Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  Goosebumps. Pure goosebumps rising all over my body as the last note faded into the dusty air of my cell. God bless America, I thought, God bless Ameri—

  My weird patriotic reverie was interrupted by the unmistakable sounds of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” coming from the toilet area behind me, followed by a rapid rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Dorj was taking a shit and whistling Christmas carols. I am going to kill him, I thought. Then the sheer bizarreness of my current situation suddenly struck me as hilarious, and I began to laugh aloud, Dorj joining me as he farted and whistled “Jingle Bells” again. I turned back to my journal, noted that I would never take the 4th of July for granted again, then crawled back under my sheet to take a nap.

  I had just started to doze off when the cell door flung open and Tom Selleck began berating me loudly in Czech. I got up from my bed, and he suddenly slammed the door shut again. I had no idea what that was all about, so I just went back to bed—maybe he was in a bad mood that day, but then again he always seemed a little grumpy to me. Ah, to hell with his Eighties looking ass, I thought, might as well go back to sleep, and so I laid back down and pulled the sheet back over my head to block out what light I could. Almost immediately the door opened again, and Tom Selleck stood there once more, this time screaming even more angrily in Czech. I sighed and sat up, put on a t-shirt and my shoes, then stood up and walked over to the irate guard.

  “What, dude? What the fuck do you want? Are you taking me somewhere? Let’s go then, so I can get back to sleep. Where am I going?” I asked him.

  I could almost see the steam rising off of his red face; Tom Selleck was seriously pissed, and I had no idea why. I saw a mighty internal struggle play across his face, the gears turning beneath his jauntily spiked hair as he searched for the words to explain his displeasure. Finally he replied in heavily accented English, the words coming out in an actual growl.

  “You . . . are not . . . going,” he said, “You . . . cannot sleep . . . under . . . white. Understand?” and made a motion for me to make up my bed.

  It was then that I vaguely remembered reading something in my prison regulations about only being allowed to use blankets and sheets to sleep after lights out. The rest of the day, a prisoner’s bed was to be neatly made, all corners tucked and the sheet tight around the mattress. The problem with that was that I didn’t have a mattress, I had three fucked up couch cushions laying on a metal frame they weren’t sized for. The bed also hurt my back like hell to sleep on—the thing was really more like a medieval torture rack with added foam padding from a trailer park yard sale than a bed, so I never really gave a crap how neatly I made it. If they wanted a neatly made bed, they were going to have to give me an actual bed. Until then, I would throw my sheet and blanket over as I saw fit. I walked back to the bed and sloppily drew my sheet back up over the pieces of foam, then flopped back down on it. “There ya go, Tom Selleck. Are you happy now?” I said, not caring if he picked up on his new nickname. Tom just scowled at me, shut the cell door, and I promptly went back to sleep.

  A few hours later I woke up to Dorj shaking me and pointing at the cell door. The hatch in the door was open, and I saw a guard’s face. He beckoned me with a rapid movement, and I got up, thinking Christ, what now? as I walked to the door. As I got nearer to the hatch, I saw the guard had a young face, and he looked rather nervous. His eyes kept darting from side to side, as if he was checking to see if anyone was watching him. When I got to the hatch, I leaned down and he began to speak very rapidly in a heavy Czech accent.

  “Randy! I am very sorry for you to be here! I am metalhead and I know you do not belong here! Please do not hate Czech Republic and Czech people, it is the fucking system! You must go home! You must keep fighting!” he said.

  “Bro, it’s nice to meet you! I don’t hate the Czech Republic or Czech People at all,” I replied, because I didn’t.

  “I am very sorry for not good English, but you must go home! I saw you at Rock-Am Park, watching Alice in Chains with Vinnie Paul,” he said, referring to a German Festival I had been at a month earlier, hanging out near the crowd with a good friend watching some bands. “I am drummer, too! Just because some fucking idiot does stage dive does not mean you should be here. I am very sorry! You must go home! We are all metal brothers! You must keep fighting!” he said.

  “It’s okay, man, it will work out. I’m not sure exactly what happened yet, but I know I never tried to hurt that boy,” I said. “Hold on for a minute.” I ran over to my locker and got him one of my guitar picks. I gave it to him, and he thanked me profusely, apologizing again for my imprisonment. I told him not to worry about it, it wasn’t his fault—the man seemed genuinely upset to see me caged up like that. I asked him if he had a cigarette, and he pulled out a crumpled box with eight or nine different kinds of cigarettes in it. He thrust it into my hands along with a lighter, and glancing anxiously to either side of him, told me he had to go.

  “You must keep fighting! Randy, you must go home!” he said, then shut the hatch, and I heard him walking quickly away. I gave Dorj a cigarette, lit one of my own, and sat down to write about my unexpected visitor.

