Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  Later at walk we had a new inmate join us, a stocky, muscular Russian named Pavel. Pavel had a huge sack of tobacco, plenty of rolling papers, and was quite generous with both. Pavel asked me in halting English about my charge, as apparently he was getting hit with a variation of the same thing. I explained my charge and its penalty, five to ten years with no time off for good behavior. I referred to it by its paragraph number in the Czech legal code, 146, which was how prisoners seemed to discuss their charges amongst each other. Rene and everyone else (everyone is a lawyer in prison, by the way) seemed to think I would have it dropped to a lesser variety of manslaughter, which carried a penalty of two to eight years, some of which could be knocked off for good behavior. I asked Pavel about how he had landed in Pankrác, and he ruefully shook his head, saying he had been out on the town with his girlfriend when a group of guys started hitting on her. He told them to knock it off, a fight erupted, and he punched one of the men in the face. The man fell down, hit his head on the cobblestone street, and went kaput right there—end of story. He was also charged with manslaughter, but his paragraph was 145, which carried a sentence of ten to twenty years with no time off for good behavior. Like most Russians I have met, Pavel looked like he could more than handle himself in a fight, but he had a very gentle manner about him that made me believe his story—he just didn’t give off the vibe of a troublemaker. I felt sorry for him.

  Sitting in my cell as the sun went down, I began to think about my possible sentence. I could do a year or two no problem, and do it with a smile. Ten years though? I decided I could do that as well, but that I could not ask my wife to wait for me that long. I would not want her to, although I believed she would, because she is a good woman who has already been through a lot with me. Cindy was still in her thirties, she could go and find someone else, start anew. I loved her too much for her to be alone for that long. I would want her to go and build a new life, to pursue happiness. She deserved that. The thought of separating from my wife was sad for me, but I grew even sadder thinking about her heading into her fifties, alone with no husband to speak of except a box of letters sent from thousands of miles away. I felt that would be wrong of me to put her through that, and whether or not I was an innocent man didn’t matter much if I went away for a decade.

  Hopefully things wouldn’t come to that though, and I banished the thoughts from my mind. The whole time I was in Pankrác, I tried my best not to think about my wife too much. Not because I didn’t love her; indeed it was quite the opposite—I loved her so much it hurt far too badly to ponder a life without her. Things would happen the way they were going to happen, and if I was found innocent, then there wouldn’t be any problem. If I was found guilty and had to do a year or two, I would have plenty of time to miss her then. If I got ten years, then I would go about coming to peace with being alone. But not until then. At present, what I needed most was a clear head. I had to stay in the moment, and not mope over my woman.

  Lights out came, and I lay there on my lumpy cot, listening to the nightly Tower of Babel as the prisoners called across the courtyard to each other. The goddamned Ukrainian above me was the loudest as usual, and kept on screaming to his comrade even after all the other men, including his friend, had stopped talking. I knew that yelling at him would do absolutely no good, in fact it would probably just piss him off and make him scream louder and longer, but he was driving me insane. I hopped up from my bed, grabbed the bars of the cell window, and got ready to curse him out. Suddenly, I was struck by how much I must resemble a monkey in a cage at the zoo, swinging from the bars, furious at my captivity. I began to laugh and get down, when an idea struck me.

  I carefully let go of the window’s bars, balancing on the iron railing of my bed, and cupped my hands on either side of my mouth, forming a bullhorn. Then I let rip with a Tarzan yell, just like Johnny Weissmuller did in those old black and white movies from the 1940s.

  “Ooooooo-aaooo-aaoooooooooooooooooooo-aaooaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .” My jungle call echoed off the gray walls of my concrete home.

  And the prison exploded into animal noises.

  Monkeys, goats, cows, chickens, dogs, elephants, pigs, cats—you name it, I heard it coming screaming out of cell windows. It was completely awesome, it went on for a good while, and it drowned out the Ukrainian (who I’m sure was losing his mind over being out-yelled). I lay back down on my bed and smiled, listening to the menagerie that had erupted all around cell #505. I thought back to what Rene had called out to me as we all returned to our cells at the end of walk.

  “Randy, go home! Go home, Randy.”

  I was trying my best to do just that, which didn’t amount to much. But I had just spent my first week in prison, I was still alive, in good physical and mental shape, and I had a smile on my face. Fuck the prosecuting attorney, fuck the judges, fuck the cops, and fuck the assholes that ran this prison.

  Fuck ’em all.

  chapter twelve

  My second week in prison began with me sitting down to do something I absolutely loathe—writing a letter to the press. In my life as a musician, I prefer to let my work and my actions speak for themselves. I don’t like explaining myself, my band’s music, or our show, especially to the press. In fact, I hate doing interviews when we put out a new record or go on tour, because I honestly really have nothing to say. I’m not the band guy who says, “This is our greatest record ever! We are so proud of it!” in the press. I view that kind of crap as the hot air that it is. I mean, who is going to tell an interviewer, “You know, this record is pretty good, but I like the one we did two records before it waaaaay better,” even if it’s the truth? “Just listen to the damn record and come to the show, and if you like it, cool. If not, I’m sure you’ll let us know”—that’s my ideal answer to all questions concerning any upcoming releases or tours by lamb of god, or any other music I may put out in the future. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help sell many records or concert tickets, so I talk to the press and answer the same questions over and over. Then, once the reviews come out, good or bad, I try not to look at them. What other people think and say about my music has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what I do and how I do it. Besides, brutal criticism from total strangers, sometimes directed at you personally, is the price you pay for daring to stand in the ring and fight instead of sitting on your fat ass in the bleachers, heckling and drinking over-priced shitty beer. I’ll take the ring any day—I’m not really a sidelines kind of guy.

