Coreyography: A Memoir (15 page)

Immediately after the confrontation with Pressman comes my big emotional breakdown. I remember thinking,
This is it! This is my moment! I’ve really got to deliver
. I was going to have to cry on cue. I thought of every bad thing that had ever happened to me, all the times my mother had told me she hated me or that she wanted me dead, but I still had to wet my eyes with a little spit. I still had to let someone on the production team blow menthol vapor in my eyes until I could produce my own tears. So in the end, it looked like I was crying, but I wasn’t.

Weeks later, as I sat there watching River crying by the campfire, tears and snot streaming down his face, I realized just how much I had dropped the ball. River had really pulled it out and I hadn’t. I was so disappointed in myself.

People don’t often realize just how difficult it is, especially for a child, to dredge up all those emotions. Because when the scene is over, they don’t just go away. There are plenty of people who’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and money in psychotherapy, learning how to move beyond old injuries or resentments. As an actor, though, you’re trying to mine your past for memories, to bring all those old fears and hurts to the surface and use them in a scene. But when it’s over, you don’t know what to do with all those feelings, so you end up stuffing them down even further and walking around feeling pretty miserable for the next day or two.

I was miserable for weeks. I was completely convinced that everyone’s work far surpassed mine. I was just shattered that River had managed real tears. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the truth.

“They blew that menthol stuff in my eyes, too, man,” he once told me, when we got together for a meal in L.A.

“What?”

“Yeah, someone came over and blew in my eyes until I started to cry.”

“But it looked so real. So believable.” I was stunned.

“Well, the emotions were real,” he said. “But I still needed some help with the tears.”

*   *   *

Wil Wheaton once
explained—in an interview with NPR—what he thought was the key to
Stand by Me
’s success:

Rob Reiner found four young boys who basically were the characters we played. I was awkward and nerdy and shy and uncomfortable in my own skin and really, really sensitive; River was cool and really smart and passionate and even at that age kind of like a father figure to some of us; Jerry was one of the funniest people I had ever seen in my life, either before or since; and Corey was unbelievably angry and in an incredible amount of pain and had an absolutely terrible relationship with his parents.

Wil was right. In a classic case of life imitating art, or of art imitating life, we were the characters we played during those sweltering three months in Oregon in the summer of 1985, the year that I turned fourteen. It was a summer of firsts for all of us—first kisses and first beers; back at the hotel, River and I smoked marijuana for the first time, and he lost his virginity that year—but all around us was the sense of an ending. Just as it did for Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy, that summer marked the end of our innocence.

I had already known River Phoenix for a few years by the time we began filming together. Every kid in this business—any kid who’s ever been through the riggers of the Hollywood audition process—remembers the hours upon hours spent in waiting rooms at studios and production offices all over town. As for the Phoenix clan—River, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty, and Summer—they always traveled together, packed inside a giant van. So whenever River and I showed up at the same cattle call, we’d usually wind up playing with his brother and sisters or tossing a football around in the parking lot. River was always positive, always up for fun. When we met up in Oregon to work on
Stand by Me,
we immediately went looking for trouble.

One day, River and I were hanging out with a member of the crew, an assistant to the sound engineer, when we spotted a bong perched high up on a shelf in the closet. River pointed, and we both giggled.

“What
is
that thing?” I whispered.

“It’s for smoking weed.”

“What does it …
do
?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “My parents smoke it all the time, but I’ve never tried it.”

“Me either. Maybe we should try it together.”

I still can’t believe we managed to convince that guy from the sound department to let us smoke (though we did pester him, aggressively, with lots of promises and pledges not to “tell anyone”), but he did eventually pull down the bong, pack the bowl, and gave us each our first hit. We coughed like crazy, shouted, “Thanks, dude,” and took off down the carpeted hallways of the hotel. We giggled and laughed, hamming it up for each other, acting as though we were high, until finally I turned to River. “I don’t feel anything.”

He blinked. “I don’t, either.”

“I thought that was the whole point?”

