Dark Days: A Memoir

by D. Randall Blythe

  That evening after sunset Martin and his lovely wife Eva and I walked a few short blocks through the narrow and winding cobblestone streets of Old Town to a very nice restaurant they ate at often. I wanted a steak, and although it was not on the menu, Martin knew the staff well and they produced one for me. Sitting there in the clothes I had been arrested in, I felt conspicuous and out of place surrounded by the tables full of well dressed diners, but the food was delicious. After dinner, we returned to the apartment and I turned on Martin’s laptop, searching for any news that I had been released. Luckily none appeared, but endless news stories about my arrest and incarceration appeared when I Googled my name. I began to read a few of these, but quickly became overwhelmed and turned the computer off. Martin and Eva went to bed, and I lay down to crash in a spare bedroom, but sleep eluded me. It was so odd to be able to turn a lamp on and off as I wished; to not hear the snores of Ganbold, the whispers of Dorj, the screeching of Ukrainians in the dark, the snap of the cell door hatch as it slid open and lights flashing on as a guard performed his periodic checks throughout the night. I got up and sat in the darkness on the balcony smoking until almost 4:00 a.m., returned to the bedroom to write a quick five sentence entry in my journal noting my freedom, and finally fell into a light sleep.

  The next morning Martin drove me to the airport, instructing me to go directly to my gate once I was through security and not lollygag in the terminals. Rumor of my release had made its way to the ears of the press (the previous evening Martin’s cellphone had been constantly ringing, mostly calls from reporters at Blesk), although no one could confirm it yet. Martin told me that he had arranged for a brief television interview with a news crew he had a good relationship with who agreed not to air it until my plane had left the ground. This made me nervous, as I did not trust the press, especially not the Czech press, who had not exactly been kind to me. But I trusted Martin and agreed to do it. As we walked from the terminal’s parking garage, I saw a camera man and a reporter in a white t-shirt standing outside the airport entrance. I did an almost seven minute interview with the reporter, who mostly asked me how I was feeling and what prison was like. At the end he asked me, “You will return to Prague?”

  “Of course, if it is necessary. I’m no flight risk. I’m an international touring artist, I have to clear my name, so yes, I will come back here if I’m called to court,” I stated with conviction.

  I said goodbye to Martin, then walked to the check in counter and presented my passport. The woman looked up my name, then asked me why I had been in Prague so long.

  “Weeeeelll . . . I was in prison,” I said, handing her my release papers.

  “Um, hold on for one second, please,” she said, and called over a supervisor. After a few nerve-wracking moments she smiled and handed me my ticket. I went through security without any incident, then made my way to my gate. I still had over an hour to kill before my plane took off, and as I passed a newsstand I saw a Czech magazine with my face on the cover. I pulled the bill of my Surf City, NC Surf Shop baseball cap low across my brow—it was no fedora, but it was my favorite hat, reminding me of the sands of Wrightsville Beach where I had spent so much of my youth, and I was especially glad to have it on this day. Soon I arrived at my gate. It was at the very end of the terminal, and felt like a trap to me, an exposed dead end. My leaving Prague was entirely legal, but I still felt like a hunted man. I expected to see a swat team (just like the one that had arrested me) come marching my way at any moment, and this was, in fact, a very real possibility. I decided the gate was too exposed, so I went into a bar with a smoking section out of sight of the terminal hallway, ordered a smoked sausage and a nonalcoholic beer. I sat smoking and staring out of the window at planes as they landed and took off until my flight number popped up on a screen in the lounge. I slugged back my beer, and went back to my gate.

  For an excruciating half hour I sat there, nervously texting with my friend London May, telling him I was free but not to let anyone know until it was announced I was on the ground in America. Finally, at 12:38 p.m. the call went out for first class passengers to board; my band had been kind enough to book me in first class after my ordeal. This was a treat, since despite what many people seem to think, lamb of god always flies coach. I sat in my seat, holding my breath as passengers slowly filed past me boarding the plane, sending a text to my wife to let her know I had made it onto the freedom bird. At last the plane’s door shut, and soon we began to taxi down the runway. It wasn’t until the second that the plane’s wheels left the ground that I emitted a great exhale of relief. I had been incarcerated for thirty-seven days, thirty-four of which I had spent behind Pankrác’s ancient walls. I was finally going home.

  But I knew this wasn’t over. I was positive I would be called to court, and weeks ago in prison, I had already made the decision to return when that call came. I had to.

  I could not turn my back on what my heavy heart told me was the right thing to do.

  part 3

  THE TRIAL

  chapter sixteen

  The longest walk you will ever take is the one you take with your dead child in your arms.

  My first wife and I found out she was pregnant not too long before my thirtieth birthday. Our child wasn’t planned, but I would never call our baby a mistake. When she told me, I grinned and said, “Well, it looks like we’re going to be parents,” and got on with the business of working hard at my roofing job and saving money. My band had just gotten signed to our first label, and had accepted an offer for our first real tour opening for a well-known national act, but I called that off. We weren’t making any money yet, and I had responsibilities to meet. I was going to be a father, and I would put the needs of my small family before my own desires. This was the way I had been raised, and I had born witness to my own father doing the very same thing, traveling hours to work every day, five, six, and sometimes seven days a week, in order to provide for my brothers and me. As a child I did not understand or appreciate his efforts, but as a man I was grateful for the lessons he taught me by example.

