A FRIEND IN PRISON
I have many friends. Which means, statistically, sooner or later one of them would inevitably end up behind bars.
This is a story about how I sent printed memes to a friend in prison and tried to support him in a most controversial way possible.
I met Chris 4 years ago during one of the concert tours. The transport company from which we rented a minivan randomly selected and assigned him to us.
We spent five weeks on the road — he was driving, and I sat in the passenger seat, coordinating routes, stops, and parking. We shared food, stories, a hotel room, and worked closely together every day.
Chris is a professional driver. For many years he worked with tourist transfers and music tours, but during COVID those ended, and he switched to package deliveries. After the pandemic, when everything came back, he continued driving artists around.
I liked working with him — he is never late, doesn’t drink at all on tour, doesn’t get tired on long drives, and can change his driving style at the first request. A professional, what else can I say!
I continued giving him work — we did two more tours, living together in hotel rooms for multiple months. During that time we understood everything about each other and, I could say, became friends.
Not the kind of friends you text every week, but rather the kind you meet after a two-year break and just continue the last conversation you had.
Friendly, kind, sincere, good guy.
Chris’s distinctive feature was that he didn’t have one. And not in a bad way.
When you work with artists for years, you get used to the strangest personality traits and other people’s egos. This one is a vegan, that one needs to breathe in silence for 10 minutes, another needs a candle of a specific brand in the dressing room. One has bursts of anger, another yaps for hours, a third constantly disappears somewhere and you have to search for him in the nearest forest with a flashlight.
Against the background of the crazy zoo that the music industry represents, Chris was normal.
A wife, kids, an apartment with a mortgage, a job. If he didn’t have to work — he could drink a beer and talk about politics. An emotionally very steady guy. Sometimes he did something odd, but again, nothing that makes a headline. Exactly the type of guy you want to have around when everything goes to shit. Which it does on tour more often than you might think.
I laughed at him, saying, “Game over, dude, you’ve completed all the male achievements — all that’s left is to die.”
To which he calmly replied: “I don’t want anything else. I’m living life and not making plans too far ahead. Let it be whatever it will be!”
Last winter I was preparing to go on my first bus tour.
Chris and I agreed that when I returned we would have a call where I would tell him all the details. He had long wanted to make a career jump and start driving buses — the pay there was significantly higher than vans, and quickly getting "D" driver’s license category was not a problem for him at all.
A week after returning, I had rested, drank all the beers, and wrote to him on Telegram that I was finally ready to chat. But didn’t get a reply.
Well, maybe he was busy, it happens. Maybe he himself was on tour somewhere, flying down a German autobahn…
A couple of weeks later I wrote again, this time on WhatsApp. And again I got no answer.
Both messages remained unread.
I didn’t put much importance to it — he would read and reply when he had the chance. On my side there was no urgency; in the end, that call was more necessary for him than for me. It could wait.
A couple more weeks later I suddenly received a request on Facebook from an unknown account.
A girl wrote to me: “Hello! If you were trying to contact Chris ****** on WhatsApp — at the moment he is unavailable, and it is unknown when he will be.”
I was a little surprised by these news. I opened her profile — in the profile photo the lady was with children who looked like the ones Chris used to call from the hotel during days off on our previous tours.
That’s how I understood that the message was from Maria, his wife. How she found my Facebook page — I have no idea.
Usually messages like this mean that the person has either died or is lying in a coma.
I replied, introduced myself, told her a little about myself, and asked whether everything was alright with my friend. To which Maria replied:
— Chris is currently in custody in Slovenia.
What could have happened that the poor guy ended up under investigation?
He works as a driver… Maybe he ran someone over and killed them? Or got caught drunk? Nothing like that had ever been typical of Chris — if he was working, everything was always precise.
And then I remembered one story he once told me during a long night drive. All the artists in the van had already passed out, and I was sitting there with matches in my eyes, distracting him with conversation so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Once he got a call from an unknown number and was offered a driving job at a rate three times higher than usual. Chris wasn’t bothered by that at all, and without thinking for long he agreed.
When he arrived at the pick-up location, an ordinary family of rather Eastern appearance was waiting for him — a husband, a wife, and a kid. He needed to drive them from point A to point B. Only the exact route was dictated to him directly over the phone — detouring through forests and some sketchy country roads.
— Bro, those are probably illegal migrants!
— Hell if I know, — Chris replied, — I checked their passports, they were citizens of Turkey. As far as I know, they don’t need a visa to enter the EU anyway.
— Maybe the passports were fake?
— Maybe… Look, I’m not a fucking border guard to scan documents with my eyes. They had passports, so I drove. I didn’t ask unnecessary questions, got paid — everything was great!
— Well, be careful with that, — I warned him then, — You never know what kind of backlash might come.
— Yeah, I only took a couple of those jobs. They never called me again.
And that’s where our conversation ended back then.
I spent a long time beating around the bush, not daring to ask Maria directly what had happened. I didn’t want to disturb a person who had temporarily been left without her husband, without his income, and with children to take care of. I’m sure she had plenty to deal with — lawyers, trips to court hearings, rebuilding her own life, and so on.
