Coreyography: A Memoir (23 page)

*   *   *

Under Ron’s tutelage,
my drug use has progressed quickly. I’m doing coke constantly, with Ron, with my newly formed entourage of hanger-on friends, and, of course, with Corey Haim. I’m up to an eight-ball every two days. I have dry and cracked nostrils, but I love the rush, the parties, the high.

Meanwhile, Sam Kinison and I have forged a tight friendship. Sam’s brother, Kevin, committed suicide in the spring of ’87, and I’ve kind of slid into place, filled that void, helped him get over some of that loss. Since then, we’ve been living the
Lost Boys
mantra together—“Sleep all day. Party all night.” He’s visiting me on the set of
License to Drive
and we’ve got clouds of weed smoke billowing out of my trailer. At night we’re having regular coke-off challenges, daring each other to see who can stay up the longest, who can do the most rails. And there are always new and different celebrities to party with. We’re hanging out with guys like Michael J. Fox and Billy Idol. I feel like part of an elite, exclusive group.

Within months, Ron is pushing me to try crack and, eventually, I do. He takes me to some rundown apartment in the Valley—supposedly we’re there to buy coke—but this guy is sitting amid an elaborate collection of glass pipes and some kind of jerry-rigged cooking station. I’ve never even seen crack. I don’t know anything about it, I’m not even familiar with the paraphernalia. “You ever done whip-its?” the man on the floor asks.

“Of course,” I tell him, with a smart-alec smirk.

“If you’ve ever done whip-its, it’s just like that.”

I inhaled, and immediately got what’s called a ringer—everything went quiet; all I heard was a high-pitched tone before dropping fast to the floor. It was engulfing, all encompassing. It was like having an orgasm and being punched in the face at the same time. Crack literally took me off my feet. After that, Ron continued pushing the envelope, always trying to get me to try something new.

I quickly decide that I need my own place—and a lock on the door to my bedroom—so, at fifteen, I get my first apartment at the Oakwoods, the outpost in Studio City. It’s fully furnished, so I can move right in, and the two-bedroom immediately becomes the staging area for elaborate nights with all of my friends. We’re having “mushroom parties” or putting on
Dark Side of the Moon
and doling out the acid. Haim, too, is over all the time—we’re in the thick of shooting
License to Drive,
our second film together, and it’s during this period that we solidify our bond, that we become like brothers. What we don’t yet realize is that we’re both terribly self-destructive, and toxic for each other.

It must have been right after Christmas, because my apartment was loaded with sandwiches. I’d thrown a party and ordered about a hundred foot-long vegetarian specials from Subway, even though I only had maybe thirty guests in attendance. I’ve got boxes and boxes of them stacked around the living room now. Haim and I are high out of our minds, reclining on the sofa, when he looks over at me with a one-eyed, quizzical stare.

“Dude,” he says, “what are we going to do about all these sandwiches?”

I come up with the brilliant idea to feed the homeless, so we somehow manage to drive ourselves downtown and dole out leftover submarines to the indigent residents of L.A. That must have taken up an hour or two, so we come back and do some more rails. Next thing you know, it’s four in the morning and we’re due on set in three hours. Real sleep is no longer an option, so we decide to send Kevin, my resident “couch surfer,” out for another eight-ball—we’ll use this in lieu of morning coffee—and take a little nap. “Make sure you wake us up by six thirty,” I call out as Kevin disappears into the night.

I feel like I’ve just shut my eyes, but Kevin is already back, hovering over my face, shoving a picture frame at me with three quarter-gram lines drawn out on the glass. I nudge Haim, we snort the lines, and I get up to take the phone off the receiver, because it’s now ringing off the hook. That’s when I glance at the clock. It’s 9:30
A.M.
We’re already more than two hours late.

“What the fuck?” I shout at Kevin. “You were supposed to wake us up three hours ago!”

Kevin starts in on a long, rambling story about traffic and naps and stopping at his apartment, while I start forwarding through the seventeen messages that have been left on my answering machine. The first one is from the second assistant director, and he sounds pleasant enough, just a friendly message checking in, since at that point I was about five minutes late and oh, did I happen to know where Corey Haim might be? They couldn’t get a hold of him, either. Then, the messages got a little less friendly, as they’re being left by people higher and higher up the ranks of the production team. The last one is from the executive producer, and he’s screaming into the phone, “You pieces of shit! Do you have any idea how much money you are costing me? You are a pair of fucking fools … jackasses!”