  During the first ultrasound to check our baby’s health, the doctor noticed something troubling. Eventually we learned that one of the chambers of our child’s tiny heart wasn’t developing properly. The doctor assured us that it wasn’t a genetic trait our child was inheriting, but a fairly common birth defect; just a random bit of bad luck in the biological game of dice humans play every time two people’s chromosomes meet and combine to create a third life. He also told us that the heart defect was easily operated on after birth, and would not affect our child’s life too much, aside from preventing extremely strenuous exercise.

  “Your baby will never be a marathon runner, but the child will be healthy in every other way,” he assured us.

  Although I stay in pretty good shape, and have always been very active physically, I’ve never run a marathon myself. And I didn’t give a damn if the child never tried out for the Olympics; I just wanted my baby to arrive safe and sound. I didn’t worry about the news of the birth defect too much, as our doctor seemed confident that all would be well after a serious but fairly standard operation. We both worked hard as my wife’s stomach grew bigger, and in the evenings after a long day of roofing, I loved to put my ear to her stomach and talk to my child. We were very content in our rented apartment in the working class Oregon Hill neighborhood of Richmond. We read books on pregnancy, started preparing a room as a nursery, and began attending birthing classes. We were so happy in that excited, scared way that only young, first-time parents feel as they watch their baby grow larger and larger in the mother’s belly.

  One hot summer day I was sweating on a roof in Orange, Virginia, when my boss called up for me to climb down. He told me that my wife had gone into labor. She was fine, he said, but it was time for me to go to the hospital. My guitarist Mark and I worked together at that time, and he came down from the roof to wish me luck. I will never forget the broad smile on his work-tanned face as he clappe
d me on my shoulder as brothers do.

  “You’re gonna be a daddy, man!” he beamed, then I was in a pickup truck for the hour-long drive back to Richmond.

  At the hospital I was rushed to my wife’s side. Our baby was coming early, as my wife was only a little over seven months pregnant. We had planned on a natural childbirth, but due to her premature labor, a Caesarean section was necessary. I held her hand as the anesthetist administered the epidural. In short order we were in an operating room. I crouched by her face, holding her hand, telling her everything was going to be okay. A nurse kept yelling at me as I unconsciously and repeatedly pulled my surgical mask down from my face so that my wife could see me when I spoke to her. It was an intense experience, but it didn’t bother me or freak me out. All I could think of was my wife’s safety, and our soon to be born baby.

  “Okay, guys, are you ready for your baby to be born?” the female doctor yelled at us in a happy voice.

  We were, and then I saw the doctor holding the small thing that was our child.

  “It’s a girl! What are you going to call her?” the doctor asked.

  With my wife still on the table, we named our daughter Sarah Fisher Blythe. Sarah after my mother’s mother and Fisher after the lazy afternoons we spent together on the James River, casting for blue gill and smallmouth bass. As the doctors began sewing my wife up, I walked over to the incubator where my daughter lay. Her hair was full and dark like her mother’s, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The doctor let me briefly touch her tiny hand, then she was whisked away. There was work to be done, as our daughter had to be stabilized so that she could live in an incubator for a while, so she could grow enough for her heart to be operated on. After they had put my wife back together again, we were given a private room, and we both fell asleep; she in her hospital bed, me in a chair beside her.

  At first nurses came by fairly regularly to let us know that the doctors were working on our daughter, and everything was going okay. But the visits began to slow, and the news was noncommittal when it came. I tried to remain positive, but there was a sinking feeling in my guts. Finally, almost seven hours after our daughter had come into the world, a young male intern walked into the room carrying a clipboard. I could see by the pained look on his face the news was not good.

  We were taken to the pediatric wing of the hospital, and we saw our child.

  Our tiny daughter was on a small operating table, tubes running out of her poor naked little body, and a doctor was keeping her alive by hand, pumping her chest with his fingertips. He looked up at me with great sorrow in his eyes.

  “She’s not responding,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  The doctors began to pull the tubes out of her tiny frame, like unplugging a broken electrical appliance.

  And my wife and I watched our daughter die.

  Soon we were alone in a small room down the hall with the still body of our child.

  After a while a young chaplain came into the room and asked us if we wanted to pray with him. I believe I told him he could pray if it would make him feel any better. He tried to talk to us, but all I wanted was for him to leave. He was trying to be of service, but he was nervous, and his presence was a great irritant to me. He watched us hold our baby for a while, then suddenly blurted, “Look, give me the baby. I’ll carry her back,” and took a step towards my wife. I quickly stepped in the way. I felt a great wave of protective violence surge within me, my instincts screaming for me to smash this kind but bumbling man in the face. I restrained myself with great effort, trying to stop my hands from shaking.

