The darker side of rock and roll was yet another thing he shared with Elvis. Since the days at the Wagon Wheel and Blue Cat Club in Natchez, he had been taking pills, pills to keep him sharp, keep him awake in the endless nights. He ate them like M&M’s, those amphetamines. “People would just give me a handful—I’d put ’em in my shirt pocket, and reach in and get one.” It became a kind of magic shirt with a bottomless pocket. People, believing they were helping him, would continue to do that for years, till “I had a full pocket of ’em, all the time. I don’t think I ever was a full-fledged addict,” he says, but that reliance on pills to make a show or get through one would deepen, worsen. At the time, in the mid- to late 1950s, he was indestructible, seemingly bulletproof. “But it was easy to get hooked on them pills, especially them pain pills,” and the slow process of destroying his body, night after unrelenting night, had begun.
He was hardly the first. Country music stars had been hooked on amphetamines forever—for Hank Williams, it was morphine—and blues and jazz musicians had made the needle and reefer part of their national persona. But with Jerry Lee that kind of thing was more dangerous. As his daddy had discovered, he had no governor. He was quickly becoming known as not a rock-and-roll singer but a wild man who would outplay, outdrink, outfight and, well, out-everything anybody. He’d steal your girlfriend or your wife, in front of you, dare you to make something of it, and then leave you at the emergency room and her at the motor court.
Most of that is true, he says, but not so much the drinking. “I never drank that much liquor,” he says, knowing that will probably make some people shake their heads and grin at the audacity of it. He did, he says, come to have a taste for Calvert Extra, “and I’d buy a fifth and set it on the piano lid. It kind of cleared my voice, usually.” But it did not take a lot of liquor to coax him into bad behavior. He was a fighter by nature—he liked the thrill of it then, when another man meant to cause him harm—and a lover, he says, by design.
“It’s rough, when they’re beggin’ to get on your bus, or on the plane. It was real life. But it seemed like a dream.”
The women—other men’s wives, often—were another, more immediate threat. “I’d be playin’, and I’d look up and see a bullet sittin’ on top of the piano,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I wonder who left me this,’ but I had a good idea who left it there. I showed it to the audience,” further cementing his legend. He did not have a lot of respect for husbands who could not keep their women happy. He knew how to do it; if they didn’t, they should try harder.
“I always had this dream, that I had a horse, this special horse, bullets wouldn’t hurt it, and the horse had a speedometer on it, and it’d go sixty, a hundred miles an hour, and I’d set ’er on one hundred and we’d go jumpin’ fences, wide-open across the land, and never got tired,” he says, and smiles. “And I’d have a gun, the fastest gun, and no one could touch me.” He is not certain what that dream means; he is not the kind of man to sit and wonder about dreams. But he has an idea.
Like men do, and have since the beginning of time, he saw no reason why he could not have everything, why he could not have the wild rock-and-roll life and all its excesses, and a family life to root him, to hold him, and there was still the ghost of his raisin’ whispering always in his ear. “I was bad about gettin’ married, though. You’d run into ’em that wouldn’t turn you aloose, so you marry them. I’d just say, ‘Ain’t no use to count you out. The rest of ’em had it.’”
In Coro Lake, the ascending monarch strolled down the street with Myra, his biggest fan. He was still living there with J. W., Lois, the boy Rusty, and Myra. He had enough money to buy a mansion, would have enough soon to buy his own Graceland, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want a mansion, didn’t want to be surrounded by yes men inside the walls and nutcases leaving love letters twisted in the iron of the gate. He liked being the richest perpetual houseguest in the history of Coro Lake, because he liked to be around Myra when he came home. She was slim, with wavy brown hair and a swan’s neck and big, big eyes, and if she was a child, he was a Russian monkey cosmonaut.
“I’ll race you,” he said to her.
“You’ll beat me easy,” she said.
“I’ll run back’ards,” he said.
She took off, giggling.
Jerry Lee could fly, backward, a skill any man who has played some football must have and one a man who is prone to take other men’s women would perhaps need. He was going full speed when he tried to swing around, lost his balance, “oh, man, it was an adventure,” and went tumbling across the asphalt of East Shore Drive. He tried to catch himself but succeeded only in scraping much of the skin off the palms of his priceless hands. “Tore ’em up,” he says. He was not badly hurt, but he did play his next show in bandages, and if there was any kind of warning in it, any irony, he missed it, but if he had caught it, he would have ignored it anyway.
