I had to know. Who, besides the great Kenny Lovelace, would Jerry Lee Lewis want to play his music with in the Great Beyond, assuming he ever actually embraces mortality and goes?
He thought a moment, then named off the great stylists. He would like to see Hank Williams in that cowboy hat, free of the pain of his twisted spine. He would like to hear Jimmie Rodgers sing through clean, strong lungs, the tuberculosis left behind on some worldly plane. He would like to talk a long while with Al Jolson, once called the world’s greatest entertainer, who if you believe some historians, actually sang himself to death. In the Beyond, there would be no needles, no reek of raw corn liquor or bathtub gin, no pills, none of those rattling bones. But if you scrubbed them all of their pain, their addictions, their obsession, would they—any of them—be the same?
I thought of that Tom Waits song, the one about how, “If I exorcise my devils, / Well, my angels may leave too. / When they leave, they’re so hard to find.” Still, Jerry Lee would like to see them all gathered ’round his piano, with Kenny playing lead guitar and some red-hot fiddle, singing their songs, all their songs, on a never-dying rotation: “Sheltering Palms” and “You Win Again” and “Waitin’ on a Train” and “Shakin’”—wouldn’t “Shakin’” just make Jolson’s eyes bug out? And in the audience would be his people, all his people, everyone he had ever lost.
I think about that, about the four of them together, and it makes me hope that my own mother is right, that there is something out there beyond this.
“Can you just imagine it?” Jerry Lee says.
When I was done with this book, I had one line left in my notes that made no sense. It did not fit anything around it, and so I could not use the usual clues to make sense of it. It just read:
he never straightened me out
The thing is, in his story, it could have meant anything, at any moment, in any situation. It could have been anyone. I had long given up on it when it finally hit me. It was Jerry Lee, talking about the piano teacher, the one who slapped him and swore to break him of his boogie-woogie. It had come up, out of the clear blue, in the middle of another thought, a whole other conversation, just a thing on his mind, slicing straight through. But now I know it was perhaps the most important of lines, because, good Lord, what if he had?
When I was done with the interviews, as the long, hot summer faded, I walked over to the bed and shook his hand.
“I will try to write a good book,” I told him.
“I know you will, Killer,” he said.