The Build

by Paul Teutul Jr

  MOM: STRONG, COMPASSIONATE WOMAN

  My mom—wow! What a wonderful, loving woman. She loved us kids, and as a stay-at-home mom, she was always there for us. In some ways, she was like a single mom raising us while my father was emotionally absent during his drinking years.

  My father had a big personality—outspoken and boisterous—and was an iron worker in the most stereotypical sense, while Mom was soft spoken and laid back. She was the type of woman who would never divorce her husband. I considered her more conservative than most of my friends’ mothers, including not letting us drink sodas. Nowadays, that’s common, but back in the eighties, that stood out compared to my friends. We would tell her that our friends’ moms let them drink sodas, but she said they weren’t good for us, and she didn’t give in to our begging.

  Mom’s personality was marked by compassion and humor, but trust me, she did not hesitate to discipline us. We didn’t get away with much around her, and when we did wrong, consequences followed. But Mom disciplined us the right way, in my opinion, usually sending us to our rooms or grounding us. I consider her style of discipline a loving discipline designed more to correct than punish us.

  Mom was strong. She had to be. She gave birth to all four of us kids naturally, with no drugs. Somehow, with four kids, a husband who couldn’t hold it together, and operating under almost constant damage control those early years, she maintained a positive attitude.

  We had a loving, interactive relationship with Mom because we spent a lot of time with her. She volunteered in our schools and encouraged us academically by taking an enthusiastic role in our homework assignments.

  Mom told us all the time that she loved us. The way that my mother loved me was what I loved about her. If anything, she might have smothered us a little bit. She probably covered for my father a little too much, trying to make it appear that our family was not a mess. But who could blame her?

  She worried about us kids, and I worried about her. She cried a lot on my shoulders over her arguments with my father. I think without intending to, she put extra pressure on me to take on the role of being the man around the house, even though I was not yet ten years old. I also put similar pressure on myself; as the oldest, I felt a responsibility to my mother because my father was so volatile.

  Mom was consistent with us kids. She wasn’t perfect, but she was consistent, and what amount of stability we did have at home came from her. She was the glue that held our family together.

  The most important thing Mom did was to instill Christian values in our dysfunctional home. We attended a Catholic church—named St. Paul’s, interestingly enough—that was more charismatic than the typical Catholic church in our part of New York. When I was around eight or so, we switched to a nondenominational church that we really liked. My father went with us sometimes, but Mom was a regular attendee, and she made sure we kids were, too.

  Mom took part in Bible studies, and she would read Scriptures to us and tell us what was right and teach us about Jesus. She planted seeds that would have a great impact on me years later.

  Ultimately, much of where I am today spiritually is the result of my mom’s influence in my early life. I have become more compassionate by watching my mother live out her faith. The compassion that she had can come only from a deep faith.

  Mom was my rock. She was the person holding down the fort at home when everything got all crazy. I cannot imagine where I would be now if she had not kept our family together.

  THE TEUTUL KIDS

  My brother Mikey needs no introduction to American Chopper viewers (although he might require a little explaining!). Danny appeared in probably only a couple of episodes, and Cristin managed to avoid the cameras altogether.

  Danny was level headed and mostly serious as a kid. With him as second oldest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt like our father didn’t do as many activities with him as he did with me.

  He’s always been the biggest sports fan among the Teutuls, and he played quarterback in football. My memory is horrible when it comes to names and dates, but Danny can rattle them off like nobody’s business, including seemingly from every football game he played during high school—and all my games, too.

  Danny was focused, unlike me. (I couldn’t figure out what I wanted in life until well into my twenties.) As a kid, he saved every penny he made. His determination and drive made him a successful businessman after he bought the steel company from my father. He was more interested in running Orange County Ironworks than being part of American Chopper. Danny really made something out of a mess in turning the business into a solid company, taking risks and reaping the fruits of those risks.

  Danny is the type of boss that people love to work for because he treats people fairly. Danny saw the adverse effects of how our father ran his business and became the opposite of him. My brother and I have talked numerous times about how we learned how not to run a company by watching our father.

  Danny’s a great father, too; he has managed to walk that fine line of running a successful business while also spending quality time with his children.

  Mikey, with his carefree and loving personality, was like the stereotypical youngest child in many ways even though he wasn’t the youngest. If you didn’t like Mikey, something was wrong with you. Fans’ outpouring of love for him at public events was borderline ridiculous. People had their differing opinions about my father and me, but everybody loved Mikey. At its core, American Chopper was a show about my father and me building bikes together, but Mikey’s presence gave our show balance. Where stressful relationships are concerned, more people would want to be like Mikey than me. Extraordinarily laid back, Mikey was the comic relief on the show and in the family. He’s always possessed the gift of being able to step into the middle of conflict, lighten the mood with a joke, and give both sides the opportunity to go back to their respective corners to cool off before matters escalate.

