No disrespect intended, but I wasn’t much of a fan of the actor Corey Haim. I was a couple years too old and had one Y chromosome too many to share the enthusiasm of the Tiger Beat demographic for him and his partner-in-crime, Corey Feldman. In fact, I can recall seeing only one of his movies, and it’s the same one everyone else saw, The Lost Boys. Oh, and also a nearly forgotten but sweet little movie called Murphy’s Romance, in which he played the son of Sally Field.
Still, if you had any awareness at all of pop culture in the late ’80s, you had to know who he was. He was as much a part of the texture of that era as jelly bracelets and Aqua Net, a familiar and likable-enough presence hovering somewhere in my peripheral vision, if not somebody to whom I paid a lot of attention. So, being the huge bleeding heart that I am, I felt genuinely bad when I learned a couple years ago just what a wreck he’d made of himself after the Awesome ’80s melted down into the Ironic ’90s. Yes, I admit I was an occasional viewer of The Two Coreys, a squirm-inducing reality series that revealed the grown-up Corey Haim as a bloated, dissolute, unhappy man who barely resembled the apple-cheeked kid in the photo above. I didn’t see a single episode of that show in which Haim didn’t reminisce about The Lost Boys, obviously his personal high-water mark, and I found — somewhat to my surprise — that I had a great deal of compassion for the former teen idol whose career and life peaked before he was old enough to buy cigarettes. I’ve struggled enough to find my own path in life that I feel for anyone who is so visibly lost as Haim appeared to be.
When I heard the news of his death early this morning of an apparent drug overdose… well, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Frustration, perhaps, at the pointless waste of a life. I certainly wasn’t surprised. It seems an inevitable and perhaps even an appropriate outcome for this particular life. Corey Haim, like so many others who are given everything at an early age by an exploitative industry that has no conscience and then have it all cruelly snatched away again, seemed to be happy only when he had the public’s attention. And nothing grabs attention like the final flicker of a burnt-out star.
Haim was 38, two years younger than me. For anyone else, I’d say he had a lot of years ahead of him; in this case, though, I think it was the years behind him that mattered most. At least to him. I may be guilty of frequent and maybe even excessive bouts of nostalgia, but — in spite of how it sometimes appears on this blog — I’m not spellbound by my past the way this poor slob was.
I’m sad for him and his inability to find some way to move on, but in a weird way, I think I feel even sadder for Corey Feldman, who has always been so closely equated to his costar, so interchangeable, that he reportedly felt the need to tweet that he wasn’t the one who had died. (His Twitter feed appears to have evaporated; at least, I can’t find it to confirm this.) I can’t imagine the sorrow he must be feeling tonight. And I can’t help but wonder what effect this might have on him. I hope I won’t be writing another of these entries for the other Corey anytime soon…