Lucky Man

by Michael J. Fox

  What could I say to Tracy; how could I explain? There was no explanation for anything. Nothing made sense. “You don't understand” had evolved from a phrase I rarely, if ever, uttered to my wife into a virtual mantra. She didn't understand; nobody understood. Even I didn't understand what Parkinson's would do to me, how it would change my life. But when I was drunk, it was all a little easier to ignore.

  If this downward spiral had continued much longer, I'm sure that there would have been an intervention of some sort. But in June of 1992, just before I finished work on For Love or Money, there would be one more bender, one last morning of awakening to feelings of confusion, fear, and remorse, not to mention a crippling hangover. And then, in a moment of clarity, something I can now attribute only to grace, I'd decide to put a stop to it.

  That summer, Tracy spent most nights on the Broadway stage, and I'd be on the film set all day long, so we saw less of one another than usual. But as For Love or Money prepared to wrap before the second week of July, we'd made the typical end-of-production shift into night shoots. On Friday the 26th of June, it happened that Tracy and I were leaving for work at the same time, she to the theater and me to the set. I'd been told to expect to work until 5:00 A.M. and advised Tracy that she probably wouldn't see me until the following morning. Our plan that day was for me to take Sam up to Connecticut, and for Tracy to join us on Sunday—Sunday and Monday being dark, or off, days for most New York theaters. But as soon as I got to work, I learned that there'd been a scheduling mistake. I wouldn't have to work through the night after all; in fact, I'd be finished by 9:30 or 10:00 P.M., and home before Tracy.

  Under normal circumstances, in less troubled times, this prospect would have cheered me and I'd have hurried home, glad for found time together. But at home was my new reality, my P.D. And so, my first impulse was this: I said I wouldn't be home until morning, and so now I have five or six hours that I don't have to account for—prime drinking time.

  There was an urgency, an edge to that night's partying, as if somehow I knew it would be my last. Even as I stood in front of the camera—all I had to do was a two-page twilight scene on a Tribeca street corner—a few of my crew buddies were picking up a quart bottle of Tequila, a bag of limes, and commandeering a blender. We were on our third pitcher of margaritas by the time the assistant director called “wrap.”

  By 10:00 P.M. we had taken over a small restaurant/bar in the village, the name of which, along with many other details of that evening, is now a blur. It must have been a Russian place because I remember throwing back shots of chilled vodka. The transition from tequila to vodka had been cushioned by a brief interlude of beer guzzling. I don't know whether it was the custom of the joint, or something we had simply improvised and the management tolerated, but as we tossed back each shot of vodka, we hurled the tiny glasses into a fireplace where they'd explode into crystalline splinters. This bacchanal went on until well after closing time, when we circled back to my trailer in Tribeca to polish off the beer in the mini-fridge.

  I don't remember being driven home, only stealing in sometime before sunrise. Nothing is quite so noisy as a stealthy drunk. Tracy's head soon peered from behind the bedroom door.

  “Mike, is that you?”

  “Yeah . . . just got back from work,” I lied.

  “Okay. Come to bed,” she said, and closed the door. I knew she'd be asleep seconds after she slipped back under the covers.

  I made a beeline to the fridge and grabbed a beer. The trip from the kitchen to the living room sofa must have been a bumpy one because when I popped the tab, the sixteen-ounce Coors sputtered and foamed. I took a long sudsy draw, and then collapsed onto the sofa, propping my feet up on its upholstered arm—I still had my shoes on. I put the beer can on the floor within arm's length, but I never reached for it again. I passed out with the taste of that final swig still in my mouth. A watery Coors tallboy: what a pathetic end to a drinking career.

  SOBER AS A JUDGE

  “Wake up . . . Daddy, wake up . . . let's go to Coneck-ti-kut.”

  I was fully clothed and slick with sweat. The sofa faced the big picture window of our West Side apartment, which looked across Central Park. While I'd been sleeping it off, my body had been cooking in the glare of the summer sun as it rose over the East Side. I came to slowly, incrementally piecing together fragments of my present situation.

