The Ride of My Life (39 page)

The Sky Bar is the highlight of the minimalist-chic Mondrian Hotel. The bar, designed by Philippe Starck, is an open-air oasis overlooking the LA Basin from its million dollar Hollywood hills view. Popular with movie stars and musicians, artists and ad agency slicksters, the Mondrian is nice—but the kind of nice you pay out the ass for. It’s “fourteen dollars for a drink” nice. I suppose it’s because you’re not buying a cocktail, you’re buying the view from the top. Jeff, PJ, and I stayed in the bar, jabbering about
Jackass
until two in the morning, when they closed. We were the last ones there, and a hotel security guard came over to our table and announced it was time for us to hit the door. As we were exiting the bar, PJ piped up in a loopy voice, “These guys need
water
.” He’d stopped in his tracks and was pointing to the plants on the poolside patio. As we ambled past the thirty-gallon terra-cotta pots, PJ announced in a concerned tone, “My God, what are you people
thinking
?” He picked up the first of several plants and hurled it into the swimming pool with a mighty heave. It was so loud.

Ten minutes later, we were all in the lobby wearing handcuffs. PJ, who had jumped in the pool to save his plants, was dripping water all over the fancy wooden floor. We were being guarded by the hotel security. The hulking, silent one with his arms crossed was an ex-pro football player, three hundred pounds of beef wrapped in a black leather trench coat, capped off with a headset earpiece and a cowboy hat. The other guy, the chief of security, was a supershort, superpissed Australian who was determined to be the most commanding figure in the room. He was chewing us out loudly, doing his very, very best to intimidate us. The Aussie was absolutely furious, threatening each of us with a punishment worse than arrest or
death. We couldn’t bear to look him, or one another, in the eyes because we were afraid we’d all start cracking up. This would have, of course, made the blunder from down under even more livid. He stopped in front of me, got up in my face, and growled, “You son of a bitch, if we were on the street I’d show you a new definition of pain. You don’t even know the
meaning
of pain.” The irony of his words did not escape me.

Behind him, even the police who’d entered the lobby were smiling at what a tool this guy was being. The outcome of the evening was ultimately successful: We got let go because I was a hotel guest, and PJ was now on some special list of people who were banned for life from the Sky Bar.

The
Jackass
demo tape was twenty minutes of nothing the TV industry execs had ever witnessed; a boiling hot gumbo of ridiculous humor and stunts. It became an instant sensation in TV network conference rooms and acquisition meetings, and within a couple months after the showdown at the Sky Bar, Spike, Jeff, and PJ had inked a deal with MTV. They got a modest budget and proceeded to make history.

Jackass
debuted on MTV on Sunday, October 8, 2000, at nine o’clock at night. The response took the network by surprise, pulling in 2.4 million viewers, the highest ratings share for that timeslot in the network’s twenty-year history. The next week, the entire time block was renamed
Jackass Sunday
, and ratings got even bigger. Within four months, every cool kid in the United States knew the name Johnny Knoxville. The risky mix of stunts and subversive humor were invented in the skate, bike, and snow worlds, and this humor was turned into a new kind of experimental, highly physical comedy by the
Jackass
crew. A few fans had taken their appreciation too far, ignoring the “
Hey. Stupid. Don’t do this
…” disclaimers and numerous skull-encrusted warnings that ran before, during, and after each dangerous skit. Some jackass on the East Coast set himself on fire, trying to film his own Jackass stunt (the show doesn’t accept submissions). In January 2001, just four months after debuting on national TV, Johnny made the cover of
Rolling Stone
, one of the entertainment industry’s barometers of cool. The only other phenomenon in history to go from nowhere to
Rolling Stone
cover status that fast was in 1987, by a band called New Kids on the Block.

During the same time
Jackass
was on the air, MTV had another show that was strictly stunts, called
Senseless
Acts of Video
. It didn’t have the lovable stupidness and gross-out factor of
Jackass
, but
SAV
regularly featured guest daredevils. They’d been asking me to cook up something crazy. Although I was still turned off from MTV Sports’ lack of tact the day I lost my spleen, I kept thinking about their offer to pick a stunt, any stunt.

For years, I’d wanted to try riding through a loop. Constructing an elaborate, sixteen-foot-tall wooden circle is one of those things, however, that has a really, really limited use. I never had the motivation or spare cash to justify building a loop for the thrill of doing it once. But
SAV
kept calling, so I began to view it as an opportunity to get a project done on MTV’s dime. I told them I wanted to do the loop. The producers from SAV wanted something more glamorous and dangerous. I could do without the “glamorous” but keyed in on the word danger. I began firing off E-mail proposals: I wanted to be lit on fire, go through a loop, then exit the loop and backflip a bucket of venomous rattlesnakes imported from various trailer parks in Arizona. They said no. They insisted on something sexy, serious, an extremely extreme stunt, and I wanted to just be goofy. I started to screw with them.

