Free Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman Page B

quite a bit of teasing—and it’s no wonder that by age twelve, I had officially and irreconcilably been labeled an outcast. I did not fit in with the effortlessly cool surfers and stoners, the Valley preppies, or the Mexican and black students, who were bused in from east L.A. Girls were a complete mystery. Though I had started to notice them, they were definitely not interested in me.
    I confided in my cousin Michael. While I had been busy acting alongside a life-size puppet on Madame’s Place , he had somehow managed to get himself an actual, honest-to-God girlfriend. They had even made out. I was astounded at his prowess. “How’d you do it?” I asked him. I could barely get a girl to look at me, let alone agree to lock lips.
    “The best way is to make a game out of it.”
    “What do you mean, a game?”
    “You know, like ‘spin the bottle’ or ‘seven minutes in heaven.’”
    I did not know, but I was excited to find out. “Let’s do it!” Within minutes, Michael had arranged for two girls from school to come over and “hang out.” Both Amanda and Leighann, he informed me, were excellent kissers.
    Before the girls arrived, Michael and I decided to play a quick game of “rock, paper, scissors” to determine who would go with who. I was desperate to be with Amanda—the doe-eyed brunette with a face full of freckles—but Michael’s paper covered my rock. Amanda would go with Michael, while I would be stuck with Leighann. She was a sweet girl, and we did share one passionless peck, but most of that afternoon we spent just talking. When we finally went looking for Michael and Amanda, however, they were full-on making out in the closet.
    Back at school, still reeling from the fact that Amanda was clearly more into my cousin than me, I decided to rethink things with Leighann. I wasn’t even sure if I liked her, but I felt like a shoo-in. Better to start off with a sure thing, I thought, and then graduate to a girl like Amanda once I had some experience under my belt. That day in class, I wrote Leighann a little note: “Will you go out with me?” She wrote back quickly, a simple one-word response.
    “No?” I shouted— out loud —as soon as I read it. Then I cowered in my seat while everyone turned around to stare. I spent most of the rest of that day in a haze, completely and totally crushed, until after the last bell rang and Leighann asked me to go for a walk.
    “As you know,” she stated, oddly professorial about the whole thing, “you don’t have a very good reputation around here. You’re not really one of the ‘cool kids.’”
    I stared at her.
    “But I like you. I wouldn’t mind being your girlfriend.… We just can’t tell anybody. As long as it stays our secret—and you don’t tell anybody, ever —then I’ll go with you.”
    That was good enough for me.
    *   *   *
    I’m more comfortable, more at home, back on the set of Gremlins . Joe Dante, who has a reputation for working with the same actors on project after project, has managed to create a little family out of the cast. Zach Galligan, who plays the lead role of Billy Peltzer, and I play arcade games like Food Fight and Paperboy during breaks in filming. (In fact, Zach likes Food Fight so much that he asks Steven Spielberg to relocate the game from the offices of Amblin Entertainment right to the Gremlins set. Amblin Entertainment, it turns out, is filled with arcade games; Steven is also a fan of them.) And Joe becomes another in a long list of substitute fathers. He is something of a cinefile, a huge fan of the classics. Sometimes, on days off, he invites me along for private screenings of old prints he had pulled from the WB vault, like 1953’s The War of the Worlds . It marks the beginning of a long and treasured friendship and the first of several projects we will work on together.
    I am also captivated by Gizmo, who seems even more real to me than Madame. Gremlins employs a lot of sleight-of-hand tricks to make