin. I felt like strangling him.
“No! Not lurty, you fat motherfucker—thirty! Thuh-thuh-thuh! We’ve been on this for three weeks now—SAY IT, GODDAMMIT, I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT! THHHHHHHHHHHIRTY!” I practically screamed, exaggerating the th sound to the point of ridiculousness, spit flying from my mouth.
“No! No thuh-thuh-thuh! No thurty! Lurty! Lurty, lurty, LUUUUUUUUUUURTY!” he yelled back, sticking out his tongue like a snake and hissing as he finally made the th sound. “No thhhhh! Thuh! Thuh! Bah! I no cobra! Englishky stupid!”
I knew it! I knew he could make the th sound! For some reason he had just found it distasteful to do so; but from there on out, anytime during English lessons that I had to correct Dorj’s or Ganbold’s pronunciation of a word containing th, I simply said, “cobra!” and they would laugh and try their best to say it correctly.
The rest of the day passed without incident; when Tom Selleck #2 came to collect my newly filled out visitation form, he gave it a brief once over, pointed to my stepmother’s name, said “Um-hmmm . . . yarl” in an approving tone, and that was that.
The next day, as my third week in Pankrác drew to a close, I caught myself day-dreaming about getting out soon. As much as I fought against it, I felt myself developing a short timer’s mentality—this would not do. My release had not yet occurred, and if my experience thus far had taught me anything, it was that there were no guarantees that things would unfold according to any sort of plan. I had been working on the comedic letter to my family, and I began imagining myself happily in America with all the people I loved, thinking that it wouldn’t be too much longer before I was home. I noticed this, and quickly reigned myself in. I put down the letter to my family, took a fresh sheet of paper, and wrote a letter to myself. I put it in an envelope, addressed it to myself care of my wife, and stuck a stamp on it. I gave the letter to the guard at the next evening’s mail call, wondering when I would next read it.
I’ve never received that letter. Perhaps it was against prison regulations to write to one’s self, and they just never sent it. Or maybe they thought I had gone crazy in there, talking to myself, and the prison censor just threw it away. Maybe it got “lost” along with several other letters I mailed from Pankrác and have been told never arrived by the intended recipients. I don’t know, and I don’t know what the letter said—my journal merely mentions that I had written and mailed one. I hope it said that I was doing the best I could to make the most of my time in a really bad situation, and that I should remember that when I got out, and make the most of the opportunities presented me.
It’s what I’m trying to do right now.
chapter fourteen
Looking through the journal of my time in Pankrác, I can see the rapid, steady, reactionary progression of paranoia, cunning, and self-preserving deceit in my psyche. Unless you are placed in solitary for the entire duration of your incarceration, to exist in prison is to master the arts of misdirection and obfuscation, and a person resolutely determined to remain completely open and honest would not fare well behind bars. Prison is not the place to wear your heart on your sleeve, nor the locale to practice absolute truthfulness—you will only be taken advantage of by your fellow prisoners, and in many instances, by less than scrupulous guards. Make no mistake about it, regardless of your guilt or innocence, prison teaches you how think like a criminal. It does this by almost automatically developing a persecuted, criminal train of thought in inmates, even in those trying their best to do their time quietly and just get by until their release. I think this is one of the biggest reasons why so many ex-cons have such a hard time re-entering normal society; when your every action and word is shaped by a siege mentality for an extended time, when the motivation for virtually every act committed by those around you must by necessity be questioned, then it’s hard to have trust in any of the human components of the system that keeps modern society functioning with at least a modicum of civility. Prison is a system as well, but to move safely and efficiently within it, one must develop character traits that would be seen as evidence of extreme neurosis or sociopathic tendencies on the outside. My writing from that time is full of sentences that only I understand the true meaning of, coded phrases detailing the constant stream of little white lies, forbidden actions, and plans to work outside the parameters of the prison rules in order to remain sane and comfortable inside while awaiting my release.
