Lucky Man

by Michael J. Fox

  So why didn't Tracy and I at some point just give in? Step out of the tent and wave? Or stroll down to the end of the driveway where scores of press (and few, if any, actual fans) were gathered? Why couldn't we have simply allowed them to have one wedding picture and made everybody happy? First, after all the tabloids had done, we were in no mood to reward them. And second, there was no way a single, nonexclusive photograph would have left them satisfied. Next they'd go after the cake-cutting shot, the “exclusive” wedding-night shot, and then the honeymoon swimsuit shots.

  Tracy and I understood that to surrender at this point would have been to give up much more than a simple photo opportunity. It would have been a vote for magical thinking; a place where you live and die by your press clippings, ratings, and box office—a place where the performance is twenty-four/seven. A decision to stroll down that driveway would have been a choice to stay in the fun house forever and kiss the real world good-bye.

  During the ceremony, the helicopters came out in force. Under the tent it was warm, but certainly nobody fainted or gasped for air. We had the flaps down on the side of the tent open to the sky, but on the opposite side (where the helicopters couldn't approach because of the terrain), the tent was open to let in the breeze. If anything, the external craziness only sweetened the event by drawing everyone even closer together.

  Unimaginable though it may have been to the uninvited gathered outside, it was a great wedding, a tremendous success. In spite of their bribes, their helicopters and subterfuge, all of their combined resources hadn't bought them as much as a single photograph. So, we paid for our privacy in the coin of bad press, the tabloids projecting the embarrassment of their failure directly onto us. It was a price well worth paying because it enabled us in a single moment not only to join together in the ritual of marriage, but to draw a line and create a space apart for ourselves. A place of our very own that, unbeknownst to us then, would help us to weather a much more serious storm ahead.

  Chapter Five

  Reality Bites

  Studio City, California—January 6, 1990

  As the limousine traveled the quarter mile from our home in the hills down to the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards, the sky darkened into night, the streetlights came on, and a gentle rain slicked the roadways. The traffic signal went to yellow as we approached Ventura, the driver wisely choosing to slow to a stop rather than trying to beat the red. There were young kids in the car, and though he knew we were in a hurry to get to the airport, he also knew the purpose of our trip. Why risk adding tragedy to tragedy?

  The five of us needed to catch the next flight to Vancouver, where my father had been rushed to the hospital. Dad hadn't been feeling well for the last month or so; not that he had ever felt physically great throughout most of his adult life. He chain-smoked, and over time packed in excess of 300 pounds onto a frame so naturally slight it once earned him mounts as a jockey. His body, on this, the first Saturday of the new decade, had finally surrendered after a sixty-one-year assault. His heart gave out first, then his kidneys began to fail. At last report, he was still alive, but barely.

  Tracy and I sat on either side of my sister Jackie, who was weeping softly. Tracy held Jackie's hand. Across from us on the rear facing bench behind the driver, our seven-month-old son, Sam, strapped into his car seat, had already nodded off to sleep. Next to him, Jackie's nine-year-old boy, Matthew, squirmed and fidgeted, using a shirt sleeve to wipe away tears of both fear and disappointment. Just old enough to recognize that his grandfather was very sick, Matt was still young enough so that to him, understandably, the more immediate crisis was the sudden cancellation of the rest of his California vacation, including the next day's trip to Disneyland.

  As we waited in the idling limo for the light to turn green, a white sedan rolled to a stop beside us—a white, 1987 Chrysler Fifth Avenue, to be exact. I knew the year and make instantly because, from the ivory Naugahyde of its landau roof down to the whitewall radials and maroon pinstriping, it was the same car I'd bought for my father on his fifty-ninth birthday. This was Dad's car. Except of course, it wasn't.

  I looked to my left and directly into my sister's face; she was staring past me out the window and at the car. Though tears rolled from her eyes, her mouth formed a smile.

  “It's a good sign,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said, though as I embraced her, my eyes met Tracy's. She was crying too, but not smiling. She didn't think the ghost car was a good sign; not a good sign at all.

  At LAX, my family boarded the plane while I stayed behind in the lounge to return a phone call. There'd been a message waiting for me from a close friend of the family. As soon as I reached him his first words were “I'm sorry,” and I knew that Dad was gone. I couldn't help but think of the white car when he said that Dad had passed while we were making our way to the airport.

  I joined my family on the plane. The attendant offered cocktails; I ordered a Jack Daniel's and a Bacardi. The drinks came, and I drained the whiskey and carried the rum across the aisle. Placing it on the tray table in front of Jackie, I sat down next to my sister and told her the news that our father had died.

  . . .

  The four years following my father's death could not have been more different from the four years preceding. Yet at the same time they present a kind of a mirror image. For me, Dad's death is a bit like the folded crease down the center of a Rorschach test, or perhaps more appropriately, a fulcrum uneasily balancing two opposing but closely linked worlds. Although I didn't appreciate it until much later, the four years I'd just spent struggling to make my way safely through the fun house of success, celebrity, and magical thinking would be child's play compared to the four years that lay ahead: a much more challenging struggle with the reality of mortality, maturity, and Parkinson's disease—real life's harsh answer to magical thinking. I couldn't know it that day in January 1990, but I was stepping across a threshold.

