American Outlaw

by James, Jesse

  AMERICAN OUTLAW

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This work is a memoir. Events, actions, experiences, and their consequences over a period of years have been retold as the author presently recollects them. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed, and some dialogue has been re-created from memory. The timeline for some events has been compressed.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jesse James

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books hardcover edition May 2011

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Jaime Putorti

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011006187

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2785-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-2788-6 (ebook)

  For insert photograph credits, see page 361.

  To Chandler, Jesse, Sunny, and my beloved Katherine

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INSERT PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  PROLOGUE

  “Oh shit! It’s him! Get ready, get ready!”

  I walk out into the bright California daylight, a baseball cap pulled low over my eyes.

  “Jesse! Yo! Jesse—look over here, man!”

  “Jesse James! Hey, how’s it going, asshole? Got time for a picture?”

  Like most pack animals, paparazzi aren’t nearly as charming when they’ve turned against you. In fact, Beverly Hills gossip photographers, seen up close, are snappingly vicious.

  “Jess, you like sluts, right? Yo! Jesse!”

  I clench my jaw and glance over at my sixteen-year-old daughter, Chandler, to check her reaction. She stares straight ahead numbly as we hurry toward our truck. It infuriates me that my children—Chandler, Jesse Jr., and my six-year-old, Sunny—have to deal with insults that should be for me alone.

  But paparazzi never play by the rules. These guys make up their own moral code. And for the last week, they haven’t hesitated to make my life hell.

  “Come on,” I order my kids, “let’s hop to it. Let’s go.” Chandler quickly raises her science textbook to cover her face, so they can’t get a shot of her. Smart.

  “Jesse! Did you talk to Sandra?” cries a skinny, ragged-looking guy at the head of the pack. “Hey, did you talk to Sandra? Did you talk to Sandra?”

  For paparazzi, peak performance hinges on volume and repetition. The loudest-crowing cock rules the roost. They hurl spiteful insults at the top of their lungs, their cracked lips hemmed in by patchy beards and wet mustaches.

  “Jesse! Jesse! Are you a Nazi?”

  Camera shutters click on full auto. I keep my head down: only a few more yards to the truck.

  As we approach my vehicle, I open the doors remotely with a click of my key. Chandler helps Sunny into the backseat. Jesse Jr. hops up front like a champ.

  Incredibly, the photographers continue to shoot. By now, each of them have likely taken several hundred pictures of me and my children just on the way to our truck, all interchangeable and nearly identical.

  “You know what?” I say. “You guys got all the shots you need today. I’m trying to take my kids to school now, so just leave for a while. Let us have some space.”

  “Yeah, you heard the guy!” one guy says, laughing. “Back off! He needs his space!” Derisive laughter follows from the pack of sweaty, middle-aged men.

  “Hey, we didn’t screw up, Jesse,” one of the men admonishes me. “You did, okay?”

  Wow, I think. Physical violence would feel amazing right now. To just dole out a single blow to someone’s greasy temple—or, even milder, to snatch a camera out of the nearest feeble grip and smash it on the curb, splintering it into black plastic glitter.

  But I reproach myself. They want you to punch them. That’s their wettest dream. A paparazzo punched in the solar plexus is a bottom-feeder who never has to work another day. No more endless late nights, coffee breath, melted candy bars on the passenger seat, weaving suicidally through Saturday-night Rodeo Drive traffic because the word is, Chris Brown just left Mr. Chow’s . . .

  I just grit my teeth, turn the key in the ignition, and pull away from the curb. I glance back at my three kids. Chandler and Jesse Jr. look pretty bummed out, but Sunny, mercifully, seems okay. For a second, nobody says anything.

  “Want to listen to some music?” I ask, finally.

  “Dad,” says Chandler. “Will those guys be at school when we get there?”

  I look in my rearview mirror. “Well, they’re following us. So, yeah, I expect they will.”

  “Can’t you lose them?” asks Jesse Jr.

  “Not with you guys in the car.”

  “How long do you think they’re going to keep following us to school?”

  I glance at him through the rearview. “Don’t know.”

  As I drive to the high school to drop off Chandler and Jesse, no fewer than thirty cars follow behind me closely. We arrive at the school, and I pull up to the side of the parking lot, as close to the doors as possible.

  “Go ahead, hurry. Before too many of them can get out of their cars.”

  They gather their things hurriedly, Chandler clutching her books to her chest, and Jesse Jr. tossing his backpack over his shoulder.

  “Hey,” I warn. “If anybody at school gives you any crap, just don’t listen to them. It’s none of their business what goes on in our family.”

  “Dad, come on. We’re not listening to anyone.”

  “All right,” I say. “I love you guys. Go on. Hurry up. Get out of here.”

  They flee into the school without looking back. I turn to the backseat, to my daughter Sunny.

