Dark Days

by D. Randall Blythe

  After we had both been sufficiently zapped with the Commie beam of deat—I mean x-rayed, Dorj and I were taken to the holding cell we had first been in when we had our blood taken. The guard took Dorj, who was gone for at least forty-five minutes. I sat in the cell alone, staring at the walls and wondering what in the hell they were doing with him that took that long. Finally, Dorj returned looking really pissed off. As I walked with the guard out of the cell, Dorj looked at me at and said, “Doctor very stupid man!” Great. The guard led me into an office, pointed at a chair in front of a large desk, sat down in another chair a few feet from mine, and promptly started to nod out. I looked across the desk at the white-haired man seated behind it.

  The doctor appeared to be somewhere between two and three hundred years old; three hundred and fifty at maximum. A long, lit cigarette dangled between his lips, perched there like a failed surgeon general’s warning, perhaps as a smoldering act of defiance against what he felt were unnecessarily hasty, perchance even risky, pronouncements by modern medical science on the hazards of tobacco use. His bulbous crimson nose had an amazing web of exploded capillaries spreading across it, resembling a miniature subway map of Tokyo wheat-pasted onto a misshapen red golf ball. White hair sprouted crazily from his head and ears. Around his neck, wrists, and on his wrinkled nicotine-stained fingers were heavy gold necklaces, thick linked gold bracelets, an expensive gold Rolex, and several hefty jewel-encrusted gold rings. In front of the doctor was what appeared to be the first ever production model PC, which his rheumy eyes stared at from beneath droopy lids. The doctor looked very confused by the computer, maybe even afraid of it. Every minute or so he would extend a single bony finger out and peck a seemingly random key, then quickly withdraw it, like he was testing the machine, poking it to see if it would suddenly spring to life and attack him, or perhaps explain the mystery of fire. I fully expected him to emit chimpanzee-like “ooh-ooh-ooh” grunts at any second. A large ashtray, over flowing with butts, sat on the desk beside the computer’s keyboard. With his cigarettes and gaudy jewelry and obvious incompetence with even severely outdated modern technology, he looked like an ancient bookie trying to figure out the spread on some futuristic calculator. He seemed to be completely unaware of me, even though I was seated no more than three feet away from him.

  I turned to look at the acne-faced guard who had brought me there, wondering if he would alert the doctor to our presence, but he was fast asleep. As I sat there staring at the drool running down the side of his face, he began snoring loudly. He wasn’t doing much of a job guarding his charge, and me a supposedly violent criminal! Not for the last time during my stay in Pankrác, I was struck by how easy it would be for me to just smash the life from someone who was supposedly there to keep me under control. There were even a few times during my incarceration where I was escorted through the prison by a lone female guard who was significantly smaller than me. This petite woman turned her back quite carelessly on me as we walked alone up and down some staircase. I never saw that even in the drunk tank back home—the guards there were all beefy dudes who looked like they were used to rough customers. If I were a female prison guard, I wouldn’t turn my back on me for a second, no chance, no way. All around me in the doctor’s office were heavy or sharp objects that would have made perfectly fabulous killing weapons. I could have reached any of them with just a few quick steps. The guard was asleep, and the doctor was way too old and oblivious to stop me. I could have ended both of them right there, very quickly.

  I’m not saying that I wanted to hurt anyone, or had any urge to, just that while I was in Pankrác I often noticed how so very easily I could. I don’t normally think these sorts of thoughts, but prison seemed to bring them out of me. Maybe it was some sort of ancient survival instinct, trying to assert itself in this strange place. Or maybe I am just a man with an inherently violent, criminal, bestial nature; but I don’t really think so. It was being in prison that brought these darker aspects of myself to the fore so regularly—it’s not like I go to the coffee shop and randomly start fantasizing about strangling the barista to death, even if he screws up my drink.

  The guard must have sensed these twisted thoughts, because he woke up with a start, throwing me a suspicious glare from one piggish eye before immediately dozing off again. The doctor continued poking at his computer keyboard every minute or two, still showing no signs of realizing that I sat directly in front of him. The office was dead quiet except for the snores of the guard and the occasional clack of the computer’s keyboard as the doctor depressed a solitary key. After about five or six minutes of this weird silence, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Hello, Doctor,” I said loudly, “what seems to be the problem today? How may I help you?”

