Coreyography: A Memoir (6 page)

Midway through shooting season two of the
Bears,
the producers call a cast-wide meeting on the set of our little league locker room. We shoot on the soundstage where
The Brady Bunch
was filmed, but it’s now clear that
The Bad News Bears
will not have that kind of longevity: we’ve been cancelled.

Looking back, I can’t believe this came as that much of a shock; our show aired at eight-thirty on Saturday night, and our lead-in was a new sitcom called
Working Stiffs
with Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton. It was a tough time slot for a kids’ show. But everyone, from the cast to the crew to the production team, seems completely and utterly crushed. (At the wrap party, someone from the cinematography department got drunk and sobbed on my shirt collar.)

The cancellation, aside from throwing my family’s finances into sudden disarray, comes at an awkward time for me personally: I’ll be sent back to public school, just as my classmates are making the transition from simple mathematics to the single most baffling concept I had ever encountered in my life: multiplication.

I had always excelled in my other classes, subjects like spelling and reading and social studies, and have a near photographic memory—hand me a script and I can remember every single word on the page—but multiplication, for some reason, just does not compute. Both my parents and teachers begin referring to this as a “mental block.” I spend most afternoons doing my times tables over and over and over, picturing an errant LEGO or a Lincoln Log floating in the middle of my brain.

As one would perhaps expect, child actors are required to maintain a decent grade point average. Anything less than As and Bs (or the occasional C) would be an indication that my “career” was taking a toll on my education, and I would have been refused a work permit. So, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that my parents chose this particular moment to start caring about my academic standing. Bad grades equaled no income.

Shortly after returning to public school, my mother started sending a daily report card along with me, little pink slips that my teacher was supposed to fill out at the end of the day with little boxes she could check to indicate whether my performance had been satisfactory or unsatisfactory, whether my behavior in class had been excellent, good, fair, or poor. It was usually my father who reviewed them and, based on my daily “grades,” administered what was quickly becoming a regular punishment.

“Go upstairs and wait for me,” he said on a day when I brought home a particularly ominous combination of letters, a bright red P and an unforgiving U. I marched upstairs and lowered my pants down around my ankles, until my father sauntered in and grabbed one of his leather belts. I was crying, counting off the spanks in my head when, midway through swat number four, the leather belt broke clean in half. For a brief moment, I closed my eyes and sent up a silent prayer, thanking God that it was over. My father, however, simply retrieved a fresh belt from his closet.

He turned and looked at me on his way out the door. “You know I don’t want to do this, Corey. But I have to. It’s the only way you’ll learn what’s right.”

I wanted to believe him. But later—when I was squirming my way out of yet another spanking—he tied my hands to the bedpost to ensure that I stayed put. He swung the belt wildly, and the buckle caught me in the eye. It bruised and swelled immediately, and I thought, surely there’s a better way to teach your kid about right and wrong than this.

CHAPTER 3

A blanket of early-morning dew had settled across the front yard and tiny blades of grass were sticking to my ankles and the tops of my bare feet. I trudged through the fog, along the winding walkway and out into the street. The windows of my father’s car were all steamed up from the inside. I pulled the sleeve of my shirt over my hand and used it to wipe away the condensation, cupped my hands together, and peered inside.

“Dad?” I called out. “Are you coming in the house now?”

*   *   *

Shortly after my
brother Eden was born, in the fall of 1979, my father moved out of the room he shared with my mother and started sleeping on the couch. This did nothing to allay their constant fighting, however, which was intensifying and—with increasing frequency—dragging on late into the night. They covered a revolving door of subjects, from the (apparently untenable) fact that my mother was spending all day, every day, at home, alone, caring for
us,
while he was out carousing, and the fact that she was pretty sure he was stepping out on her with a sea of different women, including my pretty blond teacher Mrs. Hart. After several months on the sofa, my father began sleeping in the car, curled up on top of piles of clothes and shoes and a couple of worn-out old amplifiers. How my parents managed to conceive yet
another
child amid this chaos is one of the great mysteries of my young life, but by the time Devin came into the world, in January 1981, my father was gone for good. He didn’t even show up at the hospital.