  Sam, my three-year-old son, my baby boy, whom I loved so much, was at that moment nothing more than a giant gnat, climbing all over me, buzzing in my ear, irritating me into consciousness. I wanted to swat at him, push him off me and onto the floor. Instead, I sat up painfully and positioned him beside me on the couch. I resisted fully opening my eyes; the room was too bright, its millions of lumens like tiny needles piercing my brain. My fuzzy gaze went to the carpet where the tallboy lay, no doubt toppled over hours ago by a flopping arm. I used it as a point of focus, to orient myself. A damp stain in the rug fanned out from the hole in the top of the can.

  Then I saw feet. Tracy's feet. The feet had on shoes. Shit. What time was it? She was probably on her way back to the theater for Saturday's matinee. I'd slept all morning—been passed out all morning, more like it. I kept my eyes open as I hoisted my gaze from her Nikes, past her knees, her handbag, and steadily upward. I braced for what I'd find when my eyes finally met hers. She was going to be pissed off, disgusted. I was about to be ripped into big-time, and I knew I had it coming to me.

  But when I finally summoned the courage to look her in the face I found no expression of rage. Here was something far more disturbing. She was meeting my sorry state with a calmness approaching boredom. No, it was worse than boredom; it was indifference.

  “I have to go to the theater,” she said flatly. “Are you still going to be able to take Sam to the country?”

  “Yeah,” I stammered. “I just . . . just give me a second to get . . . listen, last night . . .”

  “I don't want to hear it,” Tracy said, still eerily calm. She turned for the door and then looked back, fixing me with another look. “Is this what you want?” she said. “This is what you want to be?”

  It wasn't a question. And then she was out the door. My hands started to tremble, but not just from some fucking brain disease. I'd never been so frightened in my life.

  “Hitting bottom” is a term recovering alcoholics often use. It describes a place of physical, emotional, and spiritual despair that they had brought themselves to in pursuit of their next drink, a moment of realization that to slip any lower would be unbearable. At least as far as my drinking career was concerned, that morning on the sofa I hit bottom.

  I was lucky. Compared to the experiences of others who've battled alcohol, mine was a pretty soft landing. I'm sure many people reading this now are thinking, “Shit . . . I spilled more than you drank.” I have no doubt that's true. You hear stories of utter financial ruin, horrendous car wrecks, injury and death, prison sentences, wrecked marriages, degradation, and humiliation far beyond anything I'd ever experienced. But as long as I continued to drink, any one of those fates could have been mine.

  At first I thought of alcohol as an ally in my struggle with Parkinson's. But as I lay there on the couch that morning with Sam crawling over me, I knew this couldn't be true. Alcohol had become yet another adversary—one that threatened to take away everything I cared about.

  I couldn't do anything about P.D., but alcohol was different: here at least I had a choice, and that day I made it. Helping me to make that choice was the first thing I'd actually be grateful to Parkinson's for. Part of the disease's “gift” is a certain stark clarity about the rest of your life. P.D.'s brutal assumption of authority over more and more aspects of life makes you appreciate all those areas where you still have sovereignty. P.D. teaches you, perforce, to distinguish between the two and defend whatever you still can. Which meant the alcohol had to go.

  Winding along the Saw Mill Parkway toward northwestern Connecticut that afternoon, Sam snoozing in his car sea
t, I wasn't thinking in those terms. To the extent that my mind was working at all, it was scripting snatches of contrite dialogue, excuses, apologies. Calling Tracy was my first priority once I reached my destination and I wanted to be ready with something. Flipping through my internal catalogue of mea culpas from hangovers past, I recognized that my motivation had always been to pacify her disappointed anger. But I had nothing with which to answer that look on her face. Tracy seemed all out of fight, resigned to view me as a lost cause. Was that what I wanted? That was what I wanted to be?

  Tracy was between the Saturday matinee and evening show when I reached her on the phone. I offered a sheepish “hi” and she responded with a noncommittal “hello.” I realized that the deadly pause that followed was all mine to fill. And this is what came out of my mouth:

  “I'm sorry—I just wanted to say that I have a drinking problem, and I'm ready to quit . . . if you know somebody I could talk to . . .”