  This cheery announcement had an immediate effect on the doctor, who bolted upright (in reality it was more of a creaking semi-vertical lurch, his actual bolting days being long over), dropping his cigarette into his lap and retrieving it with a muttered curse. He looked at me, completely surprised by the sudden appearance of this knotty-haired tattooed stranger. His previous unacknowledging manner had been so complete, I wondered if he was thinking that perhaps one of his pokes at the computer had summoned me from the ether, causing me to appear like magic, even though I had been right in front him for several silent minutes. The doctor brushed some ashes from his clothes, took a long, pensive drag on what was left of his smoke, exhaled noisily, then spoke to me in a deep voice made raspy by years of chain smoking.

  “You . . . are . . . Czech?” he slowly asked me, suspicion riding the tobacco-roughened edges of his rumbling voice.

  “No, American,” I replied, wondering how my initial use of English hadn’t alerted him to my status as a foreigner.

  “Ah, Americansky. Goot, goot,” he replied, as if my nationality had cheered him up. Perhaps he had been having a Communist-era flashback, and my unexpected appearance had made him afraid that I was a member of the secret police come to question him. He was more than old enough to have lived through the darkest of those times, when such concerns were a very valid part of life in the country. The doctor then pulled out a clipboard with a chart on it and proceeded to very, very slowly ask me a long line of questions about my general health, of which I understood about half, and those with great difficulty.

  “You . . . haf . . . dee-yah-bate-ees?” No, no diabetes.

  “You . . . haf . . . arch . . . problem?” No, my heart seems to be fine.

  “You . . . haf . . . some . . . tromer?” Well, I suppose we’ve all suffered some trauma throughout our lives, but there’s none I’d care to discuss at the moment, so no, no trauma, so to speak of.

  Then the doctor’s eyes narrowed, and I could see suspicion returning to his gaze as he asked me, “You . . . haf . . . some . . . invariable . . . disease?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,” I replied, hoping that there was no disease in Pankrác so ruthless that I would absolutely contract it, no matter how strong my immune system was.

  “You . . . haf . . . some . . . wind . . . marriable . . . .disease?” he said, a hint of malice creeping into his voice.

  “I’m very sorry, but I still don’t understand what you are saying,” I said, thinking that a) I was already married, and b) even if I was single, I would never wed something as fickle as a weather pattern.

  The doctor began to stand, then, quickly thinking better of it, leaned some of his considerable bulk over the table and pointed his cigarette accusingly at my crotch. “You . . . haf . . . some . . . wenairial . . . disease!” he practically shouted, ash flying from his smoke onto the desktop. This time it was a statement of fact, as if he had just caught me red-handed, shagging his favorite teenaged granddaughter in the barn out back.

  “No! No! Absolutely not! No venereal diseases!” I stuttered, glad that the family jewels were in fact healthy, and wondering what this angry doctor would have done to me if they were not.

  “Ahhhh, goot, goot,” the doctor s
aid, “this is goot for you,” and he seemed to relax. Whew, I thought, that was a close one, as if I had actually done something to escape his ire other than have a healthy penis.

  As the doctor extinguished his cigarette and lit up a fresh one, a pleasant-faced brunette nurse in her late forties entered the room and broke out in a huge and beautiful smile when she saw me. “Ah, you are music man! I like Beach Boys!” she said in a very sweet tone of voice.

  “Really! I love the Beach Boys,” I said (because I do, and am slightly obsessed with them and their story), immediately breaking into “Barbara Anne.” The nurse was simply thrilled by this, and let out a loud shriek of glee as the doctor and now awake guard stared at me in amazement, as if they had never heard anyone sing before. After I ran through a quick verse and chorus of “Barbara Anne,” the nurse gave me a quick round of delighted applause, then turned to the doctor and abruptly began screaming at him.