Haim and I practically choked on our cigarettes after that one, thought for sure we’d both be fired. It’s a miracle they didn’t shut down the whole production. Despite our shenanigans,
License to Drive
will gross more than $22 million, and is considered a box office success.

Whenever things got heavy in the years that followed, Haim might shoot me a look, lower his breath, and whisper: “Pair of fucking fools … jackasses.”

We’d burst into laughter, mutually amused at our ridiculous past.

*   *   *

Dream a Little
Dream,
a sort of surrealist rom-com about a high school slacker, the object of his affection, and an elderly professor on a quest for immortality, is exciting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s my first starring vehicle. This one is
my
movie. For the first time, I’ll be top-billed. I won’t be part of an ensemble cast.

Director Mark Rocco, who at the time had only made one other movie—a tiny independent production starring, coincidentally, Joe Pantoliano, one of the evil Fratelli brothers in
The Goonies
—is all about making a serious, art-house film. This, too, seems fortuitous. I’m trying to transition out of teen movies. I’m tired of doing prepackaged, commercialized family films.

The acting seems like it’ll be a welcome challenge.
Dream a Little Dream
is like an endlessly more elaborate version of
Freaky Friday
; half the time I’ll be acting as though my body has been inhabited—in a kind of metaphysical, meditative dream state—by the spirit of Coleman Ettinger, a character the great Jason Robards is playing. I’ll also be allowed to act as a sort of uncredited, unofficial producer; I’ll have a say in the casting process. And I’m getting an opportunity not only to write an original song for the film, but to choreograph an on-screen original dance. By early 1988, I’ve developed a little reputation for being able to mimic the moves of Michael Jackson. I’ve been hard at work on my singing, too. Prior to the emancipation, I was spending hours at Recording Star, a sort of do-it-yourself recording studio in Westwood, bringing demo tapes home to my dad. I hadn’t been any
good,
but I desperately wanted to be. Now I was going to have my very own single, which would be released on the
Dream a Little Dream
soundtrack.

It’s a lot of firsts. With all of the added pressure and the mountains of responsibility, I decide to curb my drug use. I’m not ready—or willing—to give up partying completely, but I make an effort to slow things down.

A few weeks into casting, we’ve already zeroed in on a trio of young actresses to play the role of Lainie Diamond, the fourth lead and my on-screen high school crush. The frontrunners are Meredith Salenger, from the Oscar-nominated Disney movie
The Journey of Natty Gann
; Ione Skye, who in a matter of months will have her breakout with Cameron Crowe’s cult classic
Say Anything,
a movie that also stars my sister; and a virtual unknown named Jennifer Connelly. She’s only done a few films, most notably
Labyrinth,
the campy vehicle for David Bowie, but she’s got my vote. She’s not only a stunning beauty, but obviously immensely, insanely talented. Unfortunately, she wants too much money. Meredith Salenger wins the role. I find—to my delight—that we have incredible chemistry.

I go away for a few days to attend to some business, and when I come back one of the producers informs me that he’s got some good news.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Lala is doing the movie,” he says. Lala is Laura Sloatman, Frank Zappa’s niece and Corey Haim’s current girlfriend. They’ve been having a torrid love affair, attached at the hip since
License to Drive,
but their relationship is a dysfunctional ball of drama. I’m not too keen on introducing that dynamic to this film. “Why is that good news?”

“Because Lala only agreed to do the film if Corey Haim agreed to do it, too.”

Now, I love Corey Haim like a brother, but I’m wary of doing another film with him, especially on the heels of
License to Drive.
I’m trying to clean myself up, to branch out, to work on my music, and in two days’ time my breakout film has been turned into another “Two Coreys” movie. It’s suddenly clear that I never really had any say in it at all.

*   *   *

Dream a Little
Dream
is filming in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’ve already been here once, to assist with location scouting, but now I’m back, checking into my room at the Shell Island Resort. Ron is with me, still acting as my assistant. By the time filming ends, he’ll have scored his second cameo in one of my movies—I managed to get him a small role in
License to Drive
as well.

