Lucky Man (8 page)

But I had other passions too. When I was preschool age, my dad would return from his trips bearing gifts for all the kids; mine were often big picture books. Dad would later recount with amazement that I'd read a book, cover to cover, then find paper and pencil and, without tracing, replicate page after page of drawings in meticulous detail. This was the beginning of a lifelong love of cartooning, including caricatures that occasionally delighted but more often offended my friends and family.

Music was another obsession. I had to be one of very few eight-year-olds who got excited when Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood got together to form the supergroup Blind Faith. I bugged my parents for a guitar and one Christmas I found a shiny Fender knock-off, complete with amplifier, under 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 school career was any indication, I wasn't exactly poised to set the world on fire—not the
real
world, anyway.

Sure, in subjects that were outright creative, I excelled; drama, music, creative writing and various art electives, drawing, painting, printmaking, etc., consistently earned me
A
s. But in any subject that was based on fixed rules, like math or chemistry and physics, my grades tanked.

I can remember the exasperated look on my mother's face at report card time as I'd try to explain this to her. “These are absolutes, Mom. They're boring. Take math, two plus two equals four, I mean, that's already on the books, right? Somebody's already nailed that down. So what do they need me for?” Mom would sigh and make sure to sign the report card before Dad got home from work.

When red flags began to pop up on the school front, Dad, army signalman that he was, got right to work. A barely passing grade, or a call from school about a trip to the principal's office, meant a harsh reprimand from Dad, followed by probative questions about what the hell I was thinking and demands that I immediately cease and desist. My failure to comply wasn't rebellion, strictly speaking; it wasn't motivated by anger toward my parents, or anybody else for that matter. In fact, I shared their surprise I wasn't doing better in school. Yet, through junior high my academic grades continued to decline. The instant reprisals from Dad, once automatic, became more rare as he recognized their futility. Instead Dad resorted to curling his lip, throwing up his hands, and stalking off—that is, if I didn't slink off first.

I preferred to avoid confrontation. During my teenage years that meant avoiding my dad as much as possible. My essential approach to life, my predilection for winging it, was clearly antithetical to his. He just didn't get it. It's not that I consciously sought to flaunt my opposing point of view. To do that would be to provoke his anger, which was the last thing I wanted to do. But I could say things to Dad that seemed perfectly benign, yet in a flash our conversation would somehow shift into a one-sided recitation of the riot act.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that two powerful forces were at play here, the two gravitational fields I've already referred to: Dad's battle-tested pragmatism and Nana's idealistic belief in destiny. It seems obvious now that my reaction to her passing was to do whatever I could to bolster my detachment from the practical world. I instinctively resisted any effort to fit me into the work-a-day mold embraced by my parents and their parents before them.

So an uneasy standoff developed between Dad and me. When he eventually began simply to throw up his hands, this didn't mean I had worn him down—I was, after all, the fourth of five kids. No, I think the truth of the matter lies in Dad's own inner compass. What was most important to him was that his children be safe, and that meant developing a clear sense of what was expected of them in the world, preparing them to play contributing roles in a society that, if his experience was any indication, wasn't likely to cut them any slack. This was the test that I was failing, and he was at a loss about how to make me understand what was at stake.

It's not that Dad didn't take pride in my creative pursuits. He and Mom showed up for every dramatic production, and out of the corner of my eye I could always find them in the front row. And when I couldn't actually see his face beaming with enjoyment, I could always hear his laughter booming above everyone else's. He'd even brag about my musical exploits to his co-workers; I was surprised when I went with Mom to pick him up from work one day and all the cops were slapping me on the back, tousling my shoulder-length hair, and referring to me as “the Halex kid.”

Rock and roll—loud, unintelligible, and antisocial—was anathema to Dad. Even so, he managed to show up at 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 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.