American Outlaw Read online

  Masochistically, I switched from channel to channel. It was all the same. The bad news rolled in over and over again, like waves of toxic radiation.

  “Bullock moved out of the couple’s Sunset Beach home yesterday, fleeing to an undisclosed location . . .”

  Click.

  “The actress has canceled her trip abroad to promote The Blind Side . . .”

  Click.

  “A source close to the couple reports that James, once abnormally protective of his wife, had grown sullen and discontented in recent years . . .”

  After several more minutes of watching the news of my disgrace unravel, I finally got it. The news media weren’t going to drop this. They’d been handed their dream story. Now it was time to run with it.

  “Gosh, Dad, they’re killing you,” Jesse Jr. said to me sympathetically.

  “Hey,” I said, turning around guiltily, seeing my son witness my public execution. “Look, bud, let’s just turn it off. Let’s do something else.”

  But the news was so widespread, it couldn’t be turned on and off like a valve. I could ask my kids not to watch TV, but their friends were watching. So were their friends’ parents. People who had never met me could follow the trail of my public disgrace. The news was splashed on every gossip website. It was the top story on Google news.

  TV had always been an avenue of escape for me, a way to zone out when I didn’t want to deal with my own internal monologue. But now some nightmare version of my guilty conscience was being broadcast on four hundred channels, all day and night. The title of my most recent show came to me in a flash: Jesse James Is a Dead Man.

  The shop was the only place I could hide. But even there, no one would look at me. I felt like a pariah.

  I built this place, I thought bitterly, and now they’ve turned on me, too.

  Fuming and fumbling, I retreated behind my desk, but I lacked the strength to turn on my computer. I just stared at the black screen. My own reflection stared back at me. Dark, hopeless circles ringed my puffy eyes.

  Mustering the last vestiges of strength I had left, I tried to lose myself in work.

  “All right,” I announced, emerging from behind my desk. “We got shit to weld. Business as usual. Let’s get everyone organized and on deck.”

  Bill approached me. “Hey man, a whole bunch of the guys, well, we just wanted to let you know that we’re all behind you, no matter what.”

  “Thanks,” I managed.

  “I don’t envy you right now, man.”

  “I don’t know anyone who would. Come on. Let’s get to work.”

  It was a cosmic beatdown, the perfect retribution for all the fame I’d enjoyed over the past ten years. The media had never really liked me anyway. I was always that “heavily tattooed biker dude” to them. At best, a bizarre fit for Sandy; at worst, a menace to her reputation and safety. During the last few years, they’d begun to warm up to me, but now this scandal confirmed the worst opinions the public had harbored all along.

  “Where has Sandra Bullock gone?” major television network anchorwomen wondered around the clock, as if the absence of my wife and partner of five years was equally troubling to them as it was to me.

  The worst thing about it, though, was that they had as good an idea of where Sandy was as I did. I had no idea how to get in touch with her. That was the strangest aspect of this whole surreal journey. In a normal marriage, if something like this happened, she would have holed up with her parents for two weeks, or I would have gone to sleep at a motel down the street until I’d worked myself out of the doghouse enough to plead my case. Eventually, we would have had a chance to speak.

  This wasn’t a normal marriage, though. Sandy was a powerful woman with the means to escape into a sealed, insular environment. And even if I could get the chance to contact her, there was no way in hell she could risk taking me back, not even if she had wanted to. It would soil her professionally.

  And that was a problem. When you got up to Sandy’s level of fame, the personal became the professional. News of our scandal was impossible to separate from news of her career, so she and her publicity team had to perform emergency surgery. She had to remove the tumor immediately: me.

  “Pass me that frame,” I said, sick to death of my own thoughts. “Let’s get down to it.”

  I welded. The flame obscured my vision, incandescent blue white light hypnotizing me, and gratefully, I sank into the rhythm of the work.

  ——

  I might have been able to weather the storm. Eventually, the networks would have found another disaster, and they’d have moved on. But then the paparazzi closed in.

