The Ride of My Life (43 page)

I’d heard a rumor about some sort of wakeboard device they wanted to experiment with. They’d ordered a bike from HB and it had arrived, as I discovered when I got to the lakeside location on day two and found it being strapped to a wakeboard. It was one of the rare, collectable Evel Knievel signature models, serial number eighteen. It was going to be dragged through seaweed and muddy lake water for the next two days. The location was called the Pain Compound, and it was the same place we’d filmed the loop for TV. The description was fitting.

There was a fast-looking ski boat idling offshore as the crew made sure our costumes were looking tight—flannel shirts, headbands, and hairnets. The skit was titled “BMXican Wakeboarding.” Ehren McGehey, Ryan Dunn, Chris Ponitius [aka Bunny the Lifeguard], and I were getting ready to take it on. Ehren was the first guinea pig. He set up, gave the boat driver the thumbs up, and instantly went down in a tangle of splayed limbs, bike parts, and spraying water.

I volunteered to be the next victim. The last time I’d water-skied was when I was ten years old, and I couldn’t remember if I’d been good or was a water hazard. I’d never set foot on a wakeboard in my life. I got set up, gave the go signal, and was thrown into the water. It took awhile for the driver to circle around and return with the vessel, so I told him if I bailed, just take off and pull me around the lake until I figured it out. This method was applied until I unlocked the secret to balancing on a bike strapped to a wakeboard, hauling ass across a lake, dressed like a cholo. It was so fun. Chris and Ehren each took turns and got up, just as the sun went down. Across the lake I spotted what looked like a jump. Because of oncoming nightfall, investigation of the obstacle was postponed until the following morning.

The next day, I jumped into the water and got up right away. I was cruising the lake getting used to the balance, laying it back a few ways to represent some Vato style to match my outfit. I wanted to stand on the seat and bars and do a surfer, but it was too bumpy. I did a few Evel-style wheelies while standing on the seat, and tried to turn around to see if I could ride it backward. I went down. The contraption hooked my ankles and legs and gave them a good beating before I could clear my limbs. I got back up and decided we’d try the launch ramp. It was impossible to steer the bike, so I told the boat driver to position me toward the jump and carve a big turn, to whip me into it.

Water is hard at high speed. I came close to being knocked out, and I instantly understood why some wakeboarders wear helmets. I wanted to hit the jump and try a superman. My next attempt left a giant bruise on my ass, and on the follow-up I crashed on approach and got dragged over the jump. After a few more attempts, I was starting to lose faith. Every time I’d jump, the rope would go slack for a second, and when I landed it would yank my bike/wakeboard out of my hands. It was a bit nerve-racking as my ankles and legs got sucked into a tangle of metal and my skin was cheese gratered by sharp pedals and axles. I couldn’t see how bad the damage was, since I was submerged in a dirty lake. After each fall I wiggled my toes to make sure they were all still attached, before grabbing back onto my ski-boat-powered torture device. I kept up the jumps until finally I landed one. I tried to hang on and the grips were ripped off my bike. I did another without the grips and landed solid. Just as the triumphant
I did it!
entered my head, I fell over sideways and hydroplaned across the water at top speed, getting an unwanted enema. The bike was yanked out of my hands as I sank into the lake. I finally concluded it would be sheer luck to land a superman on a wakebike. And with a broken wrist, a throbbing skull, bleeding shins, and a bruised butt cheek, luck was a substance in short supply.

Here’s the infamous motley crew on the tour to make my second game.

I dried off and we headed back to the Vans park for more fat suit follies. I still wanted that flair.

