Coreyography: A Memoir (24 page)

Fresh off an official offer to star in
The ’Burbs,
I feel like I’m moving up in the world, so I buy myself a BMW and send Gary out to look for houses. I don’t even bother looking at the one he suggests, a “perfect house with a view on Picturesque Drive.” I rent the place sight-unseen. It’s a craphole, a one-bedroom shack with a kitchenette instead of a kitchen, but it does have an impressive view of the Valley. My cousin Michael drops out of school to move in with me—rent-free. Michael and Ron (who I’m also allowing to squat) configure a sort of apartment for themselves in the screened-in portion of my cliff-side balcony.

*   *   *

I may look
like shit—skinny and wiry and drawn—but I’m more or less sober. Which is why it’s frustrating that Joe Dante and Carrie Fisher have insisted on taking me aside on the set of
The ’Burbs
and talking to me about what they’re calling my “spiraling drug problem.”

“What are you talking about?” I shout, probably a little more forcefully than is necessary. “I’m not even doing drugs anymore. I mean, I do them once in a while, for fun. But it’s not like I’m an addict or anything. I barely even do coke anymore. You should have seen me last year on the set of
License to Drive
.”

Carrie and Joe do not agree. Joe tells me he’s very concerned, reminds me that he’s known me for years. He points to Carrie, and explains that she’s dealt with her fair share of pain and addiction. Her semi-autobiographical novel,
Postcards from the Edge,
has just been published; her struggles with alcohol are widely known.

“Please, listen to me,” she says. “You are such a talented actor, but if you keep going down this road, you’re going to throw it all away. You’ve got to stop before it’s too late.”

“I really appreciate you guys taking the time,” I say. “But you’re completely off base with this.”

And when I said that, I really believed it. Because only a month earlier, my circle of friends had convened a meeting to address the fact that we were all getting a little out of control. As a result, Haim and our friend Kevin had checked themselves into rehab; Ron went off to get sober (supposedly) in Arizona; and Alfonso and Ricky had told their parents everything, they were no longer allowed to hang out with the rest of us. I felt like we had each done what was needed. I may not have been going off to rehab, but if all of my friends were getting sober, I imagined I’d wind up sober, too. It’s not like I had any intentions of partying by myself. I was past all that, and almost a little annoyed that Carrie and Joe couldn’t see it. Then came the last day of production, when, for the first time, it occurred to me that they might be right.

It’s the middle of summer and we’re working at the Universal lot, in broad daylight, trying to get a tight shot on my face. Joe wants to catch the Klopeks’s car in the reflection of my sunglasses, but I’m so coked out, I’m having a hard time holding still.

“Corey, you have to stop twitching,” one of the crew members is whispering in my ear.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I, uh, had a lot of caffeine today.”

Sometime after we finished filming, Joe Dante gave an interview, in which he talked about how much I had changed since our days together on the set of
Gremlins.
He said that filming
The ’Burbs
was the only time in his career that he dreaded coming to work in the morning, because he had to deal with Corey Feldman.

The ’Burbs
will debut at number one, but it will be my last starring role in a major studio film for a long, long time. My career is about to take a plunge, but I’m too far gone to stop it.

CHAPTER 16

I’d been dating Charlie Spradling, a quintessential B-actress and wannabe
Playboy
pinup, since we met on the set of
License to Drive
(she has a small, uncredited cameo, where she makes out with Heather Graham’s on-screen boyfriend). It was a whirlwind romance, full of drama and fighting and lying and suspicion—rumors are swirling that she’s been cheating on me with Charlie Sheen; people seem to love seeing “Charlie and Charlie” together, even though she’s been living with me. Now, our relationship has crashed and burned; only a month or two after moving in, she’s on her way out. Seeing as how she had been living with her previous boyfriend, Dave Mustaine, the lead singer of the metal band Megadeath, at the beginning of our relationship—I actually went to Dave’s house to help her pack up her things—I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when a van full of long-haired musicians, all part of some new rock band I haven’t yet heard of, pulled up outside my home on Picturesque Drive. She announced that she was now “dating the band”—as in,
all
of them—and that they were there to help her move out. Still, I’m devastated by the breakup. When Ron and Michael return home (the four of us had been cramming ourselves into my tiny one-bedroom house), I’m sulking, alone, on the balcony.