These were the proposals I sent to the MTV’s Senseless Acts of Video show. Hell yeah!

I propositioned a quarterpipe to quarterpipe canyon air, and in the gap between ramps I wanted a lava pit with fire-breathing piranhas. I’d have M-80s in my pockets. That idea got shot down. I volunteered to jump from one rooftop to another, twenty-five stories up, with a huge bucket of acid and rusty nails at the bottom. They didn’t even reply to that E-mail.

The producers at
SAV
kept pressing for something
really
dramatic. I told them I’d do a backflip over a helicopter with the rotor blades spinning, and when I landed, I’d go through a loop. That was the deal-maker for me, the loop. They agreed to film the heli-stunt but kept procrastinating on a shoot date. My schedule filled up with other commitments, and they ended up getting the ever-confident Mike “Rooftop” Escamilla to jump the whirlybird; he pulled a clean backflip, but the loop was nowhere to be seen.

Not long afterward, Jeff Tremaine called and said it was high time I made my debut on
Jackass
. Before the words were even out of his mouth, I told him I wanted to get lit on fire and ride around a loop wearing a chicken suit. Because of the ongoing controversy with the East Coast kid who’d burned himself trying to out-
Jackass
Johnny Knoxville, the MTV standards and practices lawyers had declared anything having to do with heat, matches, lighters, flames, hot stoves, candles, or powerful flashlights was forbidden. But a looping chicken, that was perfect.

A few weeks later Tony Hawk and I arrived at the loop shoot in Florida. I thought it was going to be a cakewalk. I could envision exactly what I needed to do, how I would steer through the giant transitions and where I would pump out the backside. I called a physics expert to ask about the G forces going around a complete circle and found out that the forces of gravity were doubled every quarter of the transition. So, if I entered the loop and the first quarter was at two Gs, I’d be riding down the last transition with a force of sixteen Gs on my bike and body. That’s the equivalent of me weighing thirty-two hundred pounds for a fraction of a second. I hoped my knees and arms could take it. The stunt started atop a long plywood roll-in, and after the loop the plywood runway led to a dock with a launch ramp into an ice-cold lake.

It took me twelve progressively more punishing attempts before I made it. I didn’t have brakes on my bike, so when I finally survived a full circle, I had to purposely crash myself so I wouldn’t get my bike all wet in the lake. True to the title of the show, I felt like a jackass. After I’d made it around the loop twice successfully without my costume, it was time for the money shot.

These were the proposals I sent to the MTV’s Senseless Acts of Video show. Hell yeah!

The secret of going through a loop on a bike wearing a chicken suit, in case you ever find yourself in that situation, is to do exactly the opposite of what you think you should do. Your brain tells you to go really fast. Wrong. The compression makes your knees collapse if you hit the loop with too much speed. You need to time it so you relax and go so slow it feels like you won’t even stick when you’re upside down. It’s a lazy, carving corkscrew motion. A handful of brotographers and cameramen clustered around the loop, each yelling comically at the others to “Get the fuck out of the background, dick.” Once they were all positioned, somebody yelled “Action,” and I dropped in. With yellow feathers fluttering in the wind and Tony Hawk riding my tail, I shot through the loop. Tony tore down the roll-in next to the loop. I pulled a delayed no-handed backflip and flapped my wings off the launcher into the lake. Tony tucked and aired to aqua right behind me. I broke the surface and heard cheers and saw rescue lifeguard Chris Pontius aka “Bunny the Lifeguard,” dressed as a seminaked bunny rabbit, swimming out to help me drag my bike through the mucky lagoon back to shore.

My
Jackass
experience delivered all I could hope for, and then some.

The mustache was fake, the flip was real.

The American Dairy Council is the organization behind the Got Milk? ad campaign, and the celebrity-studded spin-off Why Milk? ads, featuring famous faces encrusted with a milk moustache. Van Halen, Michael Jordan, Tony Hawk, Jackie Chan, and other wholesome role models have helped immortalize the reasons why milk is awesome. One day my in-house publicist April Tippens got a call from the milk people, asking if I’d like to do a trick to help pimp the white stuff. I explained my sugar fetish to them, and they quickly countered with an offer for a chocolate milk ad. “Now you’re talkin’,” I said. Anybody who knows me knows I start out every day with a tall glass of chocolate milk… with four shots of espresso in it.