Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman

The scary part is that they were usually right.
    Boobie, however, was especially obsessed with the appendix. For some reason, when she was a younger woman, everyone around her started dropping like flies, all victims of a sudden, unexplained rupture. So whenever I had a stomachache she feared it was my appendix. If I fell and bumped by head, she still had to check my appendix. So there I was, lying on the floor of her bathroom, probably dying, while she frantically jabbed her fingers in my abdomen. “Does this hurt?” she yelled, as if my hearing had been afflicted. “How about this? What about now?”
    I didn’t want to tell her that I had swallowed a bottle of pills. But, by then, I had also decided that I definitely did not want to die. The thing about killing yourself is, in that moment of incomprehensible, utter despair, it seems like a good idea. Once you’ve done it, though, once you’ve actually made the decision to go through with it, you immediately start to wish that you hadn’t. It is a natural instinct to save your own life. Lying on the floor of that bathroom, I started to panic. I didn’t want to die. So, when she pushed on my stomach again and asked me if it hurt, this time I said yes.
    “It does?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, if it’s right here, then it’s your appendix. Is this worse?” She pushed into my stomach again.
    “Yes, Boobie. It’s worse,” I groaned. “It’s definitely my appendix.” I would gladly have told her that I was suffering from an acute case of smallpox if that’s what she needed to hear. I just wanted to get to a damn emergency room.
    But I didn’t tell anyone at the hospital what I had done, either. I was too ashamed. I figured all the doctors and nurses fluttering around me were brilliant, surely they would be able to figure out what was wrong. I remember a doctor coming in and asking where it hurt. I just repeated everything I had already told my grandmother.
    “Do you feel like it’s your appendix?” he asked.
    “Oh, yeah, it’s my appendix all right.”
    “Well then,” he said, “I guess we better get that taken out.”
    So, that’s exactly what they did. I had my appendix removed, unnecessarily, by the good doctors at Tarzana Medical Center. But my five-day stay in the hospital proved to be a relaxing kind of vacation—three meals a day, unlimited ice cream, and all the movies I could watch on my very own television.
    *   *   *
    I knew that The Goonies would change my life. I had envisioned it. I believe, very heartily, in the power of positive thinking. Call it The Secret if you want, or the law of attraction, but I believed in putting good things out into the universe and getting good things back, despite what the bulk of my life had looked like up until that point. Maybe that’s how I survived it all.
    Plus, I had read the script. Whenever you read something—a novel, a play—you naturally start to envision the characters in your head, you see them in your minds’ eye. When I read movie scripts, I do that, too, except I don’t just envision the characters, I mentally cast all the roles. (I’ve actually been right on quite a few occasions—the very actors I had envisioned wound up playing those same parts.) But when I read The Goonies script, the entire world opened up to me. I could picture us riding our bikes along the foggy coastline of Oregon. I imagined us traversing the dank and crumbling caves underneath the abandoned restaurant where the Fratellis were hiding out. I could see One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship. I knew, even before that first day of filming, that this would be something special. And The Goonies couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time; in real life I felt like a reject; now I was making a movie about a group of awkward kids who didn’t fit in.
    I immediately fell in love with the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon, an antithesis of sorts to the hustle and bustle of L.A. Astoria is perennially muggy and rainy and