American Outlaw Page 15

  I knew I had to get out. And fast.

  That night, Rob and I were screwing around backstage before the show, and he started teasing me again.

  “For a big, rugged fucker, you sure are a big softy,” Rob said. “Aren’t you? I mean, tour manager? Booking rooms, are you serious?”

  “I don’t have to bust heads to be a man, Rob,” I said gently.

  “Scared of the crowd.” He shook his head sadly. “Man, I never thought I’d see the day!”

  “Unlike your typical rock star,” I said, “I was not born with a tiny dingle.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “All I mean to say is that I have a normal-sized penis. Unlike your typical singer for White Zombie, I don’t feel the need to continually assert my masculinity in public.”

  “Oh bullshit!” Rob laughed. “You’ve gone soft, Jesse. Man, you would not even stage dive now, given the chance. You old woman!”

  “I’d stage dive,” I countered.

  “You would not.”

  “Absolutely. It’d be fun.”

  “Really?” Rob said wickedly. “How about tonight?”

  “How high is the stage?”

  “Fifteen feet.” He laughed. “Big drop! But I mean, if that’s too high, you could wait until our gig this spring at the La Jolla Senior Center.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Tonight’s the night.”

  “When I go into ‘I Am Legend,’” Rob said, “that’s your cue. You dive right into the crowd and start surfing. That work for you?”

  “I’m Jesse James,” I reminded him. “Original head-buster. In some circles, I am still ‘the man.’”

  “You are so not doing this,” Rob said, laughing.

  I watched the whole show excitedly, like it was my first. When White Zombie finally thrashed the opening chords to “I Am Legend,” I took a running start. My big steel-toed boots smashed hard onto the boards of the stage. At the last possible moment, I pushed off the steel lip, and, jumping as high as I could, soared directly over the crowd like a huge, ugly eagle.

  Detroit fuckers aren’t stupid, though. The crowd parted like split shit, and I smashed directly down onto the concrete floor. I dislocated my elbow, shattered my radial head, broke my thumb, my nose, and my cheeks.

  “Christ,” I mumbled weakly. “Can somebody call a doctor?”

  The band wailed on unrelentingly. Some punk’s boot came down smashing on my busted thumb, shooting waves of awful pain. A knee slammed into my back, and for a moment, I lost consciousness. I was twenty-four years old, and I was done with this shit.

  ——

  When I arrived at my mom’s house the next day, I had a cast on my arm, a bandage on my head, and a perfect imprint of a Nike tennis shoe on my chest, where a doctor had stepped on me to snap my arm back into place.

  “Jesse!” my mom said. “What on earth happened to you?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said. My head pulsed with pain. “But I’m getting out of the security business.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” she admitted. “Those people weren’t good company for you. What do you intend to do?”

  “Oh,” I mumbled. “I’ve got a plan.”

  I’d been working on a little shovel pan straight-leg frame-custom Harley for about a year in my mom’s garage. I’d taken my time on it, spared no expense, and in my opinion, it had come out really good. Whenever I’d take it out, people would really dig it, ask me questions about it. I decided the bike might serve me well as a kind of portfolio piece, and I started to take it around to shops to see if I could get a job on the strength of the work I’d done on it.

  Performance Machine was the biggest Harley custom brake manufacturer in Long Beach. The owner, Perry Sands, knew my dad, so it was a natural that I’d ask him for a gig.

  “Take a close look, man,” I said, after introducing myself and telling him what I had in mind. “This bike has Performance wheels and Performance brakes.”

  “Sure,” Perry said, looking it over carefully. “I can see that. But which shop put this together for you?”

  “Nobody,” I said proudly. “I did it myself, in my own garage.”

  He gave me a doubtful glance. “Uh-huh. I bet you did. And I guess you painted it yourself, too?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said stubbornly. “I can do all this stuff. If you give me a chance, I’ll show you. I’ll work hard as hell.”

  Frowning, Perry gave me the quick up and down. “How about that busted arm?”

  “I heal quick.”

