WARREN BEATH

I shook hands with Jerry Lee Lewis on October 14, 1974, in Fresno’s Selland Arena. He was the overwhelming iconic figure of my teenage years. I had every record and my bed in my room was right next to my piano. I went to school on Jerry Lee Lewis. I studied his hands every time he was on TV, be it Midnight Special, The Tom Jones Show, or Hee-Haw.

I dreamed about Jerry Lee Lewis. Sometimes he was teaching me things on the piano. Other times we were sharing a bottle. I had a stack of LPs nearly three feet tall. I never outgrew him. He continues to fascinate. I eventually bought the box sets of all his Sun recordings, and I have just about everything he ever put down on vinyl.

The night he played Selland Arena, there really was not much of a crowd. At the end a bunch of us went toward the stage and he sort of tottered there. I seized his hand. His eyes were little and pink like a rabbit’s.

Sometime later, he was booked at the Sheraton Inn. I showed up ready to rock, but The Killer didn’t make it. His band offered to do the show, but I took a refund.

Shaking hands with Jerry Lee Lewis was the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever head. The man was a musical God to me. I emulated all his riffs on the piano, struggled with the left hand stuff, and beat my fingers bloody pounding arpeggios.

In 1957 I was taken to see The Shaggy Dog. The Colossus of New York was the second feature, and it terrified me. I guess I was six years old. It is still a very creepy movie, to me.

Nice Monster was Glenn “Peewee” Strange. In his later days he played Sam the Bartender on Gunsmoke, which everyone watched every week.

I wrote him a letter when I was ten, and sent him a drawing of the Frankenstein Monster. He wrote me a nice note, and told me I should study art.

He also sent pictures of himself in various roles, and labored them in his big, lumbering handwriting. What a sweetheart.

I was watching this movie upstairs on my little television when my father died. It was August 24, 1964. I heard my mother screaming. He was laying on the floor and his face was blue. We lived at 957 West 20th Street, Merced, California.

I was twelve years old and I was upstairs in my little room watching Shock Theater on my little television, when, downstairs, my father was stricken with his fatal heart attack at the age of 42. The movie is an Italian horror from Mario Bava, and there is a giant unicellular monster that grows and absorbs people and things.

The movie has always sort of haunted me, and I was in my fifties when finally I tracked it down on video. I have identified the movie with my father, and had bizarre thoughts about the fact I was watching this movie. I Watched Caltiki While My Father Died.

Our fathers always haunt us, and in a sense my father to me is codenamed Caltiki the Immortal Monster. Because he was monstruous as all fathers are to their small sons, and immortal because he never dies. Monstruous and consuming, terrifying and implacable Daddy.

But now it’s a bed and breakfast. It was Sturgis Funeral Home in 1934 when Pretty Boy was killed outside Liverpool, Ohio. We got there late at night, and stayed on the third floor– the only occupants of the house. I went down and had a Twix in the room where Floyd’s body was displayed. The basement door was locked, but it was opened for us in the morning.

The basement room was the old embalming room. It is now a mortuary museum, with all the tools and suction pumps and drains. Pretty Boy’s death mask is mounted over the dryer.

A plaque now marks the location of the Conkle farm, where Floyd was killed after ingesting a meal he declared, “fit for a king”.

Sturgis Funeral Home in East Liverpool, Ohio

After a breakdown on the road, Floyd and his partner were chased from this spot. Floyd fled. Flummuxed in flight, he escaped into the woods and was shot under a corncrib. Which is somewhere below the ribs.

Color photos are courtesy of John Beiber.

I didn’t sleep much that night in the funeral home. I get too excited at these gangster sites, and have to explore. And eat stuff in the kitchen.