Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(101)

A few minutes later, Myra noticed that the boy wasn’t by her side anymore. She called to him, then panicked and ran outside, searching. No one had seen him leave the house. She called his name, louder and louder, and a neighbor heard, and came to see what was wrong. He found the child at the bottom of the pool, and while there had been a rumor of a heartbeat, just enough to give Myra false hope, the child was dead.

They buried the boy in the cemetery in Clayton, under the trees just now going green, beneath the rising voices of the great intermarried tribe. Jerry Lee’s cheeks were dry and his backbone was straight. He had done his crying in a locked room, and he will not let anyone inside it even now. He says only that he questioned it, questioned why it happened to him, his boy, but only briefly. “Why did this happen to me? I don’t understand. But I will understand someday. It knocked me to my knees, but you don’t see me cryin’, don’t see me carryin’ on. I accepted it. What can you do but accept it? And live with it. I didn’t question God. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ But you don’t forget. He’s always, always on my mind.” The hateful thing was how little time he’d had with the boy to store up some kind of memory, some kind of picture to carry. His own brother had died on a dirt road before Jerry Lee was old enough to store up the memories he needed to build something fine and lasting to cushion that one awful moment of death, and now his son was gone, taken while he traveled a million miles of highway, believing he had a lifetime to see the boy grow up, to listen for the first signs of musical talent, that thing passed down in the blood.

A few days later, he was supposed to leave for England. Family and friends assumed he would cancel, that he would closet himself with Myra and grieve, which was the decent thing. But he could not. He could not stand being left here with his own doubts about his choices and ambition and the burning need to succeed that had sent him across the country again and again to try to reclaim what had been his for only a little while. He had drunk and fought and sinned across the land, chasing and chasing, and it would be noble to say that his desire for it all was reduced to insignificance by the death of his son, but it would be a lie. Instead, as he stood over that small grave, he knew that his drive was the only thing that could save him. “It never took my desire,” he said. “I had to go to England. It wasn’t easy, but I had to go. You get a family, you hate to put ’em through all the stuff, all the fightin’ and the carryin’ on that comes with a life like mine, but I didn’t know any other way.” To give up and stay home and hurt would make it all useless, pointless.

But there was another reason. Those who sometimes dwell in the dark, who live in what some people just call depression but that they know is something far worse, know there are times when that quiet is too awful to stand, and that the worst of all things is to be alone with your thoughts. You can stand it out on the stage, or in the crowd, where you can stomp and howl and burn and rave, where the lights scorch your wired eyes and the drums drown out the cries inside your mind. “The show covers everything,” he says again. He believes it with all his heart.


Myra stayed home, planning, if things went well, to perhaps join him later. He came off the plane at Heathrow in a dark suit and white shirt, to stare into the same wall of reporters and photographers who had met his plane in England just a few years before. They asked him about Myra, asked where she was, and when he told them she was grieving and unable to travel, they asked him why he was not grieving and why he was able, and for just a few minutes, there with the flashbulbs exploding into his face, it seemed like it might be like it was before. They asked him if he did not feel it was callous to play rock and roll just eight days after his son’s drowning, and he talked to them about “the mysteries of the Lord,” and how he had to keep going, that this was the best thing for him now, to just keep singing and playing and keep working. “They were screaming for me, this time.” He opened in a theater in the industrial town of Newcastle, where working-class Brits, people with grease ground into their hands, had been sneered at by the upper classes for generations. It was a two-show gig to near-capacity crowds. He waited in the wings in an elegant black suit, white shirt, and black tie, peeking at the crowd. They cheered and stomped and howled and waved banners and signs that said WELCOME BACK JERRY LEE, as if what had happened before had all been some kind of bad dream.

It galls him to admit to any kind of fear, but he felt a sliver of it as he climbed that stage, walked to the edge of the curtain, and took that first look. “I was a little nervous,” he says. But he knew, even before he hit the first key and sang the first line, that this time it would be different, this time he would get to prove what he could do. He had always believed that they’d wanted him before, before it was all poisoned by the newspapers and their feigned outrage, which he now knew to have been phony all along, like a kind of sport. Now he looked out into the crowd and all the long miles and disappointments in the dusty Cadillac sloughed away, and he itched for the opening acts to hurry up and clear him a runway.

He surged onto the stage at a dead run, slid several feet like he was on ice and landed on his knees at the grand piano, and tore into “Down the Line.” He told the crowd he was going to drown his sorrows in his music, then, unhappy with the backup band’s tempo, showed the young drummer how to keep the beat. He pounded into “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and leaped on top of the piano. He did a wild, fifteen-minute encore as fans tried to storm the stage; later some tried to break down his dressing-room door. He would call it, later, one of the finest moments in his life, proof that he was still him, still the rocker he had been. He called Myra and told her to come to England. She arrived with a black ribbon in her hair and a Bible under her arm. A reporter stopped her in the terminal and asked her if she had any regrets.