  Hordes of photographers began to stake out my house. They were poised to make between $15,000 and $35,000 for a snapshot of something “newsworthy,” so from the moment I stepped out of my doors with my kids in the morning to drive them to school, they rolled incredible amounts of film on us. The clicking sound never stopped, from the moment I opened the door of our house until the second I managed to herd my kids into our truck.

  I was being flayed in public. The pain and the embarrassment stung. But the truth was, I hadn’t been happy or comfortable in my own skin for years. I’d never really believed that any of my wives had loved me. Deep in my heart, I’d never believed that I was worthy of their love. I’d always adhered to that same old plan I’d grown up with: push them away before they do it first.

  “Don’t come around here anymore,” I snapped at the leering horde of men with cameras as I walked by them swiftly, my head down. “That’s just low, man.”

  I slammed the door of my truck behind me, taking a huge breath. Back when my dad had brought me to school in his junk truck, loaded down with used mattresses, I had felt so embarrassed and mortified. Dully, I wondered if that’s how my kids felt about me now.

  ——

  With each stage of vilification came greater understanding. I had always thought of my wife as “just Sandy.” But I don’t think I had ever really absorbed just how famous she was, and just how much the American public loved her. Her fans and sympathizers were probably nearly as outraged and hurt by my infidelity as she was. Now, clearly, the gloves were off.

  “You can’t believe all of that crap that you’re seeing on television, Chandler,” I told my daughter. “You know that, right?”

  My daughter looked down at the floor. “Yeah, Dad, sure. I know.”

  During this time, I came to see how true a friend Karla was to me. She was my salvation and partner throughout the ordeal. She knew I’d screwed up bad, but never once, not for a single instant, did she waver in her loyalty to me.

  Together, we figured out how to get the kids to school, how to keep them sane amid the hell of the scandal. Being able to talk to her was the one thing that kept me stable.

  “It’ll be all right, Jesse.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure it will.”

  “Jesse,” Karla said. “You have always been the toughest guy in the room. Always. Now it’s time to prove it.”

  Karla wasn’t just a loyal friend, though. She was also a comrade against the paparazzi.

  “Hey! YO, KARLA! Isn’t it true that he cheated on you, too?”

  “Fuck you!” Karla snapped, furious.

  She was a menace to them. If anyone was going to go Sean Penn on someone, I think it would have been her. No one yelled at Karla after the first day.

  I kept waiting for things to cool off, but incredibly, like in a bad dream, new sludge just kept seeping to the surface. On Monday morning, after one of the loneliest weekends of my life, when all I could think of was Sandy and how she was holding up under this craziness, Us magazine published a photo of me in an SS cap, doing a Nazi salute.

  “Oh my fucking lord,” I sighed. “They are going to absolutely kill me for this one.”

  The photo had been taken at a party at my house ten years before: I’d been given the cap by a buddy of my dad’s, Barry Weiss. Barry rented a building in Gardena to a guy whose job it was to ma
ke costumes and uniforms for films like Schindler’s List and Band of Brothers. The cap was a reproduction, something he’d given to me as a joke. In a moment of stupidity, I’d put a couple of fingers over my top lip to form a Hitler mustache, and had thrown up a Sieg Heil. You could tell by the goofy expression on my face that I was anything but serious.

  But of course, no one was in the mood to believe that. The perfect storm had formed around me: first, I’d betrayed America’s Sweetheart, and then a decade-old picture of me doing a Hitler salute had made the cover of Us magazine. Yep, I was ready for the shit bin.

  “I might as well have stuck my dick in the pope’s mouth,” I said to Bill wearily.

  “That would have gone over better,” he said.

  I had a lot of explaining to do. But how do you explain that you’re not a racist? That in fact, you were kidding when you threw up the Nazi salute, while wearing an SS cap? At that point, everything just sounds like a lie.

  “Barry,” I pleaded. “You have to come out and support me. You’re my one phone call.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said, regretfully. “I got a show on A&E this fall—I can’t afford to get mixed up in all this crap. Sorry, Jess. You’re on your own, kiddo.”

