American Outlaw (27 page)

“Think about it!” I laughed. “A Mini-Cooper that shovels snow!”

“Oh, wow: NO! I know! A lowrider
Zamboni
!”

“Not bad, but what about slashing a U-Haul, so it splits open to be a wrestling ring!”

“Christ, that’s great! We’ll have a match in there, with turnbuckles and a referee and everything!”

“You guys sound like you’re having fun,” our waitress commented, refilling my water glass.

We grinned at each other across the table.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess this sounds like a pretty good time. Thom, I’ll do it.”

——

For our first episode, we decided to go for the speed–lawn mower idea. Discovery presented us with a white 1990 Mustang 5.0, with a V-8 engine. A beautiful little car.

“Let’s trash her,” I commanded.

My crew, which included Bill Dodge, my buddy who worked in my shop; Mike Contreras, guru of the oil rigs; Carol Hodge, a tough-as-nails chick mechanic; and Bob Cleveland, a lawn mower engineer, stripped the Mustang of all its deadweight. We removed the backseat, unhooked the muffler, heaved it happily into the trash, then tossed the catalytic converter into a deserted corner of our warehouse.

“
That
was easy,” I said. “Now for the hard part. Let’s figure out how to get a huge goddamn lawn mower attached to the bottom of this car.”

I honestly hadn’t counted on there being all that much stress or suspense around the build process. But once it got under way, there was almost no end to the bitching and squabbling.

“Listen, we gotta reroute this fuel line, pronto! Otherwise we’re gonna have quite an explosion when we try to start this baby up.”

“Yeah, sure, but what about the exhaust system. Don’t you think we should tackle that first?”

Everyone I’d brought aboard was very talented at what they did, which made it that much worse, because as usual, every fucker thought he was right. In order to heighten the blue-collar drama, Discovery had planned it so we had to complete our task in under a week: typical reality TV bullshit tension, but it seemed to work.

“How are we gonna cut lawns if we can’t even get the blade apparatus to mount correctly on the door?”

“Well, we’ll put a pivot on it, if you see what I mean . . .”

“No way! Listen, what we
should
do is fabricate a bracket to mount the motor . . .”

After several days of debate, I just lost my patience with the whole game. “Look,” I said, “we’re going to have to work as a team. Stop fucking talking so much. Start listening to each other.” The crew stared at me resentfully, as we sat eating our take-out dinners. “Hey, I’m sorry to have to put it that way. But you guys are screwing around too much. Nothing’s getting done.”

In the end, we were able to come to a compromise, and the mower got mounted. Tom Prewitt, a pro custom painter, took the car into his shop and made it look cherry, applying coats of ice gold pearl and lime green flake. Signature chopper flames licked up and down the side paneling. We even threw some gold rims on the tires for street props.

For our grand finale, I drove the Mustang out to Indio, where I raced a four-thousand-pound tractor mower driven by a pro lawn mower. I put the pedal to the metal, and it wasn’t even close: our Monster actually
worked
! After a week of hellacious work, I was actually cutting grass at a hundred miles an hour.

“Man, that was fun,” I said to Thom. “It took a whole bunch of bitching and moaning, but that was actually pretty cool to build this weird thing.”

“Well, rest up,” Thom advised me. “Because on Monday morning, you gotta do it all over again.”

Enthusiastically, we filmed the rest of our four-episode arc. I became absorbed in the bizarre task of creating a Ford Explorer Garbage Collector, a stretch Limo fire truck with a hose powerful enough to put out a ten-story building fire, and a Volkswagen Beetle Swamp Buggy that we took to the Louisiana Bayou, where we floated out among the alligators.

“Cool experiment,” I told Thom. “But I’m totally freaking exhausted after all that work.”

“Just wait till the show airs,” he said, smiling.

“Yeah. It’ll feel great to put this crap behind me,” I said. “I haven’t been by my shop in what seems like
weeks.
The back orders are piling up, and I feel guilty abandoning my ship.”

“Just wait until it airs,” Thom repeated, knowingly.

He was right: when the four episodes were broadcast, the numbers went through the roof.

“
Madness,
Jesse. Absolute madness,” Thom said. “I talked to the boys at Discovery this morning. They want us to do a full season! Twenty-four episodes.”