By eleven that night I was exhausted. To wait and try riding another day would give the swelling from my numerous slams time to settle in, making any action even harder. I ran down a list in my head: I wanted to pull a 540, a tailwhip, and a flair on the vert ramp, a superman, and a flip over the box jump. I had my work cut out for me, but I was determined. I was in the fat suit, for Gods sake. It was a badge of honor, and I was ready to go down in the bubbles of glory. I figured out the secret of the fat suit: You have to enter the trick perfectly because you have no room to make any adjustments. It’s “take off and hold on.” I rolled in and spun a 540. I couldn’t see the ramp over my massive gut, but I landed on my wheels. I hit so low it killed my wrist. I twisted my second 5 a little smoother and threw a tailwhip on the other wall. I couldn’t lift my leg to whip my bike back under me, so it just spanked me on the side and sent me bowling down the tranny. The next air, I took my hands off and my handlebars disappeared in my belly, but I found my grips before I touched down. I was walking the razor’s edge between “warming up “ and “burning out” and it was time to see if I had the flair in me. I took off the lip and was sure I was going down, then I saw the ramp appear underneath me and I landed it. I still had some speed, so I threw a tailwhip on the other side, and I somehow got my bike back under my legs. Then my ass got sucked into the back tire and skidded me to a stop. I was happy like Santa Claus.

I turtled around the street course with Bam and got some bonus footage doing supermans, flips, 360s, and surfers, and at two in the morning, we called it a day.

I woke up with a whole new encyclopedia of injuries. I’ve slammed so many times riding that I can anticipate what I’m going to feel like the next day, but being dragged around a lake and hucking myself off ramps in a fat suit brought me to an elevated realm of morning agony. Day four’s footage-gathering itinerary included the Jackasses’ plans for making Ryan Dunn and me strap bungee cords to our waists. The concept was an in-flight tug-of-war. We were supposed to ride away from each other as fast as we could, time it so we hit each jump simultaneously, and see what happened. Like myself, Ryan had wrist troubles of his own, and his surgery scars were still pink. Together, we vetoed the tug-of-war.

Barn’s imagination was fertile with diabolical ways to fuck people up, and he proposed a new activity, called the Scary-Go-Round. They found a playground-style merry-go-round and brought it to the Pain Compound. They wound a thick nylon rope around it and attached the other end to a truck.

The idea was to have the truck take off and jerk the rope, unfurling it and sending the Scary-Go-Round (and its passengers] into maximum rpms, like a hyper-spastic top. The dangers of the whirling metal equipment, getting clotheslined by the thick rope, and the distance to which a human body could be flung were all hypothesized by the semiprofessional stunt squad. Nobody wanted to touch it. By default, Johnny Knoxville got the honors. I was trying hard to think of something—anything—to tell him to get him psyched up, but there was nothing to say. He was just going to have to take it. “Good luck,” was all I could manage. After Johnny spun through a trial run and survived, battered and dizzy, it was time for a four-way cluster-fuck. Jason “Weeman” Acuna, Steve O, Ehren, and Johnny all mounted the equipment with nervous titters. The truck took off, the rope-activated contraption ripsawed to life and rapidly propeled the boys and sent them hurtling headlong through gravity’s tornado. It was ugly.

Leaving the set for the airport, I could tell the
Jackass
crew was happy to be doing a movie, but it was also apparent they were relieved that soon they could take a break from beating the hell out of themselves. It’d been a long couple years for those guys. Masochism as a career isn’t easy. I speak from experience.

After a month of globe-trotting, it felt good to plant my Duffs back on Oklahoma dirt. I had a few days before another trip was scheduled, so I invested my time chilling with Jaci and Baby G, plowing into the mountain of mail on my desk, and, of course, I needed to pay a visit to the good Dr. Yates. During the recent demos and streak of self-destruction, my synthetic ACL had slipped, and there was an unsettling amount of slackness in my knee. Also on Yates’s recommended service checklist; I needed to get three bones fused together in my wrist because I had completely torn my scapho-lunate ligament and broken my navicular, and my rotator cuff was ripe with a new rip. All totaled, about three months of postoperative recovery time. Wrapping up the exam, I told Dr. Yates I’d be back when I had the time to spare. There was one more suit I needed to try on.

