Forward Motion
Pounding steel with Jesse James, American badass. By Bill Vaughn

Part Two.  Although he sleeps only four or five hours a night James occasionally takes a breather from a growing list of business to-do’s. But instead of hanging at the pool or playing Hold ‘Em in Vegas, his perfect day off is spent building rides. If I wanted to interview him, his publicist explained, I’d have to hang around while he worked on a car.

So when I agreed, she set up a meeting at the South Austin Speed Shop in the Lamar section of the Texas capitol, a hot, noisy netherworld of Jiffy Lubes, muffler shops, drive bars, blues clubs, auto body joints, and guys lurking in cinderblock sheds plugging holes in windshields.

As I rode from my hotel near the Capitol building and across the Colorado River the cabdriver explained how everything in Texas bites. “Jus’ yestahday ah was out in mah garden and a damn ladybug—a ladybug!—bit mah damn awm so hawd ah saw staws!”

When we finally found the shop, concealed at the end of a driveway next to an apartment building and behind an auto-glass shop, James ignored me for an hour while I busied myself talking to the guys who worked in the shop full-time. After James finished whatever he was using as an excuse to avoid me he walked over to where I was watching a couple of guys hammer a hunk of sheet metal. I introduced myself and we shook hands. He was dressed in a black T–shirt, denim overalls, and a pair of vintage Air Jordans “I don’t want to do this interview,” he said. “It’s my day off.”

“Tough,” I said. “Your publicist says you have to,” I was not unaware that James was an inch taller than me, weighed 30 pounds of pure muscle more than I did, and was twenty years younger.

He shrugged, and asked me where in the world I was from. “I’ve got a friend who lives up there," he said. “In the Bitterroot.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“Hank Williams.”

Now resigned to a day with another damn writer, he showed me around his shop away from home. Over here on the concrete floor is the frame, cradling a V-8 engine with chrome rocker covers. Embedded in the suspension are black rubber bladders that will inflate with compressed air so he can control the distance from himself to the pavement. Over there on a rottisserie rack is the body, in its final stages of sanding before it gets its first coat of primer. Surrounded by sanders, lathes, grinders, torches, saws, and guys making a god-awful racket with all of the above, James fits a precisely cut piece of mild-steel pipe onto an ornate and strikingly graceful exhaust assembly, a sculptor’s imagining of wind or, well, flames shooting from an engine.

Part Three. He owns some 40 cars—his 1954 Chevy is his “hands-down favorite. It’s kinda dirty and noisy.” And he owns “ten or twelve” motorcycles—the one he digs most at the moment is a beast he calls Chongo Blanco, although on this day he’s driving a Harley Police Special.

Today, with the help of the shop’s staff, zealots who won’t even touch a car made after 1962 and refuse to utter the word “fiberglass,” he’s going to rebuild a 1951 Mercury two-door coupe. The Merc will be his knock-around car in Austin, where he and Bullock own a house they retreat to from L.A., along with two kids from his first marriage, ten-year-old Jesse Jr. and a girl, 13-year-old Chandler (Sunny, his three-year-old daughter, lives with her mom, his second wife).

Besides Cisco, the family’s pets include sharks, a couple of shepherd-cross mutts, a one-eyed Chihuahua and a three-legged Chihuahua.

“I wanted a car I could just tool around in with Sandy and the kids,” he says. “Something you could hit a shopping cart, and not care about the ding.” He also won’t have to worry about speeding tickets because the Merc will conceal a laser device that confuses radar guns. He smiles disarmingly, and his green eyes flash with glee behind his amber-colored glasses.

While James’s obsession with forward motion compels him to drive more vehicles in a week than most of us will drive in our lifetimes, he’s also dabbled in boats and airplanes, although he doesn’t have a pilot’s license—at least not yet. After a couple of lessons during which he took off and landed a Cessna by himself, in Monster Garage Episode 62 he mounted wings on a Panoz Esperante and flew it for some 280 feet at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He’d like to own a P-51, the classic World War II fighter plane that guarded Allied bombers over Germany. But Bullock, he says, is “a nervous flyer” after her wreck seven years ago in a light plane at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and probably wouldn’t go up with him.
 
He’s interrupted by a message on his Sidekick, a gizmo which around this guy truly earns its keep. The alert could be from any number of works in progress. West Coast Choppers expects to finish no more than 20 bikes this year for people who can afford the $85,000 to $375,000 price tag. The list currently ranges from Keanu Reeves to Metallica frontman James Hetfield to his pal Kid Rock.  He created a plus-size chopper for Shaquille O’Neill and he jokes that next he’s going to do a build for Jennifer Wilbanks, the notoroious “runaway bride.” A relentless perfectionist, James has also shrewdly calculated that confining the ownership of his bikes to an exclusive club makes them more valuable, and that each famous name is another avenue of opportunity.

Part Four  Pay Up Sucker Productions is doing post-production work on a documentary that will air somewhere sometime in 2007. His clothing lines are so popular he’s hired Korean lawyers to prosecute Korean manufacturers bootlegging knockoffs shipped to Australia. At midday after the crew decides to order out for Tex-Mex, Jesse pulls out a fat wad of cash, and strips off a couple bills to pay for lunch. In a sense he’s a bank robber like his namesake because he refuses to deal with bankers to grow his enterprises. “I’d like to open another Cisco’s, but I’ve got to save my nickels for it.”

