The Build

by Paul Teutul Jr

  I smoked angel dust a couple of times. I didn’t know that angel dust could be combined with pot. Once, I was partying with friends in the woods and someone passed me a joint that I did not know contained angel dust. I took a hit, and it really rocked me. Pot and angel dust together prevent you from remembering clearly, and when the joint came back to me, I had forgotten what it was. The combo felt great, and it was a different experience for me. But that experience turned sour on the ride home, and after getting horrendously sick, I ended my experimenting with that mixture.

  The only time I really got into serious trouble came one night after I had been drinking with my buddy Jack. We had neighbors who owned a dog, and another neighbor down the street shot the dog. So Jack and I decided to get the guy back by taking his mailbox. On an almost weekly basis.

  That particular night we got drunk and decided to go take his mailbox again. Frustrated from losing mailboxes, the man had cemented the post into the ground. Once we realized it wasn’t budging, Jack rocked the post back and forth until it broke off, and then we took the mailbox and threw it into the river. (Oddly enough, our family built a house at that same spot years later.)

  Snow had started falling, and we left footprints behind us. The guy came looking for us, and when he shined a spotlight in our direction, we ducked out of sight. Then we took off running into the woods. We were laughing so hard that at one point we ran through river mud and Jack lost both his shoes. When the coast was clear, we headed back to Jack’s house. But the guy had somehow figured out we had been stealing his mailboxes and was waiting for us at Jack’s. The cops were called, and they arrested us and took us down to the police station. My father came and got us, and he wasn’t too upset. He didn’t want me running into trouble with the law, but he didn’t freak out. It was harder on my mother, though.

  The next day, Jack and I had to explain ourselves, and my parents decided to send me to rehab.

  I was sixteen at the time. In hindsight, I wonder if I really needed rehab. I was addicted to marijuana, but I think my parents’ decision to send me to a rehab facility came out of their hypersensitivity to drugs and alcohol based on my father’s track record. Was I predisposed to having an addictive personality? Yes. But, still, I think my parents were premature in sending me to such treatment.

  However, the whole mailbox incident had taken care of any say I might have in the matter. So off I went for a month to Arms Acres, a treatment center in Carmel, New York. Arms Acres was where people would be diagnosed. Those with a drug addiction and a mental illness could be shipped to Four Winds, a psychiatric hospital. I saw people leave for Four Winds, so that was a pretty heavy scene to be a part of. I had probably done the least of anyone I met at Arms Acres.

  New patients had to wear hospital greens for a week because the facility wanted new patients to look the same for their first week. We had a regimented schedule, staying busy all day with classes and gym activities. It was a difficult situation at my age, and that is without taking into account that I was forced to be away from home for an entire month.

  I returned home intent on remaining sober. I joined a group of friends who had been through rehab, and we went to our post-rehab meetings together. We changed our habits and found ways to have fun without partying. We hung out with a mix of people, but we avoided the party scene and stopped going to clubs.

  My love of sports and girls made high school a great experience. Sports motivated me to perform better academically, and being part of a team gave me a sense of school pride. In football, I rarely left the field for the Valley Central Vikings. We had a small team and as a stocky kid, I played fullback and linebacker, as well as playing on special teams. I continued my work with weights and, pound for pound, was probably the strongest guy in the school. As team captain, I learned about leadership, too. We played much larger schools and suffered more than our share of big losses, but football still is the source of some of my favorite memories.

  I got along well with my teachers. Our school had kids from varied backgrounds, and because I partied a lot, I had friends in probably every group. One side of me was a super jock, and the other side was a burnout looking to get high.

  But the interesting thing was, being sober and changing the way I had fun didn’t really hurt my popularity in school. I had an even-keeled personality, and even though I’m sure I was a jerk at times, I had observed how some jocks picked on kids who weren’t like them and I determined not to be like that. As a result, I got along well with everyone.

  My sobriety came to an end during my junior year. I don’t have an explanation other than perhaps I gave in to my addictive side. I had been having fun without partying, but since leaving rehab I had struggled with my desire to have fun and party. I just wanted to do my own thing again.

  I still belonged to my sober group, but we all eventually went back to partying, and one day we decided to take a trip to Sparta, New Jersey. I looked forward to our trip for a whole week. I planned ahead, telling friends to take vodka for me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had never been a heavy drinker, but for our getaway, I was determined to go off the deep end.

  In Sparta, I took a large bottle of Gatorade and dumped out half the bottle. A girl handed me the vodka, and I poured it into the Gatorade. I chugged the mix. I got so sick so fast that I probably should have been taken to the hospital. I spent that night in the bathroom, passed out. Thankfully, one of my buddies, Adam, stayed with me the whole time trying to help me. It was a very scary experience.