“Myra was a twelve-year-old kid when I first got there. I paid no attention. . . . We wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at that time. But I got to watching her, and she was a grown woman all of a sudden.”
He always got what he wanted, and he wanted Myra. He did not ask himself what it would mean to his place in rock and roll’s hierarchy or history, nor did he ask himself what society would think or demand in return—what penalty he would pay for not caring that he offended the sensibilities of more careful women and men. “I wasn’t worried about my career,” he says. “If I wanted to do something, I just did it.”
Many people have asked why someone, anyone, did not explain it all to him, that it didn’t matter whether he considered it right or wrong based on his culture. It was only that, if he was to be the new king of rock and roll, there were customs and practices he would have to hold to in order to rule in this wider world. But if anyone did see the danger in what was happening in Coro Lake, anyone with any influence, they either hoped it would go away or pretended, as money flowed in, that it was not happening at all. But even if someone—Sam or Jud or someone he trusted—had vigorously questioned Jerry Lee on his relationship with Myra, he would have merely reared his head and hitched up his pants, looked down at them from a high place, and told them nobody handled him, then taken Myra to get a milk shake in his Cadillac, the top cranked down so everyone could see.
“I used to take her to school,” he said, wheeling up at the steps in one of his big convertibles, the rest of the girls giggling and squealing at her famous cousin. The legions who have condemned him for it, for romancing a thirteen-year-old girl, have painted a picture that had nothing to do with reality, he said. His own sister married at twelve. People celebrated it, because, as his mama said, the child knew her own mind. Marriage to a girl of thirteen or fourteen was routine in his family’s history, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It might be offensive to some, to many, but it was what was.
“Myra was not a baby girl. She was a woman. She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking,” he says now. He does not care how that sounds, and says it, partly, just to show he doesn’t care. “She looked like a woman to me.” She was not innocent of boys, not the way books and movies tried to make it seem, he says, and for months they had been kissing and making out. J. W. and Lois would say they knew nothing about it, that they felt betrayed by Jerry Lee, but he believes it would have been hard not to figure out that something was going on in that house, especially if they had looked outside and seen them in the car. They talked on the phone when he was on the road and disappeared in his car almost the minute he got back. “She was my third cousin, and when I talked to her on the phone, I’d say, ‘How you doin’, cuz?’
“One night, we parked out in front of the house. . . . After we got through, she started crying. ‘Now I’ve done this,’ and it wasn’t the first time, ‘you’ll never marry me, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I lived up to my bargain.
“I thought about it,” he says now, “about her being thirteen and all, but that didn’t stop her from being a full-fledged woman.”
Finally, J. W. did ask why he was calling the girl so much from the road, he would write in his own memoir, but it was too late to stop what was in motion.
“I wasn’t even trying to hide her,” says Jerry Lee. “I liked to ride around in them convertibles too much, and it’s hard to hide a woman in one of those, ’specially if she’s sittin’ on my lap.”
The fact that she was kin, his cousin, was also not troubling to him even in the least, because marriage between even first cousins was routine in his culture and certainly in his family line. If cousins had not married cousins, the great tribe in Concordia Parish would not have existed at all. It was not just accepted, it was, by all evidence, preferred. By such standards, a distant cousin was almost a rank stranger, a foreigner. “She was my third cousin. I was gonna marry her, either way,” says Jerry Lee, “even if she was my sister. . . . Well, maybe I won’t take it that far.”
Jerry Lee’s divorce from Jane was still not final in December of ’57 and would not be for about five months, another of those ridiculous laws and conventions that should have had nothing to do with him. But he had filed his papers asking for it and so had she, so as far as he was concerned, that marriage was dead and done—Jane had kept custody of Jerry Lee Jr.—and he believed he was free to remarry. He had been taught that marriage was a covenant between a man, a woman, and God, a covenant no man could put asunder, but it was a fact of life that men and women fall in love and sometimes fall slap out, and marriages die. “I think the reason I kept gettin’ married is I couldn’t find nobody,” nobody lasting, he says. As that year wound to its close, with everything he had ever dreamed of in his reach, Jerry Lee drove due south in his Cadillac across the Tennessee state line into northern Mississippi, where marriage had always been an inexact science at best, allowable to almost anyone with a few dollars and a good story or a plausible lie. With Jerry Lee was a woman who went into the Jefferson County Courthouse that day and signed a legal document stating that her name was Myra Gayle Brown and she was twenty years old. Jerry Lee signed it too, and they drove back to Memphis with that silly little piece of red tape snipped clean in two. The real Myra was in Memphis that day, in seventh grade.
