Coreyography: A Memoir (16 page)

“You like it?” Michael asked as he came around a corner and walked farther into the room.

Michael had many, many different sequined gloves—he’d been wearing them for years. Some were blue, or red, or covered with rhinestone netting, but this one was a white glove emblazoned with tiny Swarovski crystals. I couldn’t believe it—I was wearing a piece of history on my hand.

Michael, however, was disarmingly casual about the whole thing. To him, these items weren’t historical artifacts, they were just pieces of his wardrobe. If you admired a pair of his famous Ray-Bans, he might pluck them from his head and give them to you, to
keep.
Or, if you asked about the letterman jacket he wore in “Thriller,” next thing you know, you’d be trying it on. The jacket, after all, was just hanging there in his closet.

*   *   *

The Hayvenhurst party
was the last time I saw Michael for a matter of months. In the meantime, I was back at home with my mother. My father’s offer to live with him hadn’t materialized, and I didn’t bother to pursue it. Despite the massive success of
Gremlins
and
The Goonies,
work was slow. I filmed an episode of
Cheers,
an episode of
Family Ties,
but there weren’t any film offers on the table. Those long, slow-moving months immediately following
Stand by Me
were the closest thing to a hiatus I’ve ever had in my life.

The dogs were older now; they’d relieve themselves in the house, leave fecal matter all over the floors. Of course, my mother wasn’t home to clean it up. She’d be gone for the night as soon as Eden and Devin had been put to bed. Rarely did she make it home before morning. Mindy, just seventeen, had started drinking by then; her room was sometimes littered with empty beer bottles, and she spent most of her time locked away with her friends, which left me to clean up the mess. The only time
I
was allowed out, on my own, was to go jogging. My mother was still convinced I had a weight problem.

Having recently smoked marijuana and tried alcohol, though, on the set of
Stand by Me
, I was more curious than I once had been. So one night when I was home, alone, cleaning, when my mother was out and my brothers were asleep, I went rifling through her things, searching through her drawers. I guess I was looking for some sort of explanation, some reason for her behavior. At the very least, I thought I might find some weed. And that’s when I came upon a little white cardboard box. Inside were twenty or thirty little glass vials filled with white powder. I had heard—somewhere—that cocaine makes your tongue numb. I had never actually seen cocaine before, but what else could this possibly be? I dipped my pinky in one of the vials and placed some powder on the tip of my tongue. It went numb almost instantly.

I took one of the vials back to my bedroom, poured out a thin line along the surface of my dresser—that’s the way I’d seen it done in the movies—and snorted it. I don’t remember much from the few hours that followed, other than feeling a surge of adrenaline, of zooming through the house, completely and utterly unable to sit still, but I do remember thinking:
This isn’t half bad. Everybody talks about how drugs are dangerous and can kill you, but this is pretty fun.
I put the rest away, locked in a kid-size safe in my bedroom. At the time, I thought it might one day come in handy, as evidence to be used against my mother, or perhaps as a tool to get her some help.

*   *   *

That September, I
enrolled in a new school, a private academy called Stoneridge Prep, located at the base of a canyon in the valley. I had hoped Stoneridge would prove to be a friendlier, more collegial environment, since the students had to pay to attend. Unfortunately, it was not.

The students at Stoneridge broke down into the same cliques, the same social hierarchy as every other school I had ever attended: the geeks, the yuppie preps, the jocks, and the heshers, which is what we called the stoners, the kids with long hair and AC/DC T-shirts and generally antisocial behavior. It was the heshers, especially Eric and two other remarkably aggressive boys, who gave me the most trouble; there was constant taunting and teasing, near daily threats of physical violence, and though I had not yet had to leave class early or take a long leave for a role, it was as if they were on the lookout for any signs that I might be getting special treatment. They were juniors, but for some reason we were all in the same classroom, even though I was only in the ninth grade. (It was a small school, maybe forty or fifty students total.) Of course, this meant that the taunting and teasing wasn’t confined to brief moments in the hallway between classes, but rather lasted all day, every day.