  After that, I lost my desire to drink, but I started smoking pot again every day and reentered the party scene. It seemed like someone in our school was throwing a party every weekend. We really had so much fun.

  Weed was my consistent painkiller of choice because it masked much of my feelings. It was my escape. I didn’t like feeling hyped up, and weed made me mellow. I got high every day. I was a full-blown marijuana addict: I didn’t feel right when I wasn’t high. I don’t think my parents knew about the marijuana. I was working for my father and had my own money to buy pot.

  I wound up flunking my senior year and missing out on graduation with the classmates I’d had since kindergarten. I had been part of the school’s vocational program, taking classes in the morning and then working for my father in the afternoon for half my credits. But I skipped too many of my morning classes and failed. In order to get my diploma, I had to attend school an extra semester. I felt like I was on an island that semester, and the worst part was being at school and not being able to play football. I hung out at practices and helped coach when I could, and I attended all the games. I am probably one of the rare people who got to be a kindergartner and a senior twice.

  I didn’t give much thought to attending college. I was not a big fan of books to begin with, and my father never once said “You should try college” or anything like that. Although my mother had encouraged us kids academically, my father did not get involved with our schooling much. Anytime I needed his help with my homework, he would just answer the questions for me and move on to his next task. We had a family business, and I think my father planned all along for me to work full time for him after I finished school.

  My father instilled in me the importance of a strong work ethic and the value of money. I just wish he had taught me in a different way. He worked long hours for as far back as I can remember, and Danny, I, and sometimes Mikey became part of his work crew when he deemed us old enough. I started working for my father—his company was called Paul’s Welding then—before I was a teenager, sweeping the shop floor and paint dipping and hanging railings, which was an extremely messy and arduous task. I’m pretty sure looking back that dealing with all those fumes was fairly unhealthy.

  I worked on weekends during the school year and all summer during breaks, causing me to miss out on much of the summer fun my friends enjoyed. I became accustomed to working hard at a young age. When I finished high school, the really long hours started.

  From my early
teens, working ten hours a day for two weeks straight, without a Sunday off, was not abnormal. I had worked harder and more hours than probably most adults. Even though I blew too much of my hard-earned money on partying, I learned from my father what it took to make money.

  After graduating, I resisted the temptation to get a credit card. (I did not get one until I was in my thirties.) If I did not have the money to buy something I wanted, I didn’t buy it. Simple as that. I watched as friends started going into debt, and I could not understand running up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and having next to nothing to show for it.

  Also at this time, my father placed me in charge of the railings department. I had learned to weld at thirteen, and one of the guys in the shop, Pauly Perone, had showed me how to make railings. That made me want to build things. So before I finished high school, I already had enough experience making railings to run the busiest department at Orange County Ironworks. It was production work, but I enjoyed it.

  Working alongside my father that much was a bad thing for our combustible relationship. It was just like having an unhealthy marriage. We spent long days together at the shop, and then we’d be together after work, too. My father and I spent more time together than he and my mother did. It was too much; there wasn’t enough separation between us. When asked if our blowups on the show were real, I answer that we had been getting into arguments like that at work ten years before the cameras showed up.

  My father always seemed to have some type of issue with me. For whatever reason, he made a great effort in my life to frustrate me, and he did so exceedingly well. He knew which buttons of mine to push. Even during the years of the show, he would apologize to me because his father had done the same thing to him. Although my father never physically abused me, he did not break anything generationally.

  In my early twenties, I started to sprout my wings professionally. Just like while I was finding myself as a teenager, my father responded by seeking to control me more.

  Although I had yet to discover what I now consider my creative gift, looking back I can see how my creativity was beginning to emerge. It was different from what showed when I began to design custom bikes. Back then, my creativity existed in finding more efficient ways to get tasks done. And it was my dad who gave me the opportunity to discover that creativity through motorcycles.

  Problem solving is part of my makeup, and it was definitely evident in me as a kid who could put toys together by looking at pictures of the finished products. From an early age I was good at not only figuring out how things were built but also how to do things better.

  As an adult in the steel business, my gift translated into coming up with ways to improve how we made railings. The end game, with my father as a self-employed business owner, was to become faster at the process so we could make more product and, thus, more money. My father had a lot of bills to pay, and he screamed at me every day to be more productive. Unfortunately, there was no good enough for him. I could make ten thousand feet of railing a day and, based on his reaction, it was as though I hadn’t done anything. No matter how great of a job I did for my father, in quantity and quality, he wanted more.

  To be fair, I was not the only person in his business that he treated that way. He dealt with everyone by yelling and screaming that whatever had been done was not good enough. That was his method for motivating people. In his mind, if he handed out compliments, employees would slack off. If he played the part of a maniac, however, then his employees would work faster out of fear. It’s like the old mafioso saying “Would you rather be feared or loved?” But then again, my father could also be funny. We had a lot of fun at work telling jokes and pulling pranks. And he worked as hard as anyone else, so he was not demanding anything of his employees that he was not delivering himself. To portray him as this horrible monster at work would be inaccurate. But he could be a monster when he chose to be. That’s the way he felt he needed to operate to make his company successful.

