and a dangerous one. “Your Uncle Lee will destroy me for this,” Haney said.
Jerry Lee dangled.
“If your mama caught you here, she’d kill me! And your Uncle Lee will shoot me. And your Aunt Stella? She would—they would—have a heart attack.”
The music had not stopped; you could have dragged a bull alligator and a rusted washing machine through the joint when the music was going good. Haney hustled him to the door. The boy did not have to be dragged, but he did not act contrite, either. “And don’t come back,” Haney said from the door. Jerry Lee started walking in the direction of home, but as soon as Haney turned his back, he doubled back and crept through the dark to the band’s old bus. “I had to get on that bus,” he says. “I sat down in a chair, and I thought, I bet this is where he sat.” He sat there for a long time, dreaming, the music fainter now. Finally, banned for life, he walked home, the rhythm and the blues thumping inside his head.
A few days later, one of the customers called Haney over to him. “They’s a white boy under my table,” he said.
At least when Haney dragged him out, it was the same one. He could not have stood an epidemic. He threatened and pleaded with him again. “I came back,” Jerry Lee says, grinning, “for years.” He checked the “Among the Colored” column in the Sentinel, to find out when the big acts were in town. He always got in somehow, till it became ritual. He would slide under a table, and a customer would nudge him with a toe. “Is that you, Jerry Lee?”
“It’s me.”
He went back over and over and over and over. But the image that stuck in his mind was that of a young B. B. King, the “Beale Street Blues Boy,” who would one day run back into a burning juke joint in Twist, Arkansas, to save his guitar after two fighting drunks knocked over a garbage can filled with burning kerosene. Like his primary influence, T-Bone Walker, he sang the blues for a line or two, then answered with his guitar; as he bent the strings it sounded like the thing was talking back, like there was two men up there instead of one, telling the news.
It had a lot of names, then, that music: the blues, R&B, others less savory. But Jerry Lee knew what it was.
“They was playin’ rock and roll,” he says.
“They was.”
It was hard, after he had seen the Big House bulge with such raw, grand music, to get real excited about seventh grade. Still, he did his best to stay in it, even if it meant choking a man, which in this case it did.
This takes a little explaining. The sixth grade had not gone all that well for Jerry Lee. First, there had been a grade-switching scheme. “I changed all my F grades to A,” he says. “Only real whipping I ever got.” Mamie turned her back as Elmo pulled off his belt and beat the boy like a one-crop mule, beat him till Mamie pleaded with him to stop “before you beat my baby to death.” It wasn’t that the boy couldn’t do the work; it was just that it was almost impossible to learn much about Paul Revere’s ride or Isaac Newton’s apple while you were at the pool hall. If you ask him today if he minded school, he will say no, he did not mind it much, because some days—many days, really—he never got within a mile of it. He ate his vanilla wafers and marched off to school like a little man, but if there was a jukebox playing somewhere for the early-morning drunks, it shook him off his stride, or if there was just a lonely street corner somewhere, he felt compelled to lean on a power pole to keep it all company, and if the weather was hot, he just went swimming in the river or Lake Concordia, or lay in the sun and thought about songs and girls or girls and songs. He worked hard on his music because it mattered, because any nitwit could see that it was his ticket out, and let the rest slide because it did not. He watched a lot of boats churn past the levee and knocked a lot of balls across the green felt and heard a lot of Moon Mullican on the jukebox, while other boys suffered through the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, and the square root of some silly thing.
He showed up for the beginning of the seventh grade, only to find out he was not in it. He decided to take a seat anyway. He had already figured out that a person, if they were special enough, if they had something uncommon to offer, could live by a set of rules separate from those set down for dull, regular people. The way to accomplish this was to make it too much effort for people to try to bend him to their regular-people rules. “So I picked me out a seat . . . think I took Bill Herron’s seat, and I sat down,” he said. “Mr. Lancaster was the teacher and the football coach. He told me I had failed my class and said I had to go back to the sixth grade. I told him, ‘Look, if you want me to go to school, I’m going to school in the seventh grade. This is my seat right here.’ I told him. He told me to shut up, and nobody tells me to shut up. I couldn’t take that. He was a big man, and picked me up out of that seat, and we commenced to fightin’.”
Mr. Lancaster had it in his mind that he would just bodily carry Jerry Lee to the sixth grade, but it was hard to get a good grip on the boy. Jerry Lee was bobbing and weaving and gouging and twisting as the other students watched in amazement, because nothing this exciting had happened in homeroom since a boy named Otto soiled himself during a too-long assembly in second grade and had to be sent home in a secondhand sailor suit.
The coach, red-faced and muttering, finally got a grip on him, and that’s when Jerry Lee saw the man’s necktie flutter past his face. He grabbed it with both hands and just pulled.
“I was hangin’ him,” he says. “I had him, boy. I was swinging on that necktie, and I was choking him to death.”
Mr. Lancaster gave a single, mighty gasp and began to stagger around the room, Jerry Lee swinging from the necktie like a clapper on a bell. The man’s face went bloodred and his breath was coming in tiny little wheeeees; some of the little girls began to whimper and scrunch their faces up, about to bawl. “Then two of his football players come in,” says Jerry Lee, “and drug me off him.”
He was transported, still kicking, to the principal’s office and deposited in a chair.
Another boy, Cecil Harrelson, sat across the room, looking glum.
“What you in for?” Jerry Lee asked him.
“I’s fightin’ Mr. Dickie French,” the boy told him.
That impressed Jerry Lee. Mr. French, who taught history, was a navy man.
“Then Mr. Bateman, the principal, come in, and asked me what had happened, and I told him,” and he even managed to make himself seem almost noble. “I said, ‘Mr. Bateman, they tried to make me go back to the sixth grade but I didn’t want to go back to the sixth grade and I wanted to stay in the seventh grade,’ and he said, ‘Son, I don’t blame you a bit, but I got to suspend you for two weeks, because we can’t have you killing teachers.’” Jerry told him, “Well, okay,” but what he was thinking was more like, Please, Mr. Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.
“I think he give Cecil two weeks, too.”
The two boys walked together through the gate.
“Well,” said Cecil, as they turned to go their separate ways, “see ya later, Killer.”
“And I been the Killer ever since,” says Jerry Lee. Most people think he got the nickname because of his wild stage show or his reputation offstage or worse, but it had nothing to do with any of that.
“I named him. I did,” recalled Cecil Harrelson, who would go on to be Jerry Lee’s road manager and his friend through good and awful times, who would hold men while Jerry Lee hit them, as they played and fought their way across the country and back again. “It’s funny. You pass through this life and you wake up one morning, and it’s about all behind you,” Cecil said shortly before his death, “but you never forget that about being boys. It’s the first thing you think of.”
Jerry Lee continued to educate himself, one genre and influence at a time. Sometimes a hit song came over him like a fever, and he quit whatever he was doing, left people standing slack-jawed,