In the past year he’s gone from husband of America’s sweetheart to fiancé of a tatted-up reality star. The tabloids have left his reputation in ruins. His TV shows are gone. So is his chopper business. And he’s never been happier.

by Allison Glock

It is just before lunch and Jesse James is getting his hair cut in the rear of the Austin Speed Shop garage. Amid the squeal of metal being cut and pounded into vintage bodywork, his friend and barbershop apprentice Mark Ford meticulously trims around James’s ear using an electric razor from the ’50s. James admires the tool. “You’ll never have to fix that,” he shouts approvingly over the din, as Ford inches his way down his neck.

The hair falls in tufts into James’s lap, which is covered by a Hefty bag he poked a hole through with his head. James watches the locks sail down, lifts a piece aloft, eyes it disbelievingly. It has been six months since his last cut. You can hardly blame him for falling behind on personal grooming. The man has had a rough year.

“At some point, my life just became a Roger Corman movie,” he says with exasperation, knitting his brow. “Jesse James and the Attack of the Seven-Foot SS Seductress!”

He is kidding, of course, something that itself is an accomplishment, a resurrection of a part of his personality he feared might have been buried forever by what he simply calls “the shitstorm.”

“I saw the shitstorm coming, the way soldiers see sandstorms rolling in across the desert. You see it headed right at you, and there is really nothing you can fucking do about it but stand there and wait for it to hit you, and hope you survive.”

He laughs, resignation hitching in his voice. “I survived.”

The shitstorm touched ground a little over a year ago, when James, 42, a master welder, fabricator, and reality television star best known for creating West Coast Choppers — the Long Beach, California, custom motorcycle shop that revolutionized not only bike design, but bike culture — was exposed as America’s Most Loathsome Husband.

Married to Oscar winner Sandra Bullock since 2005, James made a costly miscalculation. In short, he cheated on the wrong woman, with the wrong woman. The mistress, a knife-licking, swastika-armband-wearing tattoo model, went public months after the affair ended, timing her outing with Bullock’s Oscar win. Within the space of 48 hours, James was transformed from an admired old-school tough guy into a jackbooted pariah: the thug who debased America’s Sweetheart, the hoodlum who took our Breakfast Club fantasy of improbable yet irresistible love between a roughneck street rat and the most popular girl in school and smashed it into a thousand how-do-you-like-me-now pieces. Revelations of James’s stepping out were swiftly followed by a prolonged public flogging wherein he was accused of everything from multiple infidelities with more women of questionable merit to dogfighting to “being a fucking Nazi.”

“Paparazzi were calling me Hitler in front of my kids. Asking how many whores I fucked, in front of my six-year-old daughter,” James says flatly, haircut finished, now digging into a bowl of queso at a barbecue joint around the corner from the shop.

“I never shied away from anything I did,” he adds. “I took full responsibility. I cheated on my wife. Guess what? So do millions of other men.”

Yes. But few stray with such spectacularly bad judgment. In picking Michelle “Bombshell” McGee for his gal on the side, James activated the grenade, then swallowed it live. “I’m self-destructive,” he admits coolly. “I made some seriously fucked-up choices.”

The truth was, of course, more complicated and less lurid than what was publicized. There were not, he insists, multiple mistresses. He was never a skinhead, he says. The much-publicized photo of him bedecked in an SS cap was snapped a decade earlier by “a Jewish friend,” Barry Weiss, who jokingly handed him the hat (part of a Hollywood costume). Of course, James is the one who decided to put it on and salute, tipping into ill-considered Holocaust comedy. A former assistant sold the photo to a tabloid for $200,000. “It wasn’t a revenge thing,” James says. “It was a money thing.” It didn’t help matters when another damning image surfaced, one of James in a car next to a saluting friend in a German military cap. James’s explanation: They were returning from a German car show, joking around with a prop.

Along with the Nazi images were claims of dogfighting. James did own two adopted pits, Rudy and Cisco, that attacked each other of their own accord, resulting in Rudy’s mortal wounding. “They fought Sunday at the shop when nobody was there to stop them. They had never done it before.” James says he was heartbroken when he found out. “I love animals more than people.”