American Outlaw

by James, Jesse

  “Jesse!” Karla cried. “Shut up! Just shut up!”

  My insides curled up inside me. I could tell something bad was about to happen.

  Karla began crying. She sobbed softly, as she gripped the wheel, her forearms tensing.

  “This traffic,” she whispered finally. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Karla,” I said. I put my hand on her knee. “Karla, please stop. What’s going on? Tell me.”

  “I just . . .” she said. She sniffed, shaking her head. “I just can’t live like this.”

  “But I’m going to stop boozing, I told you. I promise.”

  “It’s not the drinking, and you know it.” Her face was the picture of exhaustion and resignation. “You’re not here for me. You haven’t been for years.”

  I sunk back in my seat.

  “I’ll try harder.”

  Karla shook her head. “Jesse, our marriage hasn’t worked for a long, long time. You’re obsessed with your business. And when you want to have fun, you choose going out with your friends over spending an evening with me, every time.”

  “But I can change,” I protested. “We could go to a counselor, or something like that . . .”

  She gave me a tight, sad smile. “I’m sorry—it’s just too late. It’s over, baby. And you know it.”

  I sat there in silence, absorbing the news. The wheels of our big black truck rolled across the pavement quietly, sunlight streaming into the cab, harsh and unwelcome.

  ——

  Only a few days later, I moved out of the house. At first I slept at the shop, but soon I was able to find an apartment down the street from Karla and the kids. No matter what happened between us, I wanted the kids to have both of their parents nearby.

  I felt awful, like I’d failed. But I knew Karla was right in ending it. I had never prioritized her needs. Though in my heart I’d known our marriage was falling apart, I’d never attempted to fix it. My own desires had always come first: work, partying, getting fucked up with my friends. Deep down, I felt ashamed, and I promised myself I would never make that same mistake again.

  I consoled myself by vowing to be a better dad—there, I could still redeem myself.

  “Why are you picking me up from school, Daddy?” Chandler asked me.

  “I want to spend some more time with you, honey.” I gazed at her in my rearview mirror, strapped into her little car seat. “I miss you a whole bunch.”

  “Why aren’t you sleeping at our house?” Chandler asked suddenly.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” I began. “Mommy and I are taking some time off from each other. You know how you get mad at Jesse Jr. sometimes?”

  Chandler nodded.

  “And you don’t want to be around him?”

  Chandler nodded again. “Because he’s a butt-head.”

  I laughed. “Exactly. Well, that’s the way that Mommy feels about me, right now.”

  “She thinks you’re a butt-head?”

  “She sure does,” I said.

  “Did you tease her?” Chandler asked, wide-eyed.

  “No,” I said. “It’s more like, well . . .”

  “Daddy,” Chandler said, tiring of the conversation, “when we get home, will you give me a ride on your bike?”

  “Yeah,” I said, gratefully. “We’ll go real fast, sweetie.”

  Karla and I began to slowly strategize how best to be parents apart. It saddened me, but I knew our separation was for the best. The bond of friendship we’d formed over the course of our marriage would last, I was sure of it. Now the important thing was for us to stay close to each other, since we were going to be connected through our children for the rest of our lives.

  Life at the shop continued at as hectic a pace as ever. Fenders, once our lifeblood, were now pretty much out of the picture, as we moved into producing our expensive custom choppers full-time. The demand was immense, so I raised my prices precipitously. You couldn’t even get in the door without throwing down $60,000 to start. But instead of scaring people off, our high price tags only seemed to attract more interest.

  “Dammit,” I grumbled, peering at my steadily growing waiting list. “I’ll be in my grave before I can make all of these bikes.”

  “Jesse,” Melissa called, “I have a Thom Beers on the line. Will you speak to him?”

  “Yeah,” I grumbled. “Put him through.”

  “Hey, Jess!” came Thom’s voice. “How’s life?”

  “Not great. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but my wife and I are splitting up.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Thom said. “But if it helps, I have some great news for you.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Discovery, apparently, is poised to give us a show.”