  “NO!” I barked. “This is our baby. I am her father. I will carry her back. You can leave now.”

  The chaplain quickly left, and I could tell I had frightened the man. He was only trying to do his job, but he was young and nervous, and could not possibly understand how to speak to a couple like my wife and me. That soft and awful skill only comes through years of bearing witness to tragedies like ours, and he was obviously lean on the heartbreaking experience required of a counselor in such terrible moments. My wife and I sat for a while longer, then I looked at her. It was time to say goodbye.

  The walk down the empty hall back to the operating room was just a few hundred feet, but as I put one foot in front of the other, carrying my dead child tightly in my arms, it seemed to stretch on for miles and miles. I am her father. I am a man. This is my duty. I will carry her back. I will carry her back, no one else, I thought over and over during that surreal, endless fluorescent-bulb lit nightmare trek. When I reached the operating room, the doctors and nurses looked at me with heartbroken eyes. I could tell this hurt them greatly—they had tried their best, but our little girl was just not strong enough yet. I stood in front of them, and tried to compose myself.

  “Thank you all for trying to save our daughter’s life,” I said in a choked voice, and handed my dead baby to a nurse. I saw tears well up in the doctors’ and nurses’ eyes. As much as this had been a nightmarish experience for me, it must have been unimaginably painful for the woman who had carried our baby, so I turned and walked out of that room to go to take care of my wife the best I could.

  A few months later, after the pain of our loss got to be too much, our marriage fell apart on Christmas Eve. My brother Mark came to fetch me, and literally carried me weeping from our house back to my family. I fell deeper and deeper into the bottle for the next decade, and I never dealt with the awful sadness that sat buried inside me. Finally I got sober, and began to face my past. The pain is always there, but it has grown softer over the years. Today I live a happy and free life, but there is not a day that goes by that I do not think of my baby girl.

  Losing my child is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Even the pain of decades of active alcoholism, and the fear and uncertainty I faced during my trip to prison look trivial, even laughable, when compared to the way I felt when I watched my daughter die. It was absolute hell, the worst hell I could imagine, and only a parent who has lost a child can understand this. It is not something I wish to discuss with anyone I am not very close with, with the exception of a newly grieving parent. As an elder member of that sad tribe, I can feel their pain on a visceral level, and even if I don’t know them, I can listen well with an open, understanding heart. I can’t make the hurt go away, but I can extend my hand and let them know that they can survive this.

  I could not extend my hand to the family of Daniel, for I was accused of killing their child. They had done nothing wrong, yet suffered in confusion. No reason for their son’s death other than hearsay had been given them, unlike the cold light of reason that science provided me when my daughter died. Daniel’s family never once attacked me, bad-mouthed me in the press, or lashed out at me in anyway, neither in public nor in private. They just wanted some answers. I knew the way they suffered. I could feel it when I thought of my own child’s passing. In prison, I asked myself a question: What kind of man would I be if I did not do my best to help them find those answers, through whatever means necessary, no matter the cost?

  No kind of man at all, I silently answered, speaking my heart’s truth.

  I am a man, I thought.

  I would go back if called.

  chapter seventeen

  The words “Welcome home, sir” had never sounded sweeter than they did coming from the US customs agents at New York’s JFK airport, as he handed back my passport on August 3, 2012. Beyond a cheap duffle bag half-full of prison ephemera, I didn’t have any luggage to recheck for my flight to Richmond, so I made my way directly to the terminal’s exit to stand on American soil (or at least New York City concrete), for the first time in months. As I moved with the crowd past the last security checkpoint, I heard a female voice call my name. I turned and saw an attractive dark haired young woman standing by the exit.

  “Randy, I just wanted you to know I’m glad you’re home” she said, and gave me a hug.

  Lia w
as a lamb of god fan from New York City who had read on the Internet that I had been released from prison. The details of my flight had not been made public, but Lia had smartly figured that I would probably fly directly from Prague to New York or Washington, D.C., and from there catch a connecting flight home to Richmond. As she lived in New York and had the afternoon off, she had checked all the flights from Prague to JFK, and had decided to come and take a chance that she would see me in arrivals. After waiting a few fruitless hours she was about to leave, but decided to take a chance on one more flight. Lia was not a stalker or a weirdo; she just felt that someone should be there to welcome me back to America, and after doing so told me she would be on her way. I was deeply touched by her warm gesture, and asked her if she would stay and have a coffee with me. I called my wife (who would have been in New York to greet me but for a delayed flight from Richmond) to let her know I had landed safely, then sat and chatted with Lia over coffee until it was time for me to go for my flight home.

  After going back through security, I found a spare outlet near my departure gate, plugged in my cell phone to give it a little juice, and looked at my email inbox for the first time since I had been released. It was, of course, completely flooded with messages from approximately three million different people, the basic premise of around 95 percent of the emails being “Dude, what the fuck is going on? Bro, are you okay?!?” Just looking at this digital river of concern warmed my heart, but it also very quickly began to make me feel overwhelmed. I was just about to turn off my phone when I noticed one email subject heading that kept on popping up again and again. It was a single word: gratitude.