Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox Page B

serial fender-bender, inflicting varying degrees of damage to my parents’ vehicles at every opportunity. I was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of a downward adolescent spiral— teenage wasteland —so what intervened to stop it?
    PULLIN' OUT OF HERE TO WIN
    Throughout my life, I've made a habit of somehow salvaging victory at the very threshold of ignominious failure. Now, as would happen many times in the future, just when the earth seemed to be sliding out from beneath me like loose scree on a mountainside, I somehow stumbled onto a foothold that would lead me to higher ground.
    Why, for example, would my dad continue to let me drive his cars if I kept bringing them home with dents in the quarter panels and broken taillights? Well, for starters, I'd apologize profusely. And then I'd arrange for the damage to be repaired and pay for it promptly and in full. Because I was working again. Not at the cold storage plant, but in a new job—the one I'd continue to have off and on for the next quarter century.
    One day in the summer of 1977, our acting troupe was packing up props and painted backdrops in preparation for a performance we'd be giving that afternoon for one of the local grade schools. Ross Jones was on the phone in his office, a converted broom closet at the back of the drama class. He called me over and thrust a newspaper clipping into my hands. It was a casting call for a new television show at the CBC—Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “They're looking for a bright twelve-year-old kid,” he said. “And I was thinking, ‘Hell, you'd be the brightest twelve-year-old kid they're ever going to meet.’” Ross had always said my height and youthful looks would someday turn out to be a blessing. “I talked to them and they can see you later this week.”
    I was dumbstruck but intrigued and, odd as this might sound, immediately confident. Ross was right. I could nail this. “Oh, and Mike,” he said as he sent me off, “you don't have to worry about my ten percent.” I smiled. I had no fucking idea what he was talking about.
    A massive open audition, “a cattle call,” in showbiz parlance, the search for the kid co-star of the new CBC situation comedy Leo & Me offered a one in a thousand shot at the job. I wanted to do it even if it did mean playing a twelve-year-old. Ross was right: here was payback for all the years of short jokes. As the day of the tryout neared, my confidence grew. My mom gave me a ride to the CBC studios in downtown Vancouver. When we walked in the door, a receptionist handed me a script. Scanning the room, packed with young hopefuls and their doting mothers, I searched for a couple of chairs where we could sit down and I could study my lines. I read the words on the pages, quickly understood where the jokes were intended to be, and silently ran through them in my mind.
    This is how my mom remembers it: “There were all these little kids in there and mothers were fussing with their hair, but you wouldn't let me touch yours. The kids were all practicing their lines with their mothers, so I asked, ‘Do you want to go through the lines with me?’ ‘Nope. I'm okay. I'm okay.’ You just took it all so in stride.”
    Leo & Me , explained the director, would be a half-hour comedy about a thirty-something gambler who lives on a run-down yacht won in a poker game. Leo's playboy lifestyle is cramped when he unexpectedly inherits guardianship of a twelve-year-old nephew, Jamie—the “me” of the show's title. I hadn't given any thought about how to tell the director, producers, and other network types present at the audition, that I was, in fact, sixteen and not twelve. Was this going to be a problem? It became a moot point during the small talk after my reading, which they liked. I let slip how pissed off I was after flunking my driver's test for the second time. “It's discrimination,” I