The second week in December, in a lull in his touring schedule, he proposed in the front seat of his Cadillac. Myra would write that she was frightened and reluctant and that he pressured her, but Jerry Lee does not recall any of that. “We was in front of her house, making a little love,” he says, “and I said, ‘You want to get married?’ and she said, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and we decided to get married.”
The next day, on December 12, 1957, he drove south again, through the Christmas shopping traffic, with a Myra Gayle Brown beside him. Again he headed into Mississippi, to the town of Hernando in DeSoto County, where the young people of Memphis had been going for years to marry in secret. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, they pulled up to the chapel. The Reverend M. C. Whitten, a Baptist, performed the short ceremony, and with no family or friends to witness, Jerry Lee and Myra were married before God. The minister, who was accustomed to such things, did not question the union. There was no honeymoon—no possibility of one—so they drove back to Coro Lake. They told no one, because Myra was afraid of what her mother and father would say. Jerry Lee did not much care if they knew or not but agreed to wait, at least a little while, before telling his cousin J. W. that he was now his father-in-law, too.
He has been asked, a thousand times, if he loved the girl.
“At one time,” he says, “I thought I did.”
He thinks about it a moment, considering.
“There was love there.”
It lasted about a week before they were found out, before a well-meaning maid saw a marriage license in a drawer and pointed it out to her parents. Here stories drastically differ. J. W. and Lois said they were stunned, shaken to their very core, heartbroken, incensed, and of course betrayed. J. W. also said it sent him into a killing rage, said he was bent on murder and didn’t mind suffering the consequences, said he took after the boy in his car with a loaded pistol on the seat beside him. That might make for a good screenplay, said Jerry Lee, but it was not as dramatic as that.
“I wasn’t running from J. W. I might have been drivin’ a little fast,” he said, smiling, “but I wasn’t runnin’. He said he was gonna shoot me, but he wasn’t gonna do nothin’.” He doesn’t even believe it was much of a shock to anyone except maybe Sam and Jud Phillips, who understood, immediately, the danger in it, not from J. W. but from the inevitable bad press.
J. W. did come into the Sun studio asking if Jerry Lee was there, and he did have a pistol with him—Jerry Lee maintains it was posturing—and Sam told him to sit his pistol-waving behind down and listen to reason.
“Now, J. W., I understand that you’re mad, and I understand you want to shoot Jerry Lee,” said Sam, intimating that there were many times he’d felt like doing it himself. “But you need to understand one thing, son. You can shoot him, but you’ll make a whole lot more money not shooting him.”
J. W. went home, and Jerry Lee went unshot.
“Talk is what talk is, just a bunch of yapping,” says Jerry Lee. “I done what I wanted to do,” and for J. W. or anyone else to pretend to be shocked by that, to be caught flat-footed by his courtship of Myra, by the fact that it led to a wedding, is a revision of the way things were in those days, he believes.
He would be painted as a man leering over the cradle, while Myra would be depicted as either a nervous and confused little girl or a giddy, gushing schoolgirl, torn between puppy love and a great, deepening regret. In that portrait she seemed to go overnight from a child playing with dolls to a wife. Tearfully, in shame, she crammed her clothes and little girl’s belongings into her dollhouse, the closest thing she had to a grown-up suitcase, and left the sanctuary of her parents’ home. This would become the lasting and damning portrait of Jerry Lee, and many people believed no more damning than he deserved. But it was greatly exaggerated, says Jerry Lee. “When this so-called news broke, it was like I had committed an unforgivable sin,” he says. “I did not.”
