Drawing Dead (22 page)
Authors: JJ DeCeglie
I rose on the third day.
Summoned the courage to split.
Man the ride down and across was worse than hell. Hour after hour fighting the sickness and dread as the van I rode in threatened to cannon us off every sheer curving cut it could. The driver was a merciless madman. Veering, careening, take chance after chance as my gut and mind rocked oh so close to disaster and ordeal.
I cursed anyone who spoke to me, anyone who looked in my direction.
Made a quick overnight stopover in Chiang Mai to make sure I’d regained my rattled composure.
I hadn’t, but stoical and stupid pressed the fuck on.
Like a hellsent hangover that just would not quit the curse persisted unremitting.
But I was determined to get to Vientiane in Laos.
Everything would be better there.
I promised it to myself, and started to believe it.
I just had to shake this terrible aftermath of the illness.
This unrelenting black poison in my blood that lingered all quiet, rearing violently in hurtful attacks like a wild animal vicious out of the scrub.
At about three a.m, half-dead in the hotel room I switched on the TV and watched awhile.
I missed the start and fell asleep before the end, but portions stuck real good.
Shards of glass in my skull. Shrapnel in my bones.
It was a neo-noir film, “Kill Me Again” co-written, and solely directed by a man named John Dahl.
The first in a trilogy which includes, the modern classics “Red Rock West” and the “The Last Seduction”.
I found all this out much later.
At the time I did not even know the title.
In fact the next morning I wondered how much I’d dreamed and how much was real.
This was in between vomiting up breakfast and dreading what would occur at lunch.
All the while hoping hard that I could survive another bus trip and get my ass to Laos.
This was 2007.
And for the record I was still suffering five days later in Vang Vieng.
Fighting occasional brutal bouts.
But by Luang Prabang in the north...I was all better man.
I wrote “Drawing Dead” in 2011.
In Melbourne.
I consider it an original, personal and perverse reinterpretation.
DRAWING DEAD ©2011 by JJ DeCeglie.
No part of this text may be reproduced without the express permission of the author.