At lunchtime, a little catering truck would pull up alongside the single L-shaped building that comprised the whole of campus, from which you could buy soda or snacks. Off to the side of the building was a chain-link fence. If you crawled through a hole in the bottom and walked fifty feet or so down the lane, you’d arrive at a little wooden gardener’s shed. This is where the heshers would sneak off to smoke.

I started joining them in part because I liked the feeling of being high, and in part because I thought, by hanging out with the heshers, by proving I could be one of them, perhaps they would leave me alone. At first, my arrival was a funny thing, a novelty, the little actor kid coming to hang out in the shed. But I managed to ingratiate myself somewhat, at least until one of them agreed to sell me some weed for twenty bucks. I was way too young and naïve to realize I had massively overpaid.

Around this time my mother came up with a brilliant new way to get my weight under control. She ordered a load of diet pills, all sorts of different ones, five or six different jars’ worth, and started doling them out every morning, placing two or three in my palm. “Take these and you won’t even
be
hungry at lunch,” she said.

I looked at her suspiciously, palm up, pills still resting in my hand.

“They’re just caffeine pills,” she told me, shaking her head.

I did as I was told, took the pills, but I didn’t like the feeling: anxious, sweaty, empty, dizzy, hopped up on fake caffeine. It was different than being high on marijuana; I didn’t feel relaxed or calm, just jittery and on edge, like my heart might beat out of my chest. Before long I stopped taking them altogether. Once I had amassed a little collection, maybe fifty or sixty pills, I had an idea, another strategy to keep the teasing at bay.
These guys sell me weed,
I thought,
so I’ll sell them speed.
Which is how I became a small time “drug” peddler, selling off my mom’s diet pills at a couple of bucks a pop.

I only lasted another month or two at my mother’s. She was constantly hitting me (even if I hadn’t done anything
specifically
wrong, I’d still get a beating on what she called “general principles”; in her mind, there was nothing wrong with administering random beatings just to keep me in line), and had recently taken to smearing Clearasil on my face at night while I was asleep. During the day, Eden and Devin, each just a few years old at the time, would run into my room, bounce on my bed, and shout, “You’re fat! Corey, you’re ugly!” or launch toys at my head while I was busy with homework, before running out and hiding behind my mother, peaking out at me from behind and between her legs. It wasn’t a mystery where this mischievousness was coming from.

Back at my grandparents’ house, I soon made a discovery. In a chest of drawers in his bedroom, I found my grandfather’s gun collection and a small box of bullets. I was mesmerized by it. I would sneak into his room every day, slide out the drawer, and stare at it, until one afternoon, when I put five or six of the bullets in my pocket, dug a small hole in the front yard, and buried them. I found this oddly comforting; the idea that, if I really needed them, I could come back and dig them up. A few weeks after that, I took the smallest gun and its holster from the drawer. Since he had quite a few different firearms, I figured he wouldn’t notice if this one was missing.

It was a semiautomatic pistol with a removable magazine. I put the magazine in the grip, placed the gun underneath my bed, and fantasized about it more or less every day, over the course of the next six months. The worse things got at school, or at home, or in my life, the more I started to think, I’m gonna use that gun. I had already tried the aspirin. A gun was a much easier solution; all I had to do was pull that trigger.

One day, I was standing in the breezeway at school, making my way to my next class, when this girl I sort of liked, a little punk rocker with pink and purple highlighted hair, Jamie, approached me. She had a wide smile plastered on her face. She was holding a Styrofoam cup.

“Oh, Corey,” she cooed. “I have a present for you.”

“For me?” I must have stopped in my tracks. Jamie and I had barely spoken during the two or three months I’d been at Stoneridge. A present—out of the blue like this—seemed a little too good to be true.

“Yep, just for you,” she said. “Do you like surprises?”

“I love surprises.”

“Okay, close your eyes.”

I hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, just close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes, and she inverted the cup, spilling the contents—spit, from ten or fifteen different kids—over my head. Someone in her class had actually passed the cup around so that every single student could hawk up a giant loogie and spit it into the cup. I was standing there frozen, covered in spit and snot; I could feel it oozing down my face, could smell it even, but it was the sound of her laugh, the way she turned on her heel and sauntered over to her friends that stuck with me. That’s what hurt the most.

At home that afternoon, I pulled the gun from beneath my bed, sat on the floor of my room, cocked the hammer, and pointed the muzzle at my temple.

Pull the trigger. Pull the trigger, you pussy. Just pull the fucking trigger.
I held the gun so tightly that my whole hand started to shake. I asked God to give me the strength to pull the trigger.
Please let me die.
I begged.

But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it.

CHAPTER 11

“I’m directing another movie about kids. It’s gonna be like
The Goonies,
but with vampires. What do you think?”

Richard Donner and I were sitting in his office at Warner Brothers, and I was excited. I needed this film—I needed the time away from home, an escape from the torments of school, a chance to be around other like-minded kids my age, another excuse to get away from my mother. I would soon come to realize, however, that this film,
The Lost Boys,
really was going to be a lot like
The Goonies,
but not in the ways I had imagined.

Just like with
The Goonies,
no one was ready to actually start casting the film; this meeting with Dick had been called solely to “gauge my interest.” A few months later, I’d find out that, just like on
The Goonies,
the director with whom I had a rapport would step down midway through preproduction, opting instead to executive produce. (Dick wanted to free himself up to make the first
Lethal Weapon
.) Just as I’d had to read for—and impress—a then-unknown Dick Donner to win the role of Mouth, I’d have to read for and impress a new director to secure my part in this film. To win the role of Edgar Frog, I’d have to get past Joel Schumacher.

I met Joel at the casting offices at Warner Brothers. He seemed sweet, if also a little flamboyant. He wore a neatly knotted scarf around his neck.

“Here’s the deal, dude. This kid’s gotta be a badass. He’s gotta be tough,” he said, once I’d finished my read.

“I can be tough.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t
look
tough. You look like a sweet little kid. So, here’s what I want you to do: It’s gonna take us a few months to develop this, so start growing your hair out. Don’t cut it. And I want you to go home and watch the
Missing in Action
movies with Chuck Norris. Watch
Rambo
. Watch Arnold’s movies. Then come back to me in three months.”

So, that’s exactly what I did. And while I was gobbling up every action movie I could get my hands on and waiting for my hair to grow out, someone—either my mother or my publicist—told me about a man whom I will call Ralph Kaufman, the son of Bill Kaufman, the great casting director at Paramount who had placed me in
The Bad News Bears.
Ralph was throwing a party—described to me as a sort of young Hollywood mixer, a way for all the rising stars in the business to meet and mingle with one another.

By 1985, Hollywood was populated with a lot of young rising stars: Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore from
E.T.,
River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke from
Explorers,
the
Goonies
kids, Alyssa Milano, Scott Grimes, Andre Gower, Harold Pruett, who would later star in
The Outsiders
(the 1990 television series), as well as
Party of Five,
and Ricky Schroder and Alfonso Ribeiro, both from
Silver Spoons.
Many of them were at the party that night, held in the little house in Hollywood that Ralph shared with his father. I met some older actors, too, in particular Tony Burnham, an overweight character actor in his twenties, who I recognized immediately from
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning,
the fifth film in the Jason Voorhees franchise, in which I made a cameo appearance. I liked Ralph and Tony both; talking with them was easy, and they seemed to communicate on my level. The fact that Ralph was throwing parties for us only made him seem that much cooler. Every time Ralph hosted another party, I did my best to be there.

In the meantime, I was spending an increasing amount of time with another new friend, another man much older than me. In the spring of 1985, I was nominated for a Saturn Award—Best Performance by a Younger Actor—for my work in
Gremlins.
A man from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, Marty Weiss, had called to give me the news. He introduced himself, invited me to a special screening, and mentioned that he’d recently struck up a friendship with my mother; I remember he emphasized that point.