The marriage was, to the outsiders who stumbled across it, puzzling. Myra was routinely pulled over by police when she went for a drive in one of Jerry Lee’s Cadillacs, because they believed she was a teenager taking her parents’ car out for a spin. Once she was detained and her car dismantled by police after she tried to pay for a meal with a hundred-dollar bill, the same day a nearby bank was robbed by someone matching her description; the police themselves were unable to decide if she was a child joyriding in her daddy’s Caddy or a grown woman capable of sticking up a bank. But somehow the news of Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra mostly remained bottled up in Memphis and the surrounding area, contained by the river and the bluffs on the Arkansas side, the best-kept secret in rock and roll. For their first Christmas, Jerry Lee bought Myra a red convertible Cadillac of her own, with white leather interior.
J. W. even briefly considered filing criminal charges against Jerry Lee, but he let himself be talked out of that, too, by a prosecutor. “Talk . . . ain’t . . . nothing,” says Jerry Lee. “Me and J. W. never had no problem.” He told Myra’s mother, Lois, that he loved her daughter, and told J. W. that he would take care of Myra, that she would never want for a thing, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned. “I’ve always tried to be nice to my women, buy ’em what they want, keep ’em satisfied, keep ’em in a pretty car,” he says. He does not care that his attitudes about such things seem frozen in the past. It was the past, where this all happened, and it is where he is happiest, much of the time.
Jerry Lee and Myra went to New York City that Christmas so he could perform in a series of important holiday shows, and J. W. and Lois went with them. This was the controversial heyday of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who popularized the very words rock and roll for a national audience. Freed was putting on a package tour in New York that holiday season of a scope no one had ever seen. Fans hoping to get a seat in the Paramount Theater lined up for an entire block in midtown, pushed and shoved into place by police. Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis were headliners on a bill that would also include Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Danny and the Juniors, the Rays, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, and the Twin Tones, all crammed into a two-hour show that would be replayed throughout the day. Fights erupted on Forty-Third Street as fans pushed and fought to get in, smudging the face of rock and roll just a little bit more, but it was tame outside compared to the fit that Jerry Lee was pitching inside.
Buddy Holly would go on first among the headliners, and Freed wanted Jerry Lee to go on next, leaving the more established Fats and his orchestra to close the show. Fats had a whole stable of number one hits and was already a legend in his own time, truly, but Jerry Lee had the biggest record in the country in “Great Balls of Fire.” The problem was, Fats’s contract guaranteed him top billing in the show, and Fats’s manager drew it like a gun. Jerry Lee had no choice but to go on before him—that, or walk—but as usual, when Jerry Lee Lewis lost an argument, it meant there would soon be the sound of things breaking.
Jerry Lee took the stage to screams. On his newest hit, he beat the piano with every part of his body, elbows, feet, and derrière, beat like he was mad at it, and it was as if his sweltering music was some kind of contagion that spread to the crowd. Women fainted; hundreds, maybe more, mobbed the stage. Police formed a thin barrier as Jerry kept beating, beating, even as it began to dawn on him that what was happening in the audience was off the scale of anything he had seen, something that made the rabid girls in the Nashville National Guard Armory look like teatime at the Junior League. Some of the young people dove into the orchestra pit and clawed at Jerry Lee’s legs, trying to tear off a piece of him to take home, till he snatched off his own shoes and hurled them away (one of them was said to have hit J. W. square in the face), till finally the band just had to flee the stage, leaving by a side door. He remembers it all, but it happened so often, he says, that it kind of runs together. “Seemed like it was every night.”
Fats did his set in a decimated, shell-shocked room, with about half the seats empty, and told Freed if it was all the same to him, he would play before Jerry Lee from then on. The show broke quite a bit of furniture but also broke every attendance record the Paramount had ever set, and Billboard raved again, calling him “one of the most dynamic chanters on the current scene” and quoting Sam Phillips saying that Jerry Lee was “the most sensational performer I’ve ever watched, bar none,” and everyone knew who the “bar none” was he was talking about. Myra, back at the hotel, saw none of the craziness, none of the excitement; she and Jerry Lee had a quiet supper in the hotel when he came back, like he was home from a long day of selling insurance. It would be his routine, to try and keep his home life and rock-and-roll life separate, or as separate as possible.