  “We already had a show,” I said flatly.

  “No,” Thom said, the excitement bubbling up in his voice. “I’m talking about a recurring series, man. Get you up on that screen every single week!”

  “That’s not where I’m at, dude,” I said quietly. “You know me better than that.”

  “Okay, I worded that awkwardly. What I mean to say is, this show is an opportunity for you to do new and exciting things, and get paid extremely well for it.”

  “Well, now you have me slightly interested,” I admitted.

  “Can we go out to dinner tonight?” Thom asked. “Have ourselves a little date?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Why not? I’m single now, anyway.”

  We met in Venice that evening, at a typical West Los Angeles faux-hippie hideaway, where the tablecloths were hemp, and the candles were made out of soy.

  “Would you two like to start with something to drink?” asked our waitress.

  “I’ll have a tofu shake, extra beeswax.”

  “He’s kidding. We’ll have a couple of beers, I think,” Thom said. “Whatever’s local.”

  “No, no beer for me,” I said. “Just water.”

  Then Thom began his pitch.

  “They want to give you a show called American Chopper, Jesse,” he said. “The network thinks it’d be very cool to watch you build your custom bikes.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I hated having that damn camera crew in my face. And they were only around for a couple of weeks. I can’t imagine inviting them into my work for a year.”

  “Well, they’re only offering a four-episode pilot,” Thom coughed, politely.

  “Even so,” I said. “No way.”

  “Well, then, I don’t know,” Thom said. He scratched his head. “I sort of thought you’d like that.”

  “That’s not even creative, man,” I complained. “Can’t we do something a little more interesting? Something a little bit more . . . violent?”

  “Discovery’s a family channel,” Thom pointed out. “In case you forgot.”

  “I’m not talking violent to people,” I said. “Just like, a show that has, I don’t know, some explosions. If we’re gonna build something, then let’s build machines.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “What we should do,” I suggested, “is push the envelope. Get some of the best mechanics in the world together, and get them to build some Mad-Max, apocalypse-style vehicles.”

  “War machines,” Thom said. “Bikes that spit fire.”

  “Not bikes,” I corrected. “No offense, man, but I’ve got bikes coming out of my ears. Let’s make some cars instead: mutant cars.”

  He nodded. “Sure, sounds great. But what the hell is a mutant car?”

  “Like nightmare cars,” I said, thinking. “You know, like a Ferrari that can fly.”

  “Ferraris already fly, pretty much.”

  “Fine,” I said. “A Mustang that shoots missiles.”

  “At who? The Soviets?” Thom shook his head. “Hate to tell you, the Cold War’s over, we won. Our grass was greener.”

  “All right, then. A Mustang that can mow LAWNS!” I said, grinning as I pictured it. “Can’t you just see it? A freakin’ Mustang 5.0, mowing the lawn at a h
undred miles an hour?”

  “That sounds goofy.” Thom laughed. “Not to mention impossible.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it was easy . . .”

  “Then anyone could do it,” Thom said, nodding. “I get it. Drama. A bit of a challenge. Maybe we’ll even have some good fights among the crew during the build process. Hey, I think you have something there, Jesse.”

  For the rest of the evening, we shot ideas back and forth. At first, there was talk of situating the show in some kind of Thunderdome, where the mechanics would have to grapple up walls and punch one another in the nose to get the tools they needed to modify the cars, but eventually, that idea was rejected. Soon, the basic premise was born: a crack team of professionals, led by myself, would strip down an ordinary-looking car, bus, van, or limousine to its barest essence. From there, it would be rebuilt from the ground up, until it contained one or more magical secret powers.

  “Think about it!” I laughed. “A Mini-Cooper that shovels snow!”

  “Oh, wow: NO! I know! A lowrider Zamboni!”

  “Not bad, but what about slashing a U-Haul, so it splits open to be a wrestling ring!”

  “Christ, that’s great! We’ll have a match in there, with turnbuckles and a referee and everything!”

