American Outlaw (21 page)

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.

Enlarging factory fenders was a bum job, though. Performance Machine had their fenders manufactured in China, and working with that cheap steel was a total mess. The metal would bubble and spatter terribly under a welding torch as I attempted to split them, and then rejoin them with new steel. But, I reasoned, if I started from scratch, with better metal, I could make a really cool-looking fender. High quality, durable. Generally kick-ass.

A name had been kicking around in my head for a while, too, one that I thought had a certain ring to it.

“What do you think of the handle
West Coast Choppers
?” I asked Karla. “For my business, I mean.”

“Wow,” Karla said. “I like it. It’s catchy.”

We made a good team in those days, at least when we weren’t squabbling. Karla was still dancing then, had been doing it for going on a decade. Eventually, though, she came to an impasse, because the swimsuit dancing that she had grown up on had sort of started to go out of style.

“They’re all little sluts,” Karla said, crying, one night when she came home after work.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

She buried her head in my chest. “The other girls I work with . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Come here.” I got up and got a glass of water from the kitchen sink for her. “Stop crying and tell me what’s going on.”

She sniffed, and wiped away the tears from her eyes. “My boss . . . he says I have to go topless.”

“I thought they didn’t do that where you worked.”

“We
don’t
!” Karla spat. “But my boss says all the other places are doing it these days. He says the customers expect it.”

I sat there for a second. “What do you think you’re gonna do?”

She shrugged and looked so helpless. But then she screwed up her face, and gave me that determined kind of look that I had come to associate with Karla. “I’ll just go topless, then.”

And she tried, for about two weeks. But it was awful to see. Every night, Karla came home from work bawling her eyes out, pissed at the rude crowd, and incensed at the younger girls who were cutting into her money.

“I was so close to punching that Jezebelle tonight, I swear to God!”

“Honey . . .”

“I mean, I am like this far from
wrapping up her hair around my fist
and
yanking
her down to the floor!” She paced back and forth across the linoleum of our kitchen. “Tell me that I won’t! I’ve done it before and I am FULLY capable of doing it again!”

“Karla.” My voice was loud. “Just stop for a second.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you doing this anymore.”

“Who cares what
you
want?” She looked at me incredulously.

“Come on,” I said. “Give me a break. What I mean is, I don’t think
you
want to be doing this anymore.”

She bit her lip stubbornly. “Oh, believe me, I do. I’m better than any of those little tramps.”

“I know you are, Karla,” I said. “You have class.”

“Yes, I do,” Karla sniffed.

“But you’ve done it. You’ve lived it. It’s enough. It’s time to move on.”

She stared at me for a second, helplessly. “But what else can I
do
?”

“Work with me. Help me get my business off the ground.”

She was quiet for a moment, considering. “Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Right?” I asked.

“You could use a lot of help, is what I really mean,” Karla said. “You’ve got no sense of how to balance a bankbook, for one thing.”

“Well, see, there you go.”

“Not to mention you know nothing about marketing.”

“Right,” I said, clearing my throat.

“I’ve always wanted to try to learn about business accounting,” Karla said, excited all over again. “I think I might have some talent at it.”

“You’ll be just great. Let’s move on to the next stage, okay?”

She came closer to me, and I wrapped her up in my arms.

“I got your back,” I said. “I promise.”

She kissed me and we hugged. It felt really good, to have her heart up next to mine, to have her little body sitting up on my thighs, clutched close to me.

“You really think I was good?” she whispered. “I mean . . . at dancing?”

“Karla,” I said to her, truthfully, “you were the best I ever saw.”

9
 

My life felt full and busy. I was trying to figure out how to get my own business off the ground, but I continued to work at Boyd’s during the day, knowing I’d never find myself in the company of so many experts again. Unbeknownst to me, though, my life was about to get even fuller.

“Hon?” Karla said to me one morning as I was getting up and getting ready to ride to work. “Can I talk to you?”

“Sure thing,” I said. I buttoned the top button of my Dickie’s shirt, letting the others hang open in my Long Beach gangbanger fashion. “What’s up?”

“I . . . I think I’m pregnant.”

I was stunned.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she said, looking pale.

I waited, mulling the news over. After a moment, I was able to let the news sink in. “Well, that’s good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah,” I said. I came nearer to Karla and put my hands on her shoulders. “Aren’t you happy?”

“
I
am,” she admitted, blushing. “I just didn’t know what you were going to say.”

“I’ve been
hoping
we’d have a kid.”

“Really?” She looked at me happily. “Man, you never told me that! You’re always surprising me, Jesse.”

“We need another welder around here,” I continued.

“That’s very funny,” Karla said.

