by James, Jesse
“I believe in you,” Sandy said. “We’ll keep at it. Come on. We better bring her back.”
It was huge to me that Sandy was so firmly in my corner. I knew that she could be a great mom to Sunny, and, if given the chance, could make a momentous difference in her life. But it wasn’t just that she was capable of doing the job: I could tell that she wanted to do it. Sandy wanted to support me, but even more, I think she wanted to change things for this little girl whom she’d just met and already loved.
As always, the events of my life influenced how I approached my creative process, and one morning, I felt ready to announce to Sandy that I had news.
“I’ve come to an important decision,” I told Sandy. “I’m through with Monster Garage.”
“Really?” she asked. “But why?”
“You know, I haven’t felt that excited about the show in years. I don’t want to milk it for all it’s worth. I’d rather cut it off while there’s still some interest there.”
I’d been wanting to shift more of my energy to the home front, anyway, to getting custody of Sunny and running my motorcycle shop with a more careful eye. But the real straw that had broken the camel’s back, I told Sandy, was the way the network had dealt with my journey to Iraq.
“I just didn’t feel supported by them. I went overseas on my own dime, pretty much against their wishes. I don’t know, I just felt like I was trying to do something good, and they fought me every inch of the way. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Unsurprisingly, Discovery accepted my resignation.
“We’ll miss you, Jesse,” a network executive told me.
But I didn’t think they would miss me too much. I hadn’t always been the easiest guy to work with. In any case, it was possible that they, too, felt Monster Garage had run its course. After all, we had done five full seasons, and there’s only so many mutant vehicles a man can build. We didn’t part on bitter terms, though. They ended up running the footage we shot with the troops as a two-hour special, Iraq Confidential. In the end, I think we all felt the final chapter of our collaboration was a success.
But with the show gone, there was an immediate gaping hole in my life. For five years, I had worked around the clock, leading crews, doing demolition, design, and reconstruction. Now, suddenly, I had a lot of time on my hands. It felt strange and very unlike me to be twiddling my thumbs.
What the hell do I do now? I wondered.
At first, I figured the easy solution would be to spend all my time at West Coast; after all, we still had plenty of business to attend to. But dealing with the constant daily pressures of customers, crowds, and payroll stressed me out.
“I don’t know how I did this for so many years,” I admitted to Bill. “What the hell, man? We got thirty customers lined up to get their choppers, and every single one of them wants it now.”
I had never considered myself an artist, exactly, but I had to be in a certain mood to get my work done correctly. I had to have a certain clarity and focus, or the products I produced were going to be subpar and unremarkable. Simply put, I had to want to do it. And I felt that desire slackening.
“I used to really need to prove myself to everyone,” I explained to Sandy. “That’s what motivated me. But now I feel like I’ve proved myself. Making bikes is just not making me happy anymore.”
Sandy hugged me. As perceptive as she was, I’m sure she realized that my divorce from Monster Garage had left me feeling somewhat adrift. I also think she felt some mild guilt over her own stupendous career success. She was a sensitive, clued-in person, and she probably understood that no guy, no matter how generous he is, wants to be overshadowed by the woman he’s with. She wanted me to feel as confident about what I did as she felt about her acting, where she’d achieved so much.
“Well?” Sandy said, sympathetically. “What do you think we can do to make you feel alive again?”
I thought about it for a long time, but answers that important don’t just appear out of nowhere. I was looking around for passion, but couldn’t quite seem to find it.
Racing, however, had always been a kind of hobby of mine. Ever since I was a kid, I had always been a natural at driving at high speeds, whether it be boxcars or BMXs. As I got older, it had evolved to trucks, dragsters, and motorcycles, as well as to more novelty items, like dune buggies or off-road vehicles. With more time suddenly on my hands, I figured I could probably get a little more devoted to the sport, and have plenty of fun in the process.
With practice, I managed to gain some competence. I played around doing things like Figure 8 endurance racing, where you whipped around on the same track until you were dizzy, crossing in the middle; but what I loved most and found I was most talented at was stock car racing. It was so incredibly fast. It satisfied the part of me that lived for speed.
“Damn,” I laughed exultantly, after finishing one of my practice sessions, “why’d I even bother playing ball? This is so much cooler.”
In a matter of months, I’d managed to place myself into the Winston West series, a preliminary stock car race that took place at the Irwindale Speedway. Sandy, ever supportive, came out to cheer me on.
“Aren’t you nervous?” she asked. “I’m a little nervous.”
“No chance,” I said, patting my helmet. “This is going to be great.”
I started out sensationally, ripping out of the gate, in contention to place. But minutes into the race, my rear axle broke. My car careened out of control, and I crashed head-on into the wall at 140 miles an hour.
It was an awful, gory wreck. The dash collapsed into my face and broke my helmet, nose, and cheek. I shattered my ankle, spiral-fractured my tibia, cracked my sternum. The car was completely destroyed, and when I woke up, I found myself in an ambulance, covered with blood.
