Crash Test Girl Read online

  As far as my original belief that no one would ever see it, the video clip of my catsuit scan has been watched five million times on YouTube. On the bright side, it was my twenty-eight-year-old butt. Who wouldn’t want a record of that?

  That was how I got my butt on TV but not how I proved myself an asset. (That pun was too easy.) What really showed my dedication was my persistence during the JATO rocket car myth. After a full day at M5 and a shift at my night job, I jumped in my old Toyota pickup to drive all night long to the Mojave Desert and meet the crew by morning. I had a Hunter S. Thompson spoken-word tape stuck in the deck and was almost driven to madness but I wasn’t going to miss that old Impala screeching across the desert landscape propelled by three actual JATO rockets! I got to the hotel parking lot by 4:00 a.m. and slept in my truck for an hour. When the film crew caravan headlights hit my window, I jumped out of the truck and ran to catch them. Everyone was looking at me like I was a crazy person. They laughed and said, “What are you doing here?” “I came to help!” My stalker-ish insistence to help out worked. I made myself valuable by always going the extra mile, or in this case, five hundred miles. It was so worth it!

  The first season of the show was only three myth-packed episodes of mayhem. I found myself helping more and more. By season two, the production team realized they needed to speed up the process of making episodes. They asked if I would become part of a team that would help do all the building, setup, and cleanup for Jamie and Adam so that they could crank through the filming faster. Our work would be behind the scenes only. Since I loved helping on the show and there was a promise of a small salary, I jumped on that.

  My butt got me in the door but this day got me respect. After my night job, I drove all night to the Mojave Desert. I slept in my car for two hours in their hotel parking lot and waited for the headlights rolling out to location at 5:00 a.m. I flagged them down and spent the day assisting in whatever they needed. I busted ass to help the JATO rocket car myth for the first episode of MythBusters.

  Building a Team

  I met Tory Belleci in the parking lot on his first day as a builder on the show. He was rolling a huge tool chest toward the shop.

  “Hi. I’m Kari,” I said. “I think I’m going to be working with you.”

  “I guess you’re going to be my right hand,” he said.

  I’m pretty sure I giggled nervously before saying, “I could be your left, too.”

  What does that even mean?! We still laugh at my awkward eagerness.

  Tory had just come from Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s special effects shop, working on projects like The Matrix and the new Star Wars. Basically, I wanted to be him when I grew up. He had the fancy special effects job that I thought was The Coolest, so I was hungry to hear all of his stories. We got along really well, mostly because when you’re in somewhat miserable circumstances, you tend to bond with people, and we would often find ourselves at M5 until 10:00 p.m., scraping chicken skin and guts off the ceiling after a long day testing the Chicken Cannon Myth, for example. With blood and meat bits and the sweet smell of salmonella on his hands, Tory asked, “Why did I leave ILM?”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t know,” I said. I was so glad he did.

  After several weeks, the production team realized that the new format still didn’t pick up the pace fast enough and they needed to change it again. “So, you’re hosts now,” they told us. “We need you to start talking to the camera.” That meant Tory and I, Scottie Chapman (another local builder/rock star welder), and a “myth-tern” contest winner named Christine Chamberlain were now going to be on-camera talent?

  I said, “So other people are going to actually see us?” None of us was an actor; none of us had any ambition to be an actor. We were just background builders, promoted to being hosts, being thrown in front of the camera!

  It was a christening by fire. When you look at those early episodes, it is super awkward watching us talk on camera. I was terrible at it at first.

  The crew of MythBusters, from the beginning, put in thirteen-hour days, six days a week. We traveled together, and worked side by side. We might’ve started out as strangers, but we became family fast. And, like family, sometimes we loved each other, sometimes we hated each other, sometimes we got on each other’s nerves. But we were stuck together through good, bad, and ugly times.

  After a year or two, Scottie and Christine left the show and we needed to find a new person for the build team. Tory and I said, “Grant, of course.”

