Lucky Man

by Michael J. Fox

  I turned to my attorney and whispered, “That's it. Let's just get on with this. Any twelve will do.”

  The whole thing felt ridiculous and overblown. This was no murder trial, just a ho-hum property dispute, yet there was no question that the presence of a celebrity in the courtroom had created a legal circus.

  But if justice wasn't completely blind, she wasn't winking, either. In fact, this was the flip side of fame that I hadn't seen before. Being well-known wasn't going to earn me any special consideration, only more intense scrutiny. Cute wouldn't cut it; charm would be more of a liability than an asset, since in this setting it could be misread as guile. The obvious strategy of opposing counsel was to widen the rift between these honest working folks in the jury box and me, the arrogant boy prince of Hollywood. The strategy wouldn't succeed with the jury: they ruled against the plaintiffs on all the key issues—fraud, conspiracy—although I would end up paying for some repairs. But the plaintiff's strategy did succeed in creating a rare and unsettling opportunity for me to witness myself on trial. Day after day, I sat in the harsh light of the courtroom, watching the details of my life paraded before me.

  The theme of my defense, the central truth that ultimately persuaded the jury I hadn't conspired to defraud, was just as powerful in making plain to me at last how pathetic my personal situation had become. That theme was ignorance—that is, lack of knowledge about my own life. How could I have conspired to misrepresent a transaction that I had barely any involvement in? I had delegated the selling of the house to others, signed the sales agreement that had been Fed-Exed to me, and moved on. I had never met or spoken to the buyer—hell, before the court case, I had never even met the realtor. Were there problems with the house? I didn't think so, and I would have had them fixed if I did, but those are the kind of details that, in my charmed existence, I would never have noticed.

  To prove my innocence, I would have to demonstrate an entirely accurate pattern of detachment from the minutiae of day-to-day life, an absence of personal accountability that must have come as a shock to the men and women of the jury. I appeared before them on the witness stand, sitting on my quaking hands lest they mistake my Parkinsonian tremor for the nervousness of a liar, and laid out the intricate workings of the machinery I relied on to function in the world. I had agents, money managers, personal assistants to handle most of the practical matters of life—I was far too busy (playing make-believe for a living) to do much of anything for myself. At one particularly telling point in my testimony, I was forced to admit, “I don't even buy my own socks.” Rather than testify at all, I could have just placed a portable stereo in front of the jury box and blasted out Joe Walsh's “Life's Been Good to Me.” This was my “defense”: my life had gotten away from me. No wonder I hadn't owned up to my diagnosis, taken a cold hard look at its reality. Why should Parkinson's be any different from anything else in my life? Don't I pay someone to take care of this?

  I soon understood that the trial would drag on past the Christmas break, when Tracy and Sam and I planned to return to New York. After the holiday, she had to begin a new project. This meant I would have to return to L.A. alone in January for the concluding weeks of the case, a prospect I dreaded. At least, I thought to myself with a horrible sinking feeling, I know I won't be missed.

  This was perhaps the most humbling aspect of the whole ordeal. If I thought that by dropping everything to make some grandstand defense of my personal integrity, the world would stop spinning, I was sorely mistaken. My absence—from my family, from my career—created no discernible void; as far as I could tell, it was barely noticed. There was no project that had to be put on hold—I was developing a feature film to direct, but that was almost a year away and, anyway, I had begun to doubt my ability to see it through. Another actor might refer to my current state as “being between jobs,” but the average person would simply call it unemployment. I prefer the British term for it, “redundancy.” That's exactly how I was beginning to feel—redundant, unnecessary.

  Tracy was working through it all and apparently thriving. In the past, I'd always been pleased and proud of her when she'd be given a chance to show off her talent, but these were mean times. Every morning, by the time I'd slink out the door of the hotel on my way downtown to that dingy glue-trap of a courtroom to plead my “I'm not a fraud, just a flake” defense, Tracy had already left for the set. I have to admit, too, that for the first time in our marriage, I was feeling jealous. Her co-star, Peter Horton from the popular TV series thirtysomething, was ruggedly handsome, and not, as far as I knew, being sued by anyone. It was all making me nuts.