“Twenty-four episodes? Are you
nuts
? When will I sleep? When will I build motorcycles?”

Thom grinned. “So you’re going to turn down your own TV show, dude?”

“Of course!” I yelled. “You know why? Because it’s freaking
impossible.
”

“No, not impossible,” Thom argued. “Just difficult. I mean, look, you just churned out four hour-long shows, and you did it like a champ.”

“But I’m a walking dead man,” I protested weakly. “I’m sorry, Thom. I don’t sleep. I can’t get to the gym. Dude, I can hardly shove a burrito in my mouth before I’m hit with something else to do.”

Thom shrugged. “You got a hit show here, Jesse. You don’t say no to that.”

I groaned and sank into my seat, defeated. “How did I get myself into this, again?”

——

Suddenly, the main challenge in my life was not simply overseeing what was rapidly becoming a well-known custom motorcycle shop. It was adapting to the crazy phenomenon of “being on TV.”

“Did you notice the hordes outside?” Rick asked one morning, when we were working at the shop. Bent over an oxyacetylene torch, he readied himself to heat up a steel pipe that we would in turn bend and form into yet another CFL frame.

“Must have been a car accident,” I grumbled.

“I don’t think so,” Rick said, laughing. “Those fuckers were there for
you,
man.”

“Oh my God,” I moaned. “Kill me, please.”

“The place has become a white-trash landmark!” He chuckled. “Tourists are bringin’ their little kids to see you, dude! I seen ’em with Sharpies in hand, dying to meet the man on TV!”

“I’ll autograph a few shirts, if they ask real nice.”

“Sets a dangerous precedent,” Rick warned, flipping down his glasses. “You start with the shirts, then it moves on to the boobs. Before you know it, you got groupies coming out of the woodwork.”

“I’ll leave the chopper groupies to you, how about that, Rick?” I sighed. “I don’t think I can handle them right now.”

I had gone out on a few dates since Karla and I split, but they had mostly been a string of extremely well-contained disasters. There was just something soulless about meeting up, going to the Lobster House, and then trying to conjure up some kind of bogus romantic feeling. As much as I hated doing it, I couldn’t stop comparing every woman I met to Karla, the original spitfire girl who never knew how to hold her tongue. Stacked up next to her, most of the women I met just came off as boring.

But then one day things changed. Evan Seinfeld, the lead singer for Biohazard, was at my shop doing a photo shoot on a bike I’d built for him. A friend of his, Kristal Summers, an adult film actress, had tagged along and brought a friend.

“Jesse,” Kristal said, “I want you to meet someone. This is Janine Lindemulder.”

I knew who Janine was. Over the course of the last decade, she had become one of the most famous porn stars of all time, right up there with Jenna Jameson. Janine’s trademark, besides her considerable beauty, was that outside of her homemade sex tape with Vince Neil, she’d never performed on camera with a guy.

“Hey there,” I coughed. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Hello,” Janine said pleasantly. “This is such a great shop!”

If at first I was a little nervous to be around a famous porn star, that feeling dissolved almost immediately. Janine was bright and engaging, but even more, she was somehow conservative: she wore mom jeans and a thigh-length sweater. No question, she was beautiful, but it came through kind of quietly, in her clean, long hair and her striking, high-cheekboned face.

“You do
such
nice work, Jesse,” she said, walking around the shop. “I love the colors you use.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “Do you like bikes?”

“They’re only the coolest machines alive!” she said, laughing. “Man, can’t you tell from looking at me I’m a biker chick at heart?”

She pulled up the arm of her sweater to show a full sleeve of tattoos.

“Hard-core.” I laughed.

“I can’t help it,” she said, giggling. “I really love getting these dang tattoos.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, smiling. I put my own tattoo-covered forearm up next to hers. “It’s addictive.”

Janine let her arm linger against mine for a second.

“They look pretty good up against each other, don’t they?” She gazed up at me, smiling.

“Sure,” I agreed. “Not too bad at all.”

After Evan was done with his shoot, the four of us went out to grab some food.

“I’m going to be honest,” I told the group, laughing. “I’m not really ‘familiar’ with your work, Janine.”

Everyone grinned.
“Wow,”
Janine said. “Well, I don’t know whether to be happy or offended!”

“Jesse,” Kristal scolded. “How could you?”