  So I just chose to clam up. I hoped my record would stand for itself. I had been the first person to feature a black dude in an ad in Easyriders magazine. I’d traveled to Israel and lived on a kibbutz for a month just the previous year with my son, for Pete’s sake, while I was apprenticing under a blacksmith. I wasn’t a Nazi, or anything like that.

  What really got me was the fact that it had been a former assistant of mine who had sold the photo to Us Weekly, for $200,000. It wasn’t even a revenge thing; she and I had parted on good terms. I was learning all kinds of things about human nature, it seemed. Friendship could be sold. Money trumped all.

  Smelling blood, the gossip magazines dove for the kill. They spread their talons out in a five-mile radius, their wings overshadowing the entire Long Beach area, pupils dilating on anyone who might have ever known me, even incidentally. They knocked on doors, offering my friends and acquaintances serious money to attest to all kinds of bullshit, like that I was an animal abuser or a skinhead. Women I’d never met were offered $50,000 to swear that they’d had an affair with me. “Just give us a statement we can use! It doesn’t matter if it’s true.”

  My life was falling apart, and there was nothing to do but watch it happen. I got a text from Robert Downey Jr., who I’d developed a friendship with. The text read, simply: “What a glorious shitstorm.” I laughed for a full minute.

  I needed diversion, so I tried to have some fun with the paparazzi. I developed a routine: I’d drive sanely to school when I was dropping my kids off. But as soon as the kids were out of the car, it was go time, and we were on a racetrack. I barreled down back alleys and one-way streets at 130 miles an hour, threatening my own life and limb on a pointless, high-speed chase to nowhere. Testament to their incredible, leechlike hold, the paparazzi never gave up: if I lost them, they’d always show up for the next leg of the race.

  Infidelity wasn’t a new story to Hollywood, but we were in the Internet age now. There was no getting away from constant twenty-four-hour news, gossip sites, the endless supermarket tabloids. News was nonstop now. And my story was just trashy enough to interest the average American. I was just big enough, just famous enough, and just tattooed enough, that you didn’t feel a need to sympathize with what I might be going through personally.

  The punishing days wore on. I worked all day in the shop, pushing myself relentlessly, clocking in fifteen-hour days. But at night, I wasn’t sleeping. I twisted and turned, little snippets from the voices on TV pushing themselves in behind my eyes.

  . . . serial philanderer . . .

  . . . Nazi . . .

  . . . mistresses emerging on a daily basis . . .

  My kids saw how beat down I was. I couldn’t help it. They even tried to cheer me up.

  “Dad,” Chandler consoled me, “it’ll be all right.”

  But I wasn’t actually sure if that was true. There was nowhere to hide. Every day, it seemed more and more photographers would show up, increasing the numbers of their little tailgate party. Three of the four sides of my house were visible from the road. They had me cornered, all right.

  On the fourteenth day of my siege, I drove the kids to school, ignoring the insults thrown at me from the leering mob. I made my way over to the shop, too disheartened to take anyone on a chase. I arrived at West Coast and shut off the truck. Predictably, six of the most stalwart photographers hopped out to torment me with their cameras.

  I stood there like a dumb animal as they loaded and unloaded on me. I closed my eyes, hoping that somehow, when I opened them, I would be alone. That I would have woken up to discover this was all some kind of horrible dream.

  “All right,” I said finally, humiliated and starting to feel angry. “You guys done for today? Got what you needed?”

  “Whatever, Jesse,” said this Mexican cat with a shaved head. He edged closer to me, continued to shoot directly at me.

  “Get the fuck out of my face,” I said, dangerously quiet.

  “Ha. Yeah, sure, man,” he said, chuckling. He wore a beat-up suit jacket over a white button-down dress shirt.

  “I’m not kidding,” I warned him.

  “Dude, why are you freaking out on me?” he sneered. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “You have to leave,” I whispered, seething. “Now.”

  “Why are you tripping?” he asked. “Fuck, dude. Chill out, already.” He shook his head, as if he was annoyed, then continued to snap off shot after shot, determinedly.