Lunch is in the showroom, which houses a stunning purple 1951 Mercury coup with wrap-around skirts, which was built over the course of 14 years by one of the Speed Shop’s owners, a professorial, chain-smoking 53-year-old legend in hot rod circles named “Mercury” Charlie Runnels. The car, named Nadine, was a winner in May at the most prestigious hot rod show in America, at Paso Robles, California.

The conversation wanders from the streamliner speed car Jesse’s building that’s powered by hydrogen gas, to upholsterers, to the most embarrassing way to die—a semi carrying swine wrecks on an interstate bridge and an angler in a rowboat below is killed by a flying pig. The topic turns Iraq.

“You should see those army bases,” James says, “How big they are. We’re going to be there forever.” Then the subject is George Bush: “Everyone in Iraq knows Bush is a dickhead. He’s the boss’ kid. Everybody I know who has a successful business who has a kid? The kid is always a fuckhead. Have you ever noticed that?”

Finally, everyone weighs in on the enduring urban myth that Fred Rogers, the kindly minister who sang “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood” on his children’s show, had been an army sharpshooter in Vietnam, and wore those cardigans to hide his “sleeves” —forearms covered, like James’s, with tats. Either Fred Rogers saved Lee Marvin in the jungle, or Marvin had saved Rogers. Either way, Rogers would probably pass the cool test that would put him on the waiting list for a West Coast Chopper—that is, if he hadn’t died in 2003.

Part Five  “When I was a kid I was pretty independent,” James told me when I ask about his troubled past. He has an older sister, but they don’t get along.

“My parents left me home alone a lot. So my bicycle was like freedom,” he said. “I would ride everywhere. Twenty miles a day. I’d come home at 11 o’clock at night when I was ten. No one cared. As soon as I got my license and got on a motorcycle it was like, later. My first motorcycle was a Harley Sprint. I traded it for a 48 BLH when I was 16.”

He played linebacker for his high school football team with such zeal and skill he was all-state. “But I had a lot of bad friends. And we were bad influences on each other. And we pushed each other to see who could do the crazy shit.” This included stealing cars. And robbing a safe from a fast-food joint. He used the money to buy school clothes, including a pair of $200 work boots. “My Dad was pissed because I bought something with money he thought I probably stole. And I was pissed because he was a dick and I had to steal money to buy my own school clothes.”

The joy rides and the robbery cost him two Christmases in California Youth Authority’s juvenile hall. “One Christmas all I got was a king-sized Snickers.”

And after the playoffs his senior year, still taped from the final game at the knees and ankles, Jesse checked himself into jail. “I’d postponed my sentencing, cutting a deal with the judge till I finished the football season. They had all the big banquets and everything and even though I was a most valuable player and shit they never even mentioned my name because I was such an embarrassment. I got the newspaper and was going to go like check this out! and show it to the other guys in jail. But the paper never even mentioned me. That was embarrassing.

“I got a stack of letters from every college in the Pac Ten, West Point, everybody, fifty letters.  They all wanted to recruit me. But when they came to Long Beach after the football season on recruitment trips I couldn’t see them ‘cause I was in jail. So they all just turned around and left.”

Jesse runs his hand through his mid-length sandy-colored hair, slicked straight back across his massive head. “I spent that whole summer in jail. It was the most embarrassing thing in my life. On the one hand I was this amazing, dedicated football force, coach’s dream player. On the other side of my life I’m a total fuckhead. It bums me out to even talk about it.”

One of Jesse’s high school teachers, Lynda McClain, sent me a poem James wrote as the introduction to the class anthology. Instead of photos the kids submitted word pictures of themselves.

Putting feelings down
Over the hills and valleys of paper
Even thoughts of simplicity
Making rhymes and reason
Stalking the reader as their prey.

“Jesse made me laugh,” McClain recalls, “and the other students liked him. He often hid pain and hurt behind his smile, but he was a great kid. I am not surprised at all at his success.” 

Part Six. When Jesse got out of juvey he was burning with anger and shame and had to attend summer school to get his diploma. Then he went to Riverside City College and red-shirted on the football team. But this second chance at a career in sports was ended by a knee injury. He began looking back on his bad-ass days and wondering why he had been willing to trade the marginal fun of stealing cars for so much misery. “I could have gotten the money I needed by working,” he says. 

Jesse recently went back to a car show at juvenal hall and checked out the cell where they tanked him. “It was a gauntlet of feelings. But I’m glad I got in trouble. The horrible experiences I had. That was the beginning of another chance. I went in there and talked to the kids. And brought my car into the quad. And the guards brought them out. And they’re all chained. And no one’s allowed to talk. When I was in I thought I was a fuckin’ man. I was always a big kid. A bad-ass. But I looked at them and they’re like, just, baby-faced kids. Like I was. They’re not felons, they’re just kids. And they’re sponges for knowledge.”
James stops talking and holds up his hands. Then he walks slowly to a workbench where a nineteen-year-old kid is sending forth a fearful noise trying to bully a saw through a plate of steel. “Whoa, don’t force it,” James advises. “What you want is to let the blade do the work.”

The kid nods. Then he takes another shot at the job. And this time it works perfect. •