  “You guys sound like you’re having fun,” our waitress commented, refilling my water glass.

  We grinned at each other across the table.

  “Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess this sounds like a pretty good time. Thom, I’ll do it.”

  ——

  For our first episode, we decided to go for the speed–lawn mower idea. Discovery presented us with a white 1990 Mustang 5.0, with a V-8 engine. A beautiful little car.

  “Let’s trash her,” I commanded.

  My crew, which included Bill Dodge, my buddy who worked in my shop; Mike Contreras, guru of the oil rigs; Carol Hodge, a tough-as-nails chick mechanic; and Bob Cleveland, a lawn mower engineer, stripped the Mustang of all its deadweight. We removed the backseat, unhooked the muffler, heaved it happily into the trash, then tossed the catalytic converter into a deserted corner of our warehouse.

  “That was easy,” I said. “Now for the hard part. Let’s figure out how to get a huge goddamn lawn mower attached to the bottom of this car.”

  I honestly hadn’t counted on there being all that much stress or suspense around the build process. But once it got under way, there was almost no end to the bitching and squabbling.

  “Listen, we gotta reroute this fuel line, pronto! Otherwise we’re gonna have quite an explosion when we try to start this baby up.”

  “Yeah, sure, but what about the exhaust system. Don’t you think we should tackle that first?”

  Everyone I’d brought aboard was very talented at what they did, which made it that much worse, because as usual, every fucker thought he was right. In order to heighten the blue-collar drama, Discovery had planned it so we had to complete our task in under a week: typical reality TV bullshit tension, but it seemed to work.

  “How are we gonna cut lawns if we can’t even get the blade apparatus to mount correctly on the door?”

  “Well, we’ll put a pivot on it, if you see what I mean . . .”

  “No way! Listen, what we should do is fabricate a bracket to mount the motor . . .”

  After several days of debate, I just lost my patience with the whole game. “Look,” I said, “we’re going to have to work as a team. Stop fucking talking so much. Start listening to each other.” The crew stared at me resentfully, as we sat eating our take-out dinners. “Hey, I’m sorry to have to put it that way. But you guys are screwing around too much. Nothing’s getting done.”

  In the end, we were able to come to a compromise, and the mower got mounted. Tom Prewitt, a pro custom painter, took the car into his shop and made it look cherry, applying coats of ice gold pearl and lime green flake. Signature chopper flames licked up and down the side paneling. We even threw some gold rims on the tires for street props.

  For our grand finale, I drove the Mustang out to Indio, where I raced a four-thousand-pound tractor mower driven by a pro lawn mower. I put the pedal to the metal, and it wasn’t even close: our Monster actually worked! After a week of hellacious work, I was actually cutting grass at a hundred miles an hour.

  “Man, that was fun,” I said to Thom. “It took a whole bunch of bitching and moaning, but that was actually pretty cool to build this weird thing.”

  “Well, rest up,” Thom advised me. “Because on Monday morning, you gotta do it all over again.”

  Enthusiastically, we filmed the rest of our four-episode arc. I became absorbed in the bizarre task of creating a Ford Explorer Garbage Collector, a stretch Limo fire truck with a hose powerful enough to put out a ten-story building fire, and a Volkswagen Beetle Swamp Buggy that we took to the Louisiana Bayou, where we floated out among the alligators.

  “Cool experiment,” I told Thom. “But I’m totally freaking exhausted after all that work.”

  “Just wait till the show airs,” he said, smiling.

  “Yeah. It’ll feel great to put this crap behind me,” I said. “I haven’t been by my shop in what seems like weeks. The back orders are piling up, and I feel guilty abandoning my ship.”

  “Just wait until it airs,” Thom repeated, knowingly.

  He was right: when the four episodes were broadcast, the numbers went through the roof.

  “Madness, Jesse. Absolute madness,” Thom said. “I talked to the boys at Discovery this morning. They want us to do a full season! Twenty-four episodes.”

  “Twenty-four episodes? Are you nuts? When will I sleep? When will I build motorcycles?”

