American Outlaw - Jesse James [118]
It wasn’t like I regretted my decision: I was in love with Sandy. I really was. It’s just that our marriage wasn’t quite as simple and easy as I had hoped it would be. But then, I suppose nothing ever is.
——
The custody battle with Janine raged on. Finally, the courts threw me a bone, and I was allowed to visit Sunny in Oregon when she was three. The visit wasn’t long, but it upset me.
“Sweetie,” I said, hugging my daughter to me, embracing her skinny bones. She felt light in my grip. Her skin was incredibly pale.
“Boy, does she ever get outside?” I asked Janine.
“Of course she gets outside,” Janine snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”
But things seemed kind of strange with my daughter. Sandy and I took her out for the day, hoping to get to know her and sort of introduce our presence to her life. We took her to a playground, and she seemed disoriented.
“Look at her running up to the other little kids,” I said. “She doesn’t even know how to interact with them.”
“She’s not saying much,” Sandy observed.
It was true. My daughter wasn’t talking. She was running up to the other children, looking fascinated, as if she’d never seen another little person her own size, but didn’t seem to know where to go from there.
“This isn’t right,” I said, frustrated. “Janine is keeping her isolated in the house all day. It’s not the way a kid should grow up.”
We played with Sunny all day, and I had never felt quite so sad being around one of my kids.
“Someday real soon, she’s going to live with us,” I told Sandy. “I swear.” My determination to get my daughter had never waned, even in the face of the slow-moving justice system. But now when I saw just how pale and fragile she was, it was renewed a thousand percent.
“I believe in you,” Sandy said. “We’ll keep at it. Come on. We better bring her back.”
It was huge to me that Sandy was so firmly in my corner. I knew that she could be a great mom to Sunny, and, if given the chance, could make a momentous difference in her life. But it wasn’t just that she was capable of doing the job: I could tell that she wanted to do it. Sandy wanted to support me, but even more, I think she wanted to change things for this little girl whom she’d just met and already loved.
As always, the events of my life influenced how I approached my creative process, and one morning, I felt ready to announce to Sandy that I had news.
“I’ve come to an important decision,” I told Sandy. “I’m through with Monster Garage.”
“Really?” she asked. “But why?”
“You know, I haven’t felt that excited about the show in years. I don’t want to milk it for all it’s worth. I’d rather cut it off while there’s still some interest there.”
I’d been wanting to shift more of my energy to the home front, anyway, to getting custody of Sunny and running my motorcycle shop with a more careful eye. But the real straw that had broken the camel’s back, I told Sandy, was the way the network had dealt with my journey to Iraq.
“I just didn’t feel supported by them. I went overseas on my own dime, pretty much against their wishes. I don’t know, I just felt like I was trying to do something good, and they fought me every inch of the way. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Unsurprisingly, Discovery accepted my resignation.
“We’ll miss you, Jesse,” a network executive told me.
But I didn’t think they would miss me too much. I hadn’t always been the easiest guy to work with. In any case, it was possible that they, too, felt Monster Garage had run its course. After all, we had done five full seasons, and there’s only so many mutant vehicles a man can build. We didn’t part on bitter terms, though. They ended up running the footage we shot with the troops as a two-hour special, Iraq Confidential. In the end, I think we all felt the final chapter of our collaboration was a success.
But with the show gone, there was an immediate gaping hole in my life. For five years, I had worked around the clock, leading crews, doing demolition, design, and reconstruction. Now,