American Outlaw

by James, Jesse

Of course, not everybody loved it. As permits started to come in for me and the film crew, and things started to fall more and more in line, certain powers at the Discovery Channel voiced their strong disapproval for the project. It was even insinuated that I could be fired if I went over there, for being in violation of my Monster Garage contract.

  “How am I in violation of my contract?” I asked Sandy, that night.

  “Because you’re endangering a company product, sweetie.” She patted me on the chest. “In other words, their star.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “Come on.”

  “Well, I understand their objections—they’re still bombing over there. It’s not that safe.”

  “Well, what’s the point of doing anything if it’s safe?” I said. “I mean, where’s the prime-time drama in that?”

  Sandy understood why I was so hyped up to go over there. She might even have gathered that part of the reason I wanted to visit the troops and participate with them was to live up to the standard she was setting. But she was still worried about me. Nonetheless, I never felt like I didn’t have her permission to head over to a war zone. In the end, it was going to be my decision, and she wouldn’t lay too much of a guilt trip on me because of it.

  “Just come back,” she whispered. “Okay?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  I had been to Iraq with Kid Rock several years before, during 2003, on a USO stop. That had been a really fulfilling experience for me—the enthusiasm of the soldiers who’d shown up to see us had blown me away. Things were different, now, though, and Iraq in 2005 was a hectic scene. Public support for the war in the Middle East had really waned, and that made me all the more determined to come over and make it clear that I was supportive of the kids who were putting themselves in harm’s way.

  And they really were kids. That’s what impacted me the most. Some of these guys could barely grow whiskers on their chins, and yet here they were, wielding these crazy sniper rifles. It brought back memories of how, fifteen years earlier, during my early twenties, I’d moved to Seattle. I’d been a confused, overgrown kid who’d thought he was going to be a football hero, but instead found himself in the freezing Pacific Northwest, trying to figure out what life was all about. It was kind of compelling to observe these young men and women, still trying to get a grip on who they were, who, against all odds, now found themselves in Iraq.

  We had only seven days to pull off our Monster Garage–style build, which, as we’d planned all along, was to transform a standard-issue Humvee into a souped-up, desert pimpmobile with giant tires and spinning rims.

  “Think we’ll pull it off?” I asked Command Sergeant Major Cynthia Graham, a woman with a ton of grit.

  “It’ll be a damn sight to see if we do!” she said, laughing, the lines of her face creasing appealingly. This was a woman who’d been out in the desert for a good long time. “These guys are really excited for you to be out here, Jesse. I’ll say that much.”

  The whole week I was there, I was filled with a sense of purpose. We weren’t pulling off the most creative build we’d ever done; there was no beer being distilled inside of a fire truck, no PT Cruiser turning into a wood chipper. But the soldier-mechanics doing the grunt work loved the challenge. They liked the cameras, too—I’m pretty sure it was sort of appealing to think about becoming a star, if only for the briefest of moments. But most of all, I sensed that the troops involved with the build dug doing something different: a mechanical project that, for once, wasn’t centered around the depressing subject of battle and death. Every day, these guys repaired jeeps that had been crushed by improvised explosive devices. To them, a week with me was a lark, a much-needed vacation.

  We were having so much fun, and the work felt so good, that I almost forgot we were in a war zone. I was reminded of that fact, however, when, one evening, our peace was interrupted by a wailing siren.

  “What the fuck is that?” I asked.

  “Air raid, man. Come on, we gotta get inside. Bombs are dropping somewhere out there.”

  We were fine, of course. We even joked around in the bomb shelter, just to pass the time. But later that night, I quit joking. Three soldiers had died in the mortar attack, and nine more had been injured.

  In the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking: that’s what these guys live with every single day. Every time they went out on a mission, they were faced with the possibility that they weren’t coming back. And it kind of made me feel awed and sad at the same time, to know that such young men had made peace with death.

