Coreyography: A Memoir (21 page)

Sam was there, outside the club with a motley crew: Tommy Lee, still in the early stages of stardom (to me he just looked scary—supertall, hair down to his ass, eyeliner, piercings, and completely covered in tattoos), a number of comedians, a circle of girls, and Ron Jeremy, who I immediately recognized from his movies. Jeremy was nicer than I would have expected; I had imagined all porn stars would be sleazy and sort of low class. Jeremy seemed like a regular guy. We chatted for a bit, until he pointed to a girl in the crowd.

“See that girl? Do you think she’s cute?”

She was a petite blonde with Farrah Fawcett curls and full red lips.

“She’s gorgeous,” I said. “Probably a little too old for me, though.”

“Well, she really wants to meet you. She’s a big fan.”

Jeremy took her by the hand and led her over. “Corey, this is one of the biggest stars of adult entertainment. This is Ginger Lynn.”

Ginger, then twenty-four (nearly a decade older than me), seemed sophisticated and sweet. The fact that she was flirting with me made her intoxicating. We exchanged phone numbers. A week later, she picked me up in her silver Porsche and blew me in the parking lot of a drive-in theater.

I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. I was the opposite of a Lost Boy. I was a fifteen-year-old already grown up.

CHAPTER 14

There is a photograph, which was taken at my fifteenth birthday party, hanging up in my home office. It is part of an elaborate framed collage, just one among many different pictures taken over the span of several years. It is flanked on the left by a photo of Michael Jackson and me, on the right by another of me with Muhammad Ali. The fact that it’s part of the collage is the only reason I haven’t taken it down.

I had thrown the party at New Talent Enterprises, my father’s management firm. All the usual characters were there: Alyssa Milano and Scott Grimes, plus Majestik and E’Casanova, the famous Michael Jackson impersonator. (For weeks my friends begged me to invite the real Michael; E’Casanova was the best I could do.) But the picture in question is of Corey Haim and me. We’re both staring intently at something just off-camera. Surrounding us are three of our closest friends: Ralph Kaufman, Tony Burnham, and Ron Crimson. Somewhere in the background are Marty Weiss (arrested in 2011 for committing lewd acts on a child) and Bob Villard (indicted in 1987 on child pornography charges—though the conviction was later overturned—and convicted in 2001 of a misdemeanor for child pornography possession; pleaded no contest in 2005 to committing lewd acts on a child). It is, frankly, rather creepy. I wish I had understood the significance then, before everything that was about to happen.

*   *   *

My resolve not
to do coke didn’t last very long.

I was spending countless nights at the Cresthill house, but practically everyone in Hollywood was doing loads of cocaine (it was, after all, 1987). Plus, Ron and I were going out four or five nights a week, and he kept telling me that I just had to try it. I had never told him about the night in Santa Cruz, or the fact that cocaine had more or less gotten me fired. And I didn’t feel comfortable trying it again in front of so many people, so I pulled Sam aside and asked if he’d break me off a little, allow me to take some home.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” he asked. “I don’t want to be a bad influence or anything.”

I was fifteen years old, getting coke from a famous comedian. “Bad influence” might have been a bit of an understatement.

Cocaine is hypnotic. It gives you a sense of power, fills you with false confidence. For the first time, everything I said seemed important. I felt laser focused, like I could communicate more clearly, like my words were transcendent. “Ron,” I remember saying, “you were right! Cocaine
is
the answer.”

*   *   *

I was sitting
on the couch at my dad’s. I had taken some pills, some concoction that Ron had made up. In the span of a few months, he had become like my personal chemist, feeding me a mix-match of pills from the dwindling supply in our Ziploc bag. I was reclining, my eyes closed, feeling the high wash over my body in waves, when Ron came over and sat down next to me, a triple-X magazine in his hands—Haim and I had bought the magazine together; we kept a stash of porn in the cabinet above the fridge. I began idly leafing through the pages when Ron started touching me, reaching across my thigh to the crotch of my pants. I froze, felt my breath catch in the back of my throat.

“Is this okay?” he whispered in my ear.