  Tracy was well aware that I was mired in something awful. One evening, a few days before we traveled back to Connecticut for Christmas, she tried to get me to talk about what it was I was feeling. I didn't know what to say, and was as surprised as she was at the words I finally mumbled.

  “I've never been so miserable in my life.” I was close to tears.

  “Honey, you've got to stop doing this to yourself. I think you should see somebody.” Somewhere I had a piece of paper on which she'd copied down the phone number of a New York therapist who was supposed to be very good.

  I shook my head. Tracy had proposed this once or twice before, and I'd never done anything about it. For that matter, she'd spent the last two years begging me to get a neurologist, and I'd shrugged that off too. In the days before I got sober, I'd occasionally consider making an appointment with a psychologist, but that plan was always stopped in its tracks by a clever little catch-22 I'd devised for precisely that purpose. In those days, any therapist that was worth a damn would probably tell me that the first thing I had to do was face up to my drinking problem, and I certainly didn't want to do that. Conversely, any mental health professional that spent more than an hour with me and didn't recommend I quit drinking wouldn't be worth seeing. Ergo, no shrink for me.

  “No, I'll get through this on my own,” I'd say to Tracy. I could see that she was far from convinced.

  “Just don't give up on me,” I mumbled, not really comprehending that this time I was talking to myself.

  HAPPY X-MAS (WAR IS OVER)

  Los Angeles—December 1993

  Each day spent in court dismantling my elaborate network of defenses, ostensibly to convince the judge and jury that at the core existed no intent to defraud, laid bare a man hard even for me to recognize. This was my life we were talking about, but I felt as though I didn't truly own it. And that realization made it excruciatingly difficult to leave the courtroom each evening and pretend as if I did.

  By December 1993, I had reached bottom, the winter of my dis-connect. Returning to the hotel, I'd hug Sam, but felt far too dispirited to engage in any sort of play. With Tracy, I'd try to be polite but brief. The anger I was feeling—at the trial, at myself (and no doubt at Parkinson's, but I wasn't quite there yet)—was so inchoate that it could uncoil and spark arguments as nonsensical as they could be bitter. My self-esteem by now was so negligible that even when I'd try to be sweet or romantic, I felt as though I was cursing her with my affection. My appetite was nonexistent, and I used that excuse to avoid joining my family for dinner, which seemed to me a false and pitiful attempt at normalcy.

  What I would do instead is retreat to the bathroom, and run a bath. As I sloughed off whatever outwardly respectable shirt-suit-and-tie combo I'd worn to trial that day, I was careful to avoid catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. When the tub was full and the mirror fogged from the stream, I'd turn off the lights and slip into the hot water; as naked now as I'd felt in the courtroom, but safer. The bathtub became my refuge, my hiding place.

  My body ached. For weeks in court I'd been manipulating it, contorting it into intensely uncomfortable positions in order to mask the tics and tremors. I was well-practiced at this deception, but on a film set I'd have breaks, minutes and hours when I could retreat to my trailer and let my symptoms run riot. I'd get a heads up on when they'd need me next, and then time my P.D. meds
accordingly. But trapped in the wooden chair at my lawyers’ table, there could be no such respite. Squirming and fidgeting in this room where it seemed as though I had exposed so much already, I was not about to let anyone—jury, plaintiff, judge, or lawyer—see what I was still not willing to look at myself. Against the surface of the warm water, I could hear the muted splash of my trembling hand, feel my left side twist below; but with the lights out, I was spared the sight of it.