  “Stay by the phone,” she said quickly, and before she hung up, “I love you.”

  Within minutes the phone rang again.

  “Hi Mike,” said a female voice I recognized immediately, a good friend to both Tracy and me. It suddenly dawned on me that, while we'd had dinner with this woman many times, I'd never once seen her take a drink, not even a glass of wine. I never bothered to wonder why—just more for me, I guess.

  “Tracy tells me you think you've finally had enough?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  A brief conversation followed, a feeling-out session in which she asked a few questions and seemed convinced by my answers that I did, indeed, need help and was ready to accept it. We made plans to meet in the city on Monday. She had one more question for me.

  “Think you can not drink before then?”

  I held my reply for a beat. What was I doing? Was I really ready for life without anesthesia? Or was this just more bargaining? Something on the order of “Please, God, get me through this and I won't touch another drop”? What the hell difference did it make? My drinking days were over.

  “Yeah, I think I can do that.”

  That unfinished Coors was the last drink I've had. Ten years have passed and I haven't had to reach for the next one, though this isn't an accomplishment I can honestly attribute to my own willpower. I met my friend on that Monday, and over the following days, months, and years, she, along with an ever-widening circle of new friends, all of whom prefer to remain anonymous, showed me that it was possible to live a life without alcohol.

  You would think the decision to get sober would mark the beginning of an inspiring upward arc, but the truth is more complicated. There would eventually come such a well-defined turning point, when I would begin progressing toward a whole new way of understanding my disease and my life, but there were still a couple more difficult years ahead. As low as alcohol had brought me, abstinence would bring me terrifyingly, but necessarily, lower. Although living without the filter of alcohol provided an opportunity to examine every part of my life, it did not immediately equip me with the ability to understand what I was seeing, or to make reasoned decisions about how to react.

  For the first year of sobriety, I focused primarily on just that—staying sober. At the beginning, simply going through the motions, one day at a time, constitutes a series of heroic acts. To survive any number of social occasions for the first time without the comfort of a drink marks a behavioral milestone. My sister Kelli's wedding at which I was, ironically, the toastmaster was a notable one. Then there was my First Sober Christmas, followed by a multitude of similar events and occasions, challenges and celebrations, where, previously, I would have felt the need to reach for a beer at the very least. In the twelve months since that final hangover, I finished one film, started and finished another, and began a third, all without touching a drop. Each of these small victories gave me some measure of satisfaction.

  In the short term, though, paying such close attention to abstinence became nearly as much of an escapist distraction as inebriation had been. While I was doing something indisputably positive by quitting drinking, in the rest of my life, I was still pursuing the same fear-based agenda that had gotten locked into place in the days following my diagnosis. In my career, I stuck with my plan to do as many lucrative, broad-appeal comedies as possible. After For Love or Money, I exercised my option to work outside of my Universal contract, but instead of seeking out a challenge—a creative risk to counter Universal's safe commercial game plan—I accepted an offer from Disney to star in Life with Mikey, a sweet and squishy family comedy about a ne'er-do-well former child star whose pocket is picked one day by a young street urchin with star potential. She becomes his protégé and he becomes her agent. Yet another swing at the same old piñata.

  Tracy's disappointment was obvious, but I refused to discuss the matter any further. “I know what I'm doing—trust me.” But how could she when it was achingly clear that I didn't even trust myself? Booze or no booze, I was still isolating myself from my family and caught up in an inner turmoil that I could not comprehend, except to the extent that I was sure no one else could either. For her part, Tracy continued to work, traveling with Sam to Los Angeles for a tele-film while I spent the winter of 1992–1993 in Toronto on the Disney film. So, our deepening emotional distance was often compounded by geographical separation.

