Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  He needed a caregiver.

  Judith Ann Coghlan was his ex-brother-in-law Rusty’s wife, and Myra’s sister-in-law. She came to Nesbit to cook and help care for him, and to talk about times better than these. They had much in common. She was the daughter of sharecroppers, too, from the tiny town of Benoit, Mississippi. She was a tall blonde, a star athlete as a young woman who had played basketball for the Memphis Redheads professional team, whose players took the court in satin outfits and jumped for rebounds in big hair.

  She was living at the time in Monroe, Georgia, but said she moved to the Lewis house at her husband’s urging. She arrived to find the house and the man in need of attention.

  “He was lethargic, out of it . . . ,” she says, and worse, “Had systemic infections—shingles, pneumonia.” But treatment was difficult. “He was scared of needles,” she said, afraid of the old demon he had beaten back after a lifetime.

  “Yeah,” Jerry Lee says now, “it was no bed of roses.”

  As he lay there between fevers and bouts of pain, they spent long hours talking about where they grew up and how. They talked about old songs, and old ways. “I fell in love,” she said. “Well, I probably fell in love before then.” They had met more than a quarter century before, in Las Vegas, where he said that if Rusty didn’t marry the woman, he would. “We went to see him with sawdust on the floor in the Cherokee Plaza, in Atlanta,” she said. “I remember the women screaming. . . .”

  “And you wanted to be one of them,” smirked Jerry Lee.

  “Yes,” she said, “I did.”

  She divorced her husband in 2010 and immediately clashed with Phoebe and Myra.

  “Phoebe told me, ‘You have no right to take him.’”

  “She probably thought she was lookin’ out for me,” said Jerry Lee.

  “They told me, ‘Well, give her two hundred dollars and the old Buick,’” as incentive to leave, Judith said.

  Money was never the reason, she said. There was not much of that, hadn’t been for some time.

  “I was told he would kill me,” Judith said. “I was told he would kick me out after one month. But Jerry stood by me and we made it.”

  “I got her down here,” said Jerry Lee, “and wouldn’t let her leave.”

  At Christmas 2010, he gave her a diamond ring, but did not tell her it was an engagement ring until a few months later. “I want you to know that the ring I gave you for Christmas is a promise that I will marry you,” he said, as she later told the Natchez Democrat.

  “I’d never had a diamond like that,” Judith said.

  Jerry Lee just lay in his bed and smiled.

  She was treating him for various ailments, all over his body. “I figured if she got that close,” he said, “we might as well go all the way.”

  He was still weak and ailing, but he was feeling better.

  She traveled with him, to do a show in Budapest.

  “That’s when it was ‘Great Balls of Fire,’” he said, and then, quietly, ‘hee, hee.’”

  In those early days with Judith, he would rise from his bed and do a show, then slump exhausted in the car or plane seat for the long ride home. They were all long rides then, even if they were just up the road.

  In a concert at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville in April 2011, fans lined up by the hundreds to get tickets, to buy posters and T-shirts with the young man’s face and the simple legend KILL. They were mostly young people, people who were not alive when he was the hottest thing in rock and roll, not even alive when he was the hottest thing in country music; many of them may not have been alive when he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He had been old all of their lives.

  “A lot of the old fans are gone,” he says now. “But I guess there are new ones to take their place.”

  In a plain black suit and white starched shirt, he played them some barroom music:

  Wind is scratchin’ at my door, and I can hear that lonesome wind moan

  Tell me baby, why you been gone so long?

  Then he raised his loafer, gave it a final lick, and smiled.

  It seemed different, somehow, though it is easy to read so much into such little things. But that day he seemed different from the man of a million self-referential smiles, leering and mugging from the stage, the stage that was his due.

  He seemed, simply, happy to be there.

  The crowd, with their young voices, roared and roared.

  Tragedy continued to dog those in his life, even those on its outer reaches, even those who were bound to him in name only. Lori Leigh Lewis, Jaren’s daughter, accidentally smothered her infant son to death in May 2011 when, police said, she passed out on top of the child after ingesting a dose of muscle relaxants. “It was awful,” he says. The next year, his longtime bass player, B. B. Cunningham, was killed in a shootout at the Memphis apartment complex where he worked as a security guard. Jerry Lee was not involved, but the tragedy evoked violent memories of the past, a side of him he sometimes refuses even to recall.

  “I don’t believe in fightin’ and carryin’ on,” he says now. “That’s not my game. I sure don’t want to shoot nobody.” He says this within easy reach of the automatic on his bedside table and three feet from a drawer of firearms, including one that looks like it was made to fell a charging Cape buffalo. But those, he clarifies, are just there in case someone bothers him.

  He was hospitalized in January and February 2012 for various old ailments, including the nagging stomach trouble and a new bout of pneumonia. On March 9, when he was seventy-six and Judith was sixty-two, they were married in a small ceremony house on the Natchez Bluff, overlooking the big river, the one that swallowed Jolson when he was a boy.

  “They kind of hemmed me in,” he jokes now, pretending he was somehow bushwhacked. “What with that Baptist minister there, and all.” The wedding party sang hymns, “but it wouldn’t have been shoutin’ music,” he says, because the Baptists could not have kept up.

