Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox Page A

couple of our band's gigs, though he'd always be standing at the back of the room, as far from the noise as he could get without stepping out the door. Once, sticking around after a show to watch us pack up, he asked about the massive PA speakers we were loading into the truck. I explained that they were rentals, $250 a night. “How much you getting paid?” he asked. “$100,” I said with a flush of self-satisfaction. His face reddened, the lip curled, and I sensed him struggle to maintain composure. “Let me get this straight. You have to rent equipment to do a job that doesn't even pay you enough to cover the rental of the equipment that you need to do the job?” The arms went up and he stomped off. So much for détente.
    I had a real job once. In the summer of 1976, when I was fifteen. My mom made an attempt to simultaneously ease my father's concerns and gently steer me toward a more responsible approach to my future. There was a summer opening for a low-level office clerk, gofer really, at the cold storage facility where she worked. I spent the summer in her office making coffee, doing odd bits of paperwork, and filing. Down on the docks, fresh fish was being unloaded from trawlers whose captains would fill out storage orders, which I would then run back upstairs and deliver to the main office.
    I earned $600 for two months’ work, an achievement my parents lavishly congratulated me on. Their delight quickly evaporated when I spent the $600 to replace my electric guitar, the Japanese copy, with the real thing: a 1967 wood-grained Fender Telecaster that I purchased from an old jazz musician through a classified ad.
    My parents may have found my band's music (and economics) baffling, but there was an upside to my involvement with Halex, as they saw it, and that was Andy Hill. An honor student, star athlete, and respectful son of a prominent orthopedic surgeon, Andy was exactly the kind of kid you wanted your son to hang out with. Hell, he was exactly the kind of kid you wanted your son to be .
    Not only was I in Andy's band, but I had been accepted into his social circle, an overachieving clique comprised of South Burnaby's best and brightest. Most of them were the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, and they lived in the pricey Buckingham section of town. To ride my bike from my apartment complex by the shopping mall, past the old elementary school, and then cross the tree-lined boulevard that marked the boundary of this enclave was to enter another universe. I hung out with my new friends in their homes, which seemed palatial, swam in their backyard swimming pools, and practiced my music in their basement recreation rooms. At Andy's house there was a room dedicated exclusively to Halex; its walls were soundproofed with four inches of cork.
    In time, though, I came to resent the sense of freedom and opportunity these kids had inherited from their parents. By my sixteenth birthday I had already begun to drift away from Andy's crowd and eventually the band.
    There were other kids at school with whom I had more in common, socioeconomically anyway, and I began to spend more and more of my time with them, both in school and out. This was an edgier group. Basically good kids (I still count many of them as friends) but more overtly rebellious—longer hair, louder music, and more dismissive of conformity. Where I might have spent a Friday night with Andy staying up late to learn all the songs from Who's Next , a night at my friend Bill's house would involve ritualistically smoking an entire pack of cigarettes and working our way through a case of beer.
    Times had changed. I was no longer just moving away from accepted patterns of behavior as I followed my muse; now, perhaps emboldened by my newly acquired taste for beer, I was rejecting them outright. I picked up another habit in addition to smoking and drinking. Having somehow obtained my driver's license, I became a