Lucky Man (14 page)

Then it hit me: a sharp and unmistakable discomfort—I had to take a leak. Urgently. Made sense—the anxiety, the
goddamn beer
—but what the hell was I going to do? I was a hostage to etiquette. She'd be too polite to speak during
my
movie, and if she did say anything,
whatever
it was, “Excuse me, Your Highness, I have to go wring it,” was not going to be the appropriate response. I couldn't just get up and leave unless she did. And even if I could, I'd have to back away, tripping over the other people in our row and probably falling on my ass. There was, of course, one final option—but that was unthinkable.

And so my fantasy date with a princess turned into two of the most excruciating hours of my life, a timely reminder from nature not to get too carried away by my heady circumstances. No matter how many people were eager to let me believe otherwise, I was only human. There'd soon be more reminders. I'd need them.

Though not a king, or even a prince, I was quickly gaining the means with which to live uncommonly well. By late 1986, the driveway of my Laurel Canyon home resembled a luxury car lot. I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee, and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one I'd drive to work on any given day—it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.

Then there was the house itself. I had some remodeling done during the summer of 1986 while I was away making two films back-to-back,
Light of Day
in Chicago and then
The Secret of My Success
in New York City. The bungalow already had three bedrooms, so additional sleeping quarters weren't called for. At a cost of almost a half a million dollars, I commissioned a massive addition to the main bedroom, creating a master suite with retractable skylights and a jacuzzi/steam room area complete with fireplace, two TVs, and a full wet bar. For a twenty-five-year-old lottery winner, money was no object—and neither was good taste.

I remember a
Saturday Night Live
bit from the early eighties in which Eddie Murphy puts on white-face and discovers a different America. His first stop, post-makeup chair, is an office building newsstand. He picks up the morning paper, waits for a black customer to finish making a purchase, and then puts his paper down on the counter, along with a quarter. The vendor is confused at first, and only after nervously checking to make sure that the black customer is gone, smiles and pushes the money back toward Murphy. “You're kidding me, right pal?” the newsy laughs. “
You
don't have to pay for this. Take the paper . . . it's okay. Just take it.” Later, at a savings and loan, when an African-American loan officer asks the Caucasian Murphy for his credit history, a white banker has to come to the rescue. Once they're alone, the banker apologizes with a wink and pulls out stack after stack of fresh $100 bills. “And don't worry about paying this back . . . Need more?” Whenever African-Americans aren't present, Murphy learns, white people give each other things
for free
. But that's not all. On his way home, the subway car he's riding discharges the last of its nonwhite passengers and then erupts into a spontaneous cocktail party, complete with champagne, hors d'oeuvres, and a jazz quartet.

So what does this satire about the African-American experience have to do with my story? Well, on a political level, not much. But like Murphy's astonished black Everyman, I was experiencing the shock and vaguely illicit thrill of an unexpected crossover into a parallel universe, one that I had no idea even existed.

Like the white people in the
SNL
skit, celebrities are the recipients of a hell of a lot of free stuff. At a time when I could finally afford to buy whatever shoes I wanted, I'd be invited down to the Nike showroom in Santa Monica, handed a huge canvas duffel bag, and invited to help myself to all the swoosh-emblazoned swag I could stuff inside. Nike's motives were obvious: even one published photograph of a celebrity wearing those free shoes had the value of an advertisement without the expense of an endorsement fee. Once, on the
Tonight
show, Jay Leno asked me how I liked living in the States. “It's great. Except for the beer. American beer's a little watery,” I confided. “So I drink Moosehead Ale, imported from Canada.” A week later, sitting at my kitchen table, I heard the grinding of a large vehicle laboring up my driveway. Drawing aside the curtain, I peered out the window to see a green beer delivery truck with the giant Moosehead logo painted on the side. “There's lots more where this came from,” the delivery guy said, handing me a business card. “Just give us a call when you run out.”

