Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(95)

“I heard you,” Jerry Lee said. He saw his road manager and his boyhood friend, Cecil Harrelson, easing forward, looking at the man, then looking to Jerry Lee. Cecil was too willing to pull a knife back then, and Jerry Lee shook his head. The music died, and the place went quiet, as quiet as a room of drunks can.

Jerry Lee rose from his piano bench. He was twenty-three years old.

“Why don’t you march your dead butt up here,” he said, into the microphone, “and say that to my face.”

“I will!” the man shouted, and came on. He pushed his way through the crowd and came straight at Jerry Lee, put one foot on the edge of the knee-high stage and started to heave himself up.

Jerry Lee, still holding the long, chromed microphone stand in his two hands, lifted it from the floor and with one, quick, stabbing motion jabbed the metal rod into the man’s face. The heavy, weighted base of the stand struck the man mostly in the forehead, and he staggered backward, flailing, sliding on the floor to collapse on his back in the spilled beer. A knot the size of a baseball rose in the middle of his forehead, and one or two of the drunks wailed, “He’s killed him!” but drunks are always saying such as that.

Then Jerry Lee, his blond hair flying, leaped off the stage and into the audience and, still holding the microphone stand like a spear, screamed at them, at all of them: “Does anybody else want some of this? Do you? I’ll give you all some of it!”

“But they didn’t want none,” he says, from the distant dark of his room.

The bar owner called an ambulance, then called the law. In the movies, Jerry Lee would have sat back down and finished playing the song, but the crowd was angry, not at the drunken nitwit but at Jerry Lee; he was a lightning rod for that kind of thing in 1959 and was wounded just enough to make people think they could say anything they wanted, piling on. He watched the paramedics strain to put the big man in the back of the ambulance. Yeah, a city boy, he thought. He went down too easy for a country boy.

“You know, I can still see that boy’s face,” he says now.

It appeared the man would live, but he would likely carry the crescent imprint of the butt-end of the mike stand on his face for weeks. It would make a good story, though, to drink on later, about how he told that criminal, that baby-snatcher, that man who married his cousin, just what we thought of people like him up here, and how Jerry Lee knocked him ass over teakettle, sucker-punched him, really, when he wasn’t looking. Jerry Lee, telling his own story, would forever wonder what the man expected to happen when he cursed Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams in one foul breath, then tried to despoil the sanctity of the stage—his stage. It might not have been much of a stage, might’ve been a pretty sorry excuse for one, to tell the truth about it, but it was one more step up on the way back to a place where they paid in thousands instead of hundreds and had some paid security in the joint, so a man didn’t have to thump these big whippers his own self.

The chief of police came, since it involved a celebrity and all, but there wasn’t much he could do. Jerry Lee was clearly defending himself; the fact he had baited the man up there with the intention of knocking a knot on his head was one of the finer points of the law that could not really be discussed at midnight in a beer joint full of people under the influence of a few fifty-five-gallon drums of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But the crowd milled, humming in anger like a gang of extras in some old movie show, some mob working up its courage right before Marshal Dillon rode in and stared them down.

The chief told Jerry Lee and his band they should maybe ease off toward their cars.

“Jerry Lee,” he said, “I don’t think you should stay here.”

“We were leaving anyway,” Jerry Lee told him.

“I mean,” the chief said, “I think you need to leave town.”

“It was just like a Western,” Jerry Lee says. Some of the people in the bar jumped into their cars and followed them back to the hotel—it had happened before—but they didn’t want none, either, just wanted to act like they did for a little while longer, only wanted a slightly bigger part of the tale.

He went to his motel room—a year ago, he had stayed in the finest hotels—and waited a little while, waited till it came: the knock, but soft, not hammering and angry. He opened the door to his room and there she was. She was often there, but with a different face, a different name in almost every town. He cannot remember the names after all this time; it’s unlikely he remembered them five miles down the road. “There’s been so many . . . too many, I guess.” But he remembers the fights. Some men just remember rage so much better, remember it better than softer things, as if anger was the only emotion that really mattered to them in the end. It’s why the rich men down here with the soft accents, the ones who know where their great-great-granddaddies came from, hang sabers from an old war over their mantels instead of pictures of their grandbabies and driftwood from the beach they walked on with their dead wives.

“I fought my way out of a bunch of beer joints,” he says. “Had Cecil with me then. I got where I could read an audience, read the meanness in ’em. Every now and then we’d just see a crowd we had to straighten out . . . cursing me from the audience.

“I enjoyed a good fight back then. We had some pretty good fights in Iowa.”

The next day, he and his band loaded their equipment into two Cadillacs shrouded in forty thousand miles of dust and rolled another five or six hundred miles, whatever it took to make it to the next date. Fifty-two years later, with that ill-tempered Chihuahua between his feet, he leans back and travels it again.