American Outlaw - Jesse James [132]
“All right,” I announced, emerging from behind my desk. “We got shit to weld. Business as usual. Let’s get everyone organized and on deck.”
Bill approached me. “Hey man, a whole bunch of the guys, well, we just wanted to let you know that we’re all behind you, no matter what.”
“Thanks,” I managed.
“I don’t envy you right now, man.”
“I don’t know anyone who would. Come on. Let’s get to work.”
It was a cosmic beatdown, the perfect retribution for all the fame I’d enjoyed over the past ten years. The media had never really liked me anyway. I was always that “heavily tattooed biker dude” to them. At best, a bizarre fit for Sandy; at worst, a menace to her reputation and safety. During the last few years, they’d begun to warm up to me, but now this scandal confirmed the worst opinions the public had harbored all along.
“Where has Sandra Bullock gone?” major television network anchorwomen wondered around the clock, as if the absence of my wife and partner of five years was equally troubling to them as it was to me.
The worst thing about it, though, was that they had as good an idea of where Sandy was as I did. I had no idea how to get in touch with her. That was the strangest aspect of this whole surreal journey. In a normal marriage, if something like this happened, she would have holed up with her parents for two weeks, or I would have gone to sleep at a motel down the street until I’d worked myself out of the doghouse enough to plead my case. Eventually, we would have had a chance to speak.
This wasn’t a normal marriage, though. Sandy was a powerful woman with the means to escape into a sealed, insular environment. And even if I could get the chance to contact her, there was no way in hell she could risk taking me back, not even if she had wanted to. It would soil her professionally.
And that was a problem. When you got up to Sandy’s level of fame, the personal became the professional. News of our scandal was impossible to separate from news of her career, so she and her publicity team had to perform emergency surgery. She had to remove the tumor immediately: me.
“Pass me that frame,” I said, sick to death of my own thoughts. “Let’s get down to it.”
I welded. The flame obscured my vision, incandescent blue white light hypnotizing me, and gratefully, I sank into the rhythm of the work.
——
I might have been able to weather the storm. Eventually, the networks would have found another disaster, and they’d have moved on. But then the paparazzi closed in.
Hordes of photographers began to stake out my house. They were poised to make between $15,000 and $35,000 for a snapshot of something “newsworthy,” so from the moment I stepped out of my doors with my kids in the morning to drive them to school, they rolled incredible amounts of film on us. The clicking sound never stopped, from the moment I opened the door of our house until the second I managed to herd my kids into our truck.
I was being flayed in public. The pain and the embarrassment stung. But the truth was, I hadn’t been happy or comfortable in my own skin for years. I’d never really believed that any of my wives had loved me. Deep in my heart, I’d never believed that I was worthy of their love. I’d always adhered to that same old plan I’d grown up with: push them away before they do it first.
“Don’t come around here anymore,” I snapped at the leering horde of men with cameras as I walked by them swiftly, my head down. “That’s just low, man.”
I slammed the door of my truck behind me, taking a huge breath. Back when my dad had brought me to school in his junk truck, loaded down with used mattresses, I had felt so embarrassed and mortified. Dully, I wondered if that’s how my kids felt about me now.
——
With each stage of vilification came greater understanding. I had always thought of my wife as “just Sandy.” But I don’t think I had ever really absorbed just how famous she was, and just how much the American public loved her. Her fans and sympathizers were probably nearly as outraged and hurt by my infidelity as she was. Now, clearly, the