  In the midnineties, my father took a big step back from the ironworks company. He had been busting his tail in the business for years, and in need of a hobby, he took up customizing motorcycles. As he turned bikes into choppers, his hobby showed potential of becoming a new business. He brought me in after I had put in a day’s work at the shop to work with him on building a bike from scratch.

  Choppers, with their stretched front ends and extended forks and often very tall handlebars, had been more popular back in the sixties and seventies. Two bikes—the Captain America Bike and the Billy Bike—featured in the 1969 film Easy Rider had really helped make choppers an in thing.

  But choppers hadn’t been cool for a good twenty to twenty-five years. My father and I both liked the look of a well-constructed chopper, though. Together we drew up a bike with an old-school look that my father was partial to, and I took a lot of his ideas and put my welding experience to use in fabricating the pieces of the bike.

  The final result was a sleek chopper accented by a black paint job with yellow flames that made both of us proud.

  CREATIVE SIDE EMERGES

  My parents separated when I was in my early twenties. While they were on break from each other, my father started seeing another woman. But instead of telling my mom, “Hey, I’m seeing someone else now, and I’m not coming back,” he told my sister about his girlfriend. Cristin was fourteen. All she wanted was for her parents to be back together, and he broke this news to her first? That was an emotionally devastating moment. After being married for twenty-five years, he didn’t have the guts to tell my mother himself.

  At that point the fighting between my father and me ramped up. Not only did he leave us and do the wrong thing morally, but he told my sister instead of my mother. Mom had stayed with him through hell. Then some years after he sobered up, he decided he wanted to be a “wild man”—as he put it—and decided to leave.

  Our personal relationship was already headed downhill. Then our professional relationship worsened because his girlfriend wanted to become involved in making major decisions in the company. From my perspective, she wanted to wedge her way into our business, plus I was still carrying fresh anger from my father’s split with my mother.

  We fought really bad then. But, still, we kept marching on, as my father spent more and more time building bikes in his basement, while I continued to run the railings department at the shop.

  Even though he stayed mad at me, he did not hesitate to call me at the shop and have me come to his basement and do some fabrication for a bike he was building. The more I welded for him and helped him put together bikes, the more intrigued I became with designing bikes myself.

  My father visited a Biketoberfest in Daytona Beach, Florida, and observed bike lovers paying big bucks for customized bikes. He determined on the spot that he could custom-build bikes that people would want and, after returning home, set out to build a Pro Street bike in his basement. Near the end of the process, he brought me in to add custom fabrication, and together we finished a bike he named True Blue because of its color.

  After the bike drew rave reviews when we showed it off around town, my dad decided to go all-in on his hobby. My father used his retirement money so we could build five or six bikes without having a single order in for a bike. It was a big risk, but my father believed it would pay off. He took the financial risk that made it all happen.

  The rest is well-documented history. The short version is that we hauled a trailer load of bikes built in my father’s basement to the 1999 Biketoberfest and set up shop among all the other builders. We did not sell a single bike, but two big breaks occurred. First, an editor from Hot Bike magazine loved our work and assigned his photographer to shoot photos of two of our bikes to run in future issues. Second, we made a contact that led to the owner of a car dealership in South Carolina purchasing five of our bikes.

  Later I’ll pick up the story of how those developments ultimately led to us landing our television show with Discovery Channel. But at that ti
me we put a shop around back of Orange County Ironworks and went into production.

  My father came up with the name for the new company: Orange County Choppers. We were spit-balling potential names, and nothing catchy had landed. Then my father told me that he had incorporated OCC with his girlfriend, which irritated me because he had just made a big decision not only without me but with his new girlfriend, who I thought shouldn’t have been weighing in on business matters.

  I hated the name because after his owning Orange County Ironworks, Orange County Choppers didn’t seem original or creative. But my father got that one right, because the new name worked out well for the company, the call letters eventually led to the logo that I designed, and the name brought attention to our area of New York.

  My father first brought me in to fabricate. Over the next couple of years, I gradually stopped working at the steel shop to spend all my time on bikes.

  During this time, when I was twenty-five, I discovered that the creative process, with its need for troubleshooting how to best execute ideas, was my strong suit.

  Back then, theme bikes were not the brand-type themes I became associated with through building bikes on our show for clients and causes. Spiderwebs intrigued me, and one day an idea hit me for a build that had spiderwebs incorporated into the bike. I started the bike as a side project for myself, and as the bike developed, the idea came to have a full integration of Spider-Man, including the paint with his distinctive eyes on either side of the tank.