For instance, I know that anytime I wrote about admiring Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s witty written manner when penning correspondence, I was referring to smuggling a letter to someone on the outside without going through the prison censor (living as an inmate charged with plotting to kill Hitler in a Nazi prison, Bonhoeffer had to do quite a bit of this). Whenever I wrote down any thoughts I was having concerning details of my case, I did so in general terms; obtuse sentences full of tiny in-jokes with grim punchlines that brought no laughter to my lips. And on the first day of my fourth week in prison, I wrote about shaving with a new safety razor I had gotten from the store, and what a shame it was the prison didn’t seem to have a recycling program, as all the old plastic razors and toothbrushes just went into the trash, destined for the landfill. That meant that I had taken my old plastic safety razor, broken it apart, pulled the blade from it, and was considering affixing it to a toothbrush handle (I never wound up doing that, as it would have been pretty hard to hide, but I did keep the razor, as our old cutting tool was left behind when we switched cells—it seemed too risky to carry it with us). I wrote about the reality of my day-to-day life in such a cloaked manner because I never knew when the guards would do a cell inspection.
Cell inspections occurred at random intervals, sometimes once a week, and sometimes for four or five consecutive days. Prisoners had to leave their cells while the guards had a look around, banging on our lockers and bed frames with a long flexible stick, poking through our meager belongings for stashed contraband. I had no idea of exactly how hard they searched through our belongings, but it varied from day to day and guard to guard. Sometimes we would return to our cell after an inspection and the whole place would be a mess, clothes rearranged, beds in disarray, the contents of our lockers strewn about. Other times it looked as if nothing had been touched at all. I knew for certain that my journal had been looked through before, as my bookmark was in a different place, or it had been moved from my locker to my bed while my other reading and writing materials remained in their normal place. I had no idea if any of the guards could read English, or if they were legally allowed to seize my journal and take it in for inspection by someone who could. It was better to be safe than sorry, so I wrote about anything the authorities may not like in deceptively plain, obvious terms, the subtext of which was only apparent to me.
I had just finished stashing our new razor underneath a bit of torn linoleum and hiding the broken remains inside various bits of trash in our rubbish bucket (if the guards saw a disassembled handle, they would certainly wonder where the blade had gone) when we heard the familiar yell of “Kontrol!” and were herded out of our cell so the screws could do their thing. Luckily they didn’t find our newest bit of contraband, but I remember sweating as I leaned against the wall outside our cell, wondering if they would put me in the hole if they discovered the razor—it had been my doing, so I would have to take responsibility. I also remember the sound of the search; each guard seemed to have their own rhythm with which they searched a cell, but they all sounded the same to a certain degree. First there
was the yell of “Kontrol,” followed by a deep bass thumping as they slapped our mostly empty metal lockers, then a staccato clinking sound as they drug their stick across the radiator in each room, and finally a higher pitched clicking sequence as they did the same to the bars of our bed frames. I heard this sonic pattern echoing throughout various parts of Pankrác every single day. It was part of the rhythm of the prison itself, and my mind filed the grim beat away for use at a later time. There are several such sound patterns from prison stored in my mental hard drives, and I can hear them as clearly as if I were still in that cell—once you’ve spent enough time as a musician, the part of you that is always looking for the next song can never be turned off, no matter your surroundings.
Shortly after our cell inspection, we lined up to go for our walk. I noticed that several of the men on our cellblock were not present; Martin the junkie was gone, and two of the Roma, Scarface and Raymond Herrera, were absent as well. Once we were outside, I asked Rene where they had gone, and he told me they had been moved upstairs. Raymond had been Rene’s cellmate, and he had been given a most unpleasant replacement.
Rene’s new cellmate was the ugliest man I had ever seen in my life, bar none. A scrawny youth of average height, he looked like an anthropomorphized cross between a weasel and a chimpanzee. His long, pointy, ferret-like nose protruded in front of two, black beady eyes ringed with dark circles and sunk into a craggy simian brow. His pointy, yellow teeth were freaking enormous, sitting crookedly in his maw like an oversized orthodontist’s nightmare. His ears were large and floppy, his skin filthy and marked up with terrible, randomly placed jailhouse tattoos. He had a strange, crusty fungus coating his long, pointy fingernails, which hung at the end of arms that draped ape-like almost to his knees. His hair was lank, greasy, and had been hacked into a crooked, bizarrely asymmetrical version of a mohawk. The man looked to be in his mid-twenties, and obviously had not bathed in quite sometime. And lo, the stink of the speed freak (that most annoying of all drug addicts) was upon him, and wrought in me great trembling and despair. It wasn’t his homeliness that instilled immediate revulsion in me—despite his wretched hygiene, his unfortunate visage was no fault of his own. What turned my stomach and filled me with dread was that horrible tweaker gleam in his eye; the crazed twinkle I recognized the second I saw him watching me light up a cigarette. He immediately broke into a slanted yellow grin, and began slinking towards me. Fuck, the tweaker is gonna hassle me for smokes, I thought. I knew this would not be a quick process—nothing ever is with them.