  Her transformation from squealing school-girl music fan to screeching, malicious-hearted harpy was so abrupt and unexpected I actually jumped in my seat. I had noticed before that the key components of the Czech language as it is spoken in prison (which is very different than the Czech you hear strolling through the streets of Prague) are: 1) blistering speed, 2) ear-splitting volume, and 3) an overall verbal tenor that suggests deeply, deeply seated unhappiness and anger at everything and everyone around the speaker, especially the person being spoken to. But this woman had been so childishly pleasant to me at first, so pleased with my singing, that I had forgotten for a second that, just like the Beach Boys and their music, there was a very dark core hiding beneath that sugar-coated shell—how could there not be? She worked in a prison. The nurse let the doctor have it for a minute or so, then he, too, underwent a transformation, shedding a century or two and giving it back to her just as loudly. Where before the doctor had been speaking slowly in a deep and unintelligible, yet mostly pleasant, approximation of the English language, he was now bellowing fiercely in Czech. After about two minutes of seemingly mutual hate-filled invective, Adolph Hitler–like in intensity, the nurse stomped out of the room and the doctor picked up the phone beside him and slowly, slowly pecked out a number.

  As he brought the receiver to his furry ear, a female voice blasted out of it in a deafening greeting of “ahoy!” which the doctor promptly answered with his own scream of “ahoy!” before beginning to berate the woman on the other end (this is one of many linguistic quirks of the Czechs I never figured out—another being that every single Czech woman’s last name seems to end in ova—despite the fact that the Czechs are quite clearly landlocked, they all turn into Popeye when they say hello). After the doctor was done bawling her out, the woman responded with twice the energy and fury, her voice somehow seemingly louder in my ears than the doctor’s, even though it emanated solely from the tiny speaker of the phone’s headset. The doctor and the woman on the phone went back and forth like this for approximately five minutes, the doctor scribbling a note or two on a yellow pad in between verbal barrages. The two finally reached a satisfactorily aggressive enough conclusion, and the doctor slowly hung up the phone. He then screamed something ending in ova, which I could only guess was the nurse’s name, as she reappeared and immediately began screaming at him again. The doctor and the nurse yelled back and forth for a few minutes until she left; then he picked up the phone, slowly dialed a number, and the whole procedure, ahoys and all, began anew.

  This process was repeated without variation, and I exaggerate not one bit, for at least forty-five minutes. The nurse running in and out of the room, the screaming, the infuriated sounding phone calls, the ahoys—it was nerve shattering, and I was beginning to become a bit unwound. Throughout all this ruckus, the guard fell back asleep, not stirring or moving an inch, a large wet spot growing on his crotch where the drool dripped from his chin onto his lap. I was amazed that anyone could have slept through the commotion, which had sounded to me like three Slavic pirates exchanging screamed insults with bullhorns before sailing their ships into battle with each other on some strange Eastern European inland sea. I was starting to actually consider using some of the weapons I saw around the office to shut these people up when things mercifully began to draw to a close. Finally, after all feathers had been sufficiently ruffled and nasty enough parting shots fired, quiet descended over the office again. The doctor seemed to have forgotten me, and returned to poking at his computer again, until I cleared my throat to get his attention. He looked up from the computer screen and noticed me as if for the first time; then a hint of recognition crept into his eyes. He smiled warmly at me, like I was an old friend who he hadn’t seen in years who had decided to pop by for a surprise visit while I was in town.

  “Soooo . . .” he said, lighting his fiftieth cigarette since I had been there, “You . . . haf . . . some . . . problems?”

  Yes. Yes, I do have some problems. I am in an ancient Czech prison, stuck in a filthy cell with a Mongolian Slim Whitman who is surely going to put me in the looney bin, one whistle at a time. I don’t speak the language you were just screaming in, and I will not suddenly become fluent in it, no matter how loud anyone yells it at me. I resent the fact that you people serve me “food” that I wouldn’t slop the hogs with back home in old Virginny, that I am wearing rags, and that I sleep on a metal torture device that would cripple Charles Atlas for life after just one hour on it. I am confused and I am scared, I am thousands of miles away from my wife, my family, and my friends, locked in a basement cage; and I have absolutely no idea of when or even if I will be let out. You bet your cob-web covered ass I’ve got some problems, doc.

  “No. No problems at all,” I said.

  “That is goot for you,” he replied, blowing smoke in my face, “gootbye.”