*   *   *

Of all the
boys in the cast, River and I spent the most time together. Wil was a bit of a brainiac; he had something called a
computer,
a completely alien invention to us at the time. Jerry, meanwhile, was a full two years younger than the rest of us. That’s a huge age gap among a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. He might as well have been an infant. (Though I do remember sneaking down with him to the indoor pool at the hotel one night and submerging all of the patio furniture. This, of course, was hilarious.)

Around that time, the parents among us—Wil’s, Jerry’s, and River’s, that is; my mother was long gone by then—had had about enough of the mischief, the late nights trolling the hotel hallways, and my generally rowdy behavior. Suddenly, Jerry was spending nearly all of his time with his parents. Wil went back to his computer. And River’s family rented an old farmhouse twenty miles outside of town. For much of the remainder of that summer, I would be left to my own devices.

*   *   *

By then, River
and I had long since discovered a sort of nightclub on the outskirts of town, set up specifically for underage teens. It was located inside an old, abandoned warehouse; local kids would congregate along the cement ramp outside until the doors opened sometime around 8:00
P.M.
It would still have been light outside at that hour, the sky just starting to swirl into the faintest hints of pink and violet and blue. I walked up to the kids on the ramp, alone, and said hello.

“We’re drinking!” one of the local boys yelled, holding up a forty-ounce bottle of beer. “Come drink with us!”

I had never had a drink before; I’m not even entirely sure if River and I had yet had the experience with the sound assistant’s bong. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t drink. It’s not really my thing.”

Then I saw a girl, seated halfway down the ramp, swinging her feet beneath her. She was kind of a goth character, with jet-black hair, black lipstick, black fingernails, and a face full of stark white makeup. But underneath all of that, she was beautiful. I knew right then, I would do whatever she wanted.

“You should drink with us,” she said.

I held up my hands, palms up, to show her that they were empty. “I don’t have any beer.”

Several of the kids then pointed down the road, in the direction of the local (unscrupulously run) liquor store, and explained how I might give some older patron some money and allow him to procure me a forty-ouncer. It was surprisingly simple. When I came back, I sat down next to the goth queen, twisted off the cap, and took a sip. It tasted terrible. I screwed up my face in disgust.

“Just rip it back,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She raised the bottle to her beautiful black lips and took several long, deep swallows.

Impressed, I brought the bottle to my mouth, and just kept swallowing until it was empty. That’s pretty much all I remember.

What must have been hours later—I can only assume we went to the club—I was walking back into town, alone, stumbling over myself, laughing, tip-toeing through the grass as if walking on clouds. Then I happened upon some train tracks and realized, suddenly, that I had absolutely no idea where I was.
Where am I? What town am I in?
I actually remember looking down at the tracks and thinking,
Huh, this is just like the movie I’m in. I guess I’ll just lie down and see what happens
.

I lowered my body to the ground and positioned my hands beneath my head, resting, at an angle, on the galvanized steel of the track, and looked up at the stars. I had never seen stars like that in L.A. It was a warm, sticky night, and I had a warm, full belly. And I thought to myself, God, I love being drunk.

*   *   *

After wrapping in
Brownsville, we relocated to Shasta, a tiny town in northern California, to film the sequence on the elevated train tracks. The trestle itself is real, it soars more than a hundred feet in the air, spanning the width of Lake Britton, but some of the shots of Wil and Jerry—their jump to safety; their narrow escape from the oncoming train—were re-created on a soundstage in L.A. with the use of a green screen and a fabricated bit of track. I was still in Shasta when I got a call from my dad.

For the first few years following the divorce, I had seen my father once every few months. He would show up to take my brothers and I to Chuck E. Cheese or to catch a movie. But by the time I got to work on
The Goonies,
I had hardly seen him at all. When he explained that he wanted to come visit me on the set of
Stand by Me,
I was happy. I missed him. I wanted my father in my life.

