The Killer

A dull reddish glow emanates through her skin, enveloping her womb in light and shadow, a razor love that invites you right in.

Myra Gayle Brown’s husband is on tour, and she is ready to join him. When she meets him at Heathrow Airport, she is hounded by the press. The Killer, her husband and cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, says she is 15, even though she is actually 14. It causes a storm. He is a Great Ball of Fire and 22.

The gossip columns call her the teenage tomb, and America no longer wants to boogie-woogie with Jerry Lee. Their baby is born. His name is Steve Allen Lewis, and in 1962, at the age of three, he died in their swimming pool in Mississippi. Some blamed The Killer, others, rock n’ roll, but they were wrong. The Killer is rock n’ roll, and his wife and cousin, Myra, grieved while she was pregnant with their second child, Phoebe. When she was born, Jerry Lee was not there to cut the umbilical cord because he was playing chords and recording what his record label believed would be his comeback. There was an excitement, but Heathrow struck again, sending the Beatles to America, and changing radio playlists overnight.

Phoebe Lewis does not listen to the Beatles. Never did and never will. It isn’t out of respect for her father, or her mother, Myra, who is ritually abused, psychologically and physically, by The Killer. It is because she spends her time listening to the Rolling Stones.

She remembered her dad chasing her mom with a belt while “All You Need is Love” was broadcast around the world, and as her mother left the house, Phoepe watched Mick Jagger mime “Love” with his famous lips and parted hair. It took her a year to find out who he was.

Her parents were busy. They divorced, and her mother married the detective she hired to record The Killer’s infidelities. Her father sang country songs and was popular again. He didn’t adhere to standard Nashville country music protocol and was absorbed by a lazy press into the Outlaw movement with the likes of Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, that old rock n’ rollers, like his friend, Johnny Cash, had inspired. Phoebe and Myra knew Jerry Lee was different, and a monster, but any bitterness toward the monster dissolved like sugar in a horse’s mouth. He was a sick man, they thought, and were happy they did not have what he had, and by the mid-1970’s, Phoebe would stay with her father and uncle, The Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, at her old house dubbed “Disgraceland” in Nesbit, Mississippi, due to its proximity to her dad’s friend, Elvis, 18 miles away in Memphis.

It took one weekend with her father for him to realize that she was colorblind. She dreamt of the red, glowing womb, and when she pointed to a banana and said that was the color she saw, Jerry Lee, half-sauced on hoss, took her to a doctor who confirmed her color-blindness. Her father says there is nothing wrong with this, even though she declared that she saw color but felt it had been taken from her. “By who?” he asked, driving his brand new 1975 Lincoln Continental. “And why?”

“Did you ever hit mom while she was pregnant?”

If a man had asked him that, he would have cut his throat with a “piana” wire. Instead, he turned into their driveway in a deep silence that sends him leagues into his broken heart, where most of his mental illness and god-given talent wait.

The phone rings, and it is Jerry Lee’s father, the man who mortgaged his farm to buy his son a piano. He is in jail for driving under the influence in Tunica, Mississippi, one county over, and says he’ll be right over. He asks his daughter if she wants to see Grandpa, but she does not. “I want to look at the pool and other things, and see if all the color is gone.” Jerry Lee kisses her on the forehead and leaves. That was the first time she smelled champagne.

She wonders exactly what she sees if it is not color, and looking at the pool, it appears yellow and brown, and morphs into a strange grey that no one can describe. This is where her brother died when she was in the womb. The phone rings, and it is Elvis, who was also in his mother’s stomach when their brother died.

They had met him a few times, enough for a strung-out King to remember her name.

“Little Phoebe, how are you, baby girl? Is your daddy home?”

She said he was not.

“Do me a favor, sugar-plum, can you check to see if he got my letter?”

“He didn’t say…”

“Can you look?”

The mail was scattered on the table. She found Elvis’s letter, and it was open.

“He got it. It’s been open.”

“Thank you, sugar. Have him call me when he gets home. Tell him I miss him.”

“You do?”

“I do. Does it look like he read it?”

“It’s still folded.”

“Thank you, baby.”

They hung up without saying goodbye to one another. Phoebe hopped off the stool and sat at the kitchen table with Elvis’s letter and read what she could. Jesse Garon Presley’s unmarked grave, his name is George C. Nichopoulos, and bring your pistol.

Her father did not come home that night, but The Rolling Stones were on the news. They were embarking on a North American tour and decided once and for all she would ask her father if she could see The Rolling Stones, but it was her father she would see the following morning. She did not recognize his mugshot. He did not leave Disgraceland in a leather vest, but in a long button-up to see Grandpa. The news said he had crashed into Elvis’s gate with a loaded gun on his dashboard.

“So he did read the letter,” she said.

***

The Killer died in 2022, and when Phoebe, with the help of family members, went through the miles of road he left behind, she wished to find the letter Elvis had written to his old friend, asking him to visit him at Graceland, but instead, found a letter her father had written. She didn’t share it with anyone else, and when she finished reading it, she could smell the champagne on the page.

Myra,

Do you remember when we were poor? Do you remember when the world tripped under a wave? I remember coming to the surface, knowing I was in trouble, and as I floated away in an ocean of ink, you shone like a lighthouse, and no matter how far I drifted, I saw you and remembered the good times when I was a decent, honest man.

Jerry

Phoebe remembered him after crashing into Graceland. He kissed her on the cheek and knelt. He had done so much harm to her mother, Myra, but she forgave him, and so did she. He spoke of swimming in a river somewhere in eastern Louisiana, where they grew up. He looked her in the eyes.

“I swam early and often. First with friends, and then with family, but I went downriver, and so did others for similar reasons I could never write down. It’s embarrassing to be downriver. You never go back up again.”

That’s what he thought.

She visited that river and could not see the color. This was her world.

Mick Jagger is 82.