Alcoholics, coke heads, burn-out stoners, heroin junkies—none of these people are a bundle of joy to be around. But a speed freak? A goddamned tweaker?
You are doomed.
The hideous power of the tweaker to destroy your sanity lies in the unholy potency of his drug of choice, methamphetamine. Meth allots the tweaker plenty of time to ponder deeply the nature of his own personal reality, and after staying awake for days on end (sometimes up to a week or more), the psychosis that shrink-wraps itself around his head like some sort of malnourished epileptic octopus must be expressed somehow. Twitching, humming, and obsessively repeating non-sensical phrases, the tweaker begins to turn his awful and inhuman speed-fueled powers of concentration towards “projects”—these can assume the form of completely dismantling your brand-new computer to see what makes it tick, endlessly organizing and rearranging the beer bottles in your recycling bin, or, worst of all, explaining to you in great jittery detail the secrets of the universe (the understanding of which has been bestowed upon them by their newly developed “psychic powers”—a common tweaker delusion, I shit you not). The tweaker never rests or slumbers, merely twitches slightly slower from time to time, for those who soar aloft on wings of meth are above petty mortal concerns such as sleep. The tweaker’s ultimate goal is to pull down all those around him into his delusional, self-aggrandizing, hideously spinning world of shrieking bat-shit bonkers insanity, and woe be unto the person who gets caught in the crooked crosshairs of his bloodshot, dilated-pupiled eyes.
Chimpo Weaselman (as I came to call him) was fresh to prison (this time, at least), and was obviously still coming down from a binge—the signs were unmistakable. He tweaked his way over to me, then standing entirely too close for my comfort, held out his hand in a begging gesture and said quietly, “You give me cigarette?”
“No. I do not give you cigarette,” I said.
“Yes. Cigarette for me. Thank you,” he said, stepping in closer in an attempt to narrow the distance between us and execute some sort of tweaker mind control trick. I do not like close-talkers to begin with, and in prison every time someone had tried to close-talk me, they had been quietly attempting to beg something from me. I placed my foot directly in Chimpo’s path, halting his advance.
“No. Fuck no. No cigarettes for you. Beat it,” I said, standing my ground.
Chimpo Weaselman changed directions smoothly, slithering sideways to initiate a flanking maneuver; but I merely pivoted on my heel and slid my blocking foot around with him, effectively maintaining my defensive perimeter. He was beginning to piss me off. He looked at my foot and sadly frowned, as if to say, Oh come now, there’s really no reason for all that.
“Cigarette . . . for me!” he said one last time, as if a bright and novel idea had just popped into his head.
“I said ‘no!’ No fucking cigarette for you. You need to fuck right off and step away from me,” I said, raising my voice and visibly clenching my fists—I don’t trust tweakers, and they can become violent if the mood strikes them. Rene noticed that I was getting agitated, and said something to his new cellmate in Czech, who gave me an oily smile and slunk away to bum a smoke from someone else.
Another new inmate to the block was Ollie, a French-speaking Czech who spoke a bit of English. Ollie had been living abroad, primarily in Monte Carlo, for the last decade, having only recently returned to the Czech Republic in the last month and somehow winding up nearly immediately in Pankrác. I never bothered to ask Ollie what he was in for, but I don’t think it was a violent crime; he was a very smart, well-traveled educated guy who knew a lot about international politics, as well as being well-versed in the currency exchange and tax rates of many different countries (which made sense, Monte Carlo being a huge international destination for gamblers). I got the feeling that his criminal activities probably revolved around obtaining money by fraudulent means, which in all likelihood was why he had to leave Monaco in the first place. Regardless of whatever his crime was, Ollie was a very pleasant man to talk to, and between his remedial English and my remedial French we were able to enjoy a nice conversation about the various countries we had visited in our travels.