  But I wasn’t putting out a new record or going on tour, I was facing a manslaughter charge, and I was being demonized by the national media of the country I was incarcerated in. I couldn’t just ignore that kind of press, like I could a crappy record review. I still wasn’t exactly sure what had happened that night in 2010, but I honestly believed I never purposely attempted to harm anyone (which was the nature of the charge against me), and I wanted to state that as loudly and as clearly as I could for the record.

  “Greetings from Pankrác Prison in Prague. I, D. Randall Blythe, am writing this to inform anyone who may care of my status and position concerning my current incarceration in the Czech Republic . . .” The statement went on to elaborate on five main points: 1) a profession of my innocence, 2) my complete surprise and displeasure over not only being arrested but not being previously informed in any way of the charges against me by either the Czech or American governments, 3) a statement that I had suffered no abuse at the hands of either inmates or prison employees, 4) a few words of reassurance for my countrymen and women back home that I was both physically and mentally fit, and could not complain of my circumstances as our men and women of the armed services live through far worse in the course of their duties, and do so without whining, and 5) an expression of my sorrow over Daniel’s death, regardless of my guilt or innocence.

  I worked on the statement until we were called to go outside for a walk, which, as it was a Saturday, occurred at 8 am. As we were being led back to our cells after the hour outside was up, Felix t
urned to me and said, “And now, we will be locked in our cells for twenty-seven and a half hours.” Agh! No! Don’t say that! He reminded me of some of my band and crew members who like to start counting the days left on a tour way too early into a run. “Hey! Only forty-seven more shows to do until we get to go home for two weeks!” Dude—don’t say that kind of stuff around me.

  Felix’s talk of the extended lockdown that occurs every Saturday in Pankrác did make me think about the time I had already spent in prison, though. As I tried to recall how many days I had been locked up, I suddenly realized that despite the few lines I had drawn on my cell wall at night when I actually remembered to do so, I had absolutely no idea of what date it was, or even a firm grasp of how long I had been incarcerated. This was not a new experience for me—on tour I often don’t even know what month it is, much less the specific date. I mark my days on the road by cities and countries, not dates or days of the week. No one ever asks “Is today Thursday?”—instead it’s “Are we in Germany or Italy tomorrow? How many more shows until we get to Japan?” Dates and days of the week become meaningless out there, which can be problematic when it comes time to remember things like your wife’s birthday (sorry, honey). Although I had no desire to sit around obsessing about how many days I had been locked up, I figured that a calendar might provide me with a stabilizing reference point during my incarceration, a numeric anchor I could throw out to hold me in place in the seemingly timeless sea of prison life. The prison store, if it even had calendars for sale, wouldn’t be open until next week, so I set out to make one myself.

  I folded a sheet of paper Felix had given me into four equal sections and tore them apart, drawing a fairly even grid-style blank calendar template on it, using a toothpaste box as a straightedge. Then I looked at the date on my arrest papers, June 27, and made a calendar for that month. As I got to the end of June, I couldn’t remember if it was a thirty or thirty-one-day month. I struggled to recall this weird trick my wife has tried to teach me many times where you count the knuckles on your hands, assigning each a month—somehow this tells you which months are longer than others, but I couldn’t remember it then, and I can’t remember it now. I sat there completely stymied until I remembered to look in my wallet. Amongst the various business cards and scraps of paper containing phone numbers or emails that had no name attached (I’m always afraid to throw these things away, despite their complete uselessness) I found what I was looking for—a filthy business card-sized piece of white plastic. On one side was a tiny calendar, providing me with the number of days in the month. On the other side, printed in bright red letters was a Richmond area code phone number and the words “Johnson’s Community Bonding—Putting your feet back on the street!” Somehow the card had stayed with me through many different wallets, even into my sobriety, because hey—you never know what you might get into, right? Laughing at the irony of using an American bail bondsman’s card to help me figure out my time in a foreign prison, I finished up June, made a new calendar for July, drew an X through each date that I had been incarcerated, drew little cartoon versions of Dorj and myself beside the name of the month, and stuck it to our cork board with dabs of toothpaste. Looking at the calendars, I felt a sense of satisfaction. I had created something using available materials; a tool to help me mentally maintain a semblance of normal life in my very abnormal surroundings. I would perform many such small acts of creation during my stay in Pankrác; fashioning and decorating an ashtray from an empty can of tuna fish. Small drawings I stuck to our cell walls for decoration. Doing these kind of things, creating my stuff from whatever I had available helped me not fall into lethargy and despair. I don’t function well if I am just sitting around on my ass, staring at a wall or mindless television. I get very depressed when I can’t do something, so prison required me to exercise the already over-active creative side of my brain even more than normal.