  After working all week, we finally completed the Humvee to our lowrider-in-the-desert specifications, but, because of a faulty transmission and our inability to obtain a new one inside of a war zone, the car wouldn’t fire up. Disappointment came, because that was inevitable, but it was short-lived. The mission had so clearly been a success for all of us.

  “These guys won’t forget you, Jesse,” Sergeant Major Graham said. “This was one of the best weeks we’ve had here. It really was.”

  During their closing ceremony, I was presented with the American flag that had flown over their base during the week I’d spent there. Emotion overcame me, and I had to choke back tears. I’d never felt prouder to be a part of something.

  ——

  My life felt blessed. There was purpose in my work, and family all around me. More and more, I pictured just exactly how great it would be to have Sunny join us. She would have Chandler as a sister, Jesse Jr. as a brother, and me and Sandy as parents who loved her, as well as one another. The custody battle in the courts was taking its own sweet time, however, so I battled constantly with myself, trying to be patient, yet often failing.

  As the months passed during our first year of marriage, Sandy and I passed out of our honeymoon period, but without much of a hitch. I think sometimes we both felt the other was a bit too busy, but there was no getting around it, because work was so important to both of us.

  “You’re going into the shop on a Sunday?” Sandy asked me sleepily.

  “Sunday’s my favorite day of the week to work,” I told her, happily. “No one in there to bug me!”

  My workaholic ways hadn’t changed much over the years. I just felt my most fulfilled when I was cutting metal, sweating into my shirt. It wasn’t anything that I could share. That morning, as I drove to the West Coast Choppers shop, I noticed a small church I’d seen many times before. On a whim, I decided to stop by.

  The church was a regular-looking house of worship that had likely gone through several incarnations across the years, housing various ethnicities and Christian sects, from Cambodian Evangelicals to Mexican Catholics to Seventh-Day Adventists. Now it was an African-American church. I grinned as I approached the door and heard the pastor firing up his sermon with a vengeance.

  “None of us are perfect!” he yelled. “Even at our BEST, we have committed major indiscretions against the LORD!”

  “Amen,” came the pleased rumbling of the congregation. “Amen.” The women wore floppy hats and fanned themselves, and the men clapped and nodded. The church was small, but no one was stingy with their applause or affirmations. There was a buzz in there, a vital life energy.

  Feeling more curious, I slipped inside the doorway and found myself a corner in the back, where I could observe unnoticed.

  “Don’t you ever get so holy you develop AMNESIA!” the pastor cried. He strutted back and forth across the small stage. “Don’t you EVER get so holy, you can no longer remember there was a season in your life when you made colossal mistakes!”

  I nodded, digging the guy’s electric enthusiasm.

  “I’m talking womanizing! I’m talking stealing! I’m talking living without purpose!”

  “Amen, brother,” I said under my breath, laughing. This guy was pretty good. In fact, he seemed like he was speaking directly to me.

  “There’s been time when I’ve taken some wrong turns!” the preacher boomed, sweat dripping from his brow, as he paced b
ack and forth. “When I’ve messed up something bad! It was NIGHT for a very LONG TIME! But we all have the chance to turn it around—brothers and sisters, MORNING IS COMING!!”

  “Amen!” cheered the congregation, growing in ardor. “Amen!”

  “MORNING IS COMING!”

  “A-men!”

  The cords of the pastor’s neck stood out against his shiny skin. He clenched one fist, and his voice crescendoed mightily:

  “WILL YOU PRAY WITH ME?”

  ——

  I drove away from that church whistling, feeling cheerier and more hopeful than I could ever remember feeling. I had so much. And I was profoundly grateful.

  On days like these, it felt like my life just couldn’t get much better. But on other mornings, I had to admit there were downsides to the path I’d chosen for myself, ones that I had never counted on experiencing. Most prominent was the fact that ever since I’d gotten married, I’d seemed to have outgrown a lot of my old friends.

  Paul, one of my old carousing friends from the neighborhood, was a perfect example. He was a guy I’d known since before I’d even met Karla, and throughout the past decade, I could always count on a phone call from him at the shop around happy hour.

