The day before Jesse James planned to strap himself into a hydrogen-powered streamliner and rocket himself across the desert at 200 mph, the vehicle was in pieces. Its sky-blue wheel hubs were drying in the West Coast Choppers spray booth. Its flaming gold bodywork lay on the floor of the main showroom. And the swears of a crew of grease monkeys were echoing through the garage as they wrenched a leaking connection on the 700-horsepower engine that had yet to show signs of life.
Meanwhile, James sat calmly at his workbench, methodically turning screws into the handmade canopy that would soon make him one with his machine.
"This is my most ambitious thing I've ever tried to do on all fronts," said James.
For a guy who's set himself on fire, flown shotgun in an F16 fighter jet and crashed a monster truck into a house on his Spike TV show, "Jesse James is a Dead Man"; a person who grew a home-made television show into a cultural phenomenon, a motorcycle shop into an empire and his marriage to Sandra Bullock into a Hollywood tale come true, that's saying something.
James, 40, isn't the sort of person who does things in a small way. He isn't the sort of guy who makes compromises. He is the sort of guy who likes action -- grab-it-by-the-horns and wrestle-it-to-the-ground-till-it-whimpers style. The more action packed the challenge, the more likely James is to try it. And if that challenge involves explosions, speed and anyone telling him he can't do it, all the better.
Such was the case with his hydrogen-powered vehicle, a project he began five years ago at the tail end of his stint with the Discovery Channel -- the cable TV network that turned Jese James, the custom vehicle builder, into a household name with his X-chromosome-addled hit show, "Monster Garage." James wanted "to do some kind of fast car and do it green," he said, and BMW had just set the land-speed record for a hydrogen-powered car, sending its converted limousine careening at 185 miles per hour.
Taking BMW's achievement as a dare, James set to work on his own vehicle, hoping to run it as a live, televised event. But when he was rebuffed by NBC, Spike, National Geographic and the History Channel, the rejection only fueled James' fire to do it.
"Really, honestly, the thing that made me do the hydrogen vehicle the most out of anything else is that everybody said I couldn't do it. Everyone. For years," James said, driving the point home with a pair of prominently displayed middle fingers.
Punk. Daredevil. TV star. James is many things, but he doesn't like anyone probing too deeply into his motivations, especially if they lead to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, he's a closet greenie. While he was attracted to the challenge of building an ultra-fast zero-emissions vehicle, he was even more attracted to an ultra-fast zero-emissions vehicle that would make people angry, or, at the very least, confuse them. Jese James was a guy who'd built his career with a welding torch in one hand and a chromed ape hanger in the other, and now he was ... an environmentalist?
Only if it's action oriented. James seems to prefer his image as a high-octane bad boy, even if some of his endeavors are incongruous.
"Like I want to be the pied piper of all treehuggers," James laughed. "I don't want a bunch of people with ... Birkenstocks to show up to the shop now from Oregon. We're not going to make West Coast Choppers god's eyes and sand candles and shopping bags for Whole Foods. I wanted to prove I can make a car go 200 on water."
And that he did, on June 17, under a clear blue sky in front of an endless field of cameras capturing it all on film for the Aug. 9 finale of his push-it-to-the-limits Spike TV show. What happens to the streamliner now is "We'll use it as a boat anchor, I guess. Push it into the showroom with all the other crap I've built," James deadpanned.
It was a couple weeks after he'd blazed across the dry lake bed at El Mirage, watching the needle hit 201 mph in fifth gear in his hydrogen-powered two-wheeler. And after months of pushing his body to the brink on Nitro-powered dragsters, three-wheeled sidecars and other internal-combustion anomalies, James was (finally) taking a breather. His biggest challenge for the day: installing his new G5 Apple computer on the antique roll-top desk in his office, just below a black-and-white portrait of the actress he refers to only as "my wife," and a pistol inscribed with his name.
James is intrinsically attracted to danger, as his Spike TV show attests. He likes noise and movement and explosions -- whether they're big enough to be seen on camera, or small and invisible to the eye, e.g., inside the cylinders of a bored-out engine.
"I like pistons and a crank shaft and putting fuel in something that you know there's a flame and explosion going on there. That's what I like. That's what I've based my whole life on. I think the internal combustion engine will live forever. We just have to figure out a way to make it environmentally friendly and not belch carbon dioxide and hazardous emissions," said James, sitting in the control room of an enterprise whose decor offers ample proof of his passion for things that roll, roar and scream.