Near the end of walk, Chimpo Weaselman approached me again as I was speaking with Ollie, and he attempted to bum a cigarette again. After I brusquely informed him I would never give him a cigarette as long as I still drew breath, he then asked me to buy him some coffee and sugar from the prison store with my next shopping order. For a second I was so astounded by his request that I just stared at him—did he think that I was merely averse to parting with cigarettes, but would have no problem with buying him whatever else he wanted? Then I remembered that he was a tweaker, and tweakers are not known for their unshakeable grasp on logic; plus, he was probably just trying to get his filthy paws on any sort of stimulant he could. I told him I wouldn’t be buying him coffee, sugar, cigarettes, or anything else for that matter, that he was wasting both his and my goddamned time, and that I didn’t appreciate that one bit. I don’t believe he understood most of what I said other than “no,” but he seemed to get the point.
After breakfast the next day, both Dorj and Ganbold went back to sleep, and I decided to take advantage of the silence in the cell and get some work done. As I sat enjoying the quiet, writing letters and outlining an idea I had for a novel, I noticed how oddly comfortable I had become in prison. I had a daily schedule, I followed it fairly religiously, and I was getting a lot of writin
g done. I had (admittedly crappy) food, clothes and shelter; I had more than enough cigarettes, some half-decent instant coffee, and a few snacks. I had plenty of books and time to read them. The basic building blocks I needed for a happy life (sans wife, family, friends, and freedom, of course) were in place—I can get by with very little and remain quite content. Within just four short weeks of my arrest I had settled pretty easily into my new life as an inmate, and while I wasn’t overjoyed to be there, most of the time I was not freaked out in the least bit that I was in prison. This worried me—while I value my ability to acclimate to difficult situations as one of my best character traits, I was concerned my adaptability to my latest hardship would eventually morph into apathetic acceptance of my lot. I wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel and reconcile myself to my fate as a jailbird yet, and I definitely didn’t like how relaxed I was feeling at the moment. I pondered this oddly nonplussed state of mind for a bit, then suddenly realized that after years of constant touring, I was simply enjoying the quiet and relatively small amount of interaction with the rest of the human race I had at that time.
I was forty-one years old, and had been on the road or in a studio pretty much constantly for over a decade. I was almost two years sober, and since I didn’t party anymore, I could no longer cope with being constantly surrounded by loud, obnoxiously wasted people by doing the logical thing and getting loud and obnoxiously wasted myself. I did not enjoy being around all those fucked up people anymore—in fact, most of the time I didn’t enjoy being around most people period, drunk or sober. Touring is nothing if not an ever-changing, highly concentrated revolving group of people centered around your current location, most of whom want to talk to you, and on the road there is no peace, no quiet, no solitude, and no escape from all the attention that comes with being a public person. For some band guys that’s perfectly fine; the constant attention they get from fans and the press is a balm for their troubled, insecure souls. All of those people wanting to meet them, constantly complimenting them, telling them that they love them validates their inflated self-image, even their very existence. Everyone wants to be loved, but there is a huge difference between the true, lasting, unconditional love of good friends and family, and the temporary adoration of people who only love their idea of what you are, not the actuality of you as a person. While I was grateful that people appreciated my artistic output, enabling me to travel the world and pay my bills by doing what I love, I neither wanted nor needed that kind of external validation. What I wanted and needed was some freaking peace and quiet. I wanted to sit still for a moment, to escape my job as a traveling, screaming, black-t-shirt salesman and just read and write for a bit. For quite some time, I had been longing to erect a barrier between myself and that noisy, hectic life; just long enough to catch my breath and relax without being “Randy from lamb of god.” I never imagined that that barrier would unexpectedly arrive in the shape of prison walls. I relaxed a bit, stopped freaking out about not freaking out, and reminded myself that I might as well take advantage of my removal from society while it lasted.
Dark Days: A Memoir Page 32