  The vows were barely said when he struck his leg against a door facing, resulting in a compound fracture of his lower leg. Surgeons repaired the damage with thirteen screws and two metal plates. The pain and stress almost killed him.

  “I went out in the parking lot and got down on my knees,” Judith says, “and said, ‘Please don’t, don’t take him away, someone I have just found in my sixties.’”

  His cousin David Batey drove up from Cleveland, Tennessee, to pray with her. He told Jerry Lee what he had witnessed in the parking lot.

  The leg would not heal properly. “The pain was so bad, he was out of his head,” she said.

  He still refused the needles.

  “It was so bad, he had to go to the wound-care center,” Judith said. The wound healed—slowly, after three more operations, but it healed.

  He did not worry himself with challenges, with the distances others might set as goals: a mile, a half mile, a hundred feet. He wanted to walk across the stage to the piano stool and back, unaided.

  That would be enough.

  “And it seems okay now,” he says. “It’s tough. It’s hard to do. It’s like learning yourself to walk again,” as a child. “And you try to cover it up as much as you can. Walk out onstage, walk to the piano, set down, take the microphone and start doin’ your thing. And if you can do that, good. If you can’t do that, it’s best to stay home.”

  Now, from his bed, he looks at Judith and shakes his head.

  “Wasn’t much of a honeymoon, was it, baby?”

  She is asked now why she would take such a chance on the man they called the Killer. But that man seems, if not gone, at least very well hid. They go on dates for chili dogs and like to go to a local meat-and-three for vegetables. He still eats the food he loved as a boy, and she cooks it for him.

  “It’s what a man needs,” he says, “good lovin’, good cookin’.”

  In the dark of his bedroom in Nesbit, Judith brings him a Coke float with vanilla ice cream.

  “No Diet Coke,” he says,
and takes a sip. “Real Coke.”

  Somewhere in this nuptial bliss, an odd thing has happened: the faces of the women on the road have grown less distinct in his mind. It used to be that he could call them all back, or many of them, or things about them. “They run through my mind, and I wonder where she’s at now or where some other one is. . . . You can’t hang on to a ball of fire. That time is over. But it happened.”

  Now, though, things have changed. “I can’t even hardly remember. . . . Well, I can remember, but it really didn’t amount to nothin’. Not as much as people think.”

  He wonders if it might be time to do a new record.

  “I think now’s my time to get it again. It’s now or never.”

  He always liked that Jolson song, “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.”

  “Been thinkin’ about doin’ that.”

  He plays it through in his head.

  Pack up all my cares and woe

  Here I go, singin’ low

  Bye, bye, blackbird

  He is not worried about his hands.

  He looks at them, fingers slightly splayed and crooked, the way they rest on the keys. “It don’t matter,” he likes to say, “what my head does. They know where to go.”

  He had to prove so much in his time: that a piano man could lead a band, could be a straight-up star. That a country boy could play the Apollo. That a rock and roller could do big-time, mainstream country. That he was not just a crazy man who wrecked pianos, that he was just living life real loud. A dozen times, that he was not washed up, not done. Now he has to prove, again, that he’s not dead yet.

  “I’m back on the spot again,” he says. “I gotta go back in the studio, and prove it all over again. I gotta come out with somethin’ different, that I’ve stored back in my membranes, back there.” In the old days, he recalls, “if somebody wrote a song and it’s pretty good, I’d listen to it and play around with it a little bit,” then leave it alone till he got to the studio to cut it. “Now, it takes time to really learn the song, and get the band into it, and the singers into it, everybody into it. It ain’t just like sittin’ down and doin’ one take. Those days are gone. But of course you can’t think in that way. You gotta think you can still do it the same way.”

  That has always been the trick. If you want to do anything worth a flip, you must live in the past, at least a little bit, because that is where the magic was. That was why he was always so much more exciting live, where his mind could wander free and string together things he loved or half remembered. It was why he went back to the past again and again to find the words, the music. What is wrong with living in the past, he knew as well as anyone alive, if the past was better?

  “I’ve had an interestin’ life,” he says, “haven’t I?”

  He had said, at the beginning of interviews for this book, that he “had been lucky at everything, except life.” He has had some time to think about that, and he is no longer sure.

  His Chihuahua, Topaz Junior, eyes the people who come and go from the room with ill intent. He eyes everyone with ill intent, except Jerry Lee, and he bites anyone who tries to remove him from his place on the soft quilt between his feet.

  “But you wouldn’t bite Daddy, would you?”

  Topaz Junior snuggles deeper.

  “A great life,” Jerry Lee says.

  He has been around so long and lived so hard that almost everyone, it seems, has a story about him, a story of seeing him live, or of a thing that happened while listening to his music, or just a thing they heard, that stuck like fishhooks in their mind all their lives. The memories flash brighter and bang louder, somehow, than others. Gail Francis will always be ninety-eight pounds soaking wet, will always be a looker, every time she hears a Jerry Lee Lewis song. Dr. Bebe Barefoot, who teaches English at the University of Alabama, will always be the young woman who was actually struck by lightning as she drove down the highway listening to “Great Balls of Fire.” When she hears his music, she thinks about the world around her charged with blue fire. There are thousands of them, tens of thousands, more, who attach a moment in their lives to his story, his songs. He believes there will be more of it. “I mean,” he says, “I can’t let ’em down.”

  Late one afternoon, resting in bed, he suggests that maybe he has been foolish even to think about age. He contradicts himself a little, but then that is his prerogative. “Age never crosses my mind,” he suddenly says, and then thinks a minute. “As long as I can sing and play the way I want.”

  He pauses. “‘And the audience went crazy,’” he says, quoting a piece of some long-ago review, really almost any review, any story.

  He looks at his hands, again.

  “Just like they always was.”

  One day last winter, Judith was passing through the electronic gates of the Lewis ranch in a rainstorm when she saw, in the rain over the iron gate, what seemed to be an apparition. She described it to Jerry Lee. They think maybe it was Elvis. Not his face, not exactly, but somehow she felt it was him.

  “I don’t know if I believe in all that stuff or not,” says Jerry Lee, “but I’m beginning to.”

  A man who believes in angels should not be surprised by one.

  “That’s what I think it was, an angel,” he says, then thinks a moment. “I don’t know what it was. Some kind of warning? ‘See what they done to me?’ Maybe he was saying to not let ’em do the same to me, and my life. I don’t know.”

  Or maybe it was Elvis coming to answer that old question that haunted them both, that old question about what happens to those who sing and play this music. Maybe again, he has gone and left it unanswered.

  “It’s strictly in God’s hands,” he says. “And it makes no difference what they write or what they say, or how they feel, it’s . . . right between me and God.”

  He doesn’t believe he can talk his way in.

  “You gotta live it. You gotta . . . believe it. But you can only believe to a certain extent. You gotta live it, too. You gotta back up what you preach.”

  He would have liked to have seen this Elvis himself. He wouldn’t have been scared of him. But the apparition was gone with the clouds, and with it his answer.

  Or maybe not.

  If it was an angel, he has the answer now.

  17

  STONE GARDEN

  Ferriday

  2012

  He was going home to see his people. He drove ninety, a hundred sometimes, on the interstate between Memphis and the Natchez turnoff. The University of Alabama Crimson Tide and Louisiana State University Bengal Tigers were playing football that evening in a nationally televised game, the game of the century, people called it. “I wanted to see that game,” he said, and then, after a minute: “I’d have drove that fast if there wadn’t no game.” He wanted to get a choice room in the old Eola Hotel in Natchez, where good-looking Johnny Littlejohn, the one he first heard sing that “Shakin’” song, used to host his radio show. He stretched out on the bed, got a butler to bring up some room service, and thought of Elmo. The next morning, he and Judith took her new Buick across the big river, across the same old bridge, and he looked down to the barges and up at the rails overhead where he had dangled, and he smiled and shook his head. At the halfway point of the bridge, he told Judith, “You in Louisiana, now, baby,” and it made him happy to say it, so he said it again.

  They took a hard right turn and followed the river north; in the town of Vidalia, they stopped at the Sonic and had a cheeseburger and a Coke. “I am a Sonic man,” he says, and ate it with relish. For months he had been mostly flat on his back in that air-conditioned dark in Nesbit, like something put up in storage in a cool, dry place; now he savored the sunshine, the balm of a warm Southern fall. “I’ve found me a new Rolls-Royce, one like I used to have. . . . Took me forever, but I found it, found it in Los Angeles,” of course. They got to Ferriday about noon, past the old fish stall with its long-ago signs for the catch of the day fading to gray, past the lovely-sounding Morning Star Alley, where a br
oke-down Pontiac rusted at the curb. The marquee on the First Baptist Church warned, GOD OPPOSES THE PROUD BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE, as if they knew he was coming, but then he never thought much of Baptists, anyhow.

  For some reason he thought of Elvis.

  “Drinkin’ champagne and feelin’ no pain,” he sings. “I hit that gate.”

  Just a mile outside of the downtown, the green fields stretched out toward the big river out of sight, but you could smell it from here, those ages of mud and rot. “It used to be woods, all this,” he said. “Funny, how much it’s changed.” The dirt has not changed, still not quite brown, not gray, but the color of the front side of a dollar bill. Something else made him think of Sam Cooke. “My thirty-second cousin,” he joked. “Man, he was good.”

  They stopped and said hey to his sister Frankie Jean, who talked about Uncle Will floating out of his grave in the great deluge, and then they got back into the Buick and went to see the other kin, there in their stone garden.

  He drove north out of Ferriday on US 425, toward Clayton. He took a right on McAdams Road just before the rusted drawbridge over the muddy Tensas River, then another right on Indian Village Road. “There used to be a pretty little farm right here,” he said, and he looked for it, but it was gone. He rolled slowly between fallow fields and coasted up to the iron gate of the small cemetery like a man walking softly down a hallway to keep from waking a sleeping child. He stepped out, eased shut the door, and walked without sound through the thick grass. He left the Killer in the car.