Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(153)

The vows were barely said when he struck his leg against a door facing, resulting in a compound fracture of his lower leg. Surgeons repaired the damage with thirteen screws and two metal plates. The pain and stress almost killed him.

“I went out in the parking lot and got down on my knees,” Judith says, “and said, ‘Please don’t, don’t take him away, someone I have just found in my sixties.’”

His cousin David Batey drove up from Cleveland, Tennessee, to pray with her. He told Jerry Lee what he had witnessed in the parking lot.

The leg would not heal properly. “The pain was so bad, he was out of his head,” she said.

He still refused the needles.

“It was so bad, he had to go to the wound-care center,” Judith said. The wound healed—slowly, after three more operations, but it healed.

He did not worry himself with challenges, with the distances others might set as goals: a mile, a half mile, a hundred feet. He wanted to walk across the stage to the piano stool and back, unaided.

That would be enough.

“And it seems okay now,” he says. “It’s tough. It’s hard to do. It’s like learning yourself to walk again,” as a child. “And you try to cover it up as much as you can. Walk out onstage, walk to the piano, set down, take the microphone and start doin’ your thing. And if you can do that, good. If you can’t do that, it’s best to stay home.”

Now, from his bed, he looks at Judith and shakes his head.

“Wasn’t much of a honeymoon, was it, baby?”


She is asked now why she would take such a chance on the man they called the Killer. But that man seems, if not gone, at least very well hid. They go on dates for chili dogs and like to go to a local meat-and-three for vegetables. He still eats the food he loved as a boy, and she cooks it for him.

“It’s what a man needs,” he says, “good lovin’, good cookin’.”

In the dark of his bedroom in Nesbit, Judith brings him a Coke float with vanilla ice cream.

“No Diet Coke,” he says, and takes a sip. “Real Coke.”

Somewhere in this nuptial bliss, an odd thing has happened: the faces of the women on the road have grown less distinct in his mind. It used to be that he could call them all back, or many of them, or things about them. “They run through my mind, and I wonder where she’s at now or where some other one is. . . . You can’t hang on to a ball of fire. That time is over. But it happened.”

Now, though, things have changed. “I can’t even hardly remember. . . . Well, I can remember, but it really didn’t amount to nothin’. Not as much as people think.”


He wonders if it might be time to do a new record.

“I think now’s my time to get it again. It’s now or never.”

He always liked that Jolson song, “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”

“Been thinkin’ about doin’ that.”

He plays it through in his head.

Pack up all my cares and woe

Here I go, singin’ low

Bye, bye, blackbird



He is not worried about his hands.

He looks at them, fingers slightly splayed and crooked, the way they rest on the keys. “It don’t matter,” he likes to say, “what my head does. They know where to go.”

He had to prove so much in his time: that a piano man could lead a band, could be a straight-up star. That a country boy could play the Apollo. That a rock and roller could do big-time, mainstream country. That he was not just a crazy man who wrecked pianos, that he was just living life real loud. A dozen times, that he was not washed up, not done. Now he has to prove, again, that he’s not dead yet.

“I’m back on the spot again,” he says. “I gotta go back in the studio, and prove it all over again. I gotta come out with somethin’ different, that I’ve stored back in my membranes, back there.” In the old days, he recalls, “if somebody wrote a song and it’s pretty good, I’d listen to it and play around with it a little bit,” then leave it alone till he got to the studio to cut it. “Now, it takes time to really learn the song, and get the band into it, and the singers into it, everybody into it. It ain’t just like sittin’ down and doin’ one take. Those days are gone. But of course you can’t think in that way. You gotta think you can still do it the same way.”

That has always been the trick. If you want to do anything worth a flip, you must live in the past, at least a little bit, because that is where the magic was. That was why he was always so much more exciting live, where his mind could wander free and string together things he loved or half remembered. It was why he went back to the past again and again to find the words, the music. What is wrong with living in the past, he knew as well as anyone alive, if the past was better?


“I’ve had an interestin’ life,” he says, “haven’t I?”

He had said, at the beginning of interviews for this book, that he “had been lucky at everything, except life.” He has had some time to think about that, and he is no longer sure.

His Chihuahua, Topaz Junior, eyes the people who come and go from the room with ill intent. He eyes everyone with ill intent, except Jerry Lee, and he bites anyone who tries to remove him from his place on the soft quilt between his feet.

“But you wouldn’t bite Daddy, would you?”