Free Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox Page B

the tree. Listening to my brother's LPs, I taught myself to play.
    Maybe these proficiencies were what Nana had in mind when she'd preach her sermons of assurance; maybe not. For my own part, I never thought about success in terms of any one particular skill. I just knew there were a lot of fun things to do in the world, and a few of those things I was pretty good at.
    I remember looking forward to junior high for two reasons above all others: the first being the hundreds of new kids who would soon be pouring into my little world from feeder schools across the district, and second, the elective class. Electives were opportunities for students to choose their subjects of study. Awesome responsibility. Serious implications. I weighed all this, and selected acting and guitar. My guidance counselors and parents were unenthusiastic, but that's where my interests lay and, just as important, that's where the girls were.
    Guitar was a breeze, real basic stuff, finger picking “Alley Cat” from the Big Note Songbook. But it was in that class that I made a friend who would help me realize my musical ambitions. Andy Hill was a grade ahead of me and already the acknowledged king of Edmond's junior high school. A four-sport star athlete—hockey, basketball, rugby, and track—his athletic prowess paled in comparison to his self-taught proficiency in music. We'd swap Keith Richards guitar riffs, with me usually on the learning end of our jam sessions. By the end of the first semester, we'd formed a band, named Halex after the Ping-Pong balls of the same name. In our early teens we were already making the rounds—playing high schools, navy bases, and one or two places we weren't even old enough to enter legally. As I saw it, rock and roll offered a far more realistic shot at the big time than the NHL. Of course, to everyone else in my working-class Canadian world, a world with which I was beginning to feel increasingly out of sync, both fantasies were equally ridiculous.
    Then there was drama class. Prior to junior high, I had appeared in a few school plays and discovered, if not a passion for acting, at least a mild affinity. Memorizing lines came easily. And I drank up the laughter and attention. At the secondary school level, with more challenging material and a greater focus on process, I felt myself being drawn deeper into the campus theatrical community.
    And then I had what was for me a revelation: with a modicum of effort, I found I could effectively lose myself in whatever character I was called upon to play. At a time when I was increasingly finding myself at odds with various codes of conduct—school, family, social cliques—acting provided me with the freedom, in fact the imperative, that I follow my impulse, behave in any manner I saw fit, just so long as it served the role. Excellent!
    I appeared in every new school production, eventually joining the school touring company, which meant spending a great deal of my time with Edmond's acting teacher, Ross Jones. One of those charismatic anti -teachers that artistic students tend to gravitate toward—long hair, droopy mustache, red-rimmed eyes—Mr. Jones was so subversive he actually let us call him Ross. Like most of the drama teachers I've known, Ross was a frustrated performer who was excited by students that showed a potential that in his own life he may have felt he hadn't taken full advantage of. He pressed me to take my theatrical studies as far as I could. “There could be a future in this for you, Mike.” I'd laugh. “You're high, Ross. Acting isn't a job. You can't make a living at it . . . not like rock and roll.”
    For most of my secondary education, my head was in the clouds as I explored drama and music and art. Academically, however, it was somewhere else—up my ass, if you asked my father. My grades were slipping precipitously; the straight A s I brought home from grade school were a memory. If my junior high