American Outlaw - Jesse James [83]
After several days of debate, I just lost my patience with the whole game. “Look,” I said, “we’re going to have to work as a team. Stop fucking talking so much. Start listening to each other.” The crew stared at me resentfully, as we sat eating our take-out dinners. “Hey, I’m sorry to have to put it that way. But you guys are screwing around too much. Nothing’s getting done.”
In the end, we were able to come to a compromise, and the mower got mounted. Tom Prewitt, a pro custom painter, took the car into his shop and made it look cherry, applying coats of ice gold pearl and lime green flake. Signature chopper flames licked up and down the side paneling. We even threw some gold rims on the tires for street props.
For our grand finale, I drove the Mustang out to Indio, where I raced a four-thousand-pound tractor mower driven by a pro lawn mower. I put the pedal to the metal, and it wasn’t even close: our Monster actually worked! After a week of hellacious work, I was actually cutting grass at a hundred miles an hour.
“Man, that was fun,” I said to Thom. “It took a whole bunch of bitching and moaning, but that was actually pretty cool to build this weird thing.”
“Well, rest up,” Thom advised me. “Because on Monday morning, you gotta do it all over again.”
Enthusiastically, we filmed the rest of our four-episode arc. I became absorbed in the bizarre task of creating a Ford Explorer Garbage Collector, a stretch Limo fire truck with a hose powerful enough to put out a ten-story building fire, and a Volkswagen Beetle Swamp Buggy that we took to the Louisiana Bayou, where we floated out among the alligators.
“Cool experiment,” I told Thom. “But I’m totally freaking exhausted after all that work.”
“Just wait till the show airs,” he said, smiling.
“Yeah. It’ll feel great to put this crap behind me,” I said. “I haven’t been by my shop in what seems like weeks. The back orders are piling up, and I feel guilty abandoning my ship.”
“Just wait until it airs,” Thom repeated, knowingly.
He was right: when the four episodes were broadcast, the numbers went through the roof.
“Madness, Jesse. Absolute madness,” Thom said. “I talked to the boys at Discovery this morning. They want us to do a full season! Twenty-four episodes.”
“Twenty-four episodes? Are you nuts? When will I sleep? When will I build motorcycles?”
Thom grinned. “So you’re going to turn down your own TV show, dude?”
“Of course!” I yelled. “You know why? Because it’s freaking impossible.”
“No, not impossible,” Thom argued. “Just difficult. I mean, look, you just churned out four hour-long shows, and you did it like a champ.”
“But I’m a walking dead man,” I protested weakly. “I’m sorry, Thom. I don’t sleep. I can’t get to the gym. Dude, I can hardly shove a burrito in my mouth before I’m hit with something else to do.”
Thom shrugged. “You got a hit show here, Jesse. You don’t say no to that.”
I groaned and sank into my seat, defeated. “How did I get myself into this, again?”
——
Suddenly, the main challenge in my life was not simply overseeing what was rapidly becoming a well-known custom motorcycle shop. It was adapting to the crazy phenomenon of “being on TV.”
“Did you notice the hordes outside?” Rick asked one morning, when we were working at the shop. Bent over an oxyacetylene torch, he readied himself to heat up a steel pipe that we would in turn bend and form into yet another CFL frame.
“Must have been a car accident,” I grumbled.
“I don’t think so,” Rick said, laughing. “Those fuckers were there for you, man.”
“Oh my God,” I moaned. “Kill me, please.”
“The place has become a white-trash landmark!” He chuckled. “Tourists are bringin’ their little kids to see you, dude! I seen ’em with Sharpies in hand, dying to meet the man on TV!”
“I’ll autograph a few shirts, if they ask real nice.”
“Sets a dangerous precedent,” Rick warned, flipping down his glasses. “You start with the shirts, then it moves on to the boobs. Before you know it, you got groupies coming out of the woodwork.