  Being on television adds stress to relationships, and I think mine and Mikey’s might have been hurt in some regards by American Chopper. While I was praised as the guy creating these amazing bikes, Mikey was the guy who “answered the phones and took out the trash,” and fans treated him a little bit goofy because of that. Who wouldn’t resent that?

  When our show ended, perceptions of Mikey were slow to change—too slow for Mikey. Although his goofy-guy role worked for him as the peacemaking cutup, I believe it also bothered him a little because he is an extremely smart and talented guy and that part of him wanted to be taken seriously.

  He loves film, and he has made all kinds of crazy films, including reenactments of notable events like Nancy Kerrigan’s infamous whack to her knee leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics. It’s hysterical. He is a painter and had his own art gallery for a while. He is also a capable musician.

  Mikey is not afraid to try new things. He’s that guy who has no problem grabbing a microphone on open-mic night and putting on an improv stand-up routine that has the audience slapping their tables in laughter.

  People love Mikey’s kindheartedness. He would literally do anything for anyone who needed help. Perhaps that’s because he’s been the person who needed help. On the show, everyone saw how he went to rehab for his alcohol addiction. Mikey has come out on the other side of his tough times better for the trials he’s endured. He’s matured a lot. At this stage in Mikey’s life, he’s in the best place I’ve ever seen him.

  Then there’s Cristin, the baby of the family and the only girl. Cristin’s awesome. She’s funny, too, although a little more serious than Mikey.

  My sister was only two when my father sobered up. She didn’t know that crazy period in the Teutul household, but my father never knew how to be a father to her. Not even partially. He just couldn’t figure out how to have a father-daughter relationship. I guess my father had issues with females, because he had his worst relationship with his mother, and he fought all the time with my mom. And then Cristin came along, and forget about any meaningful relationship
with her.

  I don’t know how she turned out so well as the youngest in our dysfunctional family. With three older brothers—especially the three she got stuck with—she had to be tough growing up. As a result, she can hold her own with anybody.

  Cristin has two degrees and is a registered nurse in New York City, and a good one at that. It takes a special person to be a good nurse. To me, that’s a career that would make you miserable if you are in it just for a paycheck. But Cristin has been caring for others since she was a kid. She used to volunteer at the retirement home, and I remember her spending Thanksgiving and other holidays volunteering there.

  I think Danny, Cristin, and my mother experienced more negative fallout from the show than the rest of our family. The viewers truly knew only my father, Mikey, and me. To viewers, the three of us were the Teutuls, and we represented the entire family to the world. But there were six of us in the family, and it had to be annoying for the others.

  The family dynamics on American Chopper were new to television, and the ugly shouting matches that happened on our show impacted the family members who had nothing to do with them. They weren’t living their lives for the world to see, yet they were having to answer questions because of the other three members of the family. My mother hated all the on-screen fighting in the show’s early years. All the dysfunction she’d had to endure privately was now being seen in homes around the world.

  The positive impact of our show needed time to surface. Later, my mom worked five years for me answering phones in my new company. When callers learned they were talking to my mother, they were able to share with her some of the good that came from American Chopper.

  If I were to divide my life into sections, a major break would occur at age ten when my father sobered up.

  My father had been drinking since he was in high school, and all those years of alcohol caught up with him. His liver was enlarged, and a doctor told him that if he did not stop drinking, he would die. Plus, he had been in numerous car accidents. It was a miracle he was still alive.

  My father made the lifesaving decision to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. I don’t recall a time when my father called the family together to talk about quitting alcohol, but I give my father a lot of credit for doing the hard thing. He made the changes he needed to make, stuck with the program, and as far as I know, never had any kind of relapse. Otherwise, I’m not sure that he would be with us today.

  It is difficult to make a blanket statement about my relationship with my father after he sobered up, but overall, it did improve. The arguments didn’t stop—they have never stopped—but my father made the effort to become more involved with us kids.

  My parents continued to argue because they still had the same marital issues, but the environment around the house improved. We did more things as a family, like taking vacations, and my father attended church with us more frequently.

  I think my father needed a big learning curve, because alcohol had been part of his daily routine for so long that he had to go through a process of finding out who he was. If you think about it, he was undergoing a drastic change from a raging alcoholic to working out how to be a sober husband and father. And, again, he did not have a good model from his growing-up years.

  The first six months of his recovery were particularly difficult. His attitude wasn’t great, and he seemed miserable at times, but that determined drive of his enabled him to soldier through until, over time, the transition became easier for him.

  All in all, things went well for the first couple of years or so after he decided to sober up.

  MAKING MY OWN DECISIONS

  When I was twelve, I made the important decision to become a Christian. I went with my mom and one of her friends, Casey, to Poughkeepsie, where Paul and Jan Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network were filming one of their shows. Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters fame was one of their guests on this particular episode.