  “Yo, Jesse,” he cried. “How about coming out with us and getting your drink on?”

  “Come on, you know I haven’t had a drink in five years,” I said.

  “Well, fine—how about hitting the strip clubs all the same? We haven’t seen you in months, man!”

  “Nah. I don’t really do that anymore,” I explained.

  “What, because you’re not allowed to?”

  “No,” I said, mildly annoyed. “I can do whatever the fuck I want. But that stuff kind of lost its thrill for me a long time ago.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. “Boy,” Paul said, “you were the last dude I ever expected to go Hollywood on us. I guess I was wrong. See ya around.”

  I felt like what he was saying was total bullshit, of course. I mean, what did it really mean, anyway, to go Hollywood? I’d had one show or another on television for more than six years. Hadn’t I been famous for a pretty long while? But I guess I was starting to realize that there was a difference between being pretty well known, and being REALLY well known. Like, Sandra-Bullock-well-known.

  “People don’t get it,” I told her. “They think I’m stuck on myself, or something like that.”

  “It’s difficult,” Sandy said. “Sometimes I think it’s a pretty lonely path, being this recognizable. You have to work at maintaining some of your friendships.”

  But I didn’t exactly feel like doing maintenance on my old school buddies. To me, it felt like a betrayal. If they didn’t take me as I was in this moment, well, fuck them. I could make new friends.

  Except it wasn’t really as simple as that. Sandy was incredibly welcoming, in terms of trying to bring me into “her world,” but when it came down to it, I was really a kid from the streets. That’s just who I was. I knew that I was smart, and that I could hold my own in a conversation, but I just didn’t seem to have much in common with her friends, some of whom happened to be the movie-producing elite of the world. Some of my hardest moments were going with Sandy to her premieres and award shows. I was incredibly proud of who she was, and it felt absolutely right to support her. But sometimes I just wished she was a teacher or something. That I could go to PTA night at the school, and support her that way.

  “You look handsome,” Sandy remarked to me, as we readied ourselves for a red-carpet entrance.

  “I feel, uh, a bit out of my element,” I admitted, from the backseat of our hired car.

  “You’re fantastic,” Sandy said, looking me deep in my eyes. “Thank you for coming with me.”

  Sandy always saw the good in me, the promise I had. But all the love and support in the world still wouldn’t have been enough to make me comfortable up on the red carpet with her. Sometimes I look back at the pictures we took together, and I can read the discomfort all over me: the clench of my jaw, the way I’m holding myself. I never could seem to shake the feeling that it was all a huge farce, one big mistake. How in the hell did I end up in front of ten million flashbulbs? Wasn’t I supposed to be selling refurbished furniture at the Long Beach swap meet with my dad?

  The after-parties were even more painful. No matter how much I tried otherwise, I still felt like Jed Clampett there, stuffed into a suit, hoping no one would unmask the fraud that was me. If there was an unoccupied corner in the room, I’d quickly wedge myself into it, smiling weakly, waiting for the night to extinguish itself.

  “Jesse James!” cried a drunk producer at one of these many shindigs. He looked nearly ecstatic to have found me. “How the hell are you?”

  “Awesome,” I said guardedly.

  “Boy, I’ve been thinking about you a lot! I’ve been talking with my wife about restoring this vintage motorcycle—you might not know it from looking at me, but I’m a total bike freak, man!”

  I tried not to express my total lack of enthusiasm for Sandy’s scene, because it was always her night, and the last thing I wanted to do was throw a damper on her mood. But she was a pretty perceptive person. She could always see right through me.

  “You hated it.”

  “What?” I said, on the drive home. “That’s not true. I had a pretty good time.”

  Sandy laughed. “Come on, be honest: you were miserable.”

  “Miserable’s a strong word. More like . . . I hoped I would die?”

  “I know those events can be a bit stuffy,” Sandy said, patting my leg. “I’m sorry, Jesse.”