The year came to a close as the crowd roared in New York, first for Jerry Lee and then for that dropping ball, which seemed to signal not just the passing of the year but the passing of the young, dark king and the rise of the young, fair one—though the people who love Elvis like a religion say that was not so then and will never be, because their King was so much more than just a singer of songs. In Memphis that winter, Elvis readied to leave for Germany and the Cold War; girls wept at the gates of Graceland and said they would wait on him for the two years of his hitch and forever if they had to. It was enough to know he was still out there somewhere, like a distant star.
But as far as Jerry Lee was concerned, it was over already and had been for some time. In the coming months, he had four substantial hits as Elvis slipped. But the people who said he yearned to be Elvis have it dead wrong, he said. He might have once wanted to be, when Elvis was the essence of rock and roll, but that had shifted, altered, become something else. “I wanted to play that piano and sing and make hit records, and not worry about nothin’ except where my next check was coming from. . . . Naw, not even that.” He wanted to stand at the zenith of rock and roll and hear the multitudes call his name, then take his bow. And when it was over, when he was home from the road, he did not want them to camp out on his lawn or block his driveway or twitch at the mere thought of him or any of that nonsense. He wanted both lives; he wanted everything.
It was awkward at best, living with J. W. and Lois, so he bought Myra a three-bedroom rancher in the quiet Memphis neighborhood of Whitehaven, on Dianne Drive, and in no time the driveway was clogged with big cars and other expensive toys. It cost about $14,000, an impossible dream for a man riding a garbage truck, a life’s pursuit for a man laying brick, and one night’s pay for Jerry Lee. Myra, though she was three years too young for a driver’s license, continued to drive and continued to crash, and when Jerry Lee heard about it, he just laughed, because when you’re a rock and roller, the Cadillacs, like the women, fall out of the trees, though now of course he’d have to throw the women back. Myra quit school and went about the business of being Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis full time, sometimes traveling with him, other times staying home. To help her with the loneliness, he would later buy her a poodle they named Dinky, though Dinky was said to be badly behaved, prone to accidents, and hard on furniture and carpet and nerves. But that was the kind of real-life problem that all real-life couples have, and it was real life there on Dianne Lane, except for the preponderance of Cadillacs.
Otis Blackwell’s next great creation—he was as bankable as Coca-Cola—was something different, something without so much rough edge as his first contribution, “Great Balls of Fire,” and certainly without the grit of Jerry Lee’s first great hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” But it was a singular song that moved fast and had nuances in almost every breath, spiced as always with Jerry Lee’s signature rolling, thumping piano sound. It was not a one-take recording this time—it was a complicated song in some ways—but something Jerry Lee and the session men worked over and over till they came up with a song on which he almost wailed on one line and whispered on the next, a song that even now people have trouble trying to categorize or even explain. But if “Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” were about sex, theorized music historians, then “Breathless” was about the feeling that came after.
My heart goes ’round and ’round
My love comes tumblin’ down
You . . . leave me . . . breathless
It was a slicker song, but Jerry Lee’s piano gave it that locomotive quality, and his accent mussed its hair a little bit, and at the end of the day it was unmistakably him, but with a little wink to it. “I think it was a great song,” he says. It was like Otis Blackwell was writing blank checks for the great singers to fill in.
With what he felt was another sure hit in the bank, Jerry Lee took Myra home to see his people and found no criticism of his marriage among the kin in Concordia Parish, and those were about the only people—outside of Sam and Jud Phillips, perhaps—whose opinions mattered to him all that much anyway. His cousin Jimmy, who had condemned pretty much everything about his life over the past few years, lambasting him to the point that his sins had become a kind of cottage industry on the Louisiana and Mississippi revival circuit, said not a word about his marriage to the girl. “Jimmy was human, too,” Jerry Lee says, a mantra he would repeat over and over again where his cousin was concerned.
In January of ’58, he left for his first real international tour that did not involve a Buick or a can of Vienna sausages. Though he was a little reluctant to fly that far over water, he boarded a plane for a whirlwind tour of Australia, with stops to perform shows coming and going in Hawaii. He would be playing, again, with his friend Buddy Holly, and with Paul Anka, the boy crooner whose “Diana” was one of the top hits in the country that year. He was glad to see Buddy, but not so much Paul Anka, whom he saw as an example of the slow softening and weakening of rock and roll, a purveyor of music that had no honky-tonk, juke joint, or even church in its makeup. Jerry Lee even now lacks the capacity to pretend to like someone, and he was not fond of the fifteen-year-old Anka, disliking him only slightly less than Pat Boone.
