Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(79)

“I’ll race you,” he said to her.

“You’ll beat me easy,” she said.

“I’ll run back’ards,” he said.

She took off, giggling.

Jerry Lee could fly, backward, a skill any man who has played some football must have and one a man who is prone to take other men’s women would perhaps need. He was going full speed when he tried to swing around, lost his balance, “oh, man, it was an adventure,” and went tumbling across the asphalt of East Shore Drive. He tried to catch himself but succeeded only in scraping much of the skin off the palms of his priceless hands. “Tore ’em up,” he says. He was not badly hurt, but he did play his next show in bandages, and if there was any kind of warning in it, any irony, he missed it, but if he had caught it, he would have ignored it anyway.

“Myra was a twelve-year-old kid when I first got there. I paid no attention. . . . We wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at that time. But I got to watching her, and she was a grown woman all of a sudden.”

He always got what he wanted, and he wanted Myra. He did not ask himself what it would mean to his place in rock and roll’s hierarchy or history, nor did he ask himself what society would think or demand in return—what penalty he would pay for not caring that he offended the sensibilities of more careful women and men. “I wasn’t worried about my career,” he says. “If I wanted to do something, I just did it.”

Many people have asked why someone, anyone, did not explain it all to him, that it didn’t matter whether he considered it right or wrong based on his culture. It was only that, if he was to be the new king of rock and roll, there were customs and practices he would have to hold to in order to rule in this wider world. But if anyone did see the danger in what was happening in Coro Lake, anyone with any influence, they either hoped it would go away or pretended, as money flowed in, that it was not happening at all. But even if someone—Sam or Jud or someone he trusted—had vigorously questioned Jerry Lee on his relationship with Myra, he would have merely reared his head and hitched up his pants, looked down at them from a high place, and told them nobody handled him, then taken Myra to get a milk shake in his Cadillac, the top cranked down so everyone could see.

“I used to take her to school,” he said, wheeling up at the steps in one of his big convertibles, the rest of the girls giggling and squealing at her famous cousin. The legions who have condemned him for it, for romancing a thirteen-year-old girl, have painted a picture that had nothing to do with reality, he said. His own sister married at twelve. People celebrated it, because, as his mama said, the child knew her own mind. Marriage to a girl of thirteen or fourteen was routine in his family’s history, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It might be offensive to some, to many, but it was what was.

“Myra was not a baby girl. She was a woman. She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking,” he says now. He does not care how that sounds, and says it, partly, just to show he doesn’t care. “She looked like a woman to me.” She was not innocent of boys, not the way books and movies tried to make it seem, he says, and for months they had been kissing and making out. J. W. and Lois would say they knew nothing about it, that they felt betrayed by Jerry Lee, but he believes it would have been hard not to figure out that something was going on in that house, especially if they had looked outside and seen them in the car. They talked on the phone when he was on the road and disappeared in his car almost the minute he got back. “She was my third cousin, and when I talked to her on the phone, I’d say, ‘How you doin’, cuz?’

“One night, we parked out in front of the house. . . . After we got through, she started crying. ‘Now I’ve done this,’ and it wasn’t the first time, ‘you’ll never marry me, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I lived up to my bargain.

“I thought about it,” he says now, “about her being thirteen and all, but that didn’t stop her from being a full-fledged woman.”

Finally, J. W. did ask why he was calling the girl so much from the road, he would write in his own memoir, but it was too late to stop what was in motion.

“I wasn’t even trying to hide her,” says Jerry Lee. “I liked to ride around in them convertibles too much, and it’s hard to hide a woman in one of those, ’specially if she’s sittin’ on my lap.”

The fact that she was kin, his cousin, was also not troubling to him even in the least, because marriage between even first cousins was routine in his culture and certainly in his family line. If cousins had not married cousins, the great tribe in Concordia Parish would not have existed at all. It was not just accepted, it was, by all evidence, preferred. By such standards, a distant cousin was almost a rank stranger, a foreigner. “She was my third cousin. I was gonna marry her, either way,” says Jerry Lee, “even if she was my sister. . . . Well, maybe I won’t take it that far.”

Jerry Lee’s divorce from Jane was still not final in December of ’57 and would not be for about five months, another of those ridiculous laws and conventions that should have had nothing to do with him. But he had filed his papers asking for it and so had she, so as far as he was concerned, that marriage was dead and done—Jane had kept custody of Jerry Lee Jr.—and he believed he was free to remarry. He had been taught that marriage was a covenant between a man, a woman, and God, a covenant no man could put asunder, but it was a fact of life that men and women fall in love and sometimes fall slap out, and marriages die. “I think the reason I kept gettin’ married is I couldn’t find nobody,” nobody lasting, he says. As that year wound to its close, with everything he had ever dreamed of in his reach, Jerry Lee drove due south in his Cadillac across the Tennessee state line into northern Mississippi, where marriage had always been an inexact science at best, allowable to almost anyone with a few dollars and a good story or a plausible lie. With Jerry Lee was a woman who went into the Jefferson County Courthouse that day and signed a legal document stating that her name was Myra Gayle Brown and she was twenty years old. Jerry Lee signed it too, and they drove back to Memphis with that silly little piece of red tape snipped clean in two. The real Myra was in Memphis that day, in seventh grade.