“I know how to make you feel better,” Ron said. “Let’s do some coke.”

I sighed. “Coke will just make me stay up all night talking about her. I don’t want to talk about Charlie. I don’t even want to
think
about her tonight.”

Ron put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “We could do acid?”

“I’m fucking depressed, man. If I take acid I’ll just have a really bad trip.”

“Well,” he said, “how about heroin?”

“
What
?” I looked at him like he was crazy.

“We could do heroin,” he said again.

“I’m not going to put a needle in my vein, man. That’s disgusting.”

“You don’t have to shoot it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t have to shoot it. You can snort heroin, just like cocaine.”

That was interesting. I’d always thought heroin was an intravenous-only type drug. “Well,” I said, “what does heroin …
do
?”

“I’ve only done it once, but it’s sort of like pain medicine.”

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Where would we even get any?”

“You just go downtown. All the Mexicans sell it. It’s called
chiva
in Spanish. You just drive downtown, stick your head out the window, and say
chiva
.”

For someone who had supposedly only done heroin once, he was starting to sound pretty familiar with the process. “I really don’t think we’re going to be able to drive downtown, stick our heads out the window, yell
chiva,
and expect someone to run right up.”

“Trust me.”

“All right, fine,” I said. “I think you’re crazy, but I’ll try it.”

Ron turned out to be right—it really was that simple. Back at the apartment, latex balloons in hand, we just sort of stared at each other until finally someone broke one open. Inside was a gooey, tarlike brown slime. It smelled a bit like burnt sandalwood. “How are we going to snort this?” I asked.

It also turns out that your microwave has all kinds of convenient and unexpected uses. Nuke some
chiva,
and it becomes hard enough to crush into powder and snort.

Heroin wasn’t anything like what I imagined. It didn’t give me the psychedelic, hallucinogenic high of acid, wasn’t as in-your-face as the knock-me-to-my-knees force of crack. I felt a warm, slightly tingly sensation pass over my body, like an internal heat wave. I was a little itchy, and felt the temptation to keep scratching my skin. But I couldn’t believe this was the effect of big, bad heroin, the
worst
drug in the world, the scariest stuff you could do. I felt relaxed and at peace. Thoughts of Charlie were gone with one quick snort.

The effects of heroin, at first, are subtle; in the past I’ve described it as a delicate flower. It seems harmless, because it takes awhile to consume you. It was months before my flower had become a Venus flytrap, eating me from the inside out.

*   *   *

We’ve hired the
singer and soap opera star Michael Damian (best known for playing Danny Romalotti on TV’s
The Young and the Restless
), to produce and record “Rock On,” a cover of the David Essex song, for the
Dream a Little Dream
album. In addition, he’ll be working with me on my song, which is to be featured in the film as well as on the soundtrack. It’s a tight deadline, and we get to work right away, throwing out ideas and playing with melodies in the living room of my home on Picturesque Drive. The work we do here lays the foundation for “Something in Your Eyes,” which is to become my first original single.

The transition to music seems like a no-brainer, a natural, even obvious next step in my increasingly successful career. The release of
License to Drive
had brought with it the first glimpses of what the press would eventually dub “Coreymania.” Even as far back as filming, Haim and I had once found ourselves locked in a trailer—a screaming crowd of frenzied fans was pounding, chanting, literally rocking the trailer, as if they were trying to shake us out. We had looked at each other in disbelief, and asked ourselves, Is this real? Is any of this really happening? Overnight, the two of us together had become a security team’s nightmare. We brought with us total pandemonium. It was as if I had woken up one day and started living Michael Jackson’s life. It was as if I had wanted so badly to be famous that I had willed it into fruition. And as much as this new reality was completely surreal and insane—in many ways, I still felt like the shy, awkward outcast who was made fun of at school, ignored by girls, and getting a cup of spit overturned on his head—I ate it up.

