Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman Read Free Book Online

life, however, I started to rethink things. Every evening, after a long day on set, I’d watch the minutes on the clock tick by until seven, when he would show up with a glove, a bat, and a ball and beckon me to the backyard. I reluctantly trudged behind him, dragging my feet the whole way.
    “You have to focus on it, Corey. Keep your eye on the ball,” he said, his eyes narrowed and his forehead crinkled in concentration. Then he hurled the ball across the yard.
    I was terrible. It didn’t matter where he aimed or how fast he threw it, the ball sailed over my head, or smacked me in the chest, or—on the rare occasions I actually managed a catch—stung my tiny hand. Once my father was sufficiently disgusted with me, I’d retreat to my room and the pursuits I was actually good at, such as the Star Wars spoof I was writing, based on an article I’d found in Mad magazine.
    It was around this time that my father suddenly volunteered to become my primary on-set guardian. It was an unexpected development, and I had assumed it was because he wanted to keep a close eye on my progress as a burgeoning baseball star. I soon figured out the real reason: he had an excuse to spend the entire day away from my mother, whooping it up with the other Bears dads in the Paramount Studios parking lot. Within weeks he had become such good friends with the other parents that he announced we were taking a trip to Knott’s Scary Farm, a seasonal Halloween event where all of Knott’s Berry Farm is turned into a series of haunted houses filled with monsters and mazes. We piled into the back of someone’s rusted-out Chevelle wagon. In the middle of I-5, somewhere south of Bell Gardens, somebody sparked a joint.
    I turned to Kristoff St. John, my closest friend in the cast. (He would later star as Neil Winters on The Young and the Restless , a role he has played for more than twenty years.) “What’s that smell?” I asked him.
    “It’s weed,” he said casually.
    “What’s weed?”
    “It’s stuff parents do,” Meeno chimed in. Meeno Peluce was Soleil Moon Frye’s half brother. Their mother looked—and sounded—exactly like Janice, the hippie guitarist on The Muppet Show.
    I recognized the smell, of course. It was the same smell that wafted from my mother’s bedroom whenever my father was home, the same smell that sometimes greeted me when I climbed into his car after I’d wrapped on the set of the Bears . I knew instinctively that “weed” probably wasn’t something he should be enjoying with me in the car, but I was still only seven. I didn’t know anything about drugs, and my parents weren’t exactly the type to sit me down and talk about the dangers of them.
    *   *   *
    With our family finances on the rise, we moved to a beautiful new home at the top of a colossal hill in Tarzana, complete with huge Corinthian columns, a sweeping marble entryway, and a swirling spiral staircase. My dad traded in his old beater for a Mercedes, and my mother bought herself a Cadillac. We also hired a full-time maid.
    Technically, I was not allowed to ride my bike anywhere around my new neighborhood. The hills, my mother explained to me, were far too steep and a scrape or a scratch might jeopardize my job. “You have responsibilities now,” she told me, shoving my bike into the far corner of our two-car garage.
    But one particular morning, when my mother was still asleep, I decided to take it out anyway. Clear blue, cloudless skies stretched for miles. I let go of the handlebars and leaned my head back, closing my eyes, feeling the sunlight warm on my face until, suddenly, I was going too fast. I felt my foot slip from the pedal, the front tire shake from left to right, and then I went careening over the handlebars, tumbling end over end down the street. When I recovered, the skin was gone from my elbow, I had scrapes all over my hands and face, and there was a pool of blood on the sidewalk.
    “Goddamnit, Corey,” my mother said