  Burnaby, British Columbia—January 10, 1990

  On the morning after the memorial service, Steve and I went to the funeral home to collect the impossibly small carton containing Dad's ashes. On the way back to the house (Mom's house now), me driving and Steve in the passenger seat of Dad's (Mom's) Chrysler, we were at once appalled to find ourselves laughing at the realization that this was the only way Steve and I could ever share the car's front bench seat with Dad. Similarly, we were surprised to find ourselves stifling laughter a few hours later when, after Mom had asked us to gather up some of Dad's things, Steve and I came across a cache of our father's heart pills.

  “What do we do with these, do you think?” I asked.

  “Throw 'em out, I guess,” Steve replied. Then, after a beat, “I mean, it's not like they worked.”

  Anyone who's been through the grieving process will recognize moments like these. It's not that we didn't love and respect our dad, but that, shaken by his sudden departure, at times it seemed our most natural reactions were just what Dad's would have been: whenever possible, we had to find something to laugh about.

  It's just as common, however, when families join together in mourning for the result to be as divisive as it is cathartic. A scene played out at my mother's home later that evening that unexpectedly erupted into anger.

  It was late, almost midnight; Mom had gone to bed, and Tracy and Sam were asleep in the downstairs guest room. It was just my brother, sisters, and I grouped around the kitchen table, some sitting and some, like me, wandering to and from the refrigerator or just pacing the line where the linoleum met the kitchen carpet. The discussion was about, among other things, how best to carry out my father's final wishes.

  Dad didn't want us to feel tied to the ritual of visiting a gravesite or monument. He had loved ones in nearby cemeteries and felt remiss that he'd rarely found time to pay his respects, so he'd asked that in death he be cremated, and that we spread his ashes over those graves. This ceremony would take place the following morning, with only my mom and the five
kids taking part.

  While we worked out the logistics for the next morning, Kelli and my older sister Karen were clipping copies of Dad's obituary from a stack of newspapers. Karen asked if I wanted her to save one for me. In truth, I had already slipped a copy into my suitcase that morning, but, exhausted and a little punchy, I said something meant as a throwaway bit of levity that came out sounding all wrong. “Don't worry about it,” I said, “I'm sure my clipping service will pick it up.”

  Jackie's rebuke was particularly angry and took the form of a command. “Michael,” she barked, “sit down and shut up.”

  By now, I was even less accustomed to such scoldings than I was four years earlier on the set of Family Ties when Tracy lit into me during The Scampi Incident. This did piss me off, and I decided that it was time for me to go to bed, but not without a parting shot.

  “Hey, Jack,” I said as I turned to walk toward the basement door and make my way down to join Tracy and Sam in the guest room, “screw you.”

  The remark was neither diplomatic nor witty, I admit, but I never expected it to spark the sudden explosion I heard from behind me. When I wheeled back around, Steve had bolted to his feet, almost overturning the kitchen table in the process, and was coming at me—fast.

  I only had a second to set myself, and as he reached for me I gave him a defensive shove, intended to buy myself enough time to get to the basement door. I love my brother, I certainly didn't want to fight him, then or ever—it would be the last thing my father would want to see happen. Besides, let's face it, the guy had three inches and sixty pounds on me. But as I made my second break for the door, he grabbed hold of my T-shirt—actually, one I'd borrowed from Tracy. As I pulled away, it tore all the way down the front. He stayed with me, my sisters following closely behind, until we reached the entry hall at the top of the stairs.

  And there we stood in an uneasy standoff, the four of them encircling me in a tableau eerily reminiscent of an earlier one, a few short steps away and a few short years back. I'm thinking of that tabletop in my parents’ hall, where my siblings’ hastily assembled collection of trophies had outnumbered and surrounded my brand-new Emmy award. In retrospect that very image points to the drama within the drama—how awkwardly my fun-house self now confronted real- world disaster. When I think back to the events of those days and begin to see them from my brother's point of view, I wince—and can easily understand how things got to this pass.

  . . .

  Steve had been at the house when Dad rapidly began to deteriorate. He'd called the ambulance. He'd held and comforted our frightened father as EMS attendants punched needles into his arms and loaded him onto the gurney before speeding off to the emergency room. Steve was the point man at the hospital, conferring with the doctors, and relaying the grim prognosis to Mom, while trying to keep her as calm as possible. Then he had to make the phone calls to the rest of us, relaying the news that not only was Dad very sick, but he was fighting for his life.

  By the time Steve's call had reached me, I'm sure he was down to his last reserves of physical and emotional strength. My reaction, given his understanding of the direness of the situation, must have seemed ludicrous. But I was drawing on what I thought were my greatest and most available strengths: money and influence.

  “He should have the best doctors, Steve,” I said. “If he needs to be transported, get a chopper, send him to Seattle if you have to. Jackie and I will be right there. I'll make some calls, see if we can get a private jet.”