  It had been the strangest visit to a doctor in my entire life, and I was not sorry it was over. Almost as soon as Dorj and I were back in our cell though, Tom Selleck opened the door again, pointed at me, yelled “advocate!” and off I went back upstairs. Martin was in the attorney/client cell waiting for me, bringing good and bad news. The bad news was that the prosecuting attorney was determined to keep me in prison, and for the moment it seemed he was able to; he had made it known he would raise an objection to me being granted bail. This confused me at first; in America, to the best of my knowledge, if a judge decided to grant you bail, once it was paid you were free to go. In the Czech Republic, things worked a little differently. A prosecuting attorney could object to you being granted bail, or the conditions of your bail, and then the matter would have to be considered by another court. In the meantime, you remained in custody, whether or not the bail had been paid. My bail had been paid in full by my band, who had borrowed the rather large sum of money from our record label. Close to a quarter million dollars sat in some government account somewhere in Prague, and I sat in prison. Not only that, but Martin told me that even if the court reviewed the conditions of my bail, found them satisfactory, and decided to let me go, the prosecuting attorney could raise yet another objection, which would have to be seen by another court, who would decide whether or not to let me go. Things did not look good for my immediate release, and apparently the prosecuting attorney was a real jerk to deal with for my lawyers. In America there is generally a sense of professional courtesy amongst lawyers, even if they are taking the opposing sides of a case. Things are often worked out, hopefully fairly and in the best interest of all parties involved, with a level of civility. This was not the case with the prosecuting attorney, a Mr. Vladimir Muzik. Martin told me that when he had called Muzik to discuss the case, Muzik was rude to a level of belligerence, yelling at him that he was a busy man and didn’t have to talk to Martin. Martin seemed to think that Muzik would wait until the last moment possible to raise his objection, thereby dragging out the process as long as possible. Martin told me I could feasibly be released within a few days, but not to get my hopes up. He didn’t want me to develop unrealistic expectations about my situation, explaining that if th
e prosecutor played the system correctly, more than likely I would be spending at least a few months in Pankrác.

  I appreciated his candor. I am a man with a severe distaste for sugar-coating. I prefer to know the reality of any situation I may be in, good or bad. That way I can make an educated decision concerning my next course of action. I like to hear the truth, and if I speak, I like to speak the truth, even if it makes others uncomfortable. I have managed to offend a few folks over the years by speaking my mind—to some I am too blunt. And during my drinking days, that was definitely true on occasion. Today, I temper my honesty with as much tact as I can muster. I think I do a pretty good job, but I still manage to piss people off from time to time. I’m a nice guy with great manners; honestly, I am. But if I say something, I mean it; so if we ever meet, don’t ask me a question if you aren’t prepared for the answer. I’m going to do my best to not be a dick, but I’m not going feed you a line of bullshit or say something because I think it’s what you want to hear.

  In prison, the more I knew about the reality of my situation, the better off I was. Martin gave me a little more reality during our visit, showing me a photo from Blesk with the headline “THE DEATH GRIP!” or something to that effect printed boldly above it in Czech. The photo was of me onstage, kneeling on top a young blond man, my hand wrapped up in the collar area of his shirt, still singing into the microphone. The young man is beneath me, throwing up the horns. Apparently some video and photos of the wrestling incident I had related to the police during my interrogation had surfaced, this being one. I looked at the young man in the photo, and his appearance matched my hazy memory of him from that night, including his complete disregard for the fact that I didn’t want him onstage. Any moron looking at the photo could tell that the young man wasn’t being choked; people don’t “rock out” when being choked, they instinctively try to break free so they can breathe. But in typical tabloid fashion, Blesk had printed this photo of what was assumed as definitely being the dead young man in question (the paper identified the man in the photo as Daniel) with a glaring lurid headline in order to sell more copies of their useless rag by demonizing me. This sort of journalism disgusts me, and it always has; it’s irresponsible and can have very real repercussions on innocent people’s lives. But once again, Martin was giving me what I wanted and needed—the truth about my situation, which at that moment was being affected by a very public falsehood. He reiterated the importance of us arranging an interview with Blesk to try to get the paper on our side, which still stuck in my craw, but I knew I would have to play ball if we wanted them to stop portraying me as a murderous maleficent monster. Suing them would be both costly and time consuming, and by the time any sort of libel suit went to court, my manslaughter trial might be over. The damage would be done. So I swallowed my pride and disgust and told him to set it up.