sleep hard.

I have spent a lot of time setting up trade shows, and the experience is always fun for me- the pressure, the organization, etc.

I got that training doing road work for small performers, years ago. I wanted to be Travis W Redfish. When I was single, in my lush rolling youth, I loved to follow the bands around, help set up equipment, etc., and because I could work like a dog and knew how to take care of equipment, they let me.

Like cables. If you see a guy wrapping cables around his arm like so much hemp, he’s destroying that cable. Especially if it’s a balanced audio cable, hanking it up like that will fuck it up in short order. You have to carefully roll and loop, roll and loop. And then, and ONLY then, will the cable be safe for transport. Cabs and towers and heads have to be boxed, and secured, and etc.

And most of the guys, by the time the show was over, were too hammered to do a damned thing.

SO I closed a lot of shows. I’d get kids in the audience to help carry the big stuff, and I’d rush around and get the shit on the truck so the driver could get it on the road for the next night.

And usually, fall asleep on a pile of moving blankets. usually in the short bus the rest of the roadies rode in. One time, though, after closing up a gig in Highland, and headed for someplace north of Indianapolis, I fell asleep on the moving blankets on stage.
Now, when I work hard, I sleep hard. I’ve slept through a tornado which took the roof off the room I was sleeping in. I have been told I could probably sleep through an appendectomy, if I worked hard enough. The Ogwife claims that when we’ve been locked in the throes of some particularly strenuous lovemaking, I sing in my sleep, usually (apparently) tom waits or Steely Dan. (I’m not buying it, I think she’s hallucinating)

Anyway. the moving blankets went on top of the bus, last thing to be packed. And a couple of the drunken fools decided that it would be funny to pile me up there. I slept through being moved.

And that is how I ended up bungeed to the top of a blue-painted short bus, in the rain, headed southbound on I-65.