  Thom grinned. “So you’re going to turn down your own TV show, dude?”

  “Of course!” I yelled. “You know why? Because it’s freaking impossible.”

  “No, not impossible,” Thom argued. “Just difficult. I mean, look, you just churned out four hour-long shows, and you did it like a champ.”

  “But I’m a walking dead man,” I protested weakly. “I’m sorry, Thom. I don’t sleep. I can’t get to the gym. Dude, I can hardly shove a burrito in my mouth before I’m hit with something else to do.”

  Thom shrugged. “You got a hit show here, Jesse. You don’t say no to that.”

  I groaned and sank into my seat, defeated. “How did I get myself into this, again?”

  ——

  Suddenly, the main challenge in my life was not simply overseeing what was rapidly becoming a well-known custom motorcycle shop. It was adapting to the crazy phenomenon of “being on TV.”

  “Did you notice the hordes outside?” Rick asked one morning, when we were working at the shop. Bent over an oxyacetylene torch, he readied himself to heat up a steel pipe that we would in turn bend and form into yet another CFL frame.

  “Must have been a car accident,” I grumbled.

  “I don’t think so,” Rick said, laughing. “Those fuckers were there for you, man.”

  “Oh my God,” I moaned. “Kill me, please.”

  “The place has become a white-trash landmark!” He chuckled. “Tourists are bringin’ their little kids to see you, dude! I seen ’em with Sharpies in hand, dying to meet the man on TV!”

  “I’ll autograph a few shirts, if they ask real nice.”

  “Sets a dangerous precedent,” Rick warned, flipping down his glasses. “You start with the shirts, then it moves on to the boobs. Before you know it, you got groupies coming out of the woodwork.”

  “I’ll leave the chopper groupies to you, how about that, Rick?” I sighed. “I don’t think I can handle them right now.”

  I had gone out on a few dates since Karla and I split, but they had mostly been a string of extremely well-contained disasters. There was just something soulless about meeting up, going to the Lobster House, and then trying to conjure up some kind of bogus romantic feeling. As much as I hated doing it, I couldn’t stop comparing every woman I met to Karla, the original spitfire girl who ne
ver knew how to hold her tongue. Stacked up next to her, most of the women I met just came off as boring.

  But then one day things changed. Evan Seinfeld, the lead singer for Biohazard, was at my shop doing a photo shoot on a bike I’d built for him. A friend of his, Kristal Summers, an adult film actress, had tagged along and brought a friend.

  “Jesse,” Kristal said, “I want you to meet someone. This is Janine Lindemulder.”

  I knew who Janine was. Over the course of the last decade, she had become one of the most famous porn stars of all time, right up there with Jenna Jameson. Janine’s trademark, besides her considerable beauty, was that outside of her homemade sex tape with Vince Neil, she’d never performed on camera with a guy.

  “Hey there,” I coughed. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Hello,” Janine said pleasantly. “This is such a great shop!”

  If at first I was a little nervous to be around a famous porn star, that feeling dissolved almost immediately. Janine was bright and engaging, but even more, she was somehow conservative: she wore mom jeans and a thigh-length sweater. No question, she was beautiful, but it came through kind of quietly, in her clean, long hair and her striking, high-cheekboned face.

  “You do such nice work, Jesse,” she said, walking around the shop. “I love the colors you use.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “Do you like bikes?”

  “They’re only the coolest machines alive!” she said, laughing. “Man, can’t you tell from looking at me I’m a biker chick at heart?”

  She pulled up the arm of her sweater to show a full sleeve of tattoos.

  “Hard-core.” I laughed.

  “I can’t help it,” she said, giggling. “I really love getting these dang tattoos.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, smiling. I put my own tattoo-covered forearm up next to hers. “It’s addictive.”

  Janine let her arm linger against mine for a second.

  “They look pretty good up against each other, don’t they?” She gazed up at me, smiling.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Not too bad at all.”

  After Evan was done with his shoot, the four of us went out to grab some food.