Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(2)
Before he rocked them, before the first piano bench went hurtling across the stage and first shock of yellow hair tumbled into his snarling, pretty face and the first spellbound, beautiful girl stared up from the footlights in unmistakable intent, he played Stick McGhee songs for Coca-Cola money from the back of his daddy’s beat-up flatbed Ford and sang Hank Williams before he knew what a heartache was.
Before Memphis, before he took them from the VFW and convention halls to a place they’d not been even in a fever dream, before preachers and Parliament damned him for corrupting the youth of their nations, before he made Elvis cry, he listened to the Grand Ole Opry on his mother’s radio, the battery she saved all week till Saturday night finally fading to nothing at the end of a Roy Acuff song.
Before bedlam, before he stacked money and hit records to the sun and blazed up, up, to come smoking to earth only to rise and fall and rise and rise again, before he outlasted almost all of his kind and proved on ten thousand stages that no amount of self-destruction could smother his voice or quiet the thunder in his left hand, before John Lennon knelt and kissed his feet, he performed his first solo in the Texas Avenue Assembly of God, then hid under a table in Haney’s Big House to see people grind to the gutbucket blues.
Before any of it, before the first needle and first million pills, before the first coffin passed him by, he walked a high bridge rail like a tightrope between the bluffs of Natchez and the Louisiana side, laughing, loving the scare it threw into mortals below. A lifetime later, he rode across the same bridge and looked down to the muddy water of the Mississippi, to barges long as a football field; from up there, they looked like toys in a bathtub.
“I must’ve been crazy,” says Jerry Lee Lewis, but if he was, it was just the beginning.
The weather seems different now from when he was a boy, the air so hot and thick the sky looks almost white. The afternoon thunderstorms that have shaken this land across generations now hang hostage in that cotton-colored sky, leaving the air wet and steaming but the fields dry as parchment for weeks, a thing the old people attribute to the end of days. But the end of days has been coming here for a long, long time.
“I wonder what it’s like to die? I guess they give you shots and stuff, to help you with the pain. I don’t really know,” he says, softly, as Ida Lupino and Beware, My Lovely roll across a muted television screen. “Probably, you just drift off to another world. I don’t know what that world will be like. I like to think it’s Heaven. Can you imagine me in Heaven? Imagine the orchestra we’d have.” He tosses a macadamia nut in his mouth, unscrews an Oreo, takes a long swig of purple soda, and ponders that. “Oh, man, what a band. I’ll want to go twenty-four hours a day . . . won’t never get tired. Won’t never stop.”
He has never believed the grave is the end of a man, and that has been his torture. The greater part of a man walks in Glory or burns; there is no real in-between, not in the Assembly of God. Across his life, he has proclaimed on a rolling basis the kind of man he considers himself to be, shifting from world-class sinner to penitent, sometimes in the space of a single song. Now his choice seems finally made. I am warned by members of his family, before I even enter his presence, that he abides no cursing, no blasphemy. He will live the rest of his life, he hopes, without offending God. He tithes. He blesses his food and prays at night the Lord his soul to take. He knows the Holy Ghost is as real as a pillar of fire. He believes, as always, in the God of Texas Avenue, and knows he has sinned greatly, deeply. But his God is a God of miracles and redemption, and in this case that might amount to about the same thing.
“I did a lot of thinkin’ about that. . . . Still think about it, real heavy. I sure don’t want to go to Hell. If I had my life to live over, I would change a lot of things,” he says, not for the approval of man, but for the grace of God. “I believe I would. I’d probably not do a lot of things that I’ve done. . . . Jesus says, ‘Be thou perfect even as my Father in Heaven is perfect.’ But my Lord, I’m only human. And humans tend to forget. I don’t want to die and my soul go to Hell.
“There is a Hell,” he says. “The Bible plainly speaks of it, very big-time. The fire never quenches, the worm never dies. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The lake of fire.”
But he can bear that, he believes, better than the rest of it.
“I just want to meet them, meet all my people that I have ever lost, in the new Jerusalem,” he says. “I often wonder about that. God says you will know as you are known, and if you don’t see them there, it will be as if you never knew them. That’s awful. It worries me,” the notion that if he is cast down, it will be—to his people, even his children—as if he had never lived. “That’s heavy, ain’t it?”
“The answer is written in the book of life, for me,” he says, and the heat in his eyes tells you this is not mere rhetoric but deadly serious. “Can a man play rock-and-roll music and go to Heaven? That’s the question. It’s something that won’t be known . . . that I won’t know, till I pass away. I think so, but it don’t matter what I think. And I will take all the prayer I can get.”
The question almost pulled him apart, as a younger man. Elvis, who would understand the question perhaps better than any other man, was haunted by it, too. Jerry Lee would have liked to talk with him about it, but Elvis hurried away, face white as bone; and then he left this world, leaving Jerry Lee to grow old with it alone.