I had so many hazy thoughts rolling around my drug-addled brain, floating across my eyelids like clouds. Haim was doing it. Loads of boys in Hollywood were doing it. It wasn’t okay. I was petrified. But I didn’t want a confrontation with my new, close friend.

He unbuttoned my pants, and took out my penis.

“We shouldn’t be out here, in the living room,” he said.

He grabbed my hand and led me into my father’s room. He pushed me on the bed and took me in his mouth. I was immediately revolted, but I tried to tough it out. I told myself I could do it, that a lot of other people were doing it, that I should stop fighting and go with the flow. I ignored the nausea that gripped my stomach. I tried to imagine that I was somewhere else. That it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t happening.

In the gray light of the morning, though, I was disgusted and full of shame. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed the whole thing. I went across the street to my dad’s office. I knew Ron would be at work. I had to look in his eyes. I had to know if the nightmare had actually happened.

Ron seemed completely and totally normal. I chalked it up to being crazy, to boozing too hard, and I buried it. Pushed it way down and tried to forget. Told myself it was a drug-induced dream.

That was the beginning of a cycle I didn’t know how to break.

My father just wasn’t around much—he spent most of his time at work or was busy pursuing his own social life, so Ron and I continued hanging out, continued spending nights together out on the town, as if nothing ever happened. We went to Club Hollywood, where he introduced me to the owner, a wise-guy type, with a crooked nose, a face full of pockmarks, and what little hair he still had sculpted into a greasy bouffant. His massive belly brushed the edge of his desk, his shirt was unbuttoned to reveal tufts of curly black chest hair and an enormous, gaudy gold chain. In front of him were rails of cocaine. We stayed up partying for two days straight.

I finally went to sleep in my father’s bedroom. Ron passed out on the couch. But when I woke up, he was on me, touching me, tugging on the zipper of my pants. I realized it was happening again. I told myself that it was a dream, if I told myself it was only a dream, he would stop. He put his mouth on me again. I pretended to be asleep.

I don’t know why I couldn’t confront Ron, but I was consumed with guilt. I felt like the whole thing was my fault. If I hadn’t have said yes that first time, then what he was doing would clearly be wrong. But I did say yes, so he must have thought it was something I wanted. When I would feel him climb into my bed at night, I started rolling on my side or kicking around in my sleep, as though I were dreaming. I would abruptly roll over, pulling the covers tight to my chin, but he would creep around and come at me from the other side. I desperately wanted him to stop, but I was scared of losing my friend.

After months of this, I knew I needed a night away from Ron. So, when Ralph Kaufman invited me over to his place, I went.

Ralph had recently moved out of the house he shared with his father, all the way across town, to an apartment just a block away from my house. Harold Pruett was there that night; for some reason, he was staying with Ralph for a few weeks. Harold and I stayed up late doing cocaine (Ralph wasn’t much of a drug user to my knowledge), until Ralph put on a porno. He took a seat next to me on the couch.

I had been hearing rumors that Ralph might be gay, even that Ralph might be into young boys, but he had never made an advance aimed at
me
. He had always seemed fairly normal, in fact, like someone I could trust. When he put that porn film on, though, I felt my chest tighten, my stomach seize.

“Too bad we can’t get some girls over here, right?” he said, smiling.

I grunted. There wasn’t anything else I could say.

“Does this turn you on?” he asked.

I knew where this was going. I convinced him to turn off the tape, told him that I was just really tired. Nothing else happened that night. A few nights later, however, something did.

Harold and I passed out on the bed. When I woke up, Ralph was on me, exactly the way Ron had been. This time, I was able to deal with it more directly. I pulled up my pants and ran across the street, back to my dad’s apartment, and cried for the rest of the night.

For reasons that I still don’t completely understand, I have a hard time telling people no, a hard time recognizing when someone isn’t to be trusted. I desperately want to see the good in people. I desperately wanted to believe that all of these people in my life were loyal and true friends. Because what would it mean if they weren’t? What would that say about my life? Slowly, however, over a period of many years, I would begin to realize that many of the people I had surrounded myself with were monsters.

