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I wanted to integrate an automobile grill into the build and did tons of research before coming across a ’39 Chevy grill that lent itself to the lines and shape of a bike. We positioned it in front of the down tube to give the bike a unique grill-faced look, and we used the headlight of a ’37 Chevy as the bike’s headlight. We chose a simple flat black paint job and pinstriping to create the hot-rod look.
One of my favorite features was a reverse half steering wheel, wrapped in leather, as the handlebars and a matching crosshatch-stitched seat. I wanted to give the tires a whitewall effect. There was no white on the tires, so because we had low-profile tires, we taped off the wheel and powder-coated flat red on the spokes and center of the rims and then powder-coated the outer edge of the rims white. The end result was the tires looking whitewalled.
Going to film the show, we were happy with the bike, and I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about Jesse during the show because the Gas Monkey guys had taken shots at him through the media in the run-up. Jesse would be focused on them, not me.
The tension during the second live show was less compared to the first because we knew what to expect as far as filming. But we also knew it would be our last act with American Chopper (we had already filmed the final episode), and with the pressure to repeat as winner, there still were plenty of butterflies flying around inside my gut.
The stage had four garage doors, and when each of our doors was raised, we were to drive our bike out for the audience to see. My team and I had placed a leading lady hood ornament from a General Motors product on the front of the bike. When my garage door opened, I couldn’t see well because the smoke effect had been overdone. I pulled forward too soon, and the leading lady got caught on the rising garage door. The door lifted the bike off the ground momentarily before the hood ornament slipped off the door. Just like at the unveiling of the Cadillac Bike, a mistake increased the showmanship level because it appeared as though I were intentionally popping a wheelie coming out of the garage.
The Gas Monkey Garage guys were announced as second-place finishers, and they seemed surprised they hadn’t won. Honestly, I didn’t think their bike even deserved second. But they had a new show and strong fan base, and that helped them in the voting.
By announcing the second-place finisher first, that left my father, Jesse, and me in the running for the top spot. I believed that our team had built the best bike, but it also was a television vote and, thus, a bit of a popularity contest as well.
Once again, when the winner was announced—after another overly long pause for dramatic effect—my name was called. I was told after the show that even with four bikes in the competition, ours had received over 50 percent of the votes.
Compared to the first competition, being declared the winner brought a feeling of relief more than anything else. We enjoyed another good celebration, but to me, the bigger takeaway was that American Chopper had ended on a really high note.
We didn’t fade away—we went out with a bang.
EVERY DAY IS A GIFT
Our home needed one more thing. After we married, Rachael had turned my house into a family home. I’d bought the house a few years before we met. Being a typical guy, I didn’t pay much attention to the style of furniture. I wasn’t even concerned with making sure all the rooms were filled with furniture. For the longest time when people would visit, they would ask if I just moved in. Give me a place to sit, a place to eat, and a place to lie down, and I’m set.
Rachael raised the standards. We painted and brought in furniture. Things started going up on our walls that I would never have thought we needed. But, as usual, Rachael knew what she was doing, and she turned my bachelor’s pad into a family home.
Our place also was home of PJD, and business really started to take off soon after our wedding. Rachael handled the books, vendors, and insurance, and she oversaw the day-to-day in the office while I worked in the shop. We traveled to a bunch of different places. We worked hard and long hours, but it was fun. We were blissful in the beginning.
But a couple of years later, it was time to bring someone else into our home.
We had planned on waiting about that long to have a baby, but getting pregnant proved more difficult than we had imagined. After a year, it became stressful. After another year, it became quite stressful. We did not tell anyone that we were trying, because we knew of friends who had, and they were constantly being asked about their progress, which only added to the stress.
Rachael found it upsetting that people who thought they knew us because of the show would come up and ask when we planned to have a baby. And it happened all the time. She would politely say “Eventually” or “Not yet,” but the truth was, we were trying!
Rachael visited a fertility specialist, and everything checked out okay. I was in my late thirties, so my age became a potential factor. I also remembered hearing somewhere the warnings that smoking pot could make you sterile and feared that could be the case with me.
I wanted to have babies, but Rachael really wanted to have babies. One day I was in the shower and thinking about how much Rachael looked forward to becoming a mother. I wanted to have a baby more for her than for myself. In the shower, I asked God, Can You please give her a baby?
Not long after that prayer, in the spring of 2014, we were invited to Nashville so I could speak about Michael Guido as he received an honor from the Gospel Music Association. We stayed the weekend, which turned out to be truly memorable, if you know what I mean. It was funny to Rachael and me that after two years of trying to get pregnant, we had to go to Nashville and be a part of an honor for Guido to have a baby. A significant event in our marriage coincided with a significant event in the life of a man who had been so important to us. God has a great sense of humor.