“Where I am?” I managed to mumble.
“Oh my God, you’re alive!” Sandy cried. “He’s alive!”
Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, I’d been unconscious for more than six minutes. It had been the chaplain who had gone and fetched Sandy—they hadn’t thought I was going to wake up.
As I lay there on the gurney in the ambulance, my vision distorted, my face covered in blood, Sandy reached out and gently touched my hand. She was trembling, just super shaky. I still remember the look that was on her face. She looked like she’d already been told I was going to die.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, finally. “You’re going to be . . . fine.”
My whole life, I’d always lived full throttle, placing myself in positions of danger over and over, as if that was my right. If I lived, if I died, that was my business. But there was something different about what I’d created with Sandy. To see her so shaken there, it really made me evaluate things on a different level—it made me realize that I had a responsibility to the woman I loved to stay alive, and live sanely.
“Look, I’m done,” I told her, a few weeks later. “That NASCAR racing is for suckers.”
Sandy didn’t try to hide her happiness. “Thank goodness,” she sighed. “I don’t want you in a wheelchair.”
“Yeah, me neither, I guess,” I said. “Not unless you’re in the one next to me.”
“Ooh, a cute wheelchair duo,” she said, laughing. “Tempting. Pink, perhaps?”
“They’d make a romantic comedy out of it,” I said. “You could star in it. Keanu would play me.”
“Oh, be quiet!” Sandy laughed. “I’m just happy you’re going to be around for a while. You really had us worried for a second.” Her face grew more serious. “I mean . . . I love you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
——
That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay in bed next to Sandy, feeling her warm, innocent body next to me.
Why had I really crashed? I wondered. Was it really the car’s fault? Or had it been a mistake I’d made?
I was getting older. When I stared into the mirror in the morning, a thirty-seven-year-old face stared ba
ck at me. I didn’t exactly mind aging, but damn, it sure felt like a harsh surprise some days. It seemed like only yesterday that I’d been laughing about girls with Bobby, getting drunk in the middle of the day, stealing cars and cutting them up for cash. Life had been so exciting, with no consequences to speak of.
Silently, I rose from the bed and limped my way out of the bedroom. Heading out into the hallway, I began a slow survey of the rest of the house. I checked in on my kids. They were asleep. As I gazed down at my son, I wondered rather guiltily how he and Chandler would have gotten along if my crash had been fatal. They would have survived, of course. But they would have gone through terrible grief and hardship.
Life just got a lot harder as you got older, that’s what I was learning. It got more complicated, more difficult to understand. I cherished Sandy, I really did. She felt like the love of my life, and she was quickly becoming a mom to my kids. The idea of finding a woman I thought more highly of was laughable. I wanted to honor her by retreading my life in a way that she approved of, and in a way that made her feel proud.
But at that moment, alone in the house at night all by myself, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of having somehow transformed into a grown-up, a father to three kids, the husband to one of the most famous, impossibly perfect women in the world. It was a weakness welling up inside of me, no doubt about it. But sometimes I just wished I could find a way to make it all disappear.
16
We received the news in the summer of 2008: Janine was headed to jail.
“They got her on tax evasion,” I told Sandy. “I knew right from the start that she was going to get knocked one day.”
My ex-wife owed the IRS several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. I’d been sending Janine fifteen grand a month ever since we’d divorced, but apparently, she’d never made much effort to pay back the government the considerable debt she owed them. Instead, she’d purchased two new cars and put a down payment on a $647,000 home. Janine wasn’t going to turn it around until someone made her. She was just going to continue to fuel her self-destructive habits and lifestyle.
“That’s pretty frightening,” Sandy said.
“I know,” I said. “I can’t believe she’s been raising my daughter all this time. I don’t even want to think about it. But there’s a silver lining.”
“Really? And what’s that?”
“If she really does goes to prison, I’m going to get custody for sure.”
To this point, my attempts to win custody of my daughter Sunny, now a toddler, had been ineffectual. The courts were for the most part still really traditional. They tried their hardest to keep a child with her mother, no matter how obvious it seemed, at least to me, that I was the more stable party by a long shot.
But no judge in the world could refuse me now. Janine pled guilty to the charges of tax evasion, and she received her sentencing. In late October, we learned that she was going to be spending half of the next year in a Victorville prison.
“They’re going to grant me custody. It’s really happening,” I told Sandy. “I’m going to pick Sunny up next week in Oregon.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I want you to.”
We drove up to Oregon quietly. I was nervous: I hadn’t seen my daughter much throughout her life. Now I wondered if I hadn’t fought quite hard enough to be with her. Janine had been allowed to parent her for a long time, because I hadn’t figured out a way to prevent her. I just hoped that in the long run, her better instincts would have taken hold, that her influence hadn’t been too damaging.
“Sunny’s going to be fine,” Sandy said, reading my mind.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
She reached over and put her hand softly on my thigh. “This is the first step. We’ll go on from here.”
