Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(40)

They sold them as fast as they could load them in the Pontiac, “sold more than fifty of ’em in one day,” says Jerry Lee. He ordered more sewing machines from the company, to keep the scam going. “They told me I was the biggest sewing machine salesman in the world, the biggest of all time.”

When the bill came, people just ignored it, assuming it was a mistake, and when the company contacted them, the people said they were not going to make payments on a sewing machine they already owned free and clear, like that nice young man done tol’ ’em they did, and then they told the latest representative from the Atlas Sewing Machine Company, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to get off their porch before they got the gun or put the dogs on them. So the poor people got to keep their machines, and the company decided it needed some new salesmen in that part of Louisiana and Mississippi. By then Jerry Lee had already made about twelve hundred dollars on the great sewing machine sweepstakes of 1953.

He varied his spiel, telling some women they had won fifty dollars off, and offered to drive others to the grocery store to cash a check.

“But I was wrong,” he later told an interviewer. “I wasn’t wrong for selling sewing machines. I was wrong for sellin’ ’em the way I did.” Then he broke into song:

Be sure

You’re gonna pay

For your wrongdoin’,

Jerry Lee,

But I’ll never

Make the same

Mistake again.



“Next time,” he said, “I won’t leave the contract.”

One day, in the midst of this new crime wave, he and his partner stopped by a country store to gas up and drink a Coke and limber up their legs, and he saw a big, blue-barreled pistol in a glass case at the counter. “I guess I thought I was Jesse James,” he says. “I come back that night and I stole it. . . . I guess it’s all right to admit that, now. Got caught with it about two weeks later,” as he sat with it in his lap in a parked car as a parish sheriff rolled up behind him. The sheriff put both men in the wretched jail in St. Francisville. He called his Uncle Lee, the only man he knew who could make his bond, and Lee Calhoun said he would be by, “d’rectly.”

“It was awful, man,” recalls Jerry Lee. “The cell wasn’t as big as nothin’, and it was crowded with some rough ol’ boys—I mean some rough ol’ boys—but me and my partner stuck together. The food was terrible, this stew that was just slop. And there weren’t no women.”

After three days, Lee Calhoun finally showed up.

“He didn’t have to wait that long,” says Jerry Lee.

They went before the judge.

“Well,” the judge said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you three years in Angola.”

Jerry Lee’s heart flipped. People joke about that, but he felt it.

“God,” he said.

“But seeing as how this is your first offense,” the judge said, “I’ll make it three years’ probation, instead.”

Jerry Lee laughs off most near-disasters, but he knows how close he came, in that courtroom, to descending into the very real hell of Angola Prison. “After that, my buddy stole one of them big ol’ truck batteries, and they sent him off,” says Jerry Lee. He walked a tighter line, on probation, knowing that Angola was the dream killer. It did not last long, that caution, but it lasted long enough to get him past his probation. If the judge had known about his sewing machine racket, of course, he would have certainly done time for theft and embezzlement—unless, of course, his Uncle Lee could have fixed that, too. He can smile about it now, for whatever the statute of limitations is on a sewing machine scam, it is probably shorter than sixty years. It makes him kind of happy, though, knowing that a whole lot of people in the backwoods and bayous of Louisiana got a free sewing machine, which makes him almost like Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor and all, except of course for that twelve hundred he made off the top.

He went back across the river and started playing the boogie again for about ten dollars a night. On some slow nights in the clubs, he played the piano with his right hand and drums with his left, till the club’s owner, Julio May, told him that might not be a good idea. He told me, ‘These people come in here expecting to see a whole band, and when they see’s it’s one man, they get strange.’”

Rules, always these rules.

“I did what I had to do,” Jerry Lee says now, “to get a tip.”

Why could there not be a different set of rules, for him?

“Sometimes, when I know it’s right, I call it wrong, and sometimes when I know it’s wrong I call it right,” he says, and shrugs. It might make life confusing sometimes, he says now, but not dull. Dull is the real dream killer. “And it will eat you alive, if you let it.”





4


MR. PAUL




Natchez

1952

The stage was about sixteen inches high and had a rail across the front to keep drunks from staggering into the bandstand and getting electrocuted in the extension cords. The cigarette smoke roiled in a blue fog and the air smelled of yesterday’s beer and perfume you bought by the jug. The Wagon Wheel was like the Swan Club before it, and the Blue Cat, and the Hilltop, and other beer joints where blues and hillbilly music would collide, a place to fight over a good woman or sorry man and knock back brown liquor by the shot till you were numb or just not particular, where a wedding vow was more a suggestion, and truck drivers tipped the band in little white pills. “Country people, big shots and low shots,” says Jerry Lee, who kept time to this melee with a pair of drumsticks, and loved it all.