With all the attention, as well as all the press I’m doing for my new single—I’m telling everyone it’ll be on the soundtrack—a number of opportunities arise. I’m invited to be part of an all-star lineup of teen actors at a charity event in Idaho, where I’ll get yet another chance to sing “Something in Your Eyes.” I decide to invite Haim, not to make it an official “Two Coreys” trip, but because by now, I’m worried about him. He’s been living with Brooke McCarter—vampire Paul from
The Lost Boys,
who’s acting as some kind of combination manager/life coach—but I know Haim is now heavily into crack. Whereas I have lined up and filmed
The ’Burbs,
Haim hasn’t booked anything in months. He’s on some kind of self-imposed hiatus, the results of which can’t be good. I think bringing him with me to Idaho might help him reconnect with his fans, might encourage Haim to straighten himself out.

The concert is being held at a local high school—I believe it’s a Mothers Against Drunk Driving event. Everyone gets checked in to the hotel and then I’m off to rehearsals. I’ve got “Something in Your Eyes” ready to go, plus two or three other originals.

The whole week is a blur—there’s a local mall appearance, at which I was trapped in my limo in the parking lot, surrounded by fans and guarded by cops in what looked like riot gear. There are girls collapsing and crying hysterically. I don’t get to spend too much time with Haim, since he’s technically not in the show. But all in all, the trip feels like a success. I’m excited about what I believe is a burgeoning music career. We take the private jet back to L.A. At home, I turn on the news.

The headlines are everywhere—“Two Coreys Disaster!” “Two Coreys Disappoint Fans!” Every channel is airing footage of Haim and I disembarking from the plane in Idaho; they’re running it over and over, in slow motion no less, like we’re two criminals being paraded out for a perp walk. I was dumbfounded. What in the world was going on?

What I hadn’t known was that, while I was busy with soundchecks and backstage preparations and performing, Haim had gone on a full-fledged one-man bender. He was at the
high school,
asking local kids where he could score crack; he commandeered the limo and picked up a truckload of strangers, boozing it up and joyriding around town, and then decided to go full rock-star and trash his hotel room. Starry-eyed and self-absorbed, I was completely oblivious. The bad press is the first sign of an impending “Two Coreys” backlash. It registers, but not seriously enough.

In an attempt at damage control, I sign up for an episode of
CBS Schoolbreak Special
called
15 and Getting Straight.
This is perhaps ironic, since I’m doing anti-drug awareness television at the same time that I’ve got a festering drug problem. I’m still experimenting with heroin, but I think I have it under control, and I’ve managed to keep it well hidden. I sign on to do the show with two other kid stars, Drew Barrymore and Tatum O’Neal.

Drew and I haven’t seen each since our “date” all those years ago, and she’s not ten anymore. She’s fifteen now, and a firecracker. She’s flirtatious and coquettish, she oozes sex appeal, she acts like a woman much older than her actual age. We have instant chemistry. Plus, she’s really hamming it up, flirting and cooing and touching. And so begins yet another whirlwind romance, which the press seizes on from the start.

*   *   *

By the spring
of 1989, press junkets—two- or three-day publicity tours that usually take place in posh hotels or resorts—have become old hat. For
Dream a Little Dream,
we’ve been put up at the Four Seasons—Haim, the director Mark Rocco, and myself are each given our own enormous penthouse suite. After we’ve convened as a panel and fielded questions from as many as thirty to fifty journalists and entertainment reporters, these rooms will be used to conduct one-on-one interviews with individual members of the press. Publicity is part of the job, but junkets are generally laborious, monotonous affairs; you spend your days trying to come up with a fresh, exciting way to answer a question you’ve already heard fifteen times before, and it can be a struggle to remain focused and attentive and gracious. But when it’s finally over, the studio will often let you keep the room for one final night. “Relax, take a bath, have a massage, order room service,” one of the executives tells me. “The bill is open, incidentals are on us. Thanks for all your hard work.”

I looked around my gorgeous, enormous, empty suite at the Four Seasons, and did what any seventeen-year-old would do. I called a few of my friends. Unbeknownst to me, Haim was busy doing the exact same thing over in his room, as was Mark down the hall. Within an hour, the three of us had packed the top floor of the hotel with nearly a thousand “guests.”