His workshop is crammed with bikes and biker memorabilia, such as the "ice bike" he wheeled across a frozen river in Alaska, the original artwork for the very first edition of the "Ghostrider" comic and the framed picture of legendary Isle of Man road racer Joey Dunlop, which hangs above his lathe.
Electric, James says, is "for dorks."
"All the people involved with that technology are Dungeons and Dragons freaks. I'm just not that into it," said James, who thinks electric vehicles are "not for gearheads. No one's passionate about a golf cart," added the man who, for one of the final episodes of "Monster Garage," converted a Chevy Impala to electric power and ran an 11-second quarter mile in the 100-mph-car.
"It's too easy," said James, who spent five days on the project.
The Tesla, he says, is "lame. Who wants to ride around in a not-as-nice Lotus Elise?"
As for the Chevy Volt, James defers to GM's own product chief, Bob Lutz: "He said the only chicks you're gonna get with this car don't shave their legs. To be that non-passionate about your product, it's blatantly obvious why GM's in the [toilet]. If you're passionate about what you do, it's gonna be contagious."
James' own passion for what he does comes through loud and clear, and, as the ratings for his Spike TV show attest, it is most definitely contagious. When "Jesse James is a Dead Man" sped on to the channel in May, it was the highest-rated premiere in the network's histroy. It currently averages 1.5 million viewers per week.
So Jesse James is famous. He is rich. But he still considers himself an outsider, and he will always find ways to rebel -- sometimes in ways that don't jibe with his image.
Though leery of any green-leaning label that might mess with his reputation as a heavily inked badass, James does walk the talk. He drives a "high-mileage vehicle," such as a motorcycle or Datsun Honeybee, to his Long Beach shop a couple times a week. He recycles. The Cisco Burge diner he operates next door to his sprawling West Coast Choppers compound is solar powered, and the burgers and salads are served on real china with real silverware, rather than throwaway styrofoam and plastic. Deliveries are made via Prius.
"Everybody cares about the environment, but no one wants to pay for it or put their money where their mouth is like I am," said James, who started thinking about the implications of his redlining lifestyle in the final years of "Monster Garage," which ended in 2006.
"I started thinking about all the stuff I have and is my son going to be able to drive my '71 Cuda or will there not be fuel for it?"
Then he went to Iraq to film a special for the Discovery Channel.
"Flying over Iraq in a Blackhawk helicopter really low to the ground in a combat zone, there was oil bubbling up everywhere," said James. "There's these big black pools everywhere. It's like, that's why we're there and then why are we killing ourselves and causing ourselves so much stress? Why don't we work on a different way and become self-sufficient?"
This country, James said, "has lost its way of hard work. Forty years ago, we built a rocket with five Titan F1 rocket engines with 1.5 million pounds of thrust on each engine and put some dude on the moon. Americans did it. What we could do if we put our minds to it is amazing."
James points to his own achievement with his record-setting hydrogen vehicle, which was powered with compressed hydrogen from his welding supplier, Praxair. The tanks were built into the chassis of his streamliner. One on either side of the cramped cockpit, another just behind his head -- three bulbous tanks that not only looked like powder kegs but held at least as much explosive power.
"I'm not a scientist," said james, who went to junior college for two years. 'Hopefully all the work and money invested by every single person at this shop, hopefully that in a way pays it forward to the future -- that just a bunch of knuckleheads and motorcycle guys and off-road guys that nobody would think we can do good, hopefully they think if we can do it then Toyota can do it or someone else."
As a technology of future propulsion, hydrogen may have fallen out of favor in recent years, its hype dissipating, much like the formerly ballyhooed biodiesel, due to the energy required to produce it, the safety issues of storing it in passenger vehicles and the challenges of retooling the country's fuel-station infrastructure. But James thinks "hydogen's gonna be there" in the future, he said.
"Someone's gonna invent a car that you can dump water right in. It will have a battery storage system like a hybrid and that will be used with electrolysis to convert water to hydrogen right on site and you'll be able to run it with water and it'll be fully self-contained, self-sufficient," said James, who gives such technology a one-year timeline.
It just won't be James who pushes the technology forward. Even though he spent five years and a few million dollars of his own money to build his hydrogen vehicle, James has been there, done that. "Next," he says.
Susan Carpenter's profile of Jesse James and his acts of green rebellion was originally published in the Los Angeles Times' Brand X, July 29, 2009. Story and photo is reprinted with permission. Photo: Spencer Weiner, Los Angeles Times.