I had stumbled upon one of the lesser-known truisms of American society:
those who got, get
. No wonder I could afford a black granite steam room—I was paying for little else. There were free meals, first-class travel, luxury hotel rooms. From my time in London's pubs to the day when I finally quit drinking altogether, I don't recall many bar tabs being slapped down on the mahogany in front of me, Moosehead or no Moosehead.

Even better than
those who got, get
is the real prize in this particular box of Cracker Jack:
the wink
. You can't buy the wink—the unspoken acknowledgment from almost everyone you encounter (shopkeepers, bouncers, maître d's, airline ticket clerks, and even the uncivil civil servants in the Department of Motor Vehicles) that you've been deemed worthy of a new set of privileges; that for you the usual norms don't apply. You are no longer just plain folks.

What was astounding was how many just plain folks were willing to play along in a game whose rules were tilted so absurdly in my favor. And if I wanted to bend those rules further, or break them, or ignore them altogether, the world seemed happy to oblige. Any direction I chose to move in became the path of least resistance. Maybe this is the true root of the expression, “life in the fast lane.”

The cool thing was, I could still be a nice guy. I didn't have to sacrifice my Canadian politeness by demanding anyone get out of my way. Though I do have to confess to feeling a secret indignation, after a while, when people didn't jump. A guy can get used to this treatment.

.   .   .

I loved my automobiles, but once I'd selected which one to drive to work in the morning, freeing it from the rest of the fleet was a chore. I felt like an overpaid valet parking attendant. The solution to the problem (some problem!) was this: I still went home to Canada regularly—almost every holiday, long weekend, or hiatus—so the next time I'd just drive up there in the 300ZX and leave it behind for use during future visits.

I'd be retracing the twelve-hundred-mile route that I'd taken seven years earlier with my father, only now my big brother Steve would co-pilot. Steve arrived on a Friday afternoon flight in late August of 1986 only to turn around and hit the road again after that night's
Family Ties
taping. Our plan was to drive nonstop, L.A. to Vancouver in less than twenty-four hours.

Driving the first shift, I set a fast pace heading out of the city. In a literal manifestation of my figurative life-in-the-fast-lane attitude, I quickly grew frustrated whenever slower cars wouldn't let me pass. One slowpoke was particularly stubborn. No matter how often I flashed my high beams or how close I edged my turbo-charged sports car to his rear bumper, Mr. Where's-the-Funeral? refused to get out of my way.

“What the hell is this guy doing in the fast lane anyway?”

Steve, whose wit and timing had been my model for Alex Keaton, leaned over, glanced at my speedometer, and then at the car in front of us.

“Oh,” he answered, “about 90.”

In preparation for the drive to Canada, I'd had a radar detector mounted beneath the dashboard of the 300ZX. I can't vouch for its effectiveness—it never beeped once on the entire trip. But the very fact that I used such a device meant I recognized the rules of the road, even if I was trying to circumvent them. Experience would later teach me that maybe I didn't need to bother.

Early one afternoon, I was barreling down Ventura Boulevard in my Ferrari; I was late for an appointment at one of the studios in the Valley, a casting session. I wasn't auditioning—I hadn't had to audition for anything in years. Now the roles had been reversed; actors were coming in to read with and for me in hopes of a part in my next film, since I had casting approval. Still, I had fresh memories of what it was like to be in their position, and what an ordeal it was to be kept waiting. So I wanted to get there as fast as possible, and by applying $100,000 worth of Italian automotive engineering to the task, that was damn fast.

It had been a weird morning. After flying in from a New York press junket, I was still a little jet-lagged when, in the limo on my way home from LAX, I got a frantic call from my assistant. Burnaby, my until-now perfectly friendly and harmless pit bull, had chosen that morning to munch on the neck of a neighbor dog and was, as we spoke, mid-munch. In a surreally one-sided phone conversation, I was shouting the word “Release!” over and over into the mobile phone while on the other end my assistant was holding the receiver up to my dog's ear. When I arrived home, Burnaby was back safely inside the house and the neighbor dog, while sporting a little unwanted ventilation in its larynx, appeared likely to survive. Its owners were rattled, but not especially angry. Their Siberian husky had, after all, wandered into my yard, a trespass which, I guess, had triggered Burnaby's territorial attack instinct.

