The asphalt at the Famoso drag strip was hot, the bike licked with red and orange flames when Jesse James stepped up to the starting line and threw a leg over the 1,000-horsepower, nitro-powered dragster. A flicker of green light, a twist of the grip and James was off -- a one-man Cacklefest on a mission to beat the clock.
Seconds later, at a top speed of 161 miles per hour, James hadn't just reached the end of the quarter-mile track. He'd also won the respect of the seasoned racers who trained him and sighs of relief from the production crew that was capturing it all on camera for his new Spike TV show, "Jesse James Is a Dead Man."
James had, yet again, defied the program title, just as he'd done a day earlier, when he caught himself on fire, and a couple months prior, when he rode shotgun in an F-16D fighter plane, subjecting his 210-pound frame to 9 Gs.
James, who turned 40 last month, insists he isn't experiencing a midlife crisis and doesn't have a death wish. The Long Beach motorcycle builder with a hard-knock upbringing who came out of nowhere seven years ago to star in the rip-it-apart-and-rebuild-it TV show "Monster Garage" and later married Hollywood star Sandra Bullock sees himself as just "a regular working-class dude, you know. . . . Really. Honestly."
Identified as an "entrepreneur" and "TV star" on NBC's most recent "The Celebrity Apprentice," which Joan Rivers eventually won, the father of three is owner of West Coast Choppers in Long Beach -- a sprawling set of brick buildings that's as much an industrial complex as it is a garage. The five buildings are staffed with 50 employees who run the workwear line he sells through 1,500 Wal-Mart stores, the eco-friendly Cisco Burger diner he operates next door, his Pay Up Sucker! video production company and, of course, West Coast Choppers -- the custom bike shop that caters to a star-studded clientele of actors, athletes, rock stars and anyone else who can afford his $80,000-to-$300,000 machines and from which all his other businesses began.
A distant relative of the 19th century outlaw, James hasn't just continued his namesake's rebel tradition, he's also built it into the most famous name in modern motorcycling. But you wouldn't know it from looking at him. A renaissance man in rockabilly attire, he wears a version of the same thing almost daily: Dickie's work pants, custom Vans slip-ons and one of the plain white T-shirts he buys at three for $10 from the Compton indoor swap meet.