The divorce threw our family finances into sharp relief. I had been working steadily for more than five years, but my parents had no idea how to manage their money. After befriending a real estate agent, they snapped up properties with abandon, then ended up taking out a second and, later, a third mortgage on our home in Tarzana before eventually losing the house to the bank. My mother, my sister, my new little brothers, and I piled into her car and moved to a one-story rental in Canoga Park. There was nothing left to show for my success; just like that, we were back to being broke.

*   *   *

“You need an
operation.”

My mother was coming at me with scissors and a syringe, which she had no doubt pilfered from Actors and Others for Animals, the nonprofit where she occasionally volunteered. She had recruited Mindy to help hold me down and suddenly I was on my back on the floor. My wrists were pinned and my mother was straddling me, one knee on either side of my stomach. “Your nose just keeps growing,” she said, doing her best impression of a surgeon, cupping my chin in her hand and angling my face from side to side. “Yep, you definitely need a nose job.” She started lowering the syringe down closer to my face. Mindy howled with laughter—she still thought it was a game.

I squirmed and bucked, desperately trying to wriggle out from underneath my mom. My legs were flailing, I was trying to backpedal my way across the carpet, but it was no use. When the tears started, Mindy let go of my arms.

“Mom, it’s not funny now. Come on, stop it,” she said. But my mother didn’t stop. Mindy clearly didn’t know what to do, so she got up and walked out of the room, leaving us all alone.

“You need an injection to sedate you for the operation.” She took the scissors and pressed them against my throat, poking but not quite piercing the skin. I screamed for her to stop, squeezed my eyes shut and craned my neck as far away from her as I could. My chest heaved with deep, guttural sobs. Finally, she got up and went to her bedroom, cackling the whole way down the hall.

My mother was unraveling. She was either glassy-eyed and listless and starting to slur her words, or she was manic, barreling through the house like a freight train, trying on hot pants and see-through tops and chattering on about how she was going to find us a new father, one who actually “gave a shit” about the family. One evening, when I poked my head into her bathroom and asked what time she might be home, she ripped the toilet seat from the hinges and threatened to bash my face in. Her newest trick, which was especially terrifying, was to sneak-attack my sister and I in the middle of the night, seizing on a shirt left on the floor of my bedroom or a pair of pants casually tossed on a chair. “What the fuck is this?” she would yell, waking me up from a dead sleep, holding up the offending pair of pants in her hand. Before I even had a chance to respond, she would yank clothes from the hangers, pull them from the drawers, and toss them around the room. It looked like the aftermath of a category 5 tornado.

“Clean your fucking room, you slob,” she told me. It was four in the morning. I had to be up for school in three hours. I learned that the only time I was really safe was when she was asleep.

*   *   *

Though I can’t
pinpoint the reasons why, my mother suddenly announces that she wants to live more “independently.” Instead of relying on my aging grandparents, she hires my first set-sitter, someone to drive me to and from jobs and, essentially, to babysit me while I’m at work. Her name is Sheri. She’s a sweet woman with bright red hair, but her sneezes—and there are a lot of them—smell terrible. This is my first sneeze-odor experience. I’m not sure what to make of it.

I get hired to film an episode of
Mork & Mindy
. I’m one of several children—the show is in decline and the writers are trying all kinds of new subplots to boost the ratings, so Mork is now running a daycare—and I only have three or four lines, but Robin Williams and I get along famously, even though he insists on calling me Damien, because he thinks I look like the kid from
The Omen
. Every time he sees me, he starts whistling the movie’s haunting theme song, and shouting, “Daaaamien …
DAMIEN
!” The producers like me, too, so I’m quickly written in to another episode, and there’s talk of bringing me back later on in the season, perhaps as a regular guest star.

