Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(4)
He made it roll and thump in the spaces between the plaintive lyrics, a thing of rhythm impossible to describe in words. “The girls crowded around me and the boys got all upset and wanted to start a fight, but before long ever’body was lovin’ it. I can see ’em now. And it was love. Pure love. I loved it, and they loved it. That don’t come around too often, I don’t believe. And it wadn’t just the song they loved, it was the way.” At first he was struck by the power, at the rapt faces, the heaving chests, but did not marvel at it for long. “If you know you can do a thing,” he says, “then you ain’t never surprised.”
He is not, even with the years tearing at him, a soft man. His body has been hammered by hard living, and scoured by chemicals, and pain-racked by arthritis and most of the ailments of Job, but now he is rallying again, with clean living and that mysterious thing he has always had cloaked around him, something beyond science. He is still a good-looking man, his hair faded from gold to silver; he still records and fills concert halls in the United States and Europe, though he admits it is sometimes all he can do to finish a show. Young women still push to the edge of the stage and try to follow him back to his hotel room. Now it is his prerogative to tell them no, because the shows exhaust him. What a sorry thing, a rotten choice for a good lookin’ rock-and-roll singer to have to make.
“If I’s fifty-one,” he says, “they’d have to hide the women.”
He lives near the river still, south of Memphis in the low, flat green of north Mississippi on a ranch with a piano-shaped swimming pool, behind a gate with a piano on the wrought-iron bars. Here the living history of rock and roll sits unrepentant to any living man, and even as he tells you his life story, he seems to care little what you think. “I ain’t no goody-goody,” he says, the Louisiana bottomland still thick on his tongue, “and I ain’t no phony. I never pretended to be anything, and anything I ever did, I did it wide-open as a case knife. I’ve lived my life to the fullest and I had a good time doin’ it. And I ain’t never wanted to be no teddy bear.”
He has been honored by state legislatures and dog-cussed over clotheslines. He has disowned children and walked away from wives and girlfriends—even in the age of DNA, none has challenged his actions—and does not much care that his life and his choices might not make sense to other people. “I did what I wanted,” he says. He lived in the moment, unconcerned what those moments would add up to in the eyes of men. “Other people,” he says, “just wished they could have done what I done.” He is unconcerned with worldly redemption. He has bigger worries than that.
He has played over seven decades, from pubs to palladiums, from soccer stadiums to Hernando’s Hideaway South of Memphis, for thousands, or hundreds, or less, because even when there was no one to play for but a handful of drunks or hangers-on, there was still the talent, and when you have a jewel, you do not hide it in a sock drawer. Raw and wild in the 1950s, almost forgotten in the mid-’60s, a honky-tonk chart-topper by the early ’70s, and a Rolls-Royce–wrecking, jet plane–buying crazy man in the late ’70s and ’80s, he always played. He absorbed scandal—Rolling Stone virtually accused him of murder—and played when he could barely stand. He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.
I approached him with great anticipation—and one reservation, as to getting shot. People told me he was mercurial; some said he was crazy. He shot his bass player, they said. Why not shoot a book writer? Instead, across the days, he was mostly gracious, and asked about my mother. “I hit this one guy in the face with the butt of the microphone stand,” he tells me, as he eats a vanilla ice cream float. He actually hit four or five that way. He remains willing to take a swing at a man who offends him and suffer the prospect that some drunk redneck half his age will not care he is living history and knock him slap out. His bedroom door is reinforced with steel bars. I started to ask about that but decided I did not need to. He still has a loaded long-barreled pistol behind a pillow, a small arsenal in a dresser drawer, and a compact black automatic on a bedside table. Holes in a bedroom wall and an armoire prove that all that has come to claim him in the night, ghosts, bad dreams, or time itself, has been dealt with violently. A bowie knife sticks in one door. A dog sleeps between his feet—a Chihuahua, but it bites.
He has, in old age, a stiff-necked and—all things being relative—sober dignity, but do not say he is growing old gracefully, any more than an old wolf will stop gnawing at his foot in a steel trap. It is harder, even now, to explain what he is than what he is not. He is not wistful, except in the rarest moments, and does not act wounded; he just gets mad. He does not swim in regret, even when he walks between the graves of two sons and most of the people he has ever loved. Six marriages ended in ashes, two of them in coffins. He believes he is due some things but not the right to whine. A man like him forfeits that. A Southern man—a real one, not these modern ones who have never been in a fight with a jealous husband or changed a tire or shot a game of pool outside the church basement—does not whine, anyway. “It didn’t bother me none,” or “I didn’t think much about it,” he often says when talking about things that would have torn another man down to his shoes. Then he would physically turn away. In time I came to understand that remembering, if you are him, is like playing catch with broken glass.