  Grant Imahara was always coming into Jamie’s shop to help out with electrical things, like remote controlling, electronics, and puppet props that were used in commercials. When I met him, Grant was just a sweet, scary-smart, Star Wars–obsessed, adorable, friendly uber-nerd. It looked like he was trying to grow a mustache that never really got anywhere, which was endearing.

  We interviewed other people, but that process only confirmed our belief that Grant was the guy. The network wasn’t sold on him, though. Television people will always push for a more “polished” human, which was absurd in our case. We were supposed to be builders, not supermodels.

  Finally the network gave him the okay—with the caveat that he needed a makeover. They sent over pictures of Brad Pitt and Colin Farrell and said, “Like this.” The show creator Peter Rees pushed back and said, “We’re not changing a thing. You hire the super nerd, you get the super nerd.” Our being just regular people was the appeal of the show. None of us were brought in to be well spoken or beautiful. We were just us.

  The network realized our appeal was that we were real—everyone knows a Kari or a Tory or a Grant. The show kept getting renewed, and we were more and more inventive and daring as the years rolled along. I remember coming home to Paul and telling him, “I shot a propane tank with a rifle and blew it up. It was the coolest day!”

  He said, “This is not your day job, this is your dream job.”

  THE HARDER I WORK, THE LUCKIER I GET

  My path from receptionist/cocktail pimp to builder/TV star was like an Escher floating spiral staircase in the clouds. I was never sure if I was going up or down, if it would ever end, if I’d have to lean over the side and puke, or if it would turn into a slide and I’d fall into the sky. At no point until I sat down to write this chapter did I ever stop and think, Well, Kari, you sweat, risked, begged, and bombed your way into a brilliant career! I didn’t conceive a solid idea of success until I already had it. I assumed my career would go one way, and it turned out to be something I couldn’t have possibly imagined.

  Any creative endeavor is like that Bull in a China Shop experiment. You have to keep an open mind. Go ahead and make your assumptions and hypotheses. It can’t hurt to form a working theory based on what you’ve heard, but don’t stubbornly cling to it, or you could miss out on the wonder and wisdom being absolutely, fantastically clueless and wrong. It happens all the time: Someone thinks they know more than they actually do based on an assumption. But assumptions, even seemingly safe ones, aren’t proven as fact unless they’ve been tested.

  It’s wiser to open yourself to possibility and dumb luck, let them do their thing while you get out of your own way, avoid traps, take risks, and bust (mold, whatever) your ass.

  And don’t give up. At twenty-eight, thirty-eight, or eighty-eight.

  The only thing I knew starting out on my career path was that I wanted to make stuff. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I thought it’d be using paint and clay, but I wound up using metal, chemicals, and explosives. I hoped that I’d get to work with people I liked and respected, and I got Tory and Grant, colleagues and lifelong best friends.

  In the final analysis, my original hypothesis about how to find a dream job wasn’t so far off, but only in the broadest terms:

  I got an internship.

  The internship turned into an entry-level job.

  I got promoted into a better job.

  It became a bug-eating, poop-collecting, chicken-exploding career.


  Chapter Two

  Love

  Early on in MythBusters, we did an experiment about whether talking to plants made them grow larger. My first reaction was that it seemed like a lot of crystal-gripping hippie nonsense. But we set up different greenhouses of vegetable plants—one with plants we said nice things to (“I love you, you’re beautiful, plant”), one with plants we were mean to (“I hate you, you’re disgusting, plant”), another that received a steady onslaught of Swedish death metal music (you get the idea), and the control group of peace-and-quiet plants that we ignored. All the test subjects received the same sunlight and water.

