Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(18)

“Are you conquered, or not?” Jerry Lee asked.

The boys looked at the river below. They shook their heads.

“Are you conquered?” he shouted again.

They nodded.

“Say it!” he shouted.

“We’re conquered! We’re conquered!”

Jerry Lee leaped up, grabbed a crossbeam, and hung there, laughing.

“Oh,” he says now, “they begged me to come down, but I didn’t pay ’em no mind. I guess I could’ve fell, but I didn’t.”

He remembers coming back to earth in triumph.

The little boys crossed their hearts and swore not to tell.

“But somebody told,” he says.

His mama had a good cry and wondered what she had done to have God punish her this way.

“I’m gonna have to kill you, boy,” Elmo said, then just walked off, shaking his head. Mamie would not let him whip the boy.

The bridge incident was hard to eclipse, but sometime later he tried. One day, as the cadre of boys stood on an overpass, a long freight train appeared in the distance.

“I’m gonna jump on it,” Jerry Lee said.

“No you ain’t,” they said.

“Yes I am,” he said.

Jerry Lee climbed up on the rail and crouched there, like a hawk. The train had seemed to be lumbering along, but now, so close, it shook and clanked and rumbled, and the steel wheels moved in a blur. But he’d said he would do it. He picked a boxcar, one with a flat roof.

Well, he thought, you’ll probably make it.

He leaped into space.

He landed, slid, and came to a stop.

Hah.

Most boys would have let it go at that. But in the cowboy matinees, he had seen the heroes and bad men jump from one boxcar to another on a moving train, and he decided to give that a whirl. Besides, he was not altogether sure where this train was headed or when it might get there, and he might have to jump all the way to the engine, to tell the engineer to Please, sir, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis, and will you please stop this thing and let me off. It already looked like he was halfway to Baton Rouge. The other boys just stood in the far distance, wondering if they would ever see him again, and half hoping the train did not stop till it got to Canada. But then things would sure be dull around here, without Jerry Lee.

He walked to the edge of the boxcar and looked down at the coupling, at the crossties going by faster than he could count. Then he walked to the other end, got a running start, leaped and made the gap, easy, sliding on his belly. But this car had a more rounded roof. It occurred to him, in one sickening second, that there was nothing to hold on to. “I just slid off.”

He hit the big gravel at the trackside with an awful oomph, and the sound of rending clothes. The other little boys, watching in the distance, ran for home.

“They just left me there, the others, left me laying there like an old shoe,” he says. He was bruised all over, and skinned alive, but not broken, at least not that he could see. “I dragged myself up to the road and got a ride home with this rich guy.” The man looked him over.

“I slid,” Jerry Lee said.

“Oh,” the man said.

Mamie was without words. Elmo breathed fire and threatened, but there was nothing he could do. It was Elmo, in that deep backwater, who had taught the boy not to let fear own him. But this boy had no limits. Southern men like to think of people, sometimes, as machines so they can understand them, and they know that most small engines, like lawnmowers, have a tiny mechanism on them called a governor, a kind of safety device that keeps them from running wide open all the time and burning up. In people, it’s fear or common sense that serves as the mechanism. This boy, Elmo quickly figured out, didn’t have one. He was buck wild and strutting and had been since he was walking around good, determined to get away with as many transgressions as hours in the day would allow; he would not read a book on a bet and ogled all the pretty girls on the big yellow school bus and pretty women in town when he didn’t even know what he was looking at. He put one of his cousins in a cardboard box and set him in the middle of the road, and walked the parish with a perpetual smirk, like he knew even as a boy that he was the stud duck around here and people might as well get used to it.

They might have done more to rein the child in if they had not heard him play and sing.

The first time he really sang, when he was not yet even in school, it struck Elmo and Mamie hard in their hearts, because it was like their lost boy was not lost at all, like he was singing through this second son. Jerry Lee was not the good son, yet he could—if he did not fall to his death or drown in the Blue Hole or disappear on a freight car or get remanded to reform school—be a great one. He might be the one. But while this boy loved singing and, more important, noticed music, he was not yet a devotee of it, as his brother had been. There was too much of the other life out there to taste and conquer. He was a student of mischief, and even a lifetime later he relishes it almost as much as he relishes the early music, relishes any discomfort or awkwardness or devilment he took part in, the way he remembers the taste of his mama’s tomato gravy. Some men outgrow their boyish devilment. Others only polish it.


“Mama would wake me at seven thirty in the morning; school started at eight thirty. And I’d always say, ‘All I need is just one more minute, Mama,’ always just one more minute. She would come back in with a cup of cocoa and some vanilla wafers, and I’d eat it there in the bed and she’d sit with me. That was my favorite, that or tomato gravy and biscuits and a Coca-Cola. She was the angel in my life, my mama was. I had the best mama and daddy in the world, and I know everybody says that, but I believe it to be true. I know it is.”