Ralph used to tell us that he’d gotten his big break starring as the little kid in
The Jungle Book,
the old live-action movie, filmed some years before the animated Disney version, that Bill Kaufman was actually his step-dad, the one who had helped get Ralph into the business. None of that turned out to be true. Bill Kaufman wasn’t Ralph’s step-dad; Bill Kaufman was Ralph’s lover. Together, Ralph and Bill had been working together, coercing young men into their home. I was just the latest in a series of boys to be groomed.

I was shattered, disgusted, devastated. I needed some normalcy in my life. So, I called Michael Jackson.

*   *   *

Michael Jackson’s world,
crazy as it sounds, had become my happy place. He was adamantly against drugs and alcohol, he was extremely straightlaced; I couldn’t even swear around him. Being with Michael brought me back to my innocence. When I was with Michael, it was like being ten years old again.

“Let’s do something fun,” he said. We were sitting in the dining room at Hayvenhurst. We had just finished dinner. It was a rare night, since no one else was home. “Do you have any ideas?”

“You tell me,” I said. “It’s your house.”

“Should we go to Disneyland?”

I looked out the window. It was dark outside, already after seven o’clock. “Don’t we need all your security?”

“Let’s not tell anyone that we’re going. It’ll just be you and me.”

We jumped in his Mercedes and took off for Westwood, to a high-rise apartment building on Wilshire. “We’ll just stop in for some disguises,” he said, pulling the car into an underground garage. I didn’t even know Michael
had
an apartment. We took a private service elevator to the penthouse, walked inside, and I realized the place was empty. There were a desk and a chair in the middle of the room, a small dining table in the corner, but that was it. The closet, however, was full. He picked his way through wigs, mustaches, clown makeup, fake noses, hats. Sometimes he would put on these eccentric costumes and attempt to go out in public and blend in with everyday people. As he continued rifling through his closet, I started to look around.

He had a full-length mirror hung on the wall; scrawled on the mirror, in crayon, was a list—song titles, tracks he was considering for his upcoming album. At the bottom he had written: “Does this equal 100 million?”

Michael was fairly obsessed with the notion that
Bad
needed to outsell
Thriller,
even though many in the business would have explained that that was an impossible task. (More than thirty years after its initial release,
Thriller
remains the bestselling album of all time.) Next to the mirror—all over the walls—were Post-it notes, self-affirmations. I couldn’t believe even the King of Pop sometimes struggled with self-doubt.

I pulled my hair into a ponytail and donned a fake mustache and a pair of aviators, while Michael put on a fake nose, sunglasses, and a giant afro, and we strolled into Disneyland like two regular guys. (Though Michael was still wearing his trademark penny loafers, white socks, and white V-neck shirt peeking out from his red button-down. I don’t know how we made it through unnoticed.) We wandered through gift shops, all throughout the park, until we ended up at Videopolis, a five-thousand-square-foot outdoor dance club for teens. There we were, Michael Jackson and Corey Feldman, in the mid-eighties, standing amid a thousand oblivious teens. A Madonna song was playing. I told Michael I wanted to dance.

“Are you crazy?”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Do you realize what would happen if they find out we’re here?”

“Well, don’t do the whole Michael Jackson routine,” I told him. “Just dance like a normal person.”

“Corey.” He raised an eyebrow, and I realized he had a point.

We stayed at Videopolis, tucked out of the crowd, near the back, until the park closed down sometime around midnight. Only Michael didn’t feel like making the long drive back to Encino. We decided instead to stay the night at the Disneyland Hotel, but when we approached the desk, the attendant told us they didn’t have any available rooms.

“I would really appreciate it if you could help us out,” Michael said. He was kind and casual, not at all egotistical or demanding, as one might have expected from someone so famous.

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re completely booked.”

Michael looked over at me and sighed. “I didn’t want to have to do this.” Then he reached for his wallet and pulled out a California driver’s license and an American Express card printed with the words “Disneyland” and “Michael Jackson” in giant gold letters. He set them both on the desk. I thought the hotel attendant might choke to death; his eyes popped right out of his head.