  “I just feel like . . . well, everyone’s looking at me. I’m completely out of place there.”

  We looked at each other for a second, then both grinned.

  “We’re such an unlikely pair,” I said.

  “I love it,” Sandy said. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Sometimes I wondered if she truly felt that way, though.

  I mean, if I had been her, and I’d married some welder dude, I would have hoped to transform me, at least a tiny bit. My idea of a good time was to shoot guns, watch NASCAR, and babble about custom bikes. Truly, that’s what made me happy. It couldn’t have pleased Sandy all the time.

  “Let’s get away together,” she proposed. “Just the two of us. I have a friend who’ll let us stay at her villa in Cabo San Lucas.”

  Lounging around in a private villa in Mexico with a hot movie star wife probably sounds pretty good to the average guy on the street. And hell, I wasn’t complaining. But every flight we took had to be a total military operation, because of Sandy’s fame and the security it demanded. And then, once we’d successfully made it to our vacation house unobserved, it was hard to leave. There was peace in that villa, but sometimes I felt caged.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I think I’ll go take a drive. Explore Cabo.”

  “Are you going to take a map?”

  “I’ll live dangerously.”

  “Okay,” said Sandy, laughing. “You know what? I’ll come with you.”

  We showered, changed, then headed out to our rental jeep.

  “I’m just going to get my cell phone,” she said apologetically. “Just in case we get lost.”

  I sat in the car, jaw clenched, trying not to be frustrated. Next she’d be telling me to wear my seat belt.

  As I waited for Sandy, I popped one of the CDs I’d brought into the car stereo. Circle Jerks blasted out at full volume, abrasive and mean.

  “All set,” Sandy said, opening the passenger-side door and slipping into her seat. “Hey, wow. That’s a bit much for these eardrums. Can you lower the volume, please?”

  I lowered it. Of course I did. That’s what any husband would do for his high-class wife. She wasn’t some whore in the back of a Daytona nightclub: she was a lady, with gentler tastes. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but feel kind of cheated. It was like I was Huckleberry Finn or so
mething, when Widow Douglas decides to adopt him. They were “sivilizing” me, and I didn’t know how to make them stop.

  In the space of a few scant years, I’d gone from the hellacious pandemonium of an ex-porn star who didn’t even know herself what her next move would be, to a calm, steady, and predictable wife, for whom a night at home watching a new-release DVD constituted a thoroughly stimulating evening of entertainment. Simply put, it was an adjustment.

  It wasn’t like I regretted my decision: I was in love with Sandy. I really was. It’s just that our marriage wasn’t quite as simple and easy as I had hoped it would be. But then, I suppose nothing ever is.

  ——

  The custody battle with Janine raged on. Finally, the courts threw me a bone, and I was allowed to visit Sunny in Oregon when she was three. The visit wasn’t long, but it upset me.

  “Sweetie,” I said, hugging my daughter to me, embracing her skinny bones. She felt light in my grip. Her skin was incredibly pale.

  “Boy, does she ever get outside?” I asked Janine.

  “Of course she gets outside,” Janine snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

  But things seemed kind of strange with my daughter. Sandy and I took her out for the day, hoping to get to know her and sort of introduce our presence to her life. We took her to a playground, and she seemed disoriented.

  “Look at her running up to the other little kids,” I said. “She doesn’t even know how to interact with them.”

  “She’s not saying much,” Sandy observed.

  It was true. My daughter wasn’t talking. She was running up to the other children, looking fascinated, as if she’d never seen another little person her own size, but didn’t seem to know where to go from there.

  “This isn’t right,” I said, frustrated. “Janine is keeping her isolated in the house all day. It’s not the way a kid should grow up.”

  We played with Sunny all day, and I had never felt quite so sad being around one of my kids.

  “Someday real soon, she’s going to live with us,” I told Sandy. “I swear.” My determination to get my daughter had never waned, even in the face of the slow-moving justice system. But now when I saw just how pale and fragile she was, it was renewed a thousand percent.