He showed up in Shasta with mountains of paperwork. “I know your mother lies to you, and fills your head with stuff that’s not true. I know she tells you that I don’t pay child support. But I have all these pay stubs and receipts,” he said, rifling through the giant stack of papers. “I know she tells you that I don’t want to see you, that I don’t love you, but I do.”

The next day we took a paddleboat out on Lake Shasta. The water was calm, glassy, the only sounds were of our shoes squeaking against the paddle pedals, and a raven’s call echoing through the valley. I closed my eyes, felt the rays of the sun warm my face. And then my dad said, “I was thinking about having you move back in with me. What do you think?”

“It would beat the hell out of living with Mom.”

I was due back at my mother’s in just a few weeks, as soon as
Stand by Me
finished filming. I imagine my mother was worried about losing her grip on me—and by that I mean my paycheck—completely; every few months she’d announce, “That’s enough! I want him home.” I was not at all looking forward to the reunion.

CHAPTER 10

Michael Jackson and I had been friends for nearly a year when he called me up, shortly after filming on
Stand by Me
wrapped, to invite me to a party at his home. I had never actually been to Hayvenhurst, the sprawling mock-Tudor mansion Joe Jackson purchased for his family in the early 1970s, but stories about the compound were already the stuff of legend: Michael bought his father out of the house in the early ’80s, and immediately staged a two-year-long renovation, adding a thirty-two-seat theater, a Japanese koi pond, a zoo, a Disney-style candy shop, and—as reporters so often love to point out—a “six-foot-tall
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
diorama.” (To my dismay, the Pirates of the Caribbean did not live in a subterranean lair beneath the backyard—that turned out to be just a rumor.) Still, Hayvenhurst was, in many ways, Michael’s first attempt at creating his Neverland. But when he called to invite me to the party, I had yet to see the place with my own eyes.

The estate was crawling with kids—I believe Sean Astin and Ke Huy Quan were there (I may have even invited them)—as well as other random people in some way affiliated with the Jackson family. I was introduced to Dr. Steven Hoefflin, Michael’s plastic surgeon, who was there moonlighting as a magician, and Steven’s son, Jeff, who would one day become
my
plastic surgeon. (He had a cameo in the second season of
The Two Coreys,
when I had liposuction performed on my abdomen.) Elizabeth Taylor, however, turned out to be a no-show.

As for Michael, he was busy balancing atop a unicycle, dressed in some kind of antique vaudevillian ensemble.

Beyond the living room was a first-floor game room; there was a spiral staircase in the corner, and an exterior staircase that ascended to a balcony. It’s the exterior staircase that Michael took on his way back down to the party, entering the game room from the backyard patio. (He was always appearing and disappearing, and he was always, perpetually late. He loved making an entrance. Sometimes one just wasn’t enough.) I noticed then that his hair was longer than usual; he had already started experimenting with new looks for the
Bad
album.

“Corey!” he said when he saw me. “Have you met the magician?”

I started to indicate that I had, in fact, met the doctor, when I realized that Michael was gesturing now to someone else, apparently a second magician. Later, I would discover that there were actually three different magicians at the party.

“I’d like you to meet Majestik Magnificent Magician Extraordinaire,” he said, holding a hand out to his friend. “Majestik, this is Corey Feldman. He’s a Goonie.”

Majestik chuckled.

In recent years, Majestik has spent a fair amount of time in the public eye, in particular after Michael’s death in 2009 and during the subsequent trial of Dr. Conrad Murray. He often appears alongside Joe at events and interviews and sometimes even speaks on the family’s behalf. The true nature of his relationship to the Jacksons, however, is something of a mystery. I’ve often wondered if he’s actually a blood relative. All I know for sure is that he’s been around for decades, intertwined among the Jacksons for as long as I can remember.

As the party dragged on, I was free to wander through a number of rooms on the ground floor. That’s when I happened upon piles and piles of boxes, all labeled “Jackson Victory Tour,” stacked up in a room down the hall. I couldn’t help but look inside. I pulled out a rhinestone glove and put it on.