  Much to my surprise, the plants that we talked to, and especially the ones that rocked out to music, did grow stronger and faster than the ones that we ignored. Despite my eye-rolling and general disgust about saying, “You’re the best plant ever!” in a sickeningly sweet voice for days on end, it turned out that there was a scientific basis for our results. The aspiration of our breath—basically, blasting CO2 at the plants—and the vibrations of our voices and the music left microscopic breakage in the cell walls. In sustaining minor damage, the plants rapidly repaired themselves and became bigger and stronger, just like a healed bone is thicker at the site of the break.

  By applying all-important critical thinking, we learned that plants like to be yelled at, and that not talking to them left them limp. I also learned that the entire cast of MythBusters had brown thumbs. We didn’t do many experiments with plants after that because we knew we’d end up killing them all.

  Welcome to My Wonder Years

  On the first day of the third grade, the world became bigger than teddy bears and LEGOs. Enter the bad boy. He had bright red hair, freckles, a mouth full of braces, and acid-washed jeans—the mark of a fashion rebel, even for an eight-year-old. I also found myself curiously fond of a smart, funny kid with baby-fat cheeks and a quick wit that kept the teachers on their toes with a timely fart joke. I used to listen to Michael Jackson’s “The Girl Is Mine” and imagine the two of them fighting over me. (You know those things you never tell anyone and then you find yourself writing in your book? This is one of them.)

  Bad Boy vs. Funny Guy has been a recurring theme for me throughout elementary school, and well into junior high. I was torn between 21 Jump Street–era Johnny Depp and Splash-era Tom Hanks. The one thing the redheaded bad boy and the baby-cheeked funny guy in my third grade class could agree on? Neither wanted anything to do with me. (Unless you count gluing my ponytail to the desk behind me! I will never totally understand taunting as a sign of affection.)

  At fourteen, I was a shy girl, and could barely speak to a boy, much less attract one and then put my tongue in his mouth. My secret crushes made me break out in a flop sweat in real life, but they played starring roles in my diaries where I pined poetically for them. I could fill pages with imaginary trysts, but when I saw “him” (whomever “he” was at the time) in the hallway, I’d look at my feet, and die a little inside.

  According to the junior high social hierarchy, girls with boyfriends were popular or rich, soccer or track stars—with boobs. I was a late bloomer, as well as shy, definitely not rich, nonathletic, skinny, and incapable of speech. But, as I learned in the movies, girls didn’t have to make the first salvo. “The boy should talk first,” I told myself to let myself off the hook. I remember walking my dog by this parking lot where a bunch of skater boys hung out. My secret tactic to get them to notice me was to furiously and passionately ignore them. Not once did any of them chase after me, ask me my name, or even say, “Hello.”

  Didn’t they get that I acted like they didn’t exist in order to get their attention?

  Why were boys so dumb??

  WHAT IS TRUE LOVE, WHERE DO I FIND IT, AND HOW DO I MAKE IT LAST?

  First Contact

  Jon was a trumpet player in the marching band, and I thought he was super hot. When he walked by, my girlfriends and I suddenly became fidgety, quiet, serious, keenly interested in our books. Couldn’t show that we noticed him, or that would break the illusion that we didn’t give a fuck, which was the only way to show a boy that you absolutely DID give a fuck.

  According to all of human history and John Hughes movies, the trumpet player in the high school marching band was, by definition, a geek. Jon was the world’s sexiest geek then. I didn’t mind. I was a geek, too. I was an ID girl, which meant that, at halftime during football games, I twirled a flag, and in parades, I held a shield along with eight other girls that spelled out the school name. Mine was the space between L-O-S and G-A-T-O-S.

  I joined band for a few reasons: 1) It came with an automatic friend group, 2) I was excused from gym, and therefore super-shy me didn’t have to shower with girls who all seemed to have developed into actual women while I still went braless, and 3) I got to wear a glittery costume that I could pretend to make fun of but actually loved. In terms of high school hierarchy, the marching band was low on the totem pole. And in terms of marching band hierarchy, I was very much at the bottom. But Jon was a trumpet player and a senior so he was quite a catch.