  “You ready to go to school, Sun?”

  She nods. “Daddy?”

  “Yup?”

  “Where’s Sandy?”

  I chew my lip as I consider my answer. Well, sweetie, the truth is, I have no idea. Daddy fucked up, real, real bad, so your stepmommy decided to disappear for a few weeks.

  “She went away,” I say finally, pulling out in traffic. Instinctively, the jackals fall into pursuit formation behind me. We set out down the street toward Cubberly Elementary.

  “Is she ever coming back?”

  “Are you wearing your seat belt? Put on your seat belt, sweetie.”

  “It’s on,” says Sunny, impatiently.

  “Just making sure.”

  We weave our way through the narrow streets of Long Beach, down Fourth, across Broadway, down to East Livingston. Everywhere I go, the swarm mirrors my movements. Cars swerve next to me, in front of me, buzzing me from all sides as th
eir shutters click and their lenses refocus, retracting and extending, struggling to get a clear picture through my tinted windshield. Shooting digital is the cheapest part of the whole operation, so they roll endlessly, with infinite patience, waiting for something interesting to happen. Together, we crawl forward as a mass.

  For a strange moment, I almost feel empowered by these idiots and the devotion they show for me. They’re zealots. They would follow me to the ends of the earth. I could take us on the most boring of errands, and they would follow in rapture. Just as easily, I could lead them into the belly of the beast, South Central gang territory or a cartel-run border town in northern Mexico. Tempting as that is, my daughter is with me, so I remain calm.

  We make our way into the parking lot of Sunny’s school. I stop the truck and hop out of the cab, walking to the back door and opening it swiftly.

  “Okay,” I say, unstrapping her from the backseat. “We’re here. Ready to be a good girl for Dad?”

  “Yep. I’ll be good,” Sunny agrees.

  “So what we’re gonna do,” I say, “we’re gonna walk real, real fast, and I’m gonna kind of be a shield to you, okay? I’m gonna be super big, and you’re going to be super small.”

  Sunny kind of looks at me askew.

  “Just walk real fast, Bub.”

  We speed walk down the short patch of pavement that connects the parking lot to the kindergarten building. She takes small, bouncy steps, and I lumber after her, my coat stretched wide, trying to create a sort of no-camera zone around my small, towheaded daughter. We make it to the front doors in record time.

  “Nice work,” I say, dropping to her level for a good-bye kiss on Sunny’s forehead. “Go on, get inside. I love you.”

  “I love you, Dad,” Sunny says, as she glances over her shoulder and slips inside, giving me a quick wave.

  I walk back to my car, furiously angry, my jaw clenching. My kids have become part of the hunt, and there’s no one to blame but myself. This realization fills me with an intense rage that I need to vent. Clearly, the best target for my fury, at this moment, are the pale, flimsy cuttlefish with cameras fluttering before me.

  I nod to them, hatefully.

  Now it’s on, motherfuckers.

  Hopping into the cab of my truck, I take a moment to focus myself and crack my knuckles before driving in a slow and controlled way out of the elementary school parking lot. I lure them away from the school zone, across the winding, flat, black pavement of the industrial wasteland that is Long Beach, the proud biker armpit of Southern California. I have lived in Long Beach my whole life. It is my home, my haven. My den of pride. And they have followed me here, dead set on staking me out. They must pay somehow . . .

  But no matter how much I’d like to, I can’t just drag one of the sleazebags from his car, clutching his oily neck with my bare hands, shaking him until his consciousness dims. No, that would look pretty terrible.

  “Okay then,” I mutter, “let’s go for a ride.”

  I know this city like the back of my hand. I know its ins and outs, its secret crannies—the pockets where the paved roads end and lead to stretches of dirty gravel and dust.

  I drive just fast enough for them to think I’m trying to outrun them, but I’m not. I want them close. I dive under an overpass, finding an open spot where the pavement dips and then dies. I check the rearview: the shoal is going to follow.

  We are off the map now, on the hardpack California dirt. I breathe in, relishing the small but undeniable freedom that washes over me. The large, thick wheels of my truck ramble over gravel and dry, broken road, onto the hard flatness of the Long Beach dust bowl. The flotilla of Kias, Sentras, and Subaru wagons gives chase.

  Slowly, I begin to increase my speed. I watch as the speedometer climbs from forty to fifty. With barely a tremble, my heavy vehicle cruises to sixty, then seventy, then eighty miles per hour . . .

  Behind me, the dust is rising in a plume of massive gray clouds. I know that visibility is gradually becoming more and more obscured for the photographers. A whiteout, a driver’s ultimate nightmare, will be their reality in less than a minute. And what will they do then? Will they change course, or attempt to follow still?

  A jagged rock flies up from underneath my back wheel. Spinning, it flies directly into the front windshield of the paparazzo following closest behind me. The windshield of his car shatters. I watch as he brakes hard, pitching jaggedly.

