Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(97)

“Jerry Lee Lewis don’t disappear.”


“People, seemed like, were comin’ to my shows with a chip on their shoulder.”

The days ground by rough and noisy. “Seems like we had to fight every night.” He was in the Midwest, again, he thinks in ’59, still, or ’60, doing one of those songs he used to play with a sandwich balanced on his knee back in Black River, but the audience was noisy this night—one of those crowds of people who might love the music but did not yet understand that it took precedence over drinking and fighting and cheating and too-loud talk about who was doing what with whose husband and the gross injustice of the water bill.

He kept a drink and sometimes a bottle on top of the piano now and then, to mellow him out, and he dissolved a pill or two in the glass to hold him up. But it was no big thing. They were just part of sundown.

“Iowa, again, a honky-tonk on a lake,” is all he can remember about the place where it happened. “It was an unruly crowd.”

He played for as long as four hours some nights, then played until the boys playing behind him began to wonder if he would ever stop. That night, in the break after a long set, he waded through the usual handshakers and backslappers and women who wanted a kiss and a squeeze, and past some people who just looked at him hot and mean. There were a few in every crowd who just wanted to see him on the way down, to sneer and relish it. “I got some dirty looks back then,” he says. How long had it been since they mobbed him, since he couldn’t get off a stage without having the fingernails leave trails on his arms and rip at his clothes? Some days it seemed like yesterday, and some days it seemed like such a very long time ago. But it was all just temporary, a hiccup, he was sure, then. . .

“Hey!”

It sounded like thunder down in the bottom of a well.

Jerry Lee looked up to see perhaps the biggest man he had ever seen. “Up steps this guy,” he says, remembering, “up steps this guy who had to be seven feet tall. He had on a sleeveless T-shirt, with arms about this big around,” and he takes his two hands and makes a circle about the circumference of a telephone pole. He did not know if he was a city boy or a country boy, or even if he was altogether from this earth.

“It was the Giant,” said Cecil Harrelson, the road manager then.

They remember it, Jerry Lee and Cecil, the same.

“Which one of you guys is Jerry Lee Lewis?” the giant roared.

Jerry Lee thought that should have been obvious. Even people who didn’t like him knew who the hell he was.

The giant, impatient, bellowed again. “I WANT JERRY LEE LEWIS!”

That shut up even the most oblivious drunk. A beer joint never goes silent, but this was close.

“Well, I’m here,” Jerry Lee said.

The man stepped into the light. He was bigger in the light.

“I am gonna beat on your head,” the man growled.

Jerry Lee searched his mind for some offense he had made to this man the width and breadth of a chifforobe, and decided it had to be something about a woman, with an outside chance that, this time, he might even be innocent.

He had rarely taken a step backward when confronted by any man, except his daddy. But as this man came closer he seemed to block out the light itself, till Jerry Lee was staring into his Adam’s apple. The man pushed him not so much with his arms as with his whole presence, “and I remember he backed me all the way to the door, then out the door, and then all the way out to the car.”

Finally, his back pressed up against a door handle, he had nowhere else to go.

“So,” he says, with a certain amount of fatality, “I busted him in the mouth.” He did not throw the punch with just his right arm but with his arm and his shoulder and the weight of his body, used his hips to torque some force into it, the way Elmo threw a punch, and all the Lewises before him, the way daddies taught their sons to throw one: to hurt. But all the Lewises in every dustup and brouhaha since the Yankee War couldn’t have knocked that walking piece of furniture out with one lick. “He went down to the ground, and bounced right back up,” says Jerry Lee.

The man drew back a fist and aimed it at Jerry Lee’s head.

“Here come Cecil,” says Jerry Lee. Cecil leaped onto the man’s back, snaked one of his arms around the man’s throat, and tried his best to choke him to death, but the man didn’t even wheeze. But Cecil locked his own arms under the man’s big arms from behind, just enough to keep him from swinging free at Jerry Lee, and that was good enough. Jerry Lee, giving up on hurting the man about the head, started slamming his fists into the man’s body with everything he had. Cecil could hear bones break.

The man finally began to sag, and sank to his knees. He knelt in the parking lot, and ran his fingers over his rib cage. “I got seven broke ribs,” he said, thickly.

Jerry Lee and Cecil, exhausted, just stood gasping for air.

The man walked his fingers down his torso, counting off on the other hand.

“Seven,” the man said.

“Well, this didn’t have to happen,” said Jerry Lee.

The man nodded. “Where y’all from?” he asked.

“Louisiana,” Jerry Lee said.

The man nodded again.

“Well,” he said after a while, “I think I’ll call it a day.”

But he just kept kneeling there.