  This is what my lifelong search for room to maneuver had come to: a box of water in a lightless, windowless nine-by-sixteen-foot room—afraid to leave my artificial womb, to go outside where I could only cause trouble, disappoint my family and myself. Best, I thought, to stay right here where I couldn't fuck anything up. And stay I would, day after day, sometimes three or four times on weekends, for hours at a time, just trying to keep my head below water.

  Connecticut—Christmas Eve 1993

  It was the night before Christmas and I was making a list.

  Everyone else was sleeping in the weekend home Tracy and I kept near her parents’ Connecticut farm: Tracy, Sam, and my mom, who'd traveled east from Vancouver to be with us for the holidays. I couldn't sleep. I was restless, but not in the excited way that I had been during the Christmas Eves of my childhood, tossing and turning in anticipation of the biggest holiday on the kid calendar. Unable to quell the dyskinesias in my body, I had gotten out of bed, and careful not to disturb my wife, slipped out of the bedroom. My first impulse was to head for the bathtub, but the house was so small and the plumbing so ancient that to run the water risked waking everyone up, and I sure as hell didn't want company.

  I soon found myself in the sitting room, pen in hand, hunched over a loose collection of scrap paper I'd gathered up and laid out on the coffee table. The only light in the room was a dim floor lamp that I'd moved closer so that a soft glow was cast over my improvised work space.

  What I was furiously scribbling wasn't quite as orderly as a list; it was really more like what my anonymous nondrinking buddies would call a long-overdue fourth step, an inventory of my life to that point. But even that sounds too linear. It was more like the minutes of the raucous committee of voices chattering like spiteful monkeys inside my head. Maybe if I could get all of this down, I thought, then read it over and pick it apart, I could find some peace or, at the very least, some notion about where to turn next.

  The next several hours produced a remarkable, disturbing document: a rambling, occasionally incoherent autodissection, a ledger of faults and failures, resentments and recriminations. The words that spilled out on the page chronicled not only my present situation, but also alluded to the past: growing up small, having to constantly prove myself, overcome circumstances I couldn't control; how having done that, I'd blown it all, pissed it away. I wrote about my dad, his swing from unfairly doubting me to believing that I'd become something more than I had. And I wrote about missing him, acknowledged my love for him. I noted that having my mom there with me at that time was incredibly difficult. Her faith in me was so absolute that I wondered if she was able to see the incredible pain that I was in. I wanted to protect her from it, which was a ridiculous idea, given that I myself was overwhelmed by it. As for Tracy, I kept writing the words “does she still love me” and if she did, “how is that possible?” Over and over, I professed my love for her, and the hope that I could earn back her trust. We had always talked about having more kids after Sam, and I noted, bitterly, that she didn't talk about that so much anymore. What kind of father could I be in the future? For that matter, what kind of father was I now? I apologized to Sam. I realized I put a lot of pressure on a four-year-old to deal with me and what I was going through in a way that even the adults I knew were incapable of.

  Bleak as these pages were, there are some things in them that manage to make me laugh. Throughout I keep referring to an intense desire to be “more low-maintenance”—someone who was more dependable and self-reliant. Three or four times this phrase appears, and finally, after the last reference, I'd scribbled in parentheses “is that how you spell ‘low-maintenance’?”

  Eventually I tired of writing, or my hand cramped, or I just didn't have the strength to go on. I looked over what I'd written, and wept. Whatever else this was, I realized, it was an instrument of surrender. The next day I'd find that phone number Tracy had written down for me weeks earlier—the one that belonged to the shrink in Manhattan. I'd call her—Christmas Day or no Christmas Day. I just couldn't handle this by myself anymore.

  Reading it today, what's perhaps most astonishing about my manifesto is the one thing it failed to mention:

  That I had Parkinson's disease, and it wasn't ever going to go away.