  Eventually, Perry offered me a job in the back of his shop, installing brakes and doing whatever dirty work needed to be done.

  “Pay’s twelve dollars an hour to start. How’s that sound to you?”

  “Kinda shitty,” I admitted, “but I’ll take it.”

  “Good.” He laughed. “You start tomorrow.”

  Performance Machine was just like the shipyard. I came in early and left late. When I was in the shop, I put my head down and worked like an animal. Soon, the great feeling that I’d had in Seattle returned. I was using my hands and my mind to make something beautiful and functional and cool. The work gave me a natural high, every single day, even though I was just pretty much a grease monkey there.

  Soon, Perry and his brother Ted took a shine to me, probably because I was so serious about the whole job, especially for a kid.

  “You actually like this crap, huh, Jesse?” they said.

  “It’s okay,” I said nonchalantly.

  “Get a load of him!” Ted said with a laugh.

  Being back in Long Beach had another advantage: it helped me focus on my relationship. Karla and I were still going strong, and as each day passed, we seemed to get more serious.

  “Jess, your hair is getting so long,” she said one evening, as we were drinking beers together in the hot kitchen of her cramped Huntington Beach apartment. “It’ll be longer than mine soon.”

  “Just working up the nerve to apply to Captain Cream’s,” I explained.

  “You are a weirdo!” said Karla, laughing. “Oh my God! I’m dating a freak.” I drew her closer to me and kissed her on her pretty, tanned shoulder. She took a long pull at my beer. “Who lives with his mom.”

  “My mom’s all right,” I said, defensively.

  “But as a roommate?” Karla wrinkled her nose. “You can do better than that, Jesse.”

  “I doubt it,” I replied. “I don’t think anyone else would put up with me.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure,” Karla said quietly. She ran her fingers through my hair thoughtfully, from my scalp to the back of my neck. “I think I might be able to do a pretty good job.”

  So that was that: Karla and I decided to take the plunge. Together, we pooled our money and took out a six-month lease on a little house up on Hackett Avenue. It made for very humble beginnings. I brought my Harley, a beat-up pickup truck, and all my tools. Karla had her swimsuits, her high heels, and an old dinner table. That was about it. For some reason, we did the move at night. Maybe we thought it was safer or something. It wasn’t a very good neighborhood.

  “Well?” she asked me on our first night there. “What do you think?”

  We lay in bed next to each other, and I could hear the traffic whizzing by outside. It sounded like the ocean—if the ocean had an old internal combustion engine.

  “This place is a dump.”

  “Jesse,” Karla said, outraged.

  “Oh, hell, I sort of like it,” I admitted.

  “Man,” Karla said, snuggling closer to me. “We are going to be happy here. I know it.”

  I’d never really had a home of my own in my entire life. It had always been my dad’s place, or my mom’s, or Rhonda’s mom’s—and it had always ended badly. That night on Hackett Avenue with Karla, I felt the oddest sensation of safeness.

  My natural inclination, of course, was to celebrate the occasion with some violence.

  “I’ve decided to teach you how to kickbox,” I told Karla, the next morning. “
That way, you can keep safe when I’m at work.”

  “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, Jesse,” Karla assured me.

  “Well, now you’ll be even more capable,” I said.

  We sparred for a few minutes. I showed her how to throw a cross.

  “Not bad!” I said. “For a girl, you have pretty good form.”

  “Oh, for a girl, huh?”

  “Don’t get all offended,” I said. “Here, let me show you some combinations.”

  I hooked a short left into her chest, and followed with a right jab. But Karla darted away from the left, and in so doing, she stepped right into my jab. I bipped her good, right on the chin.

  “Oh, shit!” I laughed. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t . . .”

  I never got to finish my sentence. Karla socked me in the face with her gloved fist, as hard as she could.

  “Fuck!” I cried, holding my eye in pain. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Instinct,” Karla snapped. She was still holding up her dukes in front of her. She stared me down like a boxer. “Reflexes took over.”

  I tried to open my eye, but already it had begun to swell. “Instinct. Got it.”

