Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(37)
And up steps my mama with the Hadacol man
She done the Hadacol boogie
“They were pouring us liquor, double shots, just like in the movies. And we just moved on down Bourbon Street, club to club. They even started hearing about me, started hearing about that wild boy that played the boogie-woogies on the piano. And the more we went the drunker we got. . . . By the time the night was over, we was so drunk we couldn’t see. Caked in vomit. Couldn’t stand up. My first real drunk.” They were fortunate to get out of the Crescent City alive, he realizes now. But he had tasted the apple, and he liked it.
He’d been needing to cut loose a little bit, needed it for some time; he was starting to understand that a man just has to cut loose now and then, unless he’s scared of the world or scared of his woman. Still, somewhere during that debauched trip to New Orleans, he managed to create some musical history. At the J&M studio, where Fats Domino had been making hits for a few years now, he cut what is believed to be his first recording. Two songs: a Lefty Frizzell ballad called “Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold),” which he sang high and plaintive, and a stomping boogie that showed off all he knew. Cecil would hold on to that record into his old age.
He was done with marriage, he knew that much, and through with Dorothy. He told himself he was single in his own mind, and that should have been enough, but the State of Louisiana insisted on paperwork or resolutions or such as that. He had always hated forms and formality, hated tedium, hated the rules the other people lived by, so he did nothing, just kept on living within the rules he laid down for himself. A lot of rich men do that, and it’s easy to pull off if you’re a Kennedy or Lee Calhoun, but it takes guts to try it if you’re a poor man. “I just done what I wanted,” he says. He says it a lot.
It is why, when he walked past a car lot after closing time and saw a good-looking automobile, he saw no reason not to borrow the car for a little while, at least until morning. In the rules of regular people, that was called grand theft auto, and a felony. In such a small town, though, security on the lots was lax. “I guarantee you, if I walked by a car lot and saw one with the keys in it back then, I was gone. I just said, ‘Well, looka here.’ I drove it all over the country. But I took it back. I always took ’em back. I got all kinds of car, and parked ’em right where I had borrowed ’em from. Last one was a ’50 Chevrolet.” In a way, he treated some people that same way. He rarely speaks with regret about anyone, but he does when he talks about Dorothy. “Dorothy told me I was the only man she had ever been with, and I know that was true. . . . I left her cryin’ on my mama’s doorstep. ‘Son, you’re wrong,’ she told me. I’m ashamed it happened. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have done it.”
He made one more attempt at a holy life, in part because he wanted to ease his mother’s mind. Or at least he went to a place where doing right was the general idea. He might have even made it—probably not, but maybe—if someone had just had the good sense to lock up the piano.
The student body waited respectfully in the pews, not one painted fingernail or undone button among them, some five hundred souls humming, but quietly so, with school spirit, and alight in the love of the true gospel. The male students at Southwestern Bible Institute wore coats and ties and starched shirts to class, and the women wore long skirts and did not cut their hair, some for so long that it swung against the backs of their legs when they walked across campus in their flat-heeled shoes. Makeup was forbidden; lipstick was contraband. The young women were required to wear stockings at all times, but fall came late to East Texas that season and it was too hot to breathe, so some of the coeds drew a line down the back of their bare legs with black shoe polish, for relief. That was the year the editor of the yearbook cropped the pictures of the students so tightly that all you could see was a circle of their faces, because some of the young women had sinned against God and styled their hair. When one of the boys, Billy Paul Branham, went walking through campus after dark one evening, eating an ice cream cone and lustily singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” the dean of men gave him ten demerits.
It was not a place that rewarded individuality. “Apparently not,” says Jerry Lee.
The school offered courses in church business, missionary organization, Bible study, and of course, Pentecostal history and prophets. But there was not a lot of shouting here in the chapel on Sunday mornings, in a sanctuary sealed tight in stained glass, and no one got happy, very much, in the middle of a song. Just off campus, Victorian mansions and gingerbread architecture fronted clean, quiet streets, with not a mudhole or a black racer or an armadillo anywhere in sight. Here in this unforgiving place, Jerry Lee sat at his piano, looked over the student body, and decided it was time for a change.
The boy had always had the power to win people over, had a personality like an industrial magnet. He would be a formidable evangelist. Still married to a young woman he had no intention of keeping, he finally bowed to his mother’s wishes and decided to use his God-given talents as a singer and piano player to bring people to the Lord. He enrolled at a place called Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas. The name of the town means “cow creek” or “buffalo creek” or “fat wildcat,” depending on which linguist you believe. Waxahachie was a 380-mile, dusty bus ride from Ferriday. He chose the school there in part because it had a junior college division that was content to overlook small matters such as prerequisites and even high school diplomas. Aunt Stella and Uncle Lee helped with the tuition and bus fare, thinking he might make a preacher after all but certain he needed to get out of Ferriday before a jealous boyfriend or irate daddy caught him from behind with a pine knot or a pipe wrench—or before some car dealer had him arrested or shot him from the dark. Mamie kissed him good-bye and told him she was so proud of him, and cried a little. Elmo shook his hand like a man, and as the big Trailways pulled out from Ferriday, it carried a whole busload of unreasonable expectation.