It was not a happy tour, clunked up as it was with child singers and big orchestras. It left him wishing he and Buddy Holly could just bust out on their own and go do some good, simple, driving rock and roll and leave this mess behind. He found some peace in Hawaii. “We spent the night at the Hilton, went swimming in that beautiful water, wasn’t even scared of sharks.” But the next night, in Sydney or some such place, he found himself in a backstage area crowded with unnecessary musicians and difficult access to a bathroom, badly needing to pee. Desperate, he found an unguarded bottle of beer. He poured the beer in the trash, found a single, semisecluded corner of the staging area, and turning his back, let it go. He filled it up and set the bottle back where he found it. “I had to pee somewhere,” he says, shrugging.
A large man, one of the musicians in the orchestra, walked up, took the bottle, and took a swig.
“Yeeeeaaaaggggghhhhh!”
He flung it down, cursing and spitting.
“Just name the man,” he screamed to everyone there. “Just show me the man . . .”
His bandmates gathered ’round, ready to attack.
“I want to kill somebody!” the offended musician shouted.
“I don’t blame you,” Jerry Lee shouted back. “I would too.”
He promised to help, because musicians had to stick together.
“I’ll get him,” Jerry Lee said. “I’ll find him.”
He walked away, as if hot in pursuit.
“He was a horn player. I think, the saxophone.”
Anka, meanwhile, was getting on his nerves. He cannot recall exactly what it was about the boy; maybe just the fact he was so dad-gum nice, so good.
“He was a drip,” Jerry Lee says.
Anka was a milk drinker. Jerry Lee told him it came from kangaroo, down here, or some other marsupial, and told him to have some beer.
“The guy who was watching after him was trying to get it on with this little ol’ gal. . . . I got him a beer.”
Anka, he says, liked the beer. “He drank all that beer and got knee-walkin’ drunk, and we all walked up to the roof of the hotel. . . . Tallest building in Sydney, Australia, and it was only twelve stories high. But if you jumped off of it, it’d make a pretty good splash, I imagine.”
Anka, he remembers, walked to the edge. “I don’t like the way things are going,” he said. “I think I’m just gonna jump. I’m gonna jump off this thing.”
“That’s a good idea, Paul,” Jerry said, disgusted. “That’s the very thing you ought to do.” He sauntered over to the edge and looked down. “It’s clear.”
Buddy Holly, who was watching from a safe distance, got worried.
“He might do it, Jerry Lee,” he said.
Jerry Lee looked at him and quickly shook his head.
“Well,” Jerry Lee said to Anka, “jump.”
Anka looked down.
“Well, you gonna jump, or you gonna make us stand here all night?”
Anka hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m not gonna give you the satisfaction.”
“Son,” Jerry Lee said, “you better have some more beer.”
The boy was never in danger, says Jerry Lee. “Nawwww, you couldn’t have pushed him off. You couldn’t have got him off of there with a bulldozer.”
Buddy Holly, on the other hand, was smokin’ then, one of the driving forces in rock and roll after less than a year of making the big time, and as Jerry Lee watched him on the stage in Australia and Hawaii, he knew that the climb, the race, was never over, never really won. “Hmmmmm, I remember thinkin’, this boy’s gettin’ pretty good.” He opened for Elvis in Lubbock, caught the attention of a moneyman, and proved—even in those ugly black-frame spectacles—that he could rock it right down to the floor.
“He was my buddy.”
A few months after that night, he says, the phone rang in his house in Memphis. Holly called him about every other week, and they would talk music and the rest of it.
That night, Buddy was happy.
“Jerry, I’m thinking about marrying this girl. Now, just what do you think I should do?”
“I really can’t say, Buddy. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well, you’ve experienced it pretty good.”
“Yeah, that’s very true,” Jerry Lee conceded. “That should tell you something.”
But Buddy was serious. He wanted a real answer. “What do you think?”
“If it’s what you want to do, do it.”
Buddy went on to tell Jerry Lee about the girl, a beautiful girl he’d met in New York City named Maria Elena. He’d already proposed to her, it turned out—proposed on their very first date.
“If you love her,” said Jerry Lee, “it don’t matter what nobody else thinks.”