after they said “I do,” he came out the front door of the house at Black River wearing a white sport coat.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“Me and Cecil Harrelson’s goin’ coon hunting.”
He had no ready explanation as to why anyone would go coon hunting in a white sport coat.
Mamie liked Dorothy and, like all smart mamas, had feared this.
“You ain’t going nowhere,” she told him.
He talked back, and she slapped him. “Boy,” she told him, “you married this girl. You come here and take care of her.”
He walked into the yard with his wife calling to him, and his mother’s anger cutting at his back.
“I love you,” Dorothy cried. “Please don’t go.”
He headed out with Cecil, and left his wife with his mama.
He and Cecil were going to a bar, to hear music and play music and perhaps consort with women; his reluctance to do such outside the conventions of the church was breaking down. “It seemed like women fell out of the trees,” he says, women his age and older, all beautiful, all willing. Across the river in the honky-tonks, they waited for him in great variety. “Playing in the clubs . . . you just do it. They just lay it on you. It was just about impossible to resist. And I just had to pick one out. It just kind of seemed like a dream. It just seemed like ‘The Impossible Dream,’ as Elvis would say. I’d see these girls walking by the bandstand, mouthing ‘I love you,’ and I’m sixteen, seventeen, and I see these girls, and I just try to turn my head and do my songs and get off the stage,” but he did not try all that hard. “And, son, it was good. As long as I wanted them.”
After a while, Dorothy went home to Monroe, heartbroken. “And me and Cecil went to New Orleans.”
Once, if you really wanted to hear a piano ring, you went to Storyville, where the ladies of the evening waved languidly from the balconies, half-stoned, sugar cubes in their teeth and absinthe on their breath. Jelly Roll Morton worked here, and King Oliver, playing in the brothels while the gentlemen waited or made up their minds. A music called jazz took hold here, between the hot pillow joints and vaudeville acts and streetcars on the Desire line, but by the early 1950s the whorehouses had moved more deeply into the constant shadows of New Orleans, and the noise had shifted to Bourbon Street. Here the sidewalks throbbed with light, liquor, sex, and music, with more than fifty burlesque shows, striptease acts, and other distractions between Canal Street and Esplanade, most of them clustered in about five city blocks. Vice had a grandeur to it then. The nightclubs featured everything from the dance of the seven veils to slapstick to a man who could scratch the top of his head with his big toe, all to live music, one band bleeding onto the street and into another band, and another, and so on, till it was all just a kind of mad cacophony. Here, men lined up for a city block outside the Casino Royale, Sho Bar, and 500 Club to see Wildcat Frenchie, Lilly Christine the Cat Girl, Alouette LeBlanc the Tassel Twirler, Kalantan the Heavenly Body, Linda Brigette the Cupid Doll, Tee Tee Red, Blaze Starr (who kept company with the somewhat peculiar Governor Earl Long), and Evangeline the Oyster Girl, who rose from a shell the size of a sedan and danced with a strategically placed giant pearl. Soldiers hooted, bouncers slapped them silly, and the Mob took a little piece of every dollar. The liquor was overpriced and watered down and the pimps and the pickpockets and dope addicts moved through the cigarette smoke like wolves, and ten hard-earned dollars would not buy you a meal at Galatoire’s but might be just enough to get you killed. And it was all kind of wonderful, in a way, if all you were doing was passing through on the way to someplace that still made a little bit of sense.
Jerry Lee Lewis and Cecil Harrelson, sixteen years old, walked unafraid. Cecil, though smaller than Jerry Lee, was the perfect accomplice for such an adventure. He was tough and quick and capable, and he knew how to talk to people, how to sell his friend’s talent. They had become fast friends since that day when they both tried to murder their homeroom teachers at Ferriday High School. “Cecil was bad to use a knife,” said Jerry Lee. “He was the Killer.”
They walked past the barkers and painted girls till they saw a place that looked likely, and ducked inside. They never had to worry about being underage; unless you were pushed inside in a pram, the New Orleans bartenders would serve you liquor here, and tell you where to buy some dope, and let you see a woman dance with a snake.
“I seen things I never seen,” Cecil recalled, actually giggling.
“We never bought a drink,” says Jerry.
Cecil would ask to see “the boss man of this here establishment.” When the man arrived, Cecil made his simple pitch. “I got a boy here,” he said, “who can play the piano better’n anybody you ever saw, and I was wondering if you’d let him play a tune.”
“And some of them just looked at me like I was crazy,” said Cecil, thinking back. “But once they heard him play, even a little bit, that was all it took.”
Jerry Lee sat down and did a hillbilly jump tune called the “Hadacol Boogie,” named for a booze-laden tonic—played it hot—and in the chorus the drunken throng sang it with him like they’d all gotten together that morning and planned it out.
Standin’ on the corner with the bottle in my hand
And up steps my mama with the Hadacol man
She done the Hadacol boogie
“They were pouring us liquor, double shots, just like in the movies. And we just moved on down Bourbon Street, club to club. They even started hearing about me, started hearing about that wild boy that played the boogie-woogies on the piano. And the more we went the drunker we got. . . . By the time the night was over, we was so drunk we couldn’t see. Caked in vomit. Couldn’t stand up. My first real drunk.” They were fortunate to get out of the Crescent City alive, he realizes now. But he had tasted the apple, and he liked it.
He’d been needing to cut loose a little bit, needed it for some time; he was starting to understand that a man just has to cut loose now and then, unless he’s scared of the world or scared of his woman. Still, somewhere during that debauched trip to New Orleans, he managed to create some musical history. At the J&M studio, where Fats Domino had been making hits for a few years now, he cut what is believed to be his first recording. Two songs: a Lefty Frizzell ballad called “Don’t Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold),” which he sang high and plaintive, and a stomping boogie that showed off all he knew. Cecil would hold on to that record into his old age.
He was done with marriage, he knew that much, and through with Dorothy. He told himself he was single in his own mind, and that should have been enough, but the State of Louisiana insisted on paperwork or resolutions or such as that. He had always hated forms and formality, hated tedium, hated the rules the other people lived by, so he did nothing, just kept on living within the rules he laid down for himself. A lot of rich men do that, and it’s easy to pull off if you’re a Kennedy or Lee Calhoun, but it takes guts to try it if you’re a poor man. “I just done what I wanted,” he says. He says it a lot.
It is why, when he walked past a car lot after closing time and saw a good-looking automobile, he saw no reason not to borrow the car for a little while, at least until morning. In the rules of regular people, that was called grand theft auto, and a felony. In such a small town, though, security on the lots was lax. “I guarantee you, if I walked by a car lot and saw one with the keys in it back then, I was gone. I just said, ‘Well, looka here.’ I drove it all over the country. But I took it back. I always took ’em back. I got all kinds of car, and parked ’em right where I had borrowed ’em from. Last one was a ’50 Chevrolet.” In a way, he treated some people that same way. He rarely speaks with regret about anyone, but he does when he talks about Dorothy. “Dorothy told me I was the only man she had ever been with, and I know that was true. . . . I left her cryin’ on my mama’s doorstep. ‘Son, you’re wrong,’ she told me. I’m