As we’re nearing our first official day of shooting, I get an unexpected call from one of the producers.

“There’s a problem with Haim,” he tells me. “He might have to back out at the last minute.”

“What? Why?”

“He’s had an accident. He broke his leg.”

Apparently, Haim had been attempting to teach his mother, Judy, how to ride a motorized scooter. We each own one—I actually purchased the exact Vespa that Haim’s on-screen sister, Natalie (played by Nina Siemaszko) rode in
License to Drive.
But Judy, still a shaky novice, had run Haim’s scooter into a brick wall, injuring herself and breaking her son’s leg in the process.

We’re able to write Haim’s injury right into the script, so that he—and his cast—can still be in the movie, but to my knowledge this is his first experience with prescription painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin. While I don’t have any evidence that Haim is
abusing
these drugs, he does manage to play up his injury, to the point that we’re forced to take an insurance day or two. This isn’t the first time he has managed to shut down an entire production, and it certainly won’t be the last. But looking back, I think those few weeks marked the beginning of what would be, for Haim, a lifelong battle with prescription drugs.

*   *   *

Tony Fields was
one of the dancing zombies in “Thriller,” so I know he knows a thing or two about Michael Jackson–style moves. We begin our work together, choreographing the now-famous scene in which I dance my way down the bleachers, performing for Lainie Diamond, who at this point in the film has been inhabited by the mind of Coleman’s wife, Gena. I’m looking forward to showing the world what I can really do, but the scene itself calls for some interesting concessions.

Technically, my body has been inhabited by the spirit of Coleman, so I’m merging the spritely dance style of a teenager—heel spins and freezes reminiscent of Michael Jackson—with vaudevillian-type moves with which an elderly Coleman might be familiar, like Fosse-esque jazz hands and Broadway-style balance checks. This is an awful lot to convey within a two- or three-minute dance sequence—the sheer complexity of it should have probably signaled a problem within the script. But I’m too excited about showcasing my dance moves to realize we’ve wandered into the territory of the esoteric. I can’t see that the script is muddled, and deciphering all of these nuances is going to be a problem for the average moviegoer. It’s one of many cues—or clues—that I am about to miss.

Back in L.A. I get a call from Joe Dante’s office. I haven’t seen him since our days on the set of
Gremlins
but he’s interested in having me read for a part in a new film starring Tom Hanks. I’ve gotten my driver’s license, but I don’t yet own my own car. So, I ask my neighbor, Chris, if I can borrow his. Chris lives across the hall from me at the Oakwoods, and he operates with immunity as the complex’s unofficial coke dealer. All I have to do is knock on his door; a few hours later, he’ll discretely slide a little package underneath my door, and I’ll deliver him the cash. It’s incredibly convenient, which makes the arrangement exceedingly dangerous.

Chris owns a burnt orange Chevy El Dorado, a real ’70s-era junker that’s completely falling apart. This is what I’m driving when I pull into the Universal Studios lot to audition for
The ’Burbs
. I haven’t seen Joe in five years, not since I was a clean-cut, precocious twelve-year-old. Now I’ve got ratty black hair extensions, a too-cool-for-school attitude, and a coke problem I’m trying to keep under wraps. Plus, I’m driving a beater. It must have been a shocking transition, but my new burnout persona is a perfect fit for Ricky Butler, the long-haired, loud-mouthed resident of Mayfield Place, the fictional setting for Joe’s campy take on a Hitchcockian send-up. I’ve got enough of a chip on my shoulder to be miffed that I’m not being offered a starring role, but I’m excited about working with Tom Hanks and Princess Leia.

In the interim, I hire a new assistant. I keep Ron around as a friend—I’m still too afraid of being alone to completely cut him out of my life—but I don’t want him working for me anymore, not after he made a crack in Wilmington about missing “play time” together; it was the first time he had ever verbally acknowledged the abuse. So, Tony Burnham hooks me up with Gary Hayes, a no-nonsense kind of guy with a girlfriend. Ironically, he appeared to have a problem with gay people. I figure he’ll be a safer, more appropriate fit.