Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(20)

“Mama and Daddy seen their kid had school,” he says, but he did not always make it inside the door. He would walk off in that direction, till he was out of sight, then just go wandering, to fish or swim or throw rocks or sit and listen to an old man whup a guitar, because it was so hard to sit there in those little bitty desks and try to learn about fractions and what made the sky blue and the names of all those men in puffy pantaloons, when there was great time wasting to be done, pool halls to sneak into, barbershops to linger by. And so he just did not go often to Ferriday Elementary and hoped the teachers would just pass him through, something teachers have done since the advent of chalk. His daddy made the mistake of buying him an old motor scooter, which only increased his range. “It was a great time,” he says. “Every now and then a plane would fly over, and we’d go hide under the bridge.”

It was about this time, in the thin shadow of that distant war, he decided his own world was just too small.


“I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to go.”

He looks as if he is searching for some kind of understanding of that, which is rare for him.

“Sometimes you just need to go.”

He had hitchhiked the dirt roads and blacktop in Concordia Parish and parishes up and down the river since he was old enough to realize what his thumb was for, sometimes just to see where the roads ended, the same way he wondered how deep the Blue Hole was, that place in the backwater where cold-blooded killers were said to dump the bodies of their victims, wired to a truck part or a cinder block. The world was wide and mysterious and rich and dangerous, and he lived in only a little bitty corner of it. The river only went north and south but roads went everywhere. He had made it as far as Vicksburg, across the dull, flat green and rolling land, had some ice cream and a candy bar, then, his head humming with sugar, hitchhiked home. One day, without a sack lunch or change of clothes or a dime in his pocket, he walked down the road till he was out of sight of his mama and daddy’s house, sprinted for the highway, and stuck out his thumb.

“Mama,” he says, “would have had a heart attack.”

The first car to stop was a ’41 Ford. The old man inside looked him up and down.

“How far you goin’, boy?”

“New Orleans,” he told him.

He made up a plausible, heart-tugging story as to why; it evades him now, but he knows it must have been a good one or he never would have gotten out of Concordia Parish. A few hours and stories later he was standing on Decatur Street, with the Crescent City hunkering at his feet. He looked at the curve of the river, crowded with ferries and tugboats and big freighters, so many vessels he could almost walk from the French Quarter to Algiers, but it was the same brown river he had at home, so he did not waste much time on the docks. He wanted to see a city, see a real one, and all that it implied. “I wanted to go somewhere big,” he says, “and New Orleans was the biggest place I could think of.”

He walked the traffic-choked, narrow streets in wonder. This was the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams, dark and rich and dangerous. He saw the old iron streetcar, rumbling and clanking and spitting sparks, crowded with people rich and poor. Ladies, some half-dressed, reclined on the balconies, just languidly wasting the day. He passed the grand hotels and the tap dancers who banged against the old bricks with bottle caps on the soles of their shoes, and the mule-drawn carriages with their velvet-fringed rooftops, and a great, cream-colored church, the one the Catholics called the cathedral of St. Louis. He peeked into cafés where the rich smell of coffee drifted down the streets till it bowed to the stronger scent of a hundred kinds of liquor, pouring from bars already going strong in the stark light of day.

“Well,” he said to himself, “this is a place.”

But he was also hungry, and beginning to think, at least a little, about the commotion that would arise when suppertime came and his mama and daddy noticed he was gone.

“I wound up in front of this Italian grocery,” he says. “I guess I looked lonesome.”

The grocer, his accent so thick Jerry Lee could barely understand him, asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there, standing around. He did not look like a New Orleans street urchin; he looked lost.

“I have been kidnapped,” Jerry Lee said.

The man just looked at him, sternly.

“And I’m hungry,” Jerry Lee said.

He may not be buying this, he thought.

Then a thickset, middle-aged woman came out of the grocery, apparently the man’s wife, and said something in Italian that seemed to be laced with smoke and fire, then in English that he could understand told the man that he should be ashamed of himself for leaving this baby to stand in the street. “Give this bambino something to eat right now,” she said. He ate enough bologna to kill a normal man.

Around one o’clock in the morning, he found himself sitting on a straight-back chair in a New Orleans police station, or perhaps Juvenile Hall; he cannot really say. A police officer, calling every place in Ferriday with a telephone, had finally gotten somebody to fetch Elmo to a phone, so the officer could tell him to, please, sir, come and get his boy, because New Orleans had enough trouble as it was.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy,” Elmo told him.

Mamie was saying “Thank you, Jesus” in the background.

“I don’t know, either, sir,” the officer said.