Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(154)

Topaz Junior snuggles deeper.

“A great life,” Jerry Lee says.


He has been around so long and lived so hard that almost everyone, it seems, has a story about him, a story of seeing him live, or of a thing that happened while listening to his music, or just a thing they heard, that stuck like fishhooks in their mind all their lives. The memories flash brighter and bang louder, somehow, than others. Gail Francis will always be ninety-eight pounds soaking wet, will always be a looker, every time she hears a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Dr. Bebe Barefoot, who teaches English at the University of Alabama, will always be the young woman who was actually struck by lightning as she drove down the highway listening to “Great Balls of Fire.” When she hears his music, she thinks about the world around her charged with blue fire. There are thousands of them, tens of thousands, more, who attach a moment in their lives to his story, his songs. He believes there will be more of it. “I mean,” he says, “I can’t let ’em down.”

Late one afternoon, resting in bed, he suggests that maybe he has been foolish even to think about age. He contradicts himself a little, but then that is his prerogative. “Age never crosses my mind,” he suddenly says, and then thinks a minute. “As long as I can sing and play the way I want.”

He pauses. “‘And the audience went crazy,’” he says, quoting a piece of some long-ago review, really almost any review, any story.

He looks at his hands, again.

“Just like they always was.”


One day last winter, Judith was passing through the electronic gates of the Lewis ranch in a rainstorm when she saw, in the rain over the iron gate, what seemed to be an apparition. She described it to Jerry Lee. They think maybe it was Elvis. Not his face, not exactly, but somehow she felt it was him.

“I don’t know if I believe in all that stuff or not,” says Jerry Lee, “but I’m beginning to.”

A man who believes in angels should not be surprised by one.

“That’s what I think it was, an angel,” he says, then thinks a moment. “I don’t know what it was. Some kind of warning? ‘See what they done to me?’ Maybe he was saying to not let ’em do the same to me, and my life. I don’t know.”

Or maybe it was Elvis coming to answer that old question that haunted them both, that old question about what happens to those who sing and play this music. Maybe again, he has gone and left it unanswered.

“It’s strictly in God’s hands,” he says. “And it makes no difference what they write or what they say, or how they feel, it’s . . . right between me and God.”

He doesn’t believe he can talk his way in.

“You gotta live it. You gotta . . . believe it. But you can only believe to a certain extent. You gotta live it, too. You gotta back up what you preach.”

He would have liked to have seen this Elvis himself. He wouldn’t have been scared of him. But the apparition was gone with the clouds, and with it his answer.

Or maybe not.

If it was an angel, he has the answer now.





17


STONE GARDEN




Ferriday

2012

He was going home to see his people. He drove ninety, a hundred sometimes, on the interstate between Memphis and the Natchez turnoff. The University of Alabama Crimson Tide and Louisiana State University Bengal Tigers were playing football that evening in a nationally televised game, the game of the century, people called it. “I wanted to see that game,” he said, and then, after a minute: “I’d have drove that fast if there wadn’t no game.” He wanted to get a choice room in the old Eola Hotel in Natchez, where good-looking Johnny Littlejohn, the one he first heard sing that “Shakin’” song, used to host his radio show. He stretched out on the bed, got a butler to bring up some room service, and thought of Elmo. The next morning, he and Judith took her new Buick across the big river, across the same old bridge, and he looked down to the barges and up at the rails overhead where he had dangled, and he smiled and shook his head. At the halfway point of the bridge, he told Judith, “You in Louisiana, now, baby,” and it made him happy to say it, so he said it again.

They took a hard right turn and followed the river north; in the town of Vidalia, they stopped at the Sonic and had a cheeseburger and a Coke. “I am a Sonic man,” he says, and ate it with relish. For months he had been mostly flat on his back in that air-conditioned dark in Nesbit, like something put up in storage in a cool, dry place; now he savored the sunshine, the balm of a warm Southern fall. “I’ve found me a new Rolls-Royce, one like I used to have. . . . Took me forever, but I found it, found it in Los Angeles,” of course. They got to Ferriday about noon, past the old fish stall with its long-ago signs for the catch of the day fading to gray, past the lovely-sounding Morning Star Alley, where a broke-down Pontiac rusted at the curb. The marquee on the First Baptist Church warned, GOD OPPOSES THE PROUD BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE, as if they knew he was coming, but then he never thought much of Baptists, anyhow.

For some reason he thought of Elvis.

“Drinkin’ champagne and feelin’ no pain,” he sings. “I hit that gate.”

Just a mile outside of the downtown, the green fields stretched out toward the big river out of sight, but you could smell it from here, those ages of mud and rot. “It used to be woods, all this,” he said. “Funny, how much it’s changed.” The dirt has not changed, still not quite brown, not gray, but the color of the front side of a dollar bill. Something else made him think of Sam Cooke. “My thirty-second cousin,” he joked. “Man, he was good.”