  Steve must have been shaking his head. It's a measure of his grace under pressure that he didn't take that opportunity to rip into me, let his big-shot little brother know that even he couldn't buy, bribe, or bullshit his way out of this mess.

  “You and Jackie just need to come home,” he said simply. “As soon as you can.”

  While I made a series of futile attempts to contact friends and studio executives with access to private jets, Tracy called American Airlines and made the reservations we eventually used to fly back to Vancouver that evening.

  My mother's quiet devastation; the expressions on my sisters’ faces, as if they'd been suddenly and violently slapped in the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation; and Steve's anguish as he recounted the ordeal of our father's final moments—this is what greeted me at the door in Burnaby, and immediately it grounded me in a landscape of loss, a landscape dominated by the absence of my father. It was the harshest reinforcement yet of the truths I had been grappling with. Money, property, and prestige were no protection from reality.

  As awful as the situation was, the bottom feeders of the tabloid press did what they could to make it even worse. As far as they were concerned, this wasn't a private tragedy, but a public story. Their intrusive phone calls upset my mother, and a few even showed up at her doorstep in the guise of condolence callers. Gavin De Becker's office sent security personnel from California; a sound move as it turned out, for in subsequent days, tabloid photographers were caught smuggling cameras into my father's viewing and attempting to crash his wake. More theater of the absurd from the folks who brought you llama suits, dueling helicopters, and kidnapped grandmothers. What was astounding was that they could make no distinction between my wedding and my father's funeral. According to their twisted logic, anything that involved me was about me. But how could my family understand this, and why should they have to?

  At the wake, close friends of the family approached and spoke to me as if I alone was heir to the mantle of familial responsibility; that it was all in my hands now. Not only was I was in no way fit to take on that role, but these well-wishers, however well-intentioned, were being grossly unfair to Steve, who had already so ably shouldered so much of this burden and was, after all, eight years my senior. It must have stung.

  All of this brought Steve and me to the precipice that night in my parents’ house. I'd come home, I thought, wanting simply to be present, a grieving son and brother. But evidently I carried a lot of extra baggage with me—at least in the eyes of others, including my family. The effect was to open a gulf between my siblings and me, which was the last thing any of us needed.

  It was Tracy who wordlessly defused the confrontation. She had been awakened by the fracas, as had Sam, whom she carried on her hip as she rose up the stairs behind my brother. When I saw her, I released my grip on Steve's shirt. He noticed the shift in my gaze and let go of the shreds of mine, then turned to make way for my wife and son. Tracy knew better than to involve herself in a family feud. Taking my hand, she simply led me down the steps into the guest room. I began to blurt out my side of the story. Tracy closed the door, put Sam in his crib, and crawled back into bed.

  “Tell me about it in the morning. You need to sleep.” She switched off the bedside lamp and I lay down beside her in the darkness. She draped an arm across my chest.

  “You know,” she said, “that was my favorite shirt.”

  I knew, even the next morning, as my siblings and I made our somber rounds of the local cemeteries—speaking to each other only through our mother—that the wounds of the previous night's encounter would eventually heal. (About this, I was right.) The focus of my attention returned to my father. The way I understood things then, there was no more eventually for him and me: our relationship would forever be what it was on January 6, 1990. Future events could have no bearing. (About this, I was wrong.) I was grateful that my dad had lived long enough to know Tracy and to hold our son Sam. Their presence in my life represented a personal accomplishment that was more powerful and, quite possibly in his view, just as unlikely as my worldly fame and fortune. I doubt he expected I'd ever choose a mate as grounded as Tracy, or so eagerly embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood.

  My career did impress him, though, and I felt glad he'd lived long enough to enjoy it. Given his cautious nature, the risks I took (albeit with his solid if reluctant support) were outrageous, but they had paid off. Obvious in his pride and generous in his praise, the entire tone of his relationship wit
h me changed—though, truth be told, not until after I had become successful. The bottom line: I was untouchable now, and he knew it. Getting Dad to relax and just go with the ride will always stand as one of my most unlikely and gratifying achievements. My dad, as would be most evident with the fractured Emmy incident, had bought into the magic.

  So what would he have made of events to come? And how would his reaction have colored my own? I worry that my dad would have taken my diagnosis as a confirmation of his darkest views of the world; proof that happiness and success were not to be trusted. He believed life operated according to an inflexible system of compensation, in which each of life's gains had to be paid for by an equal amount of loss. Though obviously I can't know this for sure, I suspect he may have interpreted my P.D. as the cosmic price I had to pay for all my success. That would not have been helpful to me. For one thing, there have been times when I have felt as much myself, and the belief—which after all is nothing but superstition—has only gotten in the way of getting better.

  So much good has happened since the dark days of this period in my life that I wish my father could have lived to see. He died just as the shit was about the hit the fan, and there's much I'm relieved he didn't have to live through, much I'm not proud of. I remember thinking soon after he died that at least he lived long enough to see the magic, to enjoy and take part in his son's success. And yet, as I can see now, there was an even greater magic to come, and I so wish I could have shared that with him too.