American Outlaw - Jesse James [63]
“Great to meet you, too,” I mumbled, and set about my work.
For my first few weeks, I spent literally every second of my time welding in the back room. No one spoke to me. It figured: I was a tattooed kid in my mid-twenties, and the next youngest guy there was probably about forty. A couple of master metalworkers from Sweden were in their eighties. I just didn’t fit in.
One afternoon, I was sweating over a wheel, a split spun hoop, adding material to it to enlarge its circumference. I was all folded over my work, my welding helmet over my head. With no warning at all, Greninger walked up and pounded on the table as hard as he could with a hammer. WHAM!
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.