  The year 1993 was turning out to be a dry version of 1992. I had a lot of time alone to think, but I spent very little of that time considering a future with Parkinson's disease. Mostly I plotted ways to busy myself with anything but. I made no effort to find a neurologist or to learn more about the disease. I signed on for another Universal comedy, Greedy, slated to start production in L.A. that May. With a different trainer, I started working out again—putting on pounds of muscle mass, and looking healthier than last time, even though my symptoms were getting worse. While filming Greedy in L.A. that summer, Mikey opened and bombed. When For Love or Money finally hit theaters that fall, it too failed to generate any business. In the same way I'd fired my old agent to jump-start my movie career with Peter Benedek, I now let Pete go and signed on with one of the big-three mega-agencies. Hell-bent on doing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting different results. By year's end, I'd begin to understand why this approach is often described by people in recovery as a sort of functioning insanity.

  Charting the course of my emotions during this period is a grim and tricky task because it's not a time I went through with eyes wide open. In effect, I kept my head down and plowed forward, tensing in the anticipation of running into walls but lacking the clarity or wisdom to see them coming. It was not so much a journey as an experience of being lost in a no-man's land—far more disorienting than any hall of mirrors, a place where I'd at least recognize some reflection of myself, however distorted.

  Though I didn't know it at the time, what I was in desperate need of was objectivity, an honest and thorough accounting of where I was in my life and how or why I'd arrived there. Only then could I move ahead safely. I needed to stop running and initiate a process akin to the one that lawyers call discovery—assemble disparate bits of raw information like time lines, paper trails, and anecdotal evidence in order to develop a persuasive theory of motive and method, action and consequence. “Discovery” completed, I then needed to sit still for however long it took, as if in a courtroom, and sift through the findings, connecting the dots until I grasped the truth. And that's exactly what happened. Although I didn't have to put myself on trial—somebody else was only too happy to do me that favor.

  SO HELP ME GOD . . .

  Los Angeles County Courthouse—November 1993

  Remember that bachelor pad in Laurel Canyon—with the swimming pool in the backyard and the jacuzzi in the bedroom? Shortly after Sam was born, Tracy and I decided to sell the house and move back east. After the sale, the purchaser had some complaints and sued me. I don't need to go into the specifics of the lawsuit; civil litigation is exasperating, anguishing, and often boring. T
hough, as you will see, I learned a great deal from the experience, I'm in no hurry to repeat it.

  The crux of the case was this: the buyer claimed that there were preexisting defects with the house and landscaping that I had willfully conspired to conceal, thereby committing fraud. Further, the suit claimed that as a result, I had caused emotional and physical distress. They were asking for several million dollars in damages, many times the value of the house itself.

  Set against the backdrop of everything that was troubling me during the early nineties—the death of my father, the P.D. diagnosis, the downturn in my film career, and the rest—I was only peripherally aware of this gathering storm. As time went on, however, a court date was set, and I was called in for a deposition, as were some former employees. This wasn't going to go away, my insurance company's lawyers reported to me. They were as shocked as I was that not only was the complainant insisting on a multimillion-dollar settlement, but that the judge hadn't dismissed the whole thing outright.

  Now I was angry. I hadn't defrauded or conspired to defraud anybody. The whole thing was ridiculous, and had evolved from a nuisance into a nightmare. They were counting on me to write a check and settle, but I told my lawyers not a chance, even if that meant going to trial.

  The person suing me exercised their option to request a jury. That meant that the case could conceivably stretch on in court for at least a couple of weeks. No matter. I resolved to be there every day, for every minute of the trial no matter how long it took. The proceedings were set for November 1993, in the Los Angeles County Courthouse. As it happened, Tracy had to be in Los Angeles for another television movie during that time, so I cleared my calendar and the whole family set up housekeeping at a West Hollywood hotel.

  The lawsuit would drag on until the second week of January 1994. Jury selection alone consumed the better part of a week. The plaintiff's attorney would grill each prospective juror, asking questions like, “Do you think Alex Keaton would ever lie?”—a negative answer to which would obviously allow him to force the court to excuse that juror from service. If they made it past the other side's lawyer, then my attorney would ask his own series of questions, ferreting out strategic disqualifications. Sometimes he'd let a potential ally get away. After my lawyer thanked and excused one elderly woman from the jury pool, she made her way past our table on her way out of the courtroom, leaned over, and pinched my cheek to say, “Ooooh, I just love you.”