  “So what’s next?” she said cheerfully. She bounced nimbly from foot to foot.

  “You’re done,” I said very quietly, unlacing my gloves. “Flying colors. You passed.”

  We had tons of love for each other. But we were not a perfect couple. Adjusting to regular life after having been on the road for so many years proved a bigger challenge than I had anticipated. It wasn’t that I had been so wild on tour; quite the opposite, actually. As security, I was so used to constantly sweating to ensure that no drummers got stabbed and no groupies got pregnant that I’d rarely had the chance to blow off some steam. Now at long last, it was my time to be a shithead.

  “I don’t like you going to strip bars,” Karla informed me.

  “I don’t even speak to the girls, honey,” I told her. “Honest, no one gets a dime from me.”

  “Then why are you even there if you don’t talk to the girls?”

  “My friends make me go,” I swore. “I try to steer us all over to the library, but you know, they just won’t have it.”

  I took Karla seriously, but I also felt like it was my God-given right to run around, talk shit, get into fights, and get drunk with my friends. I knew she couldn’t press me too hard about going to strip clubs; after all, hadn’t she been doing pretty much the same thing for years now? I guess it was kind of rotten of me to use that against her, but I did it anyway. I didn’t know any better.

  “Let me be my own fucking man,” I demanded, coming home drunk in the middle of the night. “Just because we live together doesn’t mean we’re married. All right?”

  “Yeah, you sure are a big man,” she said. “I love the way you’re acting, it’s so adult and cool.”

  “I told you, you’re my woman, and that should be enough for you.”

  “It’s not that, Jesse. I don’t like you running around with that crowd . . .”

  “Okay, Karessa,” I grumbled. “Just let me get some sleep, how’s about that?”

  “How dare you call me that in this home!” she snapped. “You want to sleep? Go sleep on the fucking couch.”

  Despite my growing enthusiasm for drinking and carousing, I somehow always managed to be on point for work. Within a short while, I’d become the go-to guy when anything special came up for Perry or Ted in terms of custom design. One day, a customer named Bob Bowder came in to buy some wheels and brakes. He’d been a famous hot-rodder from Southern California in the fifties.

  “Hey, I know who you are,” he said with a smile.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been hearing about this long-haired kid who practically lives in the back of Performance Machine nowadays. You’re Jesse James, aren’t you?”

  “That’s me,” I admitted, wiping my hands on a grease-stained rag.

  “Look,” Bob said. “I don’t want to get you red in the face, but Boyd Coddington’s been asking about you. Did you know that?”

  “Nope,” I said, truthfully. Coddington was in the hot rod business; I was a motorcycle guy, not a car freak, so I’d never really taken the time to pay too much attention to his shop.

  “I believe he’s interested in getting you to come work for him,” Bob said, casually. “The way I hear it, Boyd’s saying that if you’re half as good as what people have been saying, he wants you on his team.”

  “I do bikes,” I said, shrugging.

  “Well, don’t you see, that’s just it,” Bob said, lowering his voice to an excited whisper. “Boyd’s been trying to make some custom motorcycle wheels and parts, but he’s not having much luck with it.”

  “Ah,” I said, beginning to understand.

  “He needs someone who really knows his way around a Harley.” Bob looked at me. “Are you that guy?”

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The only person I knew to ask was an old fifties greaser named Doyle Gammel, who I’d gotten to be friends with through the shop. He also happened to know my dad from back in the day. Doyle was savvy, but he was also Perry’s best friend, so I knew I was sort of taking a chance by asking him for advice.

  “Are you fucking KIDDING me?” Doyle roared. “Boyd Coddington is asking you to come work for him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What should I do?”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get into that shop?” Doyle’s eyes flashed, and he leaned up so close to me that, for a moment, I was sure he was going to clamp his teeth onto my face. “Boyd’s the best! If you don’t take that job, I’ll fucking kill you!”

  With that even-keeled recommendation in mind, I went to Perry the following day and gave him my notice. A week later, I was working for Boyd.

