Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(131)
One night, going home to Nesbit in his white Rolls, feeling no pain, he felt the liquor run warm through his blood. He had never seen anything wrong with going out and driving off a good drunk. The exits whizzed past him like fence posts, and as he pulled off the highway on his exit he noticed a long line of trucks in front of him. “I’d pulled into the weigh station,” he said. “People were looking at me, all them guys in their big trucks, like I was crazy.” He pulled onto the scales and waved.
His physical health continued to deteriorate, but again it did not show that much on the outside. The whiskey and chemicals had eaten a hole in his stomach, and it burned night and day, but he medicated himself and went on. By the fall of ’76, it seemed like the only person who halfway understood him was his old buddy Elvis. They had seen each other off and on over the years, but Elvis had withdrawn from everyone lately. His weight had ballooned. “He had got big, boy, real big,” said Jerry Lee, and Elvis was ashamed of that. Instead of going out, like Jerry Lee did, he hid in his mansion, eating pills. The music had saved both of them, and now fame was doing its best to kill them both. The larger, pill-ravaged Elvis slowly devoured the slim, pretty boy, and in ’76 he watched the outside world pass on the gray blacktop on the black-and-white screen of his closed-circuit televisions. They didn’t see each other in those days but talked on the telephone, mostly about times different from these.
Jerry Lee was a little weary of the way their legends had diverged. Elvis’s legacy had been carefully groomed and handled, and little ol’ ladies prayed for him and bought clocks with his face inside the glass, while Jerry Lee’s legend had run amok, a tale of crashed cars, pills, liquor, gunfire, divorce, lawsuits, and sexual profligacy. They had both loved their mamas.
On Monday, November 22, 1976, during one of the many reconciliations—or cease-fires—with Jaren, Jerry and his still-wife were speeding through Collierville in his Rolls-Royce when somehow he managed to turn it upside down. They were not badly hurt, but Jerry Lee was charged with driving while intoxicated and reckless driving, though the Breathalyzer would show that whatever was wrong with Jerry Lee’s faculties that day, alcohol was not involved. He was arrested and bailed out later that day, and when reporters approached him, he lashed out. He wanted to know why the press always hovered around him in the worst of times, while they always gave Elvis a pass. “Y’all hate my guts or something,” he told the Commercial Appeal. “I’m no angel, of course, but I’m a pretty nice guy.”
The Rolls was pretty well finished. He bought a brand-new white Lincoln Continental. He had always liked a good Lincoln.
The next day, Elvis called him.
“Come out to the house,” he told Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee said he would if he had time. Elmo had managed to get himself arrested for driving drunk in Tunica, and that would require some straightening out. Later that night, Jerry Lee went looking for a drink himself, at the second-swankiest nightclub in Memphis, and for some reason he settled on champagne. He never did have much luck with champagne.
Walk on, Killer
“I was at the Vapors nightclub that evenin’,” he says. There the owner of the club had given him, as a gift, a brand-new over-and-under pocket pistol, loaded of course. “Charles Feron, he owned Vapors, he give it to me. A .38 derringer.” He spent the night drinking champagne, playing with the gun, watching pretty women, and talking to old friends. Midnight came and vanished in a fog.
Finally, unsteadily, he stood and announced that, sorry, boys, but he had to go to the house.
“Me, pretty well drunk, with that derringer—it ain’t somethin’ strange.”
He knew he had something to do on the way home—oh, yeah. He had to stop off by Graceland, “ ’cause Elvis called and wanted me to. Elvis called me. It was his idea for me to come over,” he says. “I was coming to see him, answering his beck and call.”
He took the derringer with him, and a mostly full bottle of champagne.
As he got in the car, Feron told him not to put the gun in the Continental’s glove compartment, because he could be charged, if he was pulled over, with carrying a concealed weapon. So Jerry Lee just put the loaded pistol on the dash, in front of God and everybody, and—holding the champagne bottle by the neck—drove off toward Graceland. He didn’t bring the cork; it was a bottle without a future.
Just before three o’clock in the morning on the twenty-third of November 1976, the long white Lincoln Continental thundered down Elvis Presley Boulevard, weaving between the lines.
He was not angry at Elvis, he says now. He was not eaten up with jealousy. What he did feel, and had always felt, was disappointment at the way Elvis, who should have fought him to the death for the crown, had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker into such a sorry state, into a paunchy semirecluse behind locked gates. “He didn’t go nowhere,” he says. “He didn’t see people.”
As he slalomed around the white lines in the Memphis dark, he remembered better days. Once, in 1957, Elvis had pointed him out to George Klein, a friend and Memphis DJ.
“He said, ‘Take a good look, boys, ’cause there goes the most talented human being to walk the face of God’s earth.’ Elvis just had a strange way, is all.”
Elvis had only ever said one mean thing to him, back when they were both playing Vegas. In the only real argument he could recall, Jerry Lee had called him Colonel Parker’s puppet.