  Watching how a television show was filmed fascinated me, with all the camera operators and people working on the set. At the end of the program, Meadowlark spoke to the audience about salvation and asked for anyone who wanted to be saved to come up to the front. I remember feeling a little nudge at that point, although truthfully I cannot recall if it came from within me or from my mom. My mother and Casey accompanied me to the front.

  Meadowlark led all of us in the Sinner’s Prayer, and I repeated the prayer along with him, confessing my sins and asking God for forgiveness. It was a clear, definitive moment; there was no question about what had transpired. I walked away from that spot knowing I had accepted Jesus Christ into my heart and what that meant, and I felt changed inside.

  Anyone who believes that becoming a Christian means your life suddenly gets easier is incorrect. I said that the environment around our house improved over the first couple of years after my dad sobered up. That ended—at least for me—around the time I became a teenager and began finding out who I was as a young man. My father expressed regrets for missing out on the activities he would have liked to have done with the four of us. He wanted to compensate for opportunities missed, but I wanted to do my own thing and figure out life for myself.

  In the seventh grade I started enjoying school when I discovered that girls weren’t so bad after all. That year I started participating in football and track and field. Football was awesome because the physical nature of the sport provided a legal, constructive way to release my anger and aggression. In track, I ran the anchor leg on our 4x100-meter relay team, which was so good that we competed against high school teams. I also broke our school record for the shot put. I played baseball outside of school, but I didn’t want to play sports all the time because I also wanted to socialize.

  Even though my father still worked a lot, he never missed a football game or a track meet, and it felt great to look up into the stands and see him cheering for me. Then in the car afterward and when we arrived back home, we would discuss and analyze that night’s game. We also fished together more often. We argued as much as before, but my dad was trying, and that effort was what I had been wanting from him.

  Our biggest connection came through power lifting. We started lifting weights together and formed a power-lifting team with friends and, at times, my brother Danny. We entered competitions that we would drive to in our family’s big van. Those were great times.

  There was a but, though. Our relationship clearly improved after my father quit drinking, but it remained volatile. My father is a difficult man to be around because he can be particular and judgmental. His “my way or the highway” attitude made my early teen years challenging.

  When people drink heavily for a long period of time and then stop, they seem to pick up their lives mentally and emotionally where they left off when they first started drinking. For my father, that was his teenage years—and that’s the stage of life I was in. While I was trying to find myself on my own, my father had a strong opinion of who I should be and tried to impose his will on me. I wanted to become more independent, but my father wanted to control me and keep me dependent on him.

  I believe he was proud of me, but he also lived vicariously through me. When I did well in sports, it seemed as though my success was an extension of my father being successful. When I would miss one of our power-lifting workouts, he would jump all over me like it was the end of the world.

  I turned thirteen in 1987. And needless to say, I was a product of growing up in the eighties. I reluctantly admit that I wore Z Cavaricci pants and cardigan sweaters. I braided my hair in a tail. I didn’t listen to a lot of rap music, but I listened to some. None of that agreed with my father’s tastes, and he never shied away from expressing his opinion. He did not care for my friends, either.

  The way I dressed, the music I listened to, and the friends I hung out with were part of who I wanted to be. But to my father, they were more a reflection of him—and a poor one, in his opinion. No matter what I did, it seemed to always be about him, not me. Perhaps t
he cause was that my father was not happy with himself. For people like that, nothing is ever good enough for them. They carry expectations that are unattainable, and in our case, nothing I could do would earn my father’s approval. Not surprisingly, we fought a lot during my teen years.

  My father smoked cigarettes and my mother had previously smoked. Watching smoking around the house all my life, I decided I might as well give it a shot and see what it was all about. I started at twelve by occasionally stealing cigarettes from my father. By the time I was thirteen and feuding pretty good with my father, I was smoking more consistently. My buddies and I—usually five or six of us—would walk the railroad tracks into town, where there were two delis that would sell us cigarettes. Both delis knew the other would sell to us despite our being underage, so they would sell us a pack as they said something like, “Oh, these are for your mother or father?” Wink, wink, nod, nod.

  We would walk the tracks back home, smoking the whole way. We also bought gum at the delis and popped in a stick when we got home to cover the smell.

  THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

  At fourteen, I tried marijuana for the first time. I had four cousins in Montgomery, two older, one my age, and one younger. Their place was awesome because my aunt and uncle never went upstairs to their rooms. Upstairs was a wide-open free-for-all.

  My cousins introduced me to pot, and I liked it right away because it took the edge off and I liked the way it made me feel. Although some people say that marijuana is not addictive, in my case, I disagree. I started off smoking weed on weekends and progressed to an everyday habit. Although I drank occasionally, I didn’t get heavy into alcohol. I primarily limited my drinking to Friday nights at my cousins’ house or at my buddy Jack’s. I liked the way drinking made me feel; I liked the fun I had when I drank. Alcohol made me more social. Specifically, it loosened me up for talking with girls. Wondering where I would end up on a Friday night was a new and awesome experience.