It's been more than seven months since Erik Audé was arrested. A verdict could come any day now. The Pakistani government has let it be known that they will not execute Audé. Still, they say, it's very possible that he could spend the next 10 years of his life locked inside that Rawlapindi prison, 17 hours of hard driving from the foot of K-2 and a million miles from home.

Actor-writer-director-producer Billy Hayes is sitting in the den of his L.A. home, trying to find a new distributor for a film about boxers that he's written and directed. The last distributor went belly-up at the last minute, and now Hayes is scrambling to find a new one. "That's LA, you're always juggling three balls," he says. As always, time is short and he's got much to do, but Hayes is more than willing to carve a few minutes out of his hectic schedule to talk about Erik Audé.

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After all, there's probably no one in America no one in the world, for that matter -- who has a better grasp of what Audé is going through right now, sitting in an isolation cell in a Pakistani prison. When Hayes was 23 years old, he was arrested at the airport in Istanbul with several bricks of hashish taped around his waist. His five-year ordeal in a Turkish prison and his escape were documented in an autobiographical book that later became the movie Midnight Express. He's willing to make time. But he can't offer much hope.

"I know about this case," Hayes says. "Between you and me...they don't like Americans over there. He's in a lot of jeopardy."

Maybe, if Audé's lawyer can convince the authorities to be lenient, to let him out in two or three years, the kid will be able to rebuild his life, Hayes says. "It'll be a long stretch," Hayes says. "Hopefully, he'll survive it. He won't break or crack, he'll get stronger, which you do. But 10 years? Forget it. Five is getting to the end. I know that. That was my number when I had to get out. Anything above that, you lose something you're never getting back. And anything above 10, 15, all that shit, you can't function. "

Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, Hayes says. "It's his karma. It's what's coming down for him on the wheel now and there's nothing you can do other than breaking him out. Legally, you're not going to get anywhere. It's the same system I was in, probably worse."

In the time Audé's been in jail, he has been beaten a few times by guards. "Nothing serious," Audé explains. "It's just the way they do things here." He's been warned that other inmates - those with a deep-seated hatred for Americans - may be plotting against him. "One of the other inmates told me that...he said, 'I hear things.'"

And the guards have also ripped him off from time to time. Often, when he writes letters home, the guards take the few rupees he attaches for postage and throw the letters away. "I sent like hundreds of letters. Only a couple ever got through."

"They take everything," he says, adding that they'll probably steal the blanket roll that Sherry sent over with me as well, the one that smells of her perfume and her house.

But he has found at least one friend in prison. Mohammed Ayub, the deputy superintendent of the prison has taken the kid under his wing. He has a real affection for the young man he calls "Erik Anthony."

"My own personal opinion, I believe Erik Anthony is innocent. He does not use drugs, he does not drink," the jailer tells me as he stubs out a cigarette on the stone floor of his bleak office on the first floor of the prison. "This is just my personal opinion. But he doesn't even smoke."

All the same, the deputy superintendent can't help Audé in court, and the young Californian says he has no illusions about his chances.

"They can't prove that I'm guilty but they can't prove that I'm innocent either. Honestly, I think being an American is going to work against me."

Though he could face 10 years, Audé says he's praying that the judge will be lenient and sentence him to three. He's already working on ways to reduce that sentence remissions they call them. "You get like nine months off your sentence if you convert to Islam."

"My name is now Mohammed Ali," he says, trying to suppress a giggle.

And there has been one moment that made life bearable, Audé tells me as Ayub enters the room to let us know that time is running out for our interview.

"Hey, Mr. Ayub," Audé says. "Time and date?"

"April 28 at 3:30 p.m.," the older man replies.

That was the precise moment when Audé got a message from Missy. "That was when she told me that she loves me."

"When I first got here, I was like, screw it. I want to die. And then I got the letter from Missy and I was like 'Ding! Ding!' get up. It's not the 10th round yet. If it takes something like this for her to tell me that she loves me, then I'd go through it again."

Before he's escorted back to his cell, Audé says he wants to share something he's just learned, a word in Urdu.

"The word is 'subatcha,'" he says. "It means, 'it's all good."