  “You’re going to be my wheel guy,” Boyd explained to me. “Understood? You are going to eat, shit, and breathe wheels.”

  Boyd was the biggest custom-car wheel manufacturer in California. But he hadn’t been able to tap into the market for bikes yet.

  “Motorcycle geeks are finicky,” he explained to me. “Man, if they give me a call, and they get a sense I don’t know what I’m talking about? They’re gone.” He stared at me. “What I need is an expert. Can you build me some bitchin’ wheels, and talk about them to customers?”

  I cleared my throat nervously. “I can try, that’s all I can promise.” I motioned to the workers who walked confidently around the shop. “Some pretty intimidating company I have here.”

  “Ah, you’ll be fine,” Boyd encouraged me. “You got some hot rod in you.”

  The talent Boyd had amassed was truly staggering, though. I couldn’t help but take a tiny step back when I walked in for the first time. Twelve of the most talented dudes on the planet had been assembled together to build custom cars from the ground up. They were the all-stars of the hot rod world: Chip Foose, George Gould, Steven Greninger, Roy Plinkos, from El Paso, Texas—they were simply world-class. Each painter, each upholsterer, each fabricator sat at the very top of his field. And I had been brought there to work with them.

  “Hey, everyone,” I said, on my first day on the job. I gave a small wave, then pointed to myself. “I’m Jesse James.”

  No one even raised his head. The shop continued to hum along with its steady, patient buzz of activity.

  “Great to meet you, too,” I mumbled, and set about my work.

  For my first few weeks, I spent literally every second of my time welding in the back room. No one spoke to me. It figured: I was a tattooed kid in my mid-twenties, and the next youngest guy there was probably about forty. A couple of master metalworkers from Sweden were in their eighties. I just didn’t fit in.

  One afternoon, I was sweating over a wheel, a split spun hoop, adding material to it to enlarge its circumference. I was all folded over my work, my welding helmet over my head. With no warning at all, Greninger walked up and pounded on the table as hard as he co
uld with a hammer. WHAM!

  I jumped about a foot and dropped the welder on my pants.

  “AAAHHHH!” I screamed involuntarily. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Just making sure you were paying attention,” Steve said quietly. Walking away, he added thoughtfully, “Shithead.”

  After a second, I laughed. I knew then that I’d been accepted.

  Things were pretty cool after that. I’d come into the shop with a metal tape, and fast-talk all the old guys into letting me blast it through the morning. “Yeah, you like Slayer, dontcha, ya Swedish motherfuckers?” They had no idea what to make of that music, except they were pretty sure they hated it. I made some good friendships with the old weirdos, though. Roy Plinkos quickly became a teacher to me. As long as I brought him a pint of peppermint schnapps, he’d show me all kinds of cool stuff. You wouldn’t want to get his breath near any kind of open flame, though.

  Everyone did impressive work. We built beautiful 1932 Fords literally from the ground up, making the tubes, the wheels, the frame, and the suspension all by hand. We constructed a car for Wilt Chamberlain. Boyd quickly decided he liked me, probably because it was clear that I was superstoked to be there. I was making very little, maybe $700 a week, a fraction of what I had earned while on tour, but I didn’t care. I knew the experience I was getting was rare and valuable. My own work was a success, too. Wheels were flying off Boyd’s shelves as fast as I could manufacture them. The custom motorcycle movement was well under way, and Boyd, savvy businessman that he was, had gotten in at just the right time.

  “You know,” I said to Karla thoughtfully, “I just might be able to tap into this market myself. I mean, I could probably make some bike parts right here at home.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” she asked me. “You have the garage space.”

  “Boyd probably wouldn’t want me making wheels,” I said. “He’d see it as competition.”

  “Then how about making something else?” Karla said reasonably. “Something he’s not doing as much.”

  I thought about it for a while, and then it came to me: fenders. When I’d been at Performance Machine, one of my occasional jobs had been to take Harley fenders and widen them. In the early nineties, a lot of people liked to have a big back tire for their Harleys—that was just the prevailing style. That meant fenders had to be bigger, too, so they could fit over the large back tire.