Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox

fumed. “The minute you lay a phonebook on the driver's seat, they just check the fail box.” They kept asking me follow-up questions, and the more humiliating details I disclosed, the more flat-out hilarious they found the entire story. Who cares how old the kid is , they must have thought, he's a riot .
    â€œWhen you got the callback, and then the part, well, it was just surreal,” Mom marvels. “I couldn't believe it.” She couldn't, but I could.
    In addition to the lead in the series, which would begin filming later that summer, I was also offered the lead role in a separate project, a TV film that would begin production shortly after I got out of school. It was that easy. After making $600 for the entire summer the year before, I would now be getting a check for $600 every week. That summer, between the eight episodes of Leo & Me and the TV movie, I pulled in almost six grand.
    I mention the money because when people ask how it was that, given my many interests, it was acting that I ultimately decided to pursue, I'll laugh and give the glib but essentially honest reply: “It was the first thing I got paid any real money for.” In 1977, for a sixteen-year-old, working-class Canadian kid, an army brat, $6,000 was a shitload of cash. But that's really only part of the answer.
    I enjoyed the experience, the creative process, and as much as anything else, the working environment on the set. For the first time I was accepted as an equal among adults—people with far more experience than I had, who recognized in me abilities that I had not known I possessed and helped me to nurture them. This applied not only to my fellow actors, or the producers and directors, but to the seemingly endless numbers of people—gaffers, sound engineers, camera crew, hair and makeup people, and all the others—that it takes to make a TV show.
    When the cameras weren't rolling it seemed as if we were always laughing, and the tone of the humor was often darker, more complicated and irreverent than anything I'd known. These artists and artisans occupied a world apart from the sober and serious sort of workplace most adults I knew had resigned themselves to. These were the people my father had warned me about. I was home.
    In the fall of 1977, I entered high school (which in Canada begins in the eleventh grade) with a new confidence—not in my ability to meet a new level of academic challenge, but in the conviction that school was, more than ever, irrelevant to me. Throughout the eleventh grade, I continued to pick up acting jobs, commercials, radio work, and guest spots on other CBC television series. It became more and more difficult to reconcile my burgeoning acting career with what to my mind were the increasingly pointless demands of school. Somehow I muddled through, though by the end of the final semester, I was still technically a few credits short of completing the eleventh grade. If I wanted my high school diploma and hoped to graduate with the rest of the class of 1979, I'd have to repeat those courses in the fall. If eleventh grade was tough, twelfth was going to be killer.
    But before that, taking what was left of the summer after Leo & Me wrapped, I decided to spend some of my fresh TV money on a trip to California, my first. I'd made a new friend during the previous school year, a senior named Chris Coady. As bright as Andy Hill but with more of an outlaw edge, Coady had an irreverence and a twisted sense of humor that made him my ideal running buddy. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls tour would be passing through California in August, and we made plans to go catch the band at Anaheim Stadium. Chris didn't have a lot of cash, so I paid for most of the trip—the plane tickets, the motel room near Disneyland—and we had a blast. Living it up in the Hotel California, we lounged by the pool, drank watery American beer, and chatted up girls who, like us, had come from various parts of the