I found out that Corey Haim had died on Wednesday afternoon, when the all-day meeting in which I was confined took a break and I hastily went through my battery of internet pitstops: email account #1, email account #2, stock portfolio, LOL Cats, and Google News, where I saw that “Corey Haim” was a trending search term. I intuitively knew without seeing any headlines that Corey Haim had died. He had either solved Greece’s debt crisis, or died.
Whenever a celebrity dies, I feel no sadness, but just a morbid curiosity about the circumstances. I toyed with possible scenarios of Corey Haim’s demise as my meeting reconvened: Drugs, probably. Suicide, possible. Homicide, a slim chance. Natural causes, unlikely. I tried to picture a young Corey Haim in my mind, but I couldn’t. I knew Corey Haim was a pretty boy, and I’ve never liked pretty boys because I’ve never been an especially pretty girl. Honestly, I had preferred Corey Feldman, with his alert brown eyes, smirky mouth, and billowy cheeks. Corey Feldman looked smart. Smart enough to live past forty, at least.
Corey Haim is a minor enough celebrity that I forgot all about him until the next morning, when I was at the gym, flipping through the channels on the television attached to my treadmill. The Today Show featured an astounding 18 minutes of coverage about Corey Haim: his prominence as a teenage heart-throb, his inevitable decline, his slight re-insurgence on reality television, and of course his drug problems. To chime in with expert knowledge of being a child star-turned-drug addict, Today enlisted Danny Bonaduce from the Partridge Family (Let me just interject that this very bout of morning news inspired me to renew my home delivery subscription to the New York Times). Bonaduce speculated that Corey — who he had never met — was abusing prescription drugs, and then waxed lyrical about how it wasn’t drugs that killed Corey, it was the haunting specter of celebrity.
And here is where the finger of culpability points at us, the fickle public. Blame the legions of girls who elevated Corey Haim above what his paltry movie experience warranted and made him a heartthrob, and then blame them again for allowing the fascination to fade and fizzle. Perhaps that’s why, whenever a past-peak celebrity dies, the public emotes with disproportional grief. We demand to know all the details, the toxicology results, the coroner’s report, the wills. Because it’s our fault for loving, and it’s our fault for forgetting.
