American Outlaw - Jesse James [105]
“I want to be a dad to her,” I told Karla. “Of course I do. But I know that the moment I step in, Janine will tangle herself up in my life again. And then I’ll end up involving Jesse Jr. and Chandler, too. Soon we’ll be right back where we started.”
“None of this is easy, is it?” Karla asked.
“It sucks,” I agreed.
It left a huge, guilty hole in my heart to entrust my own child to a woman I considered unstable. But I swore to myself that it would only be temporary. Someday soon, I would be in my child’s life again.
During this rebuilding period of my life, Monster Garage continued to chug onward. By now it had become a reality TV juggernaut in its own right. Our ratings were terrific. The fame still felt strange to me, but I felt kind of gratified that we were making mechanics and hot rodders cool again. Blue-collar dudes, messing around in their own garages at home, hopefully felt at least a little bit proud.
I yearned to do more, though. Now that I had a little showbiz capital to throw around, I wanted to do something useful. Since I had the power to do it, I figured, why not do something that would actually make a small difference in people’s lives?
In early 2004, I told the guys in my shop, “I want to go to Iraq.”
They all looked at me like I was crazy. “What for?”
“For the kids fighting over there,” I said. “To remind them that there are people stateside who support them.”
I didn’t envision doing anything all that complicated: instead of some massive USO tour, I just wanted to take a team of soldier mechanics and transform a standard Humvee into a badass custom truck with a giant engine and some gold rims. It would be like an episode of Monster Garage, I reasoned. Just set in the desert. You know, in the middle of a war.
I’d befriended a producer on Monster Garage during the third season named Hildie Katibah, and I started to bend her ear with the Iraq idea every time I saw her.
“Do you get where I’m going with this? It would just be a real simple build, but something the kids involved would remember for a real long time.”
“It’s a great idea, Jesse,” Hildie said. “I think there’s a show there. But you know that Iraq’s probably not the safest place to go right now, right?”
“Yeah, and?”
“Well, hey, if you want to brave it, I’m behind you. All I’m saying is, it might be a hard pill for Discovery to swallow.”
Hildie was right: we put out feelers at the network, and most of the people making decisions felt the mission was unnecessarily dangerous, with no real upside. Disappointed, I agreed to shelve the idea temporarily.
Instead, we continued to film Monster Garage right there in Southern California, where we had our silly fun. We took a 1964 Peel Trident, said to be the world’s smallest car, and gave it a face-lift using an all-midget crew. A cool ’69 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow got transformed into a Porta-Potty pumper. We even turned a fire truck into a professional-grade brewery. I had a stellar time using my brain to dream up the outlandish vehicles, and it was always an immense, fulfilling challenge to get the crew to transform them into realities. But despite all this, I couldn’t help but notice the show was beginning to outlive its usefulness in my life.
Quietly, without even realizing it, I was becoming more serious, and more inward. The fucked-up events of recent years had quenched my thirst for chaos and thrills. More and more, I found myself wanting to focus on what was really important in life: my children, meaningful work, and people who had some kind of substance to them.
So, it was while in this general state of mind that I met Sandra Bullock for the first time. And my life would be forever changed.
——
Her godson wanted to see West Coast Choppers. That’s how it started.
It was Christmastime, 2004, when I received a call at the shop.
“Jesse, my name’s Terri. I’m calling on behalf of Sandra Bullock. I’m her assistant.”
“Hi, Terri,” I said. “What’s going on?”