But in the end she told everything herself.
Chris was transporting two illegal migrants across the border of Croatia and Slovenia. And in Slovenia the local cops busted him. They confiscated the car, took his phone, and locked him in detention until the court hearing. He could only call his family a couple of times a week on a landline.
The article he was charged under carried a sentence of 3 to 10 years in prison. So there was a chance he could go away for a LONG time.
But the judge took into account that the defendant had no previous convictions and that he had a wife and two small children depending on him.
In the end he was given 13 months in prison, with the possibility of applying for parole after half the term, and a fine of €800.
So, considering the seriousness of his original situation, Chris won a ticket to Disneyland.
I sat there thinking about how to relate to all of this.
Yes, he committed a crime. But no one died and no one was harmed.
Do I feel sympathy for him? Not really.
If he had been judged unfairly, or under a political charge in an unjust court, then sympathy might have been appropriate. One could write him something like “stay strong, bro, we’re with you!” or “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade or whatever!”
Obviously he went for it himself, for the money. Realizing that it might be illegal. He got caught. He was processed in a European court and given a sentence, and a fairly mild one compared to what it could have been otherwise.
I didn't have a solid reason to feel sympathy after that, but I still wanted to support my friend. Didn't want to walk away only based on fact that he is now a convict.
So I made the only possible decision — to laugh at the idiotic situation he had gotten himself into. Make the most fun out of it, to ease his time.
And boy I did it in the most controversial way possible.
— Where can I send a message, support an old friend in trouble?
Maria sent me the prison’s mailing address and warned:
— Just keep in mind, all letters will be opened and read by the guards before being handed over!
— Even better, — I smirked and cunningly rubbed my hands.
This was a unique opportunity, because when else would a person I know personally end up in prison. Such LUCK simply couldn’t be missed!
So all the idiotic creativity and greasy jokes from my brain floated to the surface and began to boil.
I threw together the first letter on the fly before leaving for another tour, just to check whether it would arrive or not.
It arrived in a week. I could now continue.
I spent more time on the second one. I tried to imagine what life in a Slovenian prison might look like and what the general context there was. What could Chris and the guards reading his mail laugh at?
The absence of a phone! If there is no phone, then there is no internet, no Instagram, and no memes. And without them you can’t go anywhere!
I wrote to a friend with a PhD in memology:
“Masha, I have a friend sitting in prison, we need to make a selection of memes. But not for high end post irony meta people — for NORMAL folks!”
Masha immediately jumped in: “Awesome, I’ll sort it out now!”
She sent me several options, and I found some myself:
I printed them out on a printer at the local library. The old librarian lady looked at me somewhat strangely, but didn’t say anything. She probably understood that I had my reasons…
I put them in an envelope and sent out:
The third letter was collective. We went on tour with another band, whom Chris had already driven before, and some of the guys received the idea of a jail letter with great enthusiasm.
A funny detail was that in the tour group was a mix of Russians and Belorussians, while Chris was the only European, and he used to complain that he couldn’t understand a damn thing we were saying to each other.
We used to joke a lot about prison back then — that sooner or later we would all end up there, exploiting the stereotypes of post-USSR autocratic governments. And now we were mocking the fact that, against all odds, out of all of us it was somehow Chris who ended up in prison.
I sent the next letter from Britain. At that time we were traveling with friends by car through Scotland, and on the road we stopped to refuel and buy something to eat.
It turned out to be the same service station where three years earlier Chris and I had made an emergency medical stop. Back then, during a drive across the UK, a passenger car suddenly cut in front of us, violating traffic rules. Chris slammed the brakes, but one of the musicians had been asleep and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. As a result he smacked his head hard against the back of the front seat, and we had to pull at that very station so the injured person could be examined by the local medic on duty.
Filled with nostalgia, I bought Chris a word-play puzzle. Basically a kind of senior person entertainment. Well, what else is there to do in prison, right?
The joke with this puzzle was that it was made by the British for the British. Which meant that more than half the words were unknown neither to me nor to my travel companions.
There were some wild words and completely idiotic topics like shades of green and the vocabulary of a tax inspector. Solving such a puzzle for a person not from Britain would be more painful than pleasant.
And that’s exactly why I bought it.
I sent the final one from the USA, a few weeks before Chris would be able to apply for parole.
It was just a cute sticker. But for Chris it might have been quite insulting.
I also had several ideas that I couldn’t or didn’t manage to properly carry out.
The first was a template for origami which, when assembled, would supposedly give a person a tool for escaping from prison. I spent a long time googling “origami shovel”, “origami file”, and even “origami shiv”, but didn’t find anything decent. To design such a template myself I had neither the skills nor the time.
I thought the joke would be funny because the guards might freak out over it, and in the end Chris would just have a small paper shovel that in reality couldn’t do anything. But the concept was, frankly speaking, rather unfinished, so I dropped it.
The second idea was probably my favorite. Since I knew the prison’s address, I wanted to find it on Google Maps. I planned to read all the reviews people had left about this prison, pick the best ones, print them out, and send to Chris.
