Free Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman Page A

inside.
    “What the hell is this?” he says, confused. “Pete? What are you doin’ in there?”
    “Don’t ask,” I say, pulling the branches apart to reveal a tiny sliver of my face, before running off to deliver a different tree to Mr. Anderson’s truck.
    When filming finally wraps, Joe Dante calls out to me, “See you next month!”
    “Uh, don’t I have a pretty big role?” I asked him. “What do you mean, ‘see you next month’?”
    “This is a six-month shooting schedule,” he explained. And so began what was, for me, a very unusual acting experience—I’d shoot a few days out of every month and then return to my regular life.
    By the time Gremlins began filming, in the summer of 1983, I was back to living at my grandparents’ house more or less full-time. Mindy stayed behind in Canoga Park, effectively raising my two little brothers. Tom, my mother’s boyfriend, was thankfully gone, but my mother was back to going out every night. Sometimes she didn’t come home until morning. Sometimes she’d up and disappear for a week or more at a time. Since she didn’t want—or couldn’t handle—the responsibility of delivering me to set on time, she agreed that moving out for a spell would be for the best. Of course, she had no trouble cashing my paychecks.
    Though it is the first time in my life that I am living almost fully outside of my mother’s grasp, it is not the first time the subject has been broached. When I was eight, around the time of my parents’ divorce, my uncle Merv—bless that man—pulled me aside one afternoon and locked me in my grandmother’s bathroom.
    “Listen, Corey,” he said, more serious than I had ever seen him. “You need to understand something. You are a very bright young man. You have magic in you. I see it. I don’t want you to listen to the negative things people put in your head.”
    I stared at him, wide-eyed. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.
    “Mary and I have been discussing the possibility of bringing you to live with us,” he continued. “What would you think of that?”
    I was instantly flooded with images of what my new life at Uncle Merv’s house might look like: home-cooked meals, everyone eating around the table. Being tucked in to bed every night. Being hugged. Being told that I was special. I could have kissed him. Instead, I threw my arms around his neck.
    “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I told him, my shrieks reverberating against the tiles of the tiny bathroom. Merv promised that he would speak with my mother and find a way to make it all work. But then his wife, Mary, was diagnosed with cancer and the issue of me coming to live with them was put on hold indefinitely.
    When Mary died, little more than a year later, something in Merv broke. We sat shiva , the Jewish tradition of mourning a loved one for one whole week. He strung her wedding ring on a chain and wore it around his neck. He wore black. But he never recovered. He became further and further disconnected from the family, recluse-like, and I knew that I would never be invited to stay.
    There was talk, briefly, about going to live with my uncle Murray after that. Of all the Goldstein children, Murray was the most financially successful; he lived in a sprawling home in Encino, complete with an in-ground pool. But Murray was strict and severe—more strict, even, than my grandfather. I wasn’t convinced that living with Uncle Murray would be any better than staying with my mother. So, I settled in with my grandparents and enrolled in a school near their home.
    Public school, to put it mildly, was awkward. I had been in and out my entire life, so maintaining normal friendships with kids my age was virtually impossible. I was small and scrawny and, as my experience on The Bad News Bears could attest, decidedly not an athlete. Add to this the fact that I was an actor —something that, even this close to Hollywood, was met with suspicion, a raised eyebrow, and