As friendly as my neighbors were, I'd been a public figure long enough to recognize them as potential complainants in a dog-bites-dog lawsuit. So, as I climbed into the Ferrari and roared down the driveway for the meeting at the studio, I punched the number of my attorney into the car phone to give him a heads-up. Ironically, we were still talking when, going in excess of 80 mph down a stretch of Ventura Boulevard, I saw the flashing blue and red lights of an LAPD patrol car strobing in my rearview mirror.

“Shit. You're not going to believe this,” I said to my lawyer. “Hang on . . . I may need you in a second.” I pulled over and in my side mirror, marked the cop's progress as he made his approach—left hand on the butt of his revolver, and right hand tracing the smooth line of the black Ferrari. Maybe he needed to convince himself that it had actually stopped; even parked, the car looked like it was doing fifty. His opening remark made it clear that I was screwed.

“Do you even
have
a driver's license?”

I sit low in a car seat anyway, and in a Ferrari, built to ride close to the road, I must have looked, from his perspective, like a high school kid on a joyride. It wasn't until he'd studied the photo ID I'd handed over with trembling fingers—panic, not Parkinson's—that we actually made direct eye contact. His stone face now dissolved into a smile.

“
Miiike
,” he said, peeling off his sunglasses. “You gotta take it easy, buddy. This is a big heavy car, and we sure don't want to see you getting hurt.”

“I'm sorry,” I stammered, even though his cheerful admonition hardly demanded an apology.

“Okay now,” he said, reaching in to return my license and shake my hand. “You have a nice day, and take it easy. My wife and I wanna be able to keep on watching
Family Ties
. We love that show.”

I've been issued plenty of traffic citations—all deserved—but there had been just as many instances like this one, though maybe none quite so egregious. I felt a tremendous wash of relief followed by the exhilarating rush of knowing that I'd gotten away with something I shouldn't have. Then it started to freak me out a little. I mean, I was happy to take the free pass and go. It's not like I called the cop back and insisted that I had a ticket coming to me and, goddammit, he'd better write me up. But, on a commercial boulevard, with stop lights at regular intervals, in lunch hour traffic on a weekday, traveling at over 80, I was brazenly flouting the rules that every other citizen of Los Angeles was bound to comply with. Add to this my state of mind at the moment—jet-lagged, harried, preoccupied by that morning's chaotic events—and I deserved not only a ticket, but to be barred from the public roadways altogether. But as soon as that cop recognized the perp in the Ferrari as that funny kid from the box in his living room, the menace became “
Miiike
.” I couldn't help but wonder, as I slowly pulled out into the flow of traffic, “How fucked up was
that
?”

YES-MAN

I don't know about your kids, but the first word each of mine mastered was “no.” The same was true for me as a kid, and probably for you as well. From the corrective (“No, you can't have cake for dinner”) to the protective (“No! Johnny, never pee in the wall socket”), “no” is how we establish and begin to comprehend boundaries. But this doesn't mean “no” is only about limits. By giving a child the means with which to define his or her own unique identity and sense of self, pronouncing the word
no
marks the first step on the road to autonomy.

Still very much a kid in my mid-twenties, I was no longer hearing the word
no
very often, if at all, and frankly, I was too blissed out to care—at first. All yeses, all the time, worked just fine for me. “Well, Mr. Fox, we are totally booked for the evening, but,
yes
, we can seat your party of ten. Right this way.” “Why
yes
, a twelve-hundred-square-foot lavatory tacked onto your bedroom would be a
wooonderfulll
idea.” “
Yes
, here's my phone number. Call me anytime.”

As a young child, I dreamed and spoke incessantly of a world of limitless possibility. And now, it turned out that such a world did exist, and this was it—I'd arrived in the magical realm of “yes” that they'd told me existed only in fairy tales. Yet there are times when any sane person, no matter how spectacular their box office or Nielsen ratings, expects to hear “no”—as in “No, you can't drive twice the legal speed limit on a city street.”