A little over a month after we came home from Tennessee, we traveled to California on business. Rachael put on one of her dresses, and it was too tight on her hips. She said, “Either I’ve suddenly gained weight or I’m pregnant.” We kind of brushed it off. Toward the end of the trip, Rachael started to feel a little off. The night we returned home, she took a pregnancy test. In fact, I think she took a few because she couldn’t believe the results. I was lying in bed looking at some old cars online (I had started collecting old cars and was looking to add to my collection) when Rachael came out of the bathroom and told me, “You can’t buy any more old cars. We have to save for college.”
On February 3, 2015, Hudson Seven Teutul was born.
Hudson was the only boy name that we liked. We came up with plenty of girl names to choose from, but Hudson was it for boys. I don’t know what we’ll do if we have another boy.
Seven as the middle name was Rachael’s idea, and we chose it for several reasons. Rachael and I met in 2007, and his due date was in our seventh year together. Seven is also a prominent number in the Bible, as it represents completeness. Hudson definitely brought completion to our marriage.
Birth is a miracle, and having that first child is a real game changer. I have never experienced anything that has brought me more joy than Hudson. It takes a parent to understand the significance of having a child. To me, making a human being together is an awesome responsibility that God gives us.
We worry over our son—I’ve been told that’s normal for first-time parents. But we did have one scare regarding Hudson’s heart. He had a murmur that our doctor recommended we have checked out by a specialist. It was at the end of a week, and when I called to make an appointment, the specialist’s office scheduled us for early the following Monday morning. Their urgency made us worry that something might seriously be wrong, and we spent the weekend scared. It turned out to be nothing. We had one of the best baby heart specialists practically in our backyard. (People came in from all over the country to see this doctor.) He looked Hudson over and told us that a valve was shutting slowly, but that was normal for a baby. We learned from the specialist that a baby’s heart continues to develop after birt
h and that many adult heart specialists do not fully understand the development of a baby’s heart.
Even though everything turned out fine, there is no scare like one regarding a child’s health. Going through that early in Hudson’s life reminded us to treat every day with him as a gift. Having a child changes how you view everything else in your life.
I had anticipated becoming a father for many years. I wanted to be ahead of the game by thinking of how I would handle fatherhood. My brother Danny has five kids, and I have been close to my nieces and nephews. Because of how much time I have spent with them, fatherhood didn’t freak me out.
Yet I also knew that becoming a father would be a challenge for me because of what it was like growing up with my father. Even though Hudson isn’t three yet, I believe that through the grace of God I am already breaking the generational curse in my family.
I went from being single into my thirties and enjoying the selfishness it brings, to getting married, and then to the birth of our first child. Those steps were good for me; they made me grow up and mature. And that has helped me feel comfortable in my position as a dad.
There are heavy, unnatural things in the dynamic with my father that I don’t believe I carry with me. Because of my relationship with God and the work He has done within me, I do not have to deal with a lot of the issues my father does. There are remnants that can show up sometimes, but all in all, I feel good about the type of dad I will be to Hudson and any other little Teutuls that might one day grace our family.
Unfortunately, that confidence I carry has come through separating from the unhealthy relationship with my father. As I write this book, he is sixty-eight, and I think he has calmed down some. He’s softened as he’s aged, and he’s not as volatile as he once was. My father lives about five minutes from our house, but we have very little contact. Most of our communication comes in the form of an occasional text. He has showed up more at family functions lately, although Hudson was two months old before he came to see his grandson for the first time. My father also missed Hudson’s first birthday party; he said he was too upset over the death of one of his dogs the day before. I want my son to have his grandfather around, but I don’t know if that will, or can, happen.
Mikey is working with our dad, so there is still that family connection. But I don’t think my father’s heart has changed concerning me. I’ve always believed he had an issue with me, more so than with my siblings, that he could not get past.
When I reflect back over my life, I cannot say that my father and I have ever had a good relationship. Back in the early days of building bikes together, we had fun. I think we have tried more at certain times than others to get along well, but our relationship has always been one of adversity.
It’s a good question for discussion as to whether our relationship would be better now if we had not filmed American Chopper. There is no way to know the answer. I think my father became somewhat of a monster because of the show; he took on the persona of “Senior” after we became big. I once ran across a list of ten descriptions of a parent. If a check mark could be written next to three of the ten, then the parent could be considered narcissistic. I checked all ten for my father. Now, combine narcissistic tendencies with the power that comes from being a reality television star, and that is where the monster part comes in.
The show placed my father in a position where he could make up the rules and the people around him had to play by his rules. That, in turn, created a situation where that narcissistic condition was being fed in a way that otherwise would not have occurred. Power often comes with money. Fame really feeds the narcissist.