We reached the house and got out of our car. I caught sight of Sunny on the porch of her house, with the court-appointed guardian. She looked small and short and pale. My heart rose into my throat when I stooped down to hug her.
“You remember Sandy, don’t you, sweetie?” I asked her.
Sunny nodded.
“We’re both real excited, because you’re going to come live with us,” I explained. “You’re going to have a big brother and sister. They can’t wait to meet you.”
Sunny looked down, not saying anything.
“We live right on the beach, Sunny,” Sandy said gently. “Have you ever been in the ocean before?”
Sunny looked up, interested. “Yes,” she said, after a second. “It was cold.”
Sandy laughed. “Well, the water will be warmer in California. I think you’ll like it.”
I looked uncertainly at my two girls.
“Well?” I said. “It’s a long drive back. Should we get on it?”
“Yes,” Sandy said, extending her hand down to Sunny. After a moment’s hesitation, Sunny clasped on, and they began to move forward. “Let’s do it.”
I felt hopeful.
——
And so, our family expanded once more. It was an exciting time for all of us: for Sandy, to be a mother for the first time; for Chandler and Jesse Jr., to be siblings to someone who really needed it; for Sunny, to slowly unfold into an environment filled with warmth and support; and for me, to feel like a dad who finally got his game right.
I’d become a parent so young. It had taken me a long time to grow fully into the role. But I felt like I’d finally arrived at my destination. I’d identified the people about whom I cared most deeply. I’d committed the rest of my life to making sure they were happy and safe.
“I’m turning into a regular family man,” I remarked to Sandy, as we prepared to spend Friday and Saturday nights at home with the clan, fitting together puzzles with Sunny, watching movies with the older kids.
“Would you ever have predicted it?”
“What, me being this boring?” I laughed. “I guess not. But weirdly enough, I kind of like it.”
It was a good thing that I did, too, because recently, I had started to feel like my family was the only thing that I was running right.
West Coast Choppers, according to the plan that I’d set up in my mind, was supposed to have focused me during what I saw as a transitional time. It was supposed to take my mind off the fact that my main project for more than half a decade, Monster Garage, was over and done with. But instead, the shop was just getting on my nerves. Without intending to, I had let it grow into a kind of unruly monster over the years. I had more than 145 employees on my payroll, and even keeping their names straight was a challenge at times.
“Who’s that?” I frowned.
“Her name’s Susan. She’s been here six months, man. She’s one of the accountants. Don’t you remember?”
Things had just gotten way too big for me. And unfortunately, I had never learned to delegate very well. I wasn’t one of these crafty CEOs with ten underlings running his arms and legs for him. Instead, every single goddamn tiny decision seemed to run directly across my desk. Every sale, every customer complaint, every bit of shop drama: it all came to me.
But the real killers were the lawsuits.
“I can’t believe it,” I exploded, one day. “Another one?”
They had been coming in, like biblical plagues, over the course of the last several years. Ever since I had married Sandy, my legal luck had turned to shit. The leeches had come out of the swamp, suing me more than half a dozen times. In 2007, the California Air Resources Board accused me of churning out bikes in violation of their clean-air standards, and they stuck their hands deep in my pockets, even though I offered to recall each of my bikes and make them smog compliant. Later that same year, a customer going through a messy divorce wanted to renege on his deal to buy a custom chopper, but I’d already spent his down payment on labor, so I refused; he sued me, too. In 2008, even my freaking lawyer sued me.
I don’t know if I had a sign on me, saying “Take my money!�
�� Maybe I’d kicked around in the spotlight too long, let my brand get too well known, because things had sure been simpler when I was selling fenders out of my garage. I think people thought that because I was married to Sandy, I had access to her money, which wasn’t true. She and I kept our finances separate. Both of us understood it was the path of least drama.
But if the intention was to wear me down, my various litigants were succeeding. My legal bills were enormous, and I went from feeling like West Coast Choppers was my retreat, the one place where things made sense, to not even really wanting to be there that much anymore. I couldn’t help but feel like I was milking the cash cow for everything it was worth. And that had never been my style.
“It just doesn’t make me happy anymore,” I told Sandy. “There’s so much stress associated with being there.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Sandy sympathized. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Unless you can make me excited about doing something I’ve done a million times before, over and over again,” I said, “I think the answer might be no.”
I hated to act ungrateful. I knew that I’d achieved every blue-collar guy’s fantasy, having created what was probably the biggest and most prestigious custom motorcycle shop in the world. I’d built it up from the ground, from absolutely nothing, just by my own sweat. But now I couldn’t help but wish to be rid of it. I couldn’t help but want to be free to do something, anything, else with my life.
“I think we need to go out to a nice dinner,” Sandy suggested. “Just you and me. I’d like some alone time with my amazing husband.”
“Yeah, all right,” I agreed. “Maybe that’ll help.”
“Make the reservations,” Sandy said, flashing me her famous smile. “I’ll get dressed.”
But even that didn’t seem to work out for us.
“Jesse! Sandra! Can you give us a shot? Can you give us a second?”