  Satisfaction washes over me, intense and immediate. One gone, I think, smiling, twenty-nine to go.

  I begin to drive more and more dangerously, careening from side to side without reason or warning, and more and more dust flies up in the air behind me, churned up by my massive wheels. A chorus of tinny horns heralds general panic and mayhem among the paparazzi. Their plaintive war cry doesn’t inspire any fear in me, though: I increase my speed to ninety, then a hundred miles an hour.

  Behind me, I hear the dull smash of metal on metal, followed by a furious volley of frightened horn blasts. Some men have damaged their flimsy cars beyond repair. Perhaps they will leave them to bake in the pitiless desert. Or maybe the collision is only incidental, a mere fender bender that won’t shake even one of them off my tail, and instead will only inspire them to more relentless pursuit. I don’t know.

  And suddenly, my satisfaction from winning a temporary, meaningless battle against a couple of bottom-feeding photographers turns sour in my throat. What’s the point? I think bitterly. None of this will stop the real story: my front-page failure.

  I crush the gas pedal to the floor, flying through the envelope of rising earth, as if maybe, if I go fast enough, drive recklessly enough, I can disappear through the cloud, into a place where my mistakes never existed, where I had never betrayed myself so infinitely in the first place.

  Go.

  1

  I’ve had a violent life.

  When I was six, my parents split up after a crazy screaming fight in their bedroom that ended with my dad punching something and breaking his hand. When I was seven, I took my first ride on a chopper, courtesy of my mom’s drunk boyfriend. I got trashed for the first time when I was ten, on California Coolers. Pretty standard blue-collar upbringing, I suppose.

  By the time I was fourteen, I’d grown into a huge, strong, confused, zit-faced punk. My main purpose in life seemed to be stealing shit from the Riverside mall, alongside my best friend, Bobby, a beefy guy with long hair and a mess of scars on his forehead, just like a WWF wrestler.

  Bobby was a fearless, relentless, and almost absurdly enthusiastic thief. Not a week went by without him honing his skills.

  “Let’s take us a little walk, Jesse. What do you say?”

  “Aw, man,” I groaned. “Really?”

  I was tired, and I was hot. It was the summer of 1983, and Riverside, California, was in the midst of yet another sticky, smoggy heat wave.

  “You heard me, man! You haven’t been stealing SHIT lately. You’re getting soft. Worse than that, you’re getting lazy. Come on. Get up off your ass. We’re going to the mall. Let’s steal shit.”

  Bobby led the way, strutting through the heat of the Riverside afternoon, wearing a three-quarter-length-sleeve Ozzy Osbourne Howl at the Moon baseball shirt. I followed him dutifully, dragging my large feet, squinting in the bright sunlight as I eyed the industrial crap that dotted our landscape: the brake shops, the strip-mall vet clinics, a batting range. Finally we made it down to the Tyler Mall, where we headed toward our favorite target—the RadioShack.

  “Watch the master work,” I announced, as we stepped through the doors.

  “Sure, fucker,” Bobby said. “Go ahead.”

  As I took a slow lap around the store to divert the salesman, I checked out the merch, casually.

  “Poor bastard,” I whispered to Bobby when I reached him again. “Doesn’t suspect a thing.”

  “Wow,” he said, totally unimpressed. “You’re a real operator, James. I’m just so proud to know you.”

  “Qui
et, buddy. Watch and learn. Watch and—” I cut myself off midsentence. The clerk had turned momentarily to assist a customer, leaving his back to us. I reached out and swiped a Sony Walkman, stuffed it under my shirt and under the waistband of my jeans. I hopped out of the store in a quick beat.

  My heart was amped. I racewalked to the other end of the mall. Every so often, I glanced back over my shoulder: no one was following. I was safe.

  Twenty minutes had elapsed before I dared to come back to the RadioShack side of the mall. As I approached, I saw Bobby’s hulking figure appear on my horizon. In his thick arms, he appeared to be cradling an entire home stereo system.

  “You still here, asshole?” He hefted a receiver, amp, and two speakers.

  I stared at him, confused. “How did you . . . get that?”

  “Nothing to it.” He stared right back at me. “Should we head home?”

  “Bobby, man,” I said, laughing. “How’d you just walk out of RadioShack with a full system?”

  He shook his head at me sadly, like I was slow. “You dumbass, I just stared the clerk dead in the eyes and walked out with it. I mad-dogged him.” Bobby grinned at me, proudly. “I got real big balls on me, James.”

  Stereos were all fine and well, I guess, but I felt more badass when we were stealing cars. Second- and third-generation Camaros were ideal, because they were easy to chop up and sell. It wasn’t that big a deal to steal a new Camaro back then: the 1980s muscle cars still had 1950s technology inside the door.