“What?” I said, smiling. “A little fella with a strong set of hands is just what I need out there in the garage.”

“How do you know it’s going to be a boy?” Karla asked, her hands on her hips.

I looked at her quizzically. “I’m Jesse James. Of
course
it’s going to be a boy.”

When I let Boyd in on the news, he grinned real big at me.

“Congrats, kid. And listen, if that girlfriend of yours wants another baby, just let me know.”

Boyd reminded me of my dad sometimes. He was a good hustler. I think out of everyone I’ve ever met, he was just the master of massaging money out of people. I can’t even count the number of times people came into the shop all pissed, threatening to sue him, because their superexpensive custom car had some imperfection in it, or wouldn’t be ready on the agreed-upon date.

“You
promised
!” they’d scream, red-faced, spitting into Boyd’s face.

“Listen, can I talk to you?” he’d ask them seriously. “I’d like to tell you precisely what occurred with your car; I think you’ll find it very interesting.” And he’d shoulder them into his office, like they were the last friend he had on the earth. Forty-five minutes later, the
pair would walk out arm in arm, and Boyd would escort them to the parking lot, where he would bid them a respectful adieu.

“What happened?”

“Wouldn’t you know?” Boyd would say to me, shaking his head, impressed with himself. “That fucker just sprung for two more cars.”

Boyd had a softer side to him, too. He was dedicated to employing developmentally disabled adults in his shop. The whole time that I worked there, Boyd had three or four of these guys in there, working alongside his team of seasoned pros to churn out hot rods. I didn’t quite get it at first—obviously, they slowed down our production schedule to some degree, and I was always a stickler for moving fast. But after a very short while, I discovered that I loved working and learning alongside these guys. They just had the biggest hearts ever. One really special worker was named Gregory. Boyd tended to coddle Gregory, but I treated him just like any other coworker.

“Yo! Gregory. Come here for a second. I got something to tell you.”

He would put down his tools and look at me, interested.

“Hey man,” I’d whisper. “
Fuck
you.”

Gregory’s eyes would get all wide. “Fuck
you,
Jesse!”

I was never happier than when I was buying Hershey bars and Dr Pepper’s on my breaks, and trying to feed them to Gregory to get him all wired on sugar. He also loved Power Rangers, so I’d always wind him up good by starting conversations about them.

“Boy, you like those Mighty Morphins, huh, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Gregory, looking excited. “Goldar!”

“Goldar’s one of the bad guys, though, isn’t he? Are you a bad guy, Gregory?”

“Yes.”
He squinted at me, giving me his best impression of an evil villain.

When Gregory celebrated his fortieth birthday, I bought him a big Power Ranger glove, one that made all these electronic sounds. Man, his eyes sure did get big when he unwrapped that glove.

“For me!” he said, cradling the glove possessively.

“Now, hold on, that glove is not for
Gregory,
” I said, “it’s for a badass
Power Ranger,
okay?”

His birthday was on a Friday. The following Monday, bright and early at seven a.m., his parents showed up with him at work. They were very old, and this morning they looked very tired.

“Are you Jesse?”

“I am,” I said.

His mother handed me back the box gently. “Thank you very much, but we’re going to have to return this to you.” She cleared her throat and looked sideways at her son. “Gregory hasn’t been to sleep yet this weekend.”

“Whoops,” I said, reddening, as I accepted the box. “Hey, Power Rangers have to sleep, too, Gregory,” I reminded him.

For a while, Boyd’s was like home for me. But then things started to get bumpy. I was making the shop a ton of money with the wheels, and Boyd started to treat me with favored son status. The grumbling started then, and it only worsened when Boyd gave me a new van to drive around.

“Really, Boyd?” I said, impressed. It was a brand-new Astrovan, lowered, with cool seventeen-inch wheels. “I
dig
it.”

“Something to drive that hot pregnant girlfriend of yours around in,” Boyd explained.

“Gotcha,” I said, laughing.

“It’s not a fucking present,” Boyd said. “Just so you know. It’s on loan, so get that through your head. But you’re doing real good. Just look at it as a small bonus, to let you know my heart’s in the right place.”

Unfortunately, the word got around real quick that the boss had given me a car. Right away it started getting a little political and cliquey in there. Guys who’d started to open up and accept me clammed right up.

“Boy, I wish
I
had a new car,” one of the guys complained loudly, as he passed by my wheel station. “That’d be pretty sweet.”

“Yup,” said another guy, shooting me a hateful look. “My Jag’s about dead. I guess we’ll all have to hitch rides with Jesse James. That is, if he’ll be so kind as to pick us up in that shiny new van of his.”