Something like: “Best two years of my life, 5 stars rating.” Or “Once got stabbed there, would not recommend! 1 star rating.”
But it turned out that comments on prisons in Google Maps were disabled :(
So I had to completely abandon the idea.
While I was having fun coming up with more and more stupid ideas, I didn’t receive a single reply. Even though the return address of my London apartment was written on every envelope.
After the second or third letter, I seriously began to doubt whether it had been a good idea…
Did Chris understand my idea of simply laughing at the situation he had gotten himself into? Or was he not in the mood for jokes at all? Or, on the contrary, was he very angry at me because of this trolling?
I never explained him the idea and simply started sending stupid shit without any warning...
Sometimes I wrote to Maria to ask how things were going, and she replied: “Chris received your first letter, he sends many thanks!”, “Chris received the second letter”, “the third”… But the prisoner himself never got in touch. Perhaps he didn’t even tell his wife about the contents of those letters.
— Alex, he’ll get out of prison, take the return address, wait for you near your house and stab you, — that other band joked while signing the third collective letter.
After the silence in response even to the third letter, their jokes in my head moved into the category of real possibilities.
But I could no longer stop. It was scary and funny at the same time.
A few weeks after sending the last letter, after returning from another tour, I learned that Chris had been released on parole.
To be honest, I was already very nervous about it. The idea was very funny in my head, but that didn’t mean that a person actually sitting behind bars would find it just as funny. I knew Chris’s sense of humour well, but the perspective from inside prison could have changed his perception in a way I would never be able to understand.
I came to terms with the thought that because of my 'awesome' jokes I had not only lost a friend and a good professional driver contact, but had also gained a real enemy.
A month later Chris suddenly wrote to me on WhatsApp:
— Hi, dude! How are things? Wanna have a call?
My pulse spiked and I nervously swallowed. “Oh boy here we go…”
— Of course, let’s do it! Is this evening convenient?
We had a call. It was quite strange to hear the voice of a friend after such a long break. And no less strange was that it felt as if we simply continued the conversation we had been having the last time we met.
Surprisingly, at the moment of the call Chris was flying down a German autobahn. After getting out, he almost immediately started working and closing the huge hole in the family budget.
Besides the served sentence and the fine, he was also banned from entering Slovenia for several years.
— Yeah, Alex! I really screwed up this time around, haha! I didn’t even think to check the local legislation and see how many years they could give for transporting illegal migrants! I thought it was just a fine or something like that!
It turned out that the “just a couple of jobs” from an unknown number had turned into a regular thing for Chris. The money was good, and it never occurred to him to do any long-term planning or risk assessment. That in Slovenia they give up to 10 years for this kind of stunt — he found out already in pre-trial detention from his lawyer.
There were many people locked with him under the same charge. Despite the fact that the police confiscated and checked everyone’s phones, not a single organizer of these illegal schemes ended up in prison. The migrants themselves were also released, and according to Chris's information the ones he was transporting at the time of his arrest had already made it to France and were receiving benefits there. Meanwhile, the drivers themselves were the only ones serving the time.
This changed my initial opinion that sympathy toward Chris would have been inappropriate.
Yes, he did indeed break the law. But how adequate is such a law? Giving drivers up to 10 years for transporting illegal migrants? In some countries, that’s what they give for murder.
Dealing with migrants may cause media noise. The organizers have to be tracked down, clever police operations carried out. But the driver — there he is, just take him and lock him up! Modern days frontier justice.
Chris was generally satisfied with the prison, as much as that is possible. Not a resort, but not a labor camp either. All day long he read books and worked out. He said that in the end he turned into a blob of muscles, and hearing that made me feel even more uneasy.
— Did you even receive my letters?
— I received five letters from you! Thanks a lot dude!
— Well, when I received the first one, I was a little upset. I thought, damn, why insult a person who has already insulted himself enough? But then, after the second one, I caught the right frequency and started laughing too.
He secretly hung the printed memes one by one on the information board in the common hall where the prisoners gathered. So that they also wouldn’t fall behind life, so to speak.
When after some time the guards noticed a meme and tore it down, Chris hung up a new one. The last one, with the giant cock, he hung up a day before his own release.
— So what are your plans now? — I asked.
— Same as always, ordinary life, brother. Spend time with the family, and the rest of the time just work and earn money. If you ever have work — send it my way, I’ll be very glad!
But I had been planning to do that anyway.
Before saying goodbye, I admitted that I had been sure he now hated me and would stab me the first time we met.
Chris laughed and said everything was fine, once again confirming that he understood my joke.
— So why didn’t you ever reply to me?
— The reply I sent you from prison at the end of summer?
— Nothing arrived. What was in it? — I asked, genuinely surprised.
— As you may imagine, I didn’t have many opportunities to look things up while I was serving my sentence. So I drew you a plan of the prison from memory.
— You drew a prison plan and sent it to me? Knowing that the guards read the letters?
— Yeah, — Chris replied completely carefree. The thought that this was probably the one thing you absolutely SHOULD NOT send from prisons once again didn’t occur to him.
— Yeah, mate, you really will never change… Take care of yourself, hope to see you soon! — I replied before saying goodbye.