“Sorry,” I said, still laughing, “but I’m kind of behind on my girl-girl porn.”

“She’s only the
best
of the best,” said Kristal. “Cream of the crop, the standard by which all others are measured.”

“Thank you, honey,” Janine said modestly. “But those days are gone. I haven’t done a scene in years. And frankly, I don’t want to.”

“You don’t miss it?” Evan asked, smiling naughtily. “Just the teensiest bit?”

“No,” Janine said. She shrugged. “It was wild, and I would never trade it for anything. But it’s behind me now. It’s the craziest thing, but after all these years, I think I’m finally turning into a grown-up.”

“Man,” I said, nodding, thinking about my own messed-up past—my years spent busting heads and drinking until I didn’t remember who I was. “You said a mouthful.”

She smiled across the table at me. “Well, thank you.”

She blinked her almond-shaped eyes, and I was captivated. For a moment, the others at our table, charismatic as they were, melted into nothingness. All I could feel was Janine’s warm gaze.

——

We were a pair. It was instant.

“I just can’t believe how
similar
we are,” she marveled.

“Tell me about it,” I agreed. “I’m kind of tripping out.”

For the first time, I felt very matched, in terms of life experience. My world had changed since the first airing of the documentary, titled
Motorcycle Mania,
and as my local fame gradually transformed into something much bigger, it seemed to change more every day. However, in spite of what I had done thus far, Janine had done far more. She had a name for herself, not to mention her own money and her own source of esteem.

Janine was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was tan and fit, with a sensual hourglass body and long blond hair. Everything about her seemed equally stunning. And on a purely animal level, she was tireless.

Janine seemed fascinated by me, too. She wanted to know every detail about my life. I had never had anyone ask me about my childhood before, but Janine seemed ready to hear it all.

“What were you like when you were a real
little
kid?” she asked. Her hand toyed across my chest as we lay in bed.

“Kinda nuts,” I said, after a second. “A little violent. When I was about five years old, there was this kid down the street who I hated.”

“What was his name?” Janine asked, smiling.

“Steven,” I said, warming to my story. “We always fought each other. One time, he took off his belt and he smacked me in the head with it.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, right? The buckle tore right into my head and made me bleed,” I remembered. “So, I got pissed and went in the house and grabbed this antique bullwhip that my dad had hanging from a hook, and I ran back to Steven. Somehow, I whipped it around his neck. I had him down on the ground, choking him.”

“Jesse!” Janine laughed. “You were a
madman.
Nowadays, they’d probably hold some kind of intervention.”

“I wish they had,” I admitted. “I was kind of unhappy.”

“You were lonely.”

I looked at her, surprised. “Yeah, I think I really was.”

She fixed me with the most serious, concerned look. Right then, I could read the love in her eyes. I could almost hear her saying,
You’re not going to be alone anymore.
It was just the craziest thing.

But Janine was more than just curious. She was fun, and she was impulsive. I had never met anyone in my entire life who was as ready to have an adventure at the drop of a hat.

“Man, I am beat. These hundred-hour weeks are driving me crazy.”

“Jesse,” Janine declared, “you need a vacation.”

“I wish. Unfortunately, we’re filming on Monday morning, bright and early.”

“
And?
It’s Saturday.”

“And, I haven’t been by the shop enough this week. I gotta go in and make sure those idiots haven’t burned it down to the ground.”

“No way,” Janine said, her hands on her hips. “Listen to me for a second. What do you
really
want to be doing right this instant?”

“Well, riding a chopper into Mexico, or something,” I said, shrugging. “But . . .”

“And who would you like to
take
there, and have, like, the
best
time ever with?” Janine smiled hugely.

“Well, you, of course,” I said, “but the truth is, I really can’t . . .”

“I don’t want to hear another word
about
it!” she cried. “You know that you want to go! You know we HAVE to go! So get your butt up off that couch and let’s go! Come on! Let’s go! Let’s roll!”

Her enthusiasm was contagious.
Why not?
After all, what good was being a success if you didn’t live like one? With Janine laughing delightedly behind me, I throttled my bike through La Jolla, through San Diego, all the way down to northern Mexico, flying through Rosario, into Ensenada, the wind blasting at our faces, her hands gripped tight around my waist and her thighs snug around my hips.