  That guard was just the first person since I had been arrested who made me feel like I was still a decent human being. My lawyers were being paid to declare my innocence, but the young man who had just come to my cell was one of my people. He had appeared, most definitely against the rules from the extremely nervous look of him, stopping by just to bolster my spirits, perhaps at the risk of his job or worse. He had spoken in a language that let me know he understood me, why I was there, and the difficulties I might face in the future. I’m not talking about his broken English; I’m referring to the silent language that all members of the underground music community I am a part of share. We recognize our own, no matter what color or creed, and this young man had come to me to let me know that my people were thinking about me, that not everyone in that foreign land hated me. I don’t think the guard even smoked cigarettes, but had gathered a few for me, bringing me the only gift he could. His visit did me more good than I can explain, and I never even got his name.

  So to this young guard, if you ever happen to read this, I would like to thank you—you helped me greatly. I hope we meet again, and if we do, the beers are on me, brother.

  Later, during our one-hour outdoors, Felix told me that others on the cellblock had known about the guard’s visit. Rene began pointing at me, saying “music good for you, rock-n-roll, baby!” I agreed, and when Rene said that it was too bad there was no music in Pankrác, I pointed to my head and told him I had music in my mind.

  “Ah, the machine; yes, the machine. In the machine, I free. Searching for free,” he said as he pointed to his own shaved and tattooed dome, “but here is home now. Finito,” and sadly tapped the ground in front of him.

  Rene told me he had not seen his wife for sixty-four months, and had another twenty years’ time left to serve in three different prisons. He was scarred and tattooed; an uneducated man with rough manners, and had obviously been involved in some sort of long-term life of crime, but I never saw him behave with anything but kindness to those around him. We never discussed why he was locked up. I had no problem asking anyone what their charges were in Pankrác, because everyone I talked to knew why I was there and would speak openly to me about it, but for some reason I never asked Rene. We would talk about family and tattoos and music and art (Rene was an accomplished artist with pen and paper who made me several sketches as gifts or trades), but not about his crimes. Maybe I never asked him because I didn’t want to know what he had done—this was a man with the numeral thirteen tattooed on the back of his head because M is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet, and his daughter’s name was Maria. He spoke of her as fondly as any father I had ever talked to had about his own daughter. Whatever he had done, it didn’t matter now. He was one of my homies on the block, he showed me respect, repaid me when I loaned him smokes or coffee, and even helped me out when he could. T
he outside world, and what he had done in it, was something that had no bearing on our relationship inside. In prison, unless you are a sexual offender, child abuser, or psycho killer, not many inmates will stand in judgment of your actions. No one goes to prison on a winning streak, so there’s really no room or patience for holier-than-thou attitudes. I certainly tried not to judge anyone, because at the root, we were all the same—in the machine, searching for free.

  Men in prison also share what they have when they can. If you are greedy, you will be treated as such. After I finally got some money on my books, I had more to share than most men in Pankrác. I was always as generous as I could be with the inmates I knew, but I was careful who I shared with, as I didn’t want to become known as a rich push-over in the general population—carelessly displaying wealth is not a good maneuver in prison (or anywhere, for that matter—besides the fact that you look like an asshole, you are just painting a target on yourself). One person I always shared with was Rene’s friend, the Quiet Gypsy. He never spoke much at all (and that’s why I just called him the Quiet Gypsy, or T.Q.G. for short—the dude was totally silent most of the time), had no money on his books that I could tell, but had a generous heart. He displayed this quality during walk that day when he reached into the waistband of his pants and pulled out a fat plastic baggie of the good stuff.

  Coffee.

  Holy crap, the dude had coffee. He began portioning it out into scraps of paper, standing in the corner of our concrete cage while the rest of us watched for guards on the walkway above. It looked totally sketchy, exactly resembling the countless drug transactions I had witnessed or been a part of, except the gear was just good old java. We were not supposed to carry anything except cigarettes out of our cells during walk, so the coffee was against the rules. If the guards found any contraband on you when they searched you before heading out to walk, you could kiss it goodbye—this could and did happen from time to time. T.Q.G. had risked having his coffee taken, just so he could share it with us, and I immediately took a liking to him. I didn’t have any paper to take coffee in, so Rene tore off a corner of the baggie, poured me a share, and carefully sealed it with a lighter; once again in the exact same precise manner as drugs are dealt sometimes. I thanked T.Q.G. with great earnestness, and he waved me away in an almost embarrassed manner.

  You can bet your sweet ass that when my wife brought me some expensive packs of instant coffee from America a few days later, the Quiet Gypsy immediately got a healthy portion. I remember those who look out for me.