  * * *

  SOME THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGE

  My early crushes on Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp were filled with fervor. But I never fantasized about marrying them, not even Tom (I know, I know . . . he’s basically the epitome of “husband material”). I didn’t realize until much later that this was odd. Marriage never crossed my mind, and I never associated myself with the role of “the wife.” Instead, I was in love with pure romance: raw, passionate, dramatic—like a horrible rock ballad. But also like the love I saw at home. My own parents were soul mates—still are—after forty-five years of faithful marriage.

  I liked to play with Wedding Barbie in her pretty dress—who didn’t?—and my version of Ken clearly understood that Barbie had her own friends, her own pursuits, her own career. Even as a girl, I envisioned love with lots of personal space and freedom. If I wanted to up and travel for a month, my partner would have to say, “Can I help you pack?”

  I also thought of myself as a romantic, in love with the heroines in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Gilda, naively seeing them as free-spirited women who went to parties, seduced handsome men, were strong, beautiful, and fascinating, and unafraid to show their vulnerability.

  My desires for independence and freedom seemed to contradict my equal longing for true love and romance. I wanted nothing and everything from a relationship, and I knew that finding a partner capable of giving me what I wanted was not going to be easy. It might not happen at all.

  * * *

  The band traveled to competitions in a bus, and I always wanted to be within a few rows of Jon. That way, I could employ my “ignore him and never make eye contact” strategy. But Jon was nearly as shy as I was, so I switched my game to “have my friend tell his friend that I thought he was cute.”

  It worked.

  LOVE ONLY WORKS WHEN YOU WORK FOR IT

  One night, he walked me to my front doorstep. I knew what was coming and was terrified because I had no idea what I was doing. We leaned toward each other, and I got my first Princess Diaries–style one-foot-popping kiss. It was awesome.

  After the sweetest first kiss that ever was, I said, “Good night,” ran inside, closed the door, ran to my bedroom, and called my best friend Brittany to tell her every tiny detail. Being “with” Jon raised my social status by a mile. Suddenly, I was part of a group of girls who traveled in a clump in the general proximity of the clump of our boyfriends. I can’t remember going on a one-on-one date with Jon. Maybe he never asked, or maybe I avoided it. He might try to run the bases with me, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Or was I? What if he touched under my shirt and I hyperventilated? That’d be so sexy.

  It never got that far anyway. It was the innocent high school era of dry humping on the couch while watching rental videos—the ’90s version of “Netflix and chill.” We were solidly planted on French-kissing first base, nearly always surrounded by other people. As a couple, we barel
y talked and never removed clothes. I was very satisfied with this level of intimacy (hardly any). I was far more excited to have girl friends who participated in my “romance” by sharing our stories and secrets. I enjoyed being in a couple just as much as I liked my boyfriend.

  THE FIXER-UPPER

  When I was eighteen, I fell for a guy named Jason, like the horror movie. He had an infectious laugh, like a machine gun, which I adored. Jason was the first person I said “I love you” to. We were together for a year before this sweet, ambitious, funny guy took acid, and he didn’t come back from the trip. He started speaking in numbers, spouting conspiracies, and went crazy with paranoia. He ran from his house in the middle of the night and showed up at my window, soaking wet, no shoes, ranting with wild eyes. I stopped him from burning his house down and from cutting his face with a razor. I was afraid to leave him alone.

  His paranoia became so stressful for me to manage that I got really sick, too, and my parents wouldn’t let me leave the house. My friends encouraged me to break up with Jason, but I stayed through all the craziness because I felt it was my duty to help him recover, which he eventually did. I thought the strong thing to do was to fix him/us. I thought that love was something you worked for, worked at.

  A classic case of “no good deed goes unpunished,” soon after he recovered, he started cheating on me with an actress. One day I found a practically naked picture of her in his drawer and asked, “What the hell is this?!” Looking back now, I think he wanted me to find it. The conversation he wanted to have with me wasn’t one he could just bring up casually.