People need to live within parameters; they need to be able to be told they are wrong and at times be put in their proper place. My father had money and fame, and that gave him the power to surround himself with yea-sayers dependent on him for paychecks. The show was on for ten years, so that environment lasted a long time.
Also, when you’re a TV star, it’s too easy to believe the hype about you, to believe it when people tell you that you are the greatest. The result is that the rules of life—what is right and wrong—get blurred because, as a narcissist, only your world exists. Anyone who doesn’t want to fit into your mold is out.
My father would say publicly that all of us at Orange County Choppers were a team. But inside the shop, it was different. I once overheard him telling someone in his office that no matter what anyone told that person, everything that had transpired at OCC, every bit of success, was because of my father and him alone.
Our conflicts on American Chopper are probably rooted in a one-sided sense of competition that began to develop before the show. When I began to discover my creativity in designing bikes, when our bikes’ designs started to attract attention, our relationship became more strained than it had been. As long as my father could take credit for things that I did, he was okay. But division came when he could no longer claim ownership of what I created. Instead of my father being proud of me, he became jealous.
We held different views of our company’s success. I viewed what I did as complementary to him, capable of taking his work to another level. He saw me as a competitor. I never felt competitive with my father, yet he treated me like a jealous friend. Fathers and sons get into it with each other. But at the end of the day, after the arguing is finished, the dad should want what is best for his son, for his son to excel beyond what the father could ever do. But my father does not want that for me.
When he had an opportunity to see the business as a legacy he could pass on to the next generation, where he could have taken the approach of “Here’s the keys, Son,” he instead decided he did not want to have me around anymore. So he fired me.
We should have made for a good team. The creative was my strong suit, while he had the drive and ability to invest money. Dad took all the financial risk. I’ve consistently acknowledged that, and I forever will be grateful to him for providing me with the opportunity to discover my gift. But he does not believe that I have earned anything. Much of that probably goes back to the way he was raised. For as long as I can remember, he has looked at me as though I had it easy compared to him. I certainly am a benefactor of my father’s drive, work ethic, and willingness to risk his retirement money to build bikes. OCC would not have existed otherwise. But somewhere along the way, the creative began attracting more attention than the company itself, and my father felt he was not receiving enough accolades. We made for an amazing combination for a while, but it didn’t last. It could not last.
And for ten years, our bad relationship played out in front of a worldwide audience.
I am the type of person who likes to look for the positives in the negatives, and as odd as this sounds, I hope one positive came from my father and I on television screaming at each other and destroying doors after our fights. It was weird having total strangers walk up and ask about our relationship, or tell me that I was in the right, or tell me that my father was right. It is not normal to have people who don’t know you take sides in your relationship with your father. But our dysfunctional relationship has helped countless people, even if it was just by helping them realize that being abnormal isn’t as abnormal as it seems.
The sheer number of people who have expressed relating to our relationship is staggering. They aren’t just fathers and sons; they’re mothers and daughters, siblings, families that do business and work together. No direct relationship is necessary, either. It can be a son or daughter who has witnessed abuse, or a friend who struggles in a relationship. Everyone is affected by family dynamics, and that transcends gender and culture. Our ratings overseas made me aware of that.
People want to hide their dysfunction, and understandably so. But that is not always healthy. If nothing else, perhaps by being truly real on television, we gave people who could relate to us the courage to come out of hiding and seek help.
HONOR MY FATHER?
My relationship with my father makes interesting the commandment found
in Exodus 20:12 to “honor your father and your mother.” The rest of that verse contains a promise for those who honor their parents: “so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”
What that verse does not contain is an exemption or waiver. It does not say “unless your father mistreats you.” Or “except for those whose father rejects them.”
Scripture is clear: I am to honor my father. In spite of the circumstances, I have a responsibility to him. How he treated me, or the fact that he fired and sued me, does not relieve me of or lessen my responsibility.
Honor your father.
The way I define honor in our context is not to discredit my father, not to disrespect him, and to take care of him should the time come when he physically needs my assistance.
Rachael and I invited him to our wedding even though he was suing me at the time. Honestly, the invitation was issued reluctantly. But with Rachael’s help, I came around to the idea, and although he decided not to respond or show up, I felt like I had done my part.
STILL IN MY PRIME
Ten years on television is a long, long time, and I didn’t miss American Chopper right after filming ended. Even though I had been self-employed since starting PJD, having the show had basically been like working for the network. The show could get overwhelming at times, with the required travel and appearances, the production calls, and the “He said this about you” regarding my father. As much as I enjoyed American Chopper, there had been times when I looked forward to the show ending.
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