  Chapter Six

  Year of Wonders (Or: The [Real] Secret of My [Real] Success)

  Connecticut—December 26, 1993

  I had spoken with an analyst once before—but that was in a sitcom. During the fourth season of Family Ties, Gary Goldberg and producer Alan Uger co-authored a one-hour script called “A—My Name Is Alex.” Alex's best friend dies in a traffic accident while moving some furniture—an errand Alex was supposed to be helping him with, but had weaseled out of at the last minute. Wrestling with profound survivor's guilt—compounded by the realization that he was spared only through an act of selfishness—Alex seeks the counsel of a psychotherapist. For Alex P. Keaton to admit a need for this sort of help was completely out of character. Self-reliance, after all, is the cornerstone of the swaggering boy-wonder persona he presents to the world; unstoppable, Alex ascends on a straight line toward the future of his choosing.

  The death of his friend stops him in his tracks, though, and poses questions that, for once, he can't glibly answer. As the episode's schoolyard-rhyme title suggests, Alex now has to retrace his steps through life, beginning with early childhood, in order to reconcile the fear and self-doubt he feels on the inside with the admiration and praise he's always received from the outside world. The episode was shot in a theatrical Our Town style in which the therapist is never seen on camera; Alex looks directly into the lens as he answers the probing questions put to him by a disembodied male voice.

  That episode won me an Emmy, but now, immersed in this dauntingly real version of my alter ego's anguish and reaching out just as he had for professional help, the only reward I sought was relief. In many ways I could relate to Alex's confusion. Like him, I never thought I'd have anything to do with psychologists or psychotherapy. I was always a figure-it-out-myself kind of person, but it was painfully clear to me that this time I didn't have a clue about where to start. Like Alex, I had a great deal invested in being regarded as a winner, by myself as well as others; to find myself this beaten down and vulnerable made me feel as though I'd somehow, at last, come up a loser. But losing is one thing, and quitting is another: thankfully, something deep inside would not allow me to quit.

  Unlike the disembodied voice in the “A—My Name Is Alex” episode, the one on the other end of the telephone line was female and belonged to a nonfictional human being—that therapist in New York whose number I had saved and finally dialed on the day after Christmas 1993.

  Joyce is a Jungian analyst who practices on the West Side of Manhattan. When I asked her recently about that first phone call, she told me that I sounded like “a little boy who'd rather die than admit how scared he was.” My voice shaking (Joyce said I was “barely audible”), I recall telling this stranger on the phone that I felt “like my life is in flames.” Interestingly, neither of us remembers any mention of Parkinson's disease during that first of what would turn out to be hundreds of conversations.

  I had an immediate, visceral sense that I had done the right thing in reaching out for help. All I wanted to know now was how soon could I get in to see her. Joyce reminded me that I had called during the holidays and she had no appointments scheduled until the following week. Still, she had been listening carefully to both what had and hadn't been said, and quickly determined that I was in crisis an
d needed to see somebody right away. Never one to believe in coincidence, Joyce also gave no small weight to the fact that although she was supposed to be out of the city that day, she happened to be in her office when my call came.

  “I can see you this afternoon at three,” she offered, and gave me the address. There was a pause. That afternoon? We hadn't planned on returning to the city so early—my mother was visiting, it was the day after Christmas, and anyway, I was counting on an hour or two in the bathtub.

  “I don't know if that time works for me,” I replied.

  On her end, Joyce must have been incredulous. Here I was with my life in flames, and I was haggling with her about appointment times.

  “Do you have anything later in the day or maybe tonight?” I couldn't help it. Negotiating had become reflex for me.

  Joyce held firm. “Three P.M.,” she said. “Today.”

  M—MY NAME IS MICHAEL

  December 26, 1993–Spring 1994

  My anxiety was liquid; the phone call to Joyce had primed the pump—and it was ready to flow. I showed up at her office at 2:55 P.M., and seconds later we were seated across from each other, she with a notepad on her lap and me with my head in my hands. Recalling that first session, Joyce says I arrived “defenseless,” as if “all of my skin had been peeled away.” I started to tell my story, haltingly at first, and then in a torrent. I didn't leave until 6:00 P.M.