  Luckily later that day I was called out of my cell for a visit with Martin, and he brought me several things that would help fill my time a little bit—three packs of cigarettes (the asshole guard only let me keep one), some envelopes and stamps so I could write letters, two English books, and two printed out emails. One was from my drummer, Chris. He wrote me to say that the band was working as hard as they could to get me out of there, and that the support for me from the music community was overwhelming. Several very well-known musicians, people from groups far bigger than ours, were speaking up publicly about my situation. The fans were sticking with me, a White House petition had been started and was rapidly gathering signatures, and people were sporting “Free Randy” shirts already. It was good to know that I hadn’t been forgotten by the music family I had been a member of for my entire adult life.

  The other email was from my wife Cindy, and I must have read it fifteen or twenty times that day alone. “Honey, I don’t even have the words for how sorry I am about what you’re going through. Even just saying that falls terribly short. I know you’re staying calm and strong—you continue to amaze me with what you’re capable of doing, of handling . . .”—the beginning of that letter was all I needed to feel better. I just needed to know that my wife knew I was okay, that I was maintaining a stoic attitude, that I was still the man she knew I was and would continue to be. She had given me that in a few short sentences, which was a precious gift to me. I didn’t worry about myself that much when I was in prison—there were scary moments, but I had handled them so far without freaking out and I knew I would continue to do so. But make no mistake about it, I am a worrier by nature—about other people. If someone I care about is going through a particularly rough spot, I will worry about them until I am almost paralyzed with anxiety. This is counter-productive of course, and I try not to worry so much, but I can’t help it a lot of the time. And I had been very worried about my wife, because I knew that me being locked up would pain her. After I read her letter, I wasn’t so worried, because I knew that she could sense I was okay. The letter went on to let me know that she had seen pictures of me in court, and could tell by my face that I was remaining calm. She also knew that I was okay because she had heard I was learning some Mongolian from my cellmate (in later letters from other friends, they said similar things—they knew I was doing okay because I was still trying to absorb some culture, even in prison). Reading Cindy’s letter had made even more determined to not let the weight of my uncertain future crush me under its fearsome heel. I would soldier on, and do what I could to run a tight mental and physical ship. Energized, I made a small sign for our cork board on a square of paper. It read in bold letters: Maintain Discipline. I stuck it up, then plopped down on my bed to look at the two books Martin had brought me.

  Ah, books. Books I could read. By this time, I hadn’t cracked open a book in almost two weeks, the longest period I had gone without reading since I had first learned how, and I was starting to get a little nutty from the lack of mental exercise. The first one I picked up was The Quest, by Wilbur Smith. From what I could gather after a brief perusal, it was a historical novel set in ancient Egypt, and seemed to center mainly around the activities of a slave who had been castrated. Well, at least there wouldn’t be any dirty parts to get me all worked up and missing the wife. Hmmm, could be interesting, but I’m really not a huge fan of the whole slavery and penis removal thing, I thought, and picked up the other book. This one also involved a bit of forced physical mutilation, but seemed to have a slightly more hopeful bent to it. Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival, by Dean King, was about thirty women who had survived the Long March, a massive and brutal 4,000 mile retreat across China on foot by Mao Zedong’s Red Army from the soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Army. The book’s title was taken from the ancient Chinese practice of binding girls’ feet at a young age (thereby permanently deforming them) in order to make them develop the “lotus gait,” a mincing way of walking primarily on the heels that was deemed erotic by Chinese men at the time. The women of Unbound had rejected this barbaric proces
s, and saw Mao Zedong’s Communist Party (which opposed foot binding) as progressive and feminist, so they endured the Long March, even though several of them were later persecuted by the Communists during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the ’60s and ’70s. My wife’s mother is from China, I have family there, and I find the history of the land fascinating (especially the complete and abrupt overhaul of national identity that came with Mao’s rise to power), so despite the lengthy list of character names in the front of the book (all those Wangs and Yangs and Tangs looked pretty confusing), I decided I would probably give Unbound a go before The Quest. Plus, although the subject matter looked pretty grim, at least the Chinese women had rejected foot binding and had decided to walk on their own two normal feet; once somebody cuts off your pecker in ancient Egypt, you just have to deal with it and come to some sort of acceptance, I guess. My decision was made final the second I read the author’s brief bio on the back dust jacket: Dean King lives in Richmond, VA. My homeboy! I settled down with the book, and made a mental note to contact King one day and tell him how reading a hometown author’s book in prison had cheered me up. (So thanks, Dean—it really did!)

  The next morning after breakfast Bradley came by #505 and opened the door. Dorj and I were both laying on our beds, me swiftly decimating Unbound (it was a good book) and Dorj whistling. Bradley didn’t appear to really want anything. I think he was just bored and wanted to see if he could piss me off.