  I was also happy to see Martin, the man who had passed out in the hallway after our doctor’s visit the first day. He looked a lot healthier, and I asked him what had happened that day. He told me that he had been dope sick, withdrawing from heroin since he had first been locked up nine days ago, and had not been able to sleep. This surprised me, because I have seen many dope sick junkies kicking before, but didn’t see it in him that day. Martin had been in the hospital ward for the last few days, being given nutrients and ten milligrams of diazepam (a.k.a. Valium) to help him sleep as he kicked the dope; if an inmate was judged as having sufficiently bad drug withdrawals the prison doctor would sometimes do that to help wean them off. That was it though—the whole time I was in Pankrác, I never once heard mention of any sort of alcohol or drug rehabilitation programs or educational classes, and I met plenty of guys who were in there because they were drug addicts. Martin had been arrested for shoplifting a lighter from a convenience store—he needed it to smoke the heroin he had just bought and stashed in an alley. He told me that once he left prison, he was done with drugs. It was ruining his health and his life, he couldn’t believe he was doing time in prison for stealing a plastic lighter. He told me he wanted to stay clean, to not live that terrible way anymore. I told him that I was an alcoholic, not a drug addict, but that I knew many, many drug addicts. It had been my experience that almost none of them were able to get and stay clean without some sort of help, so I wrote down the name of an international organization that has helped many of my addict friends and strongly encouraged him to look them up the same day he left prison, as they would surely have an office in Prague. He thanked me, and told me he would. Martin wasn’t a bad man, he was a man with a drug problem. I realize that this is very hard for some people to grasp, but it is true—not all drug addicts are horrible human beings. Most of them just need help breaking the chains of their addiction, not a prison sentence. Of course for some alcoholics and addicts, a prison sentence is the only way they will begin to grasp the ramifications of their actions and get clean. Then there are those unrepentant criminals who most definitely need to be locked up for the good of society. But most drug addicts I have known started off as decent, normal citizens, only becoming involved in a life of crime after their addiction led them down that dark path. Before it kills the addict, in order to feed itself, addiction will almost always eventually lead an otherwise sensible person into committing actions that would horrify them if they were not caught in its vicious grip. Alcoholism and drug addiction have existed for as long as alcohol and drugs have existed. That is longer than humanity’s written record, and that is not conjecture, that is scientific fact. It has not changed in thousands and thousands of years. Unfortunately, our way of dealing with this problem hasn’t changed that much either. I hoped that Martin would learn from his mistake and be one of the lucky ones who managed to break the cycle, or he would wind up dead, insane, or back in prison.

  I cannot express how grateful I am to be sober today. It is everything to me.

  That evening when Uncle Fester made his normal rounds yelling “Chai!” I asked for hot water instead. I dumped a huge lump of the instant coffee into my mug, stirred it up, and immediately took a huge gulp. As I almost choked on the gritty mouthful, I quickly realized that the coffee was not the pre-brewed and freeze-dried instant variety I had expected, but was instead finely ground roasted beans. Dorj had been watching me, and laughing at my ignorance and haste as I spit out the bitter brew, signaled for me to wait five minutes. I did, the grounds settled, and it turned out to be a halfway decent cup of coffee. At the very least, its robustness was miles above and beyond the barely flavored hot water the prison doled out each morning as an excuse for coffee. I get my taste in coffee from my mother’s father, Papa, who drank it strong enough to put hair on your chest, because he was a man, by God. He would yell at his wife, my Nana, if she made a pot that most humans could consume without their hearts exploding, “Sarah! You know I can’t drink this stump-water!” Whoever Pankrác’s barista was, they were definitely a stump-water kind of guy, and I cursed him most mornings until I got some instant coffee to stiffen up his disgracefully diluted drink.

  Uncle Fester also came around that evening with a cart full of books from the prison library. As he poked his head into the cell door hatch, he held up a few paperbacks and asked me, “Book?” I practically ran to the door and snatched the books out of his hands, but upon opening them saw that they were printed in Czech. I sighed, handed them back, and asked him if he had any English books instead.

  “Englishky for book? No. Next tomorrows maybe. I ask for you,” he said with his signature creepy grin, and slammed the hatch shut. I heard Dorj laughing again, and I wheeled around to face him, irritated by his mirth.

  “You no want book?” I said, lapsing into the broken English that seemed to be the most effective way of communicating with my slothful cellmate, “Why you no want book? You can read Czechsky, you fat motherfucker. Why you no want book?”

  Dorj waved his hand in dismissal. “Bah. I no read book. Book spatny,” he said “I pure vodka. Pure vodka doubry (good).”

  “Maybe you should have read a few books on how to get a visa instead of drinking so much goddamned pure vodka, then your fat ass wouldn’t be stuck in this shit hole with me,” I barked, but Dorj just laughed, said, “Pure vodka” once more for emphasis, whistled a bar or two of “Jingle Bells,” then rolled over and went to sleep. He was grinding on my
nerves more and more each day.

  The next day, Tom Selleck opened our cell door and yelled “doctor!” Dorj and I got dressed and followed a dense-looking pimply-faced guard upstairs to see whatever passed for a member of the medical profession in Pankrác. First we were taken to a large and dusty room with two walls of floor to ceiling dirty glazed windows. The room was completely empty except for a steel table and a rickety looking x-ray machine. The thing looked ancient, and as I held a slate over my chest so they could x-ray my lungs, I wondered if this contraption had been calibrated since it had arrived at Pankrác, or if I was being blasted with a lethal dose of Cold War–era radiation.