The day after the diagnosis, I was on another plane to another destination: Southern California. My family, friends, and team joined me and we took up a row at the EXPN Sports and Music Awards show in the Universal Amphitheater. It was the second annual EXPN ceremony, already being touted as the Grammy awards of alternative sports (an oxymoron?). Attendees from the worlds of music and sport made the scene for an evening of entertainment, celebration, and recognition. It was cool mingling with musicians. I shocked Dave Navarro when I told him Jaci and I had danced to Jane’s Addiction’s “Summertime Rolls” at our wedding—eight years earlier. “
Eight years?
Man, I guess marriage doesn’t always not work,” was his reply.

Before the show, I was tipped off by Ron Semiao to make sure I sat on the end of an aisle, so I could quickly scramble to the stage to accept one of the crowning accomplishments of my career: an EXPN Lifetime Achievement Award. The only other person to ever get the award was Tony Hawk, the previous year. It was an honor, but also slightly bizarre watching the video summarizing my life while I sweated remembering what I wanted to say once I mounted the stage. Two hand-wringing minutes later, Johnny Knoxville presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to me, a Fender Telecaster guitar with a plaque built into the body. Standing in my new suit at the podium, holding an electric guitar, I looked out at the sea of faces. In a moment of clarity, I suddenly remembered I’d stood on the same spot on that stage when I was fifteen years old when I rode for Nancy Reagan on the Dan-Up Yogurt tour. That was the start of what would become my career—at the time, it hadn’t dawned on me to think of bike riding as a way to make a living. It was just the way I wanted to live my life. I was a kid from nowhere, Oklahoma, who liked to catch air. Fifteen years and countless concussions, catastrophes, and a few victories later, and I still felt that way. Holding the guitar, I gave thanks to those who helped get me there. It took awhile, because the list was long.

Two days after the EXPN awards, I reported for duty to Norton Air Force base on the smoggy outskirts of San Bernardino, a couple hours into the desert beyond LA. Stashed away in the bowels of an airplane hangar was a superstructure made of precious alloy metal and exotic wood—to call it merely a ramp would be an understatement. Cost? One point two million dollars. It was thirteen and a half feet tall and eighty feet wide with an eight-foot-wide channel tunneled through the middle. There was a roll-in towering thirty-five feet off the floor that shot riders down a sixty-five-degree angled runway (which was extra spooky without any brakes on my bike), through the tunnel in the halfpipe, and out the backside, over a distance launch ramp to clear a thirty-foot gap. To scrub speed after the roll-in launcher, there was a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-tall quarterpipe. Oh, and circling the entire ramp was an oval plywood section of simulated singletrack, with ten-foot-tall launch ramps aimed up the backsides of the halfpipe decks. Those were for the freestyle motorcross guys. It was gloriously huge, totally custom, and fully portable (once broken down, it filled eleven semi trucks).

The ramp was the best thing my tires had ever touched. It was perfect. Hard as concrete, lightning fast, stable, predictable. It was built like a Mercedes-Benz; every detail down to the tiniest screw was flawless. Tony Hawk was the one to blame. The ramp was his idea, and he’d funded the entire operation (apparently his Activision games are doing okay]. The concept was to bring the ramp on the road as part of an action sports extravaganza and musical blowout. The top skaters, bike riders, and motocross jumpers would assault the ramp while bands played right next to the decks on a hydraulic-loaded stage. There was a mild amount of choreography, dangerously loud pyrotechnics, and at one point all eleven bikers and skaters were on the ramp at once—plus the FMX guys flying fifty feet overhead doing tweaked airs. It was a complete spectacle, but also respectable. The last time something like this had been attempted was the Swatch Impact tour, which seemed tiny in comparison.

We had two weeks of rehearsals to figure out the most insane and entertaining ways to merge our skills with the extraordinary ramp. A show was scheduled in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay events center—a sort of practice run for the real deal, which is a twenty-four city arena tour in the fall of 2002. If things went well in Vegas, it would ensure the success of the Tony Hawk Boom Boom Huckjam as a touring production and could change the way action sports are presented. If it flopped, it meant Tony spent a couple million dollars on the most expensive ramp session in history.