By the second episode, though, things at home are starting to take their toll. I am desperate for some kind of positive attention, but I have no idea how to get it. So, I whine. I complain. I act out. I ask repeatedly when we’re going to wrap, when I might have a break, when is it going to be lunchtime. The word
obnoxious
is thrown around a lot, and my chance to become a series regular is quickly scrapped.

I get rebooked on another episode of
The Love Boat,
but things aren’t any better over there. I am inconsistent and bratty. I am nominated for a Young Artist’s Award for Best Young Actor, Guest on a Series, but there are a lot of calls to the agent. Then comes strike number three.

All the Way Home,
a Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Tad Mosel, was nominated for a Tony award when it debuted on Broadway in 1960. Now it’s going to be adapted for television, but the producers want to broadcast it live on NBC. It’s an ambitious project with an impressive cast. Sally Field, fresh off an Oscar win for
Norma Rae,
will star in the role of Mary Follett, a newly widowed woman in 1915-era Tennessee. William Hurt will play her dead husband. I assume that I will be cast as their son, Rufus, but the role goes instead to a boy named Jeremy Licht. He seems like a nice enough kid; I’ve palled around with him at auditions, but he doesn’t have much of a résumé. (Eventually, he will play one of the Hogan boys on the 1980s sitcom
Valerie
alongside Jason Bateman.) I am cast in some tertiary supporting role, way,
way
down in the billing. I have one, maybe two, whole lines.

Rehearsals for the play, which are scheduled to last for a couple of months, start out well, though I have such a small part that the majority of my time at work is spent at “school” (which, for this production, is a room in the basement), banking hours. Some days I don’t even get called to the set at all. Jeremy, however, quickly proves to be a bit of a prankster. He starts out innocently enough, flicking my ear or tugging on my hair or tripping me on the way to lunch, but he is a master at making
me
out to be the troublemaker. As soon as I react, he raises his voice just loud enough for the nearest adult to hear. “Hey, why are you fighting with me?” he says. “I’m here to work. I’m trying to do my
job
.” You have to hand it to him, actually. He really is one hell of an actor. And I am an easy target.

I sink deeper and deeper into despair. My parents are divorced, I have virtually no relationship with my father, my first real television show has been cancelled, and now here I am doing this tiny part in this stupid play and taking crap from Jeremy Licht. The more he teases me, the angrier and angrier I get. And then finally I decide I can’t take it anymore. Instead of being a punching bag, I hit him back.

For the first time in my life, I get fired.

*   *   *

“Please, please, please
don’t tell my mom.” Sheri is driving me home and I am begging her—pleading with her—not to break the news to my mother. The closer we get to the house, the more desperate my begging becomes.

“I have to tell her, Corey,” she says. “There’s really no way around it.”

“But she’s going to kill me.”

“She’s not going to kill you. You’re overreacting. Your mother seems like a lovely woman. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

Everything will certainly not be fine, I know, and I’m convinced that Sheri must be some kind of a moron. I glare at her. How does nobody else see it? That my mother has gone completely and utterly insane? I make one final plea as she steers the car into the mouth of the driveway, then follow her slowly to the front porch, my chin tucked tightly to my chest, cowering behind her as she rings the doorbell.

The next few moments play out in slow motion. My mother comes to the door, looking slightly dazed, and Sheri begins explaining the situation. I can hear their voices, but they sound distant and far away, like the “wa wa wawa wa” of the adults in the
Peanuts
cartoons, like I have water in my ears. When I hear Sheri use the word
dismissed,
though, everything comes back into focus, the truth of the thing rushing at me all at once. My mother snaps her neck and glares at me.

“You got
fired
?”

We stare at each other for a few awkward moments.

“Go inside and wait for me,” she says. She closes the door behind her, and they talk for a while on the porch. When I hear Sheri’s engine rumble to life in the driveway, I freeze. It’s going to be bad. I know it.

“
Corey!
” My mother slams the door behind her. It rattles in the frame. “Get your ass in that room. Right now.”