Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(123)

He remembers one trip in the 1970s, a trip from Las Vegas to Knoxville. The long flights often turned into mile-high drunks, and so it was this day. He was half-asleep on that flight when he glanced out the window and noticed “it looked like to me we were getting mighty close to the ground.”

He looked up to see one passenger come half running back from the cockpit.

“Jerry Lee, I don’t know if you know it, but your pilots are both asleep,” he said.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “I better go wake ’em up.”

He opened the door to the cockpit and looked inside. The men were asleep, and by now the treetops were almost brushing the wheels.

“They wasn’t drunk, just asleep,” he says. “They didn’t fly me again.”

It was a freedom he had never had before, even at the height of his rock-and-roll days. He could just go when wanderlust struck him. He would get off the phone at his house in Memphis and announce to whoever was lying around there, “Hey, y’all wanna go to Europe?”

“I reckon,” they would say, and off they’d go.

“It was the most perfect DC-3 in the country. It was beautiful on the inside. And it had everything you could want on a plane.” There was only one problem: “It was slow, slow, slow.”

He laughs about it now. “I remember one time, we was passing over San Antonio, Texas. And I looked down at the freeway and cars was passin’ us.” He asked the pilot, named Les, if that was normal. “Les, looks to me like those automobiles down there are passin’ us.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s true,” the pilot said. “We got a real bad headwind.”

“I said, ‘I want a plane that will go faster than this.’ So I got a Convair 640. It was made by the people out of Switzerland. . . . Nice bar, nice restroom . . . Had twenty-five seats on it—I mean, seats like this,” in his living room. “Anything you wanted, you know? Rolls-Royce engines on it. . . . And every time I’d leave town, my daddy—he didn’t mean anything by it, but there would be twenty-five people on that plane! People I didn’t even know.”

One time, they were slated to head over to London. “I got Les to fly us to Kansas City, catch a plane out of Kansas City. And some old guy sittin’ on the plane, he says, ‘Jerry Lee . . . I want you to know how much I appreciate this. I have never been overseas in my life. This is really gonna make my year.’

“I said, ‘Well, you just enjoy it, sir.’ He thought we was flyin’ to England. We’s just goin’ to Kansas City.”

The insanity of the lean years had continued, now with better and louder toys. They carried guns on the plane. They carried pills. After one transcontinental plane ride—he cannot recall exactly whether it was going or coming—Elmo, who had been drinking for several states, suddenly bolted out of his seat, leaped behind the wheel of a waiting limousine, and went squealing off over the tarmac, for all practical purposes stealing the car, only to crash it a mile or so down the road. Police arrived to see a gentle and frazzled old man sitting in the backseat, telling a tale of how he had been sitting there all along. He was Jerry Lee Lewis’s ol’ pappy, he said, and he’d just been waiting in the backseat when some guy stole the car with him in it and ran it into the ditch. What was most impressive was that Elmo was still limber and quick enough to switch from the front to the back before the law got there.

Gunfire was commonplace. He had a friend named Arthur who walked up to him drunk at a party.

“Jerry Lee, I think I might have ruined myself,” he said.

“What do you mean you ruined yourself?” Jerry Lee asked.

“I stuck my gun down the front of my pants and it went off,” he said.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “you might have ruined yourself.”

Sick of dealing with outsiders and certain that he could run his own business as smoothly as any carpetbagger, Jerry Lee had formed Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Incorporated, located in a suite on Airways Boulevard, retaining as his manager the trusted Cecil Harrelson, who had backed him in ten thousand honky-tonks, and hiring as creative director Eddie Kilroy, who had brought him the Chesnut song that put him back on top. Cecil was in the family officially now, having married Linda Gail, who would divorce him and marry Kenny Lovelace, then divorce him and marry Cecil again on her way to eight marriages, a Lewis family record.

The days of the Cadillac were done. He bought a Rolls-Royce; all the real rock and rollers had a Rolls. It had a twelve-cylinder engine and would outrun any police car in the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. The days and nights were wild and fat and rich, and he could take it, man, even feed on it, because he was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was taking pills again, had never really stopped. He had a never-ending supply of them, some even legal, from George Nichopoulos, the man who medicated Elvis, the man they called Dr. Nick. But he could not medicate himself effectively enough to dissolve the pain of his mother’s death; some days it could still find him, after so much time. Reeling, hurting, he did himself great harm in those days, but instead of crashing, he reeled on. He supported relatives when they fell on hard times and even when they didn’t, and if there was anyone keeping track of the money he spent or the money he owed or the money that was owed him, they were sleeping through it all. There were few records or no records, and that would haunt him one day. The rules, the laws, seemed silly still. He reeled toward the next stage, the next record, the next large payday. Like most episodes of his life, he sang his story from the stage, singing Creedence Clearwater like he meant it: