by Don Keith
Well, she certainly had his full attention there. He followed her.
In the four months Jimmy had spent time at the station, he had never once been past Big Beulah, the transmitter, Charlie’s junky engineering office, or the on-air studio. He noticed that the hallway opened to several offices on the right. Through a large picture window on the left side he could see a large open studio filled with rows of folding chairs, a big square microphone on a stand, and an upright piano.
In one of the offices, an older man he had seen a time or two in Charlie’s office was sitting at a cluttered desk talking on the telephone. He had his shoes off and his sock feet propped up on stacks of papers which covered the top of the desk. His toupee had slid to one side of a perfectly bald head and he idly scratched his dome as he talked.
“...and that little old station we had in Tuscaloosa had such low power we couldn’t be heard more than a couple of miles away. We told sponsors the reason we were so weak was because so many folks was tuning in to us that it was sucking all the signal out of the air...”
The next office held one desk, covered with flowers, strands of twisting ivy, an amazing collection of bric-a-brac, souvenirs, and knick knacks and dozens of framed photos of dark-haired children. There was barely room for the big electric typewriter that hummed and ground away as if in agony. The woman who sat behind the desk pounded the groaning machine wildly and chewed busily at a mouthful of gum. She was tiny, almost hidden behind the typewriter and all the junk on her desk. The little woman was sitting high up on a stack of pillows that allowed her to be able to reach the keyboard. She danced in her seat to the music that was playing on the air, piped through a speaker in the corner of the office.
Lulu did not take time to introduce Jimmy to either of the people in the offices. She must have assumed he knew them, or that he simply did not need to. She kept bumping along down the hallway until she came to a stop at a closet at the far end. Her bulk seemed to plug that entire end of the corridor. She pulled open the closet door and dragged out snake-like tubing to attach to a big canister vacuum cleaner.
“My rheumatiz has got me so stove up I can’t hardly push and pull this old contraption around no more. I been after Miss Clancy to get me another one but that woman is so tight with money that she squeaks when she walks,” Lulu rambled on, more to herself than to Jimmy. “That old biddy has got the first penny she ever made, I swear. She squeezes a dollar so hard that you can hear old President Washington holler.”
Jimmy knew who Mrs. Gloria Clancy was. She was the station owner who had inherited WROG outright when her husband, Clarence, had passed away several years before. The woman was well past eighty years old herself, still spry, but in the grip of senility that sometimes bordered on daffiness.
When she made her daily pilgrimage to the station, all speakers were immediately turned down by the first person who spotted her coming. Mrs. Clancy was the only person in the state of Alabama who did not know what kind of music WROG was playing those days. And the staff wanted to keep it that way.
The old woman assumed it was still the big band records, the soap operas and quiz shows from the old Blue Network. Or maybe the daily shows with hillbilly music singers and the preachers on Sundays, all originating live from the big studio Jimmy had just passed. The shows that had been the bulk of the programming when Clarence Clancy had been alive and ran the station with an iron hand.
Amazingly, Miss Clancy did not seem to notice the rock and roll throbbing from the speakers when she popped her head into the control room every morning at 7:30. She never failed to say hello to Jerry Diamond. If Jerry was in the middle of a live commercial or reading a news report on the air and could not return her greeting instantly, she took a tightly rolled-up copy of The Birmingham Post-Herald newspaper and whacked him hard in the back of the head until he stopped talking to his vast audience and responded to her.
Nowadays, no matter what he was doing, when the boss lady came into his studio, he stopped in the middle of whatever was going on, spoke into the microphone a smiling “Good morning, Miss Clancy,” and then picked up where he had left off. It had become a regular part of his show, something the listeners actually looked forward to.
“Good morning, Miz Clancy!” It became his trademark, and later it even showed up on tee-shirts and bumper stickers and coffee mugs.
“Here, Mr. Jimmy Gill. You can start earning your biscuits by running this vacuum cleaner around in the lobby and then in yonder in the big studio,” Lulu commanded. “Mind you get all them needles that’s been falling off them Christmas decorations.”
“Yes’m,” he acknowledged, happy that he was finally getting a look at the rest of the station. And that some good food might be his eventual reward. He knew, too, that doing more work could result in job security.
The lobby was a big room with a metal desk near the front door entrance. A bleached-blonde woman sat behind the desk and answered the constantly ringing telephone, filing her nails without missing a stroke as she tucked the phone between her head and shoulder and stabbed the buttons with a long-red-nailed finger. There were a couple of sagging couches and a table or two lined up along the wall under a bank of windows. The tables were littered with mimeographed WROG station survey sheets that listed the top songs for that particular week in the order of their popularity and featured photos of Jerry Diamond and Rockin’ Randy and the other disk jockeys.
Dying cedar limbs and a strand of weak, blinking lights had been hastily tacked to the window sills in deference to the season. Over in the far corner, a scrawny Christmas tree with a few broken ornaments tilted precariously to the north. Someone had wrapped empty boxes in gaudy paper to simulate presents under the tree.
Jimmy worked vigorously to impress Lulu Dooley and managed to suck up most of the brown, dry cedar needles from the floor. Then he captured a bunch of dust bunnies from under the couch, got the contents of several overflowing ash trays on the tables, and finally switched off the roar of the vacuum.
He was standing there, proudly surveying the excellent job he had done, already tasting Lulu’s fried chicken, when the station’s front door flew open behind him with a noisy rush of wind and traffic noise from the Superhighway. Someone was in a big hurry to get into the radio station. Two young men, dressed identically in dark pants and black leather jackets over white tee shirts, each with his hair slicked back and cow-licked in the exact same direction, marched in tandem. They pivoted on the balls of their feet and quickly canvassed the lobby, as if looking for some kind of trouble that might be awaiting them at WROG.
They were apparently satisfied that neither the skinny kid tangled in a nest of vacuum cleaner hoses nor the bleached-blonde receptionist with the jangling telephone attached to her ear posed any serious threat to them. They turned back to the door in unison, pushed it open, and motioned to someone outside that the coast was clear. It was safe to come on inside.
The blonde receptionist watched the men’s choreographed moves, her eyes huge, and allowed the phone to temporarily go unanswered. Jimmy knew he probably looked as stunned as she did, standing there tied up in the vacuum’s hoses.
The man who came through the door was the skinniest human being Jimmy had ever seen. His tight, pistol-legged black pants clung to his legs. Their bottoms were shoved down into black motorcycle boots that boasted flashy stainless steel studs. His shirt was black, also, but with colorful embroidered designs crisscrossing its front. The man had a black motorcycle jacket thrown casually across his shoulders.
Jimmy was struck at once by the sharpness of the man’s angular features, his high forehead, honed nose, and the mass of wavy blonde hair that was heavily oiled and combed back to an arrowhead of a duck-tail. Electricity seemed to crackle around him as he moved into the lobby.
He looked around quickly, swaggered to the desk. He recognized and relished the effect his presence had on the blonde receptionist. He lifted the telephone receiver from her shoulder, looked at it hard, as if it had insult
ed him somehow, and then dropped it heavily back into its cradle. That killed the incessant ringing for the moment.
Then he bent toward the woman and boldly kissed her on her forehead. He said something to her that Jimmy could not quite hear over the music from the corner speaker.
It seemed for sure that the woman was going to faint dead away. She turned crimson, her hands clutched together at her breast as if she did not trust them to behave otherwise. The man held up a hand while he looked into the woman’s worshipping eyes. One of the two men behind him read his mind and slipped a ballpoint pen between his fingers. He wrote something with a flourish on the first page of the woman’s telephone message pad then winked at her. She turned even redder and seemed to be having trouble breathing.
The skinny man turned and spied Jimmy Gill, standing there in the middle of the radio station lobby, being swallowed by the boa constrictor vacuum cleaner hoses.
“Hey there, whippersnapper!”
He strode over to him with a cocky walk, casually reaching for a comb from his back pocket and running it down each side of his head as he approached. Jimmy did not know whether to run or stand his ground. It was odd. The man seemed so friendly and likeable, and yet so threatening and dangerous. And all at the same time.
“I guess you’ll be wantin’ an autograph from old Jerry Lee, too.”
Jimmy smelled beer and cigarettes. The skinny man reached to shake his hand and a spark of static electricity leapt from his hand across space to Jimmy’s. His grip was firm and confident, but the look in his eyes was just a shade away from animal wild.
It suddenly dawned on Jimmy who this man was. Jerry Lee Lewis. The young challenger to Elvis Presley, who, like “The King”, also came from Memphis, Tennessee. A rising star who was already dominating the charts and radio air waves with his manic kind of hillbilly-rooted rock and roll. Jerry Lee reached to thin air again and one of the men immediately produced a glossy photograph from an inside jacket pocket and handed it to him.
“What’s your name, whistle-britches?”
“Jimmy,” he stammered, but then had a sudden thought. “And could you do one for Mrs. Polanski and Mrs. George? They’re my neighbors.”
He signed Jimmy’s picture, then two more, the handwriting so cock-eyed that the names were impossible to read, but Jimmy did not care. He held the photos at a distance, not wanting to smear the ink before it had time to dry. The photos were of Jerry Lee, semi-crouched at the front of a stage with a band playing behind him, his blonde hair pitched forward over his face, lips seductively close to a huge microphone that he held in both hands, almost as if he was lovingly caressing it. His mouth was set in a snarl revealing blazing white teeth while girls in the audience below struggled to reach him, to grab him, to claim him as their very own.
Lewis suddenly turned and bolted toward the door to the studio as if someone in there had called out his name.
“Boys, there’s a pee-anno in here! Come on!”
And they followed him as he shot through the doorway. The blonde receptionist and Jimmy Gill were close behind.
“Damn, I’ve missed playing music while we’ve been doing all this hand shaking and picture autographing stuff,” he yelled to the ceiling, limbering his fingers, doing a quick dance step and a twirl on his toes, then laughing crazily, like a mad scientist about to unleash his self-created monster.
Jerry Lee stepped to the piano—placed there for the preachers and gospel singers who still did their Sunday morning shows live on WROG—sat down on the bench reverently, ran his fingers lovingly along the length of the keyboard, and smiled a dangerous smile. He tickled one of the keys with one finger. Even Jimmy Gill recognized it as a caress that implied pure sexuality.
Lightning flashed in Jerry Lee’s eyes. Quietly, then louder, he began to stroke several of the keys at once, and the rumbling sound poured out of the instrument like a flood that would not be dammed up any longer.
Lewis soon was banging the keys violently, stomping the peddles, bouncing on the bench in what appeared to be a fit of ecstasy that bordered on religious fervor. But it was not noise that he was coaxing from the piano with all his wild pounding and foot stomping and crazy gyrations.
It was pure rock and roll. Primal thunder. Sex with shaped notes.
Jimmy could not believe how fast Jerry Lee’s fingers flew, how he threw his head from side to side with sheer joy and abandon. He kicked the bench away and stood in a crouch, all without missing a beat. He started to sing, a smile still on his face, a tear in one eye.
It was “Great Balls of Fire,” even more frenetic and powerful than the record they had all heard so many times already. The version that Jimmy spun on the twin record players in his bedroom floor. The boy had to sit down quickly in one of the metal folding chairs, the emotion of the moment almost too great for him. For a few seconds, he was sure he would faint dead away. The receptionist was leaning against the wall, fighting a faint herself, still flushed from her kiss from Jerry Lee Lewis.
Rockin’ Randy was behind the glass in the control room, bouncing dangerously in the already overtaxed chair, his fat lips open in a wide grin, holding on to his ear phones as if they would pop off his head from the sheer force of the music. The on-air light over the studio window was burning hotly. That meant that Randy had opened the studio microphone and was broadcasting Jerry Lee’s impromptu concert live to the audience lucky enough to be tuned in to WROG at that magical moment. The torrid licks and the soulful singing were vibrating at eight-hundred twenty kilocycles, pushed out by five-thousand watts of signal power all over the southeastern United States.
After another frantic verse and a chorus, Jerry Lee whipped the keyboard lengthwise with his fingers another couple of times, banged the keys mercilessly again, then threw his head back, his blonde hair flying, and laughed that maniacal laugh once more.
“Hot damn, this son of a bitch can rock, can’t he?” Jerry Lee screamed it to the studio ceiling, to all gathered in the room, to God. But also to the uncounted thousands of radio listeners who were eavesdropping.
Randy slapped wildly at the switches on the control room board. Then he held his huge head in his hands, his face glowing red with embarrassment.
Just then, as if on cue, a short, bald man wearing a plaid coat and striped trousers burst through the studio door, arms waving, spit flying, face crimson with anger.
“Dammit, Jerry Lee, we were supposed to meet at WBMH two hours ago! They’re the station that’s sponsoring this concert tonight, not WROG, and they’re fit to be tied already. And then I hear you on the air over here, and we got a sound check at the auditorium in ten minutes...”
Lewis slammed down the keyboard cover, gave the man a withering go-to-hell look, and stood menacingly straight out of his crouch, clenching and unclenching his fists. Jimmy thought Lewis was going to hit the little man in the face right then and there. But suddenly, Lewis looked in Jimmy’s direction, grinned, and gave him a sly wink. Then he stepped to where the blonde receptionist still leaned against the wall for support and kissed her again, this time square on her red lips. She struggled to keep from collapsing.
“Looky here, boys and girls. We got the music that can make the blind see and the crippled walk, but we got to put up with bastards like these just to let people hear it,” he said quietly, to no one in particular. Then he strutted out the door, his bodyguards and the loud little man in the funny clothes close behind them.
Charlie McGee, Lulu Dooley, the tiny woman from the office with the typewriter, and the man with the cockeyed toupee all stood at the studio window and watched wide-eyed as the scene had been played out in the studio. Except for the slight lingering smell of beer and cigarettes, there was no evidence at all that Jerry Lee Lewis had even been there. That any rock and roll magic had just happened right there in front of them.
But when Jimmy Gill glanced over at the old, dusty piano, it seemed to be quivering. Then, almost imperceptibly, it actually did move. The piano’s leg on the l
eft rear corner gave way and the instrument settled to the floor at an odd angle. When it hit, the impact of the frame on hard cement coaxed one softer, melodic note from the instrument’s strings.
It was almost as if Jerry Lee’s spirit was still in the studio, longing for just one more chord, one more precious stab of pure rock and roll.
Twelve
Christmas was shaping up better as usual. Jimmy had made Grandmama a present, a coaster for her ice tea glass, carved from a piece of cypress with some cork glued on. Detroit gave him the idea and helped him make it. It had been raggedly wrapped and placed under the tiny cedar tree Jimmy sawed down with a butcher knife out behind the house. They had no ornaments for the tree, so he cut paper strips from the newspaper and made a chain out of them for a garland, and then he found an old forgotten set of colored bulbs in the bottom of a dresser drawer. Only a half dozen of them still burned, but they were the red, yellow and orange ones, the ones Momma had always thought were the prettiest. He wrapped them around the limbs of the cedar and plugged them into the wall socket.
He almost cried. It might look a tiny bit like Christmas in the duplex on Wisteria after all.
Somehow, Grandmama had been able to afford to buy him a new pair of tennis shoes for school. He had a couple of other packages under the tree that felt suspiciously like a pair of socks and some underwear. She also told him Mrs. Polanski had sent over some ham and cornbread dressing and Mrs. George had brought by a fruit cake. Lulu Dooley had given him a pumpkin pie that smelled wonderful through its waxed paper covering. But he half-lied and only told Grandmama that one of the ladies at the station had sent it. Not that it was a colored woman. That way, she would allow them to eat it.