  I could feel the anger rising in me. All of a sudden, I felt just like the messed-up, angry teenager I used to be, when if I was mad enough at someone, I’d do anything to fuck them up, and if they locked their door, I’d smash their window, yank them out of their car, and beat the shit out of them.

  There were no consequences back then, I had nothing to lose. And what scared me very badly at this moment was the fact that, my pulse quickening dangerously, I was starting to feel precisely the same way. A sick feeling rose in my throat. I saw red, and somehow I knew that if I didn’t leave that very instant, I was in real danger of doing something terribly violent.

  Trembling, I shuffled away from the photographer. I walked back to my truck, where I opened the heavy front door and climbed behind the wheel. I sat there for a long moment, frightened, gripping the steering wheel, my hands like claws, knowing I had to somehow escape from this hell.

  I turned the key in the ignition, and tore away from the lot.

  “Yo man!” called out the paparazzo after me, puzzled. “Why you tripping?”

  ——

  I drove endlessly in circles around Long Beach, and for once, no cars followed me. But I still felt completely defeated and undone.

  As I orbited the blocks so familiar to me from my childhood and youth, I passed high schools, gas stations, strip joints, taco stands, and auto parts stores. None of them were open to me now. Everyone knew about me. Everyone hated me.

  I drove on, faster now, drumming on the dash with my fingertips, feeling light-headed, like I was ready to take a chance, do something rash. By coincidence, I passed the black church that I’d found years before. Immediately, I pulled into the parking lot.

  Maybe this spot is the answer, I thought. Maybe I can talk to someone—that preacher. Maybe he’ll listen to my story.

  I made my way up the walk and pounded on the front door.

  “Hey,” I called out desperately. “Is anybody there? Hello?”

  But the door was locked. Panicked, I knocked louder and louder, again and again, slamming the flat of my hand heavily against the wooden frame of the door.

  “Hey!” I said. “Come on! Open up!”

  “Yo,” a homeless guy passing by said to me. “Nobody home.”

  “I can see that,” I muttered.

 
“No, they moved. They went to Compton about a year ago,” he said. “Not enough black folks in Long Beach for a congregation anymore.”

  I said nothing for a moment. Then, dejected, I began to walk back to my truck. There would be no salvation for Jesse James. Not today.

  I sat behind the wheel of my truck, my head spinning. There had to be a solution, a place I could go to get away. But no clear answers came.

  If only I could escape, I thought frantically. If only I could go somewhere and leave this fucking horrible mess behind.

  Nothing came to me, so I drove home. I had no other place else to go. But I felt like a trapped animal in a cage there, too.

  I couldn’t turn on the TV. I couldn’t read the newspaper. I couldn’t go to work.

  And then somewhere, amid my panic and distress, I remembered a friend of mine telling me, years before, about a rehab facility he’d gone to in Arizona called Sierra Tucson.

  “It’s an amazing place,” he’d said. “It turned me right around.”

  With trembling fingers, I turned on my computer and found the website of the facility. I scrawled the address down on a piece of paper. It would be a five-hundred-mile drive from Long Beach to Tucson—a grueling, narrow journey down the I-10. But I knew I had to go there.

  Because if I don’t, I thought, something terrible is going to happen. And soon.

  18

  Blue-black light hung on the horizon as I throttled down the I-10, the vibrations of the tires and the frame tranquilizing my wrecked mind.

  I’m finally going somewhere, I thought. I’m finally getting out of this hell-zone.

  It was four o’clock in the morning.

  I pressed harder on the accelerator, watching my speed increase to 120 miles an hour, then 130, then higher. The industrial shitscape of Los Angeles gave way to something even bleaker as I passed out of lonely Riverside into the wide-open range of horse stables and twisted trees and spinning giant wind turbines outside of Indio. In the back of my mind, I remembered a carefree, drunken trip I’d taken once many years before on the same route . . . heading to a spring break party at Lake Havasu . . . the car full of delirious teens, everyone smoking and yelling . . . Hey, don’t you know what all those wind turbines are for, man? someone said, coughing, they suck all the smog out of Los Angeles—and then the trusting expression of one of the girls we’d brought along—Really?