I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Is what he said, and then he said it again – actually, several times – for emphasis:

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

He looked like Clay Shaw as portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in Oliver Stone’s biopic, JFK. Hard to pin down an age to him; a round sixty seems to fit, though he carried himself like an ex-athlete, still muscled beneath his suit. An air of confidence sat upon his shoulders, and he spoke at the volume of one who is well accustomed to it. A quarter of a million cigarettes had passed those vocal cords, and his bottomless Texas twang could sand the paint off my house.

The bride had asked him what time his flight was the next morning. Eight a.m., he replied, swinging that perpetually-filled glass of red wine around in the air. She sympathized that maybe he could get some sleep on the plane.

“I’ll sleep when I’d dead,” he exclaimed.

“I ain’t got time for people who tell me they ain’t got time,” he boomed, catching both the eye of me and my wife, next on line. “I say to people, what are you doing between one a.m. and two a.m. Sleeping! they’ll say. Well, I say, I ain’t got time for that. I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”

“So, what do you have to show for it,” the bride asked, half-expecting a rags-to-riches millionaire success story. After all, there were quite a few successful men and women at the wedding. “What are you doing now?”

He laugh-coughed. “Well, not much at the moment. Oh, I did this and that, here and there. I been with Neil Young for a little bit – ”

Neil Young! That caught my attention, but he left no opening for verbal exchange.

“Then I moved on, did a little bit more of one thing, then another – but I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”

The children were antsy and the party was wrapping up. The wife and I interjected, said our goodbyes to the bride, followed the rest of the guests out the door of the winery.

“He sounds like he’s been smoking a pack a day since he was a baby,” I said to my wife later that night.

“No wonder he can’t sleep,” she said.