Rushfield Babylon (Gary As I Knew Him)

Rushfield Babylon (Gary As I Knew Him): "Gary As I Knew Him

In 1984 Gary Coleman came to Crossroads School, where he enrolled in my class.


Of all the schools in the world, Crossroads was probably the one were Gary probably had the greatest chance of living anything resembling a normal life, given the liberalisness of the school meant that people generally didnt get beaten up for being short, etc and the school’s showbiz connections where every third parent was Barbara Streisand meant that he was not the spectacle he might have been elsewhere.

But that was not much of a chance. Even given all that, he was still Gary Coleman, at that time - with Strokes nearing the end of it’s run, the highest paid TV star on Earth, and not in any way shape or form anything resembling a normal kid. So despite it being Crossroads, the gawking and spectacle of his presence was not minimal.

And it soon became clear that while he wanted very much, fairly desperately in fact, to enjoy some of the trappings due to a “normal kid” he was completely without any experience in how to behave with people his age.

Of all the bad hands people have been dealt in life, of the people who I have known up close, compared to the starving in Mongolia, Gary had as about a rotten combination as anything I’d seen. I won’t give the details, but there was very much a horrifying tragedy about his life, a desperation that I think at age 16, was too big for us his classmates to comprehend or take in.

This was a kid who had been shoved on stage before he knew what the stage was; who had been farmed out by his parents to a network that used this child and his instant catch phrase as their trained seal while entirely depriving him of the life of a normal child. At this phase, Strokes had moved from NBC to squeeze once last season’s worth of blood out of it on ABC. We didn’t know then how the parents were systematically pillaging the fortunes their son was bringing in, but I do recall a sorta uncomfortable feeling about his father coming to pick him up in a massive, I believe Rolls Royce every day. And then there were his health problems which kept him in more pain than any of us knew and ultimately forced him to drop out before graduation.

But despite all this, there was this sense of some incredibly energetic mind trying to do things, striving, searching for his way, as all teenagers are, but with far fewer guideposts. On one end of the spectrum was the day he came to school dressed in an elaborate and impressive astronaut’s uniform. On the other end, he was writing screenplays - something back then that teenagers didn’t really do - which he carried around in his briefcase, spinning plans for a writing/directing career.

Given all that he had to deal with, its not surprising that he was never able to find the way through all the clutter of his life, the baggage of being Gary Coleman, to live out his dreams. How many of us after all do, with far less clinging onto us.

The last time I saw him was a few years after high school in a video store in Westwood. Strokes was long over by then, and he was buying up a huge selection of movies to watch, and clearly didn’t have anyone to watch them with him. I wish I could say I reached out a hand to an old classmate, but again, we were young and selfish, and too new at life to understand how his hyperactive clinginess was born from a real tragedy not just like a nerd being annoying.

As I grew older and watched now from afar, the reports his life get stranger and stranger, it became more clear how much what had happened in those days had cost him; to have your childhood stolen by our nation’s major industry when you are very young, small, ill and fragile, how does one recover from that and ever just “be normal”, particularly when you remain, long after the show has ended and the money is gone, such a recognizable figure, someone who, where ever you go will live with being a character that you never were given the chance to pick. Sadder still to think, from the very little glimpse I got, that there were real dreams in there that would never find their way to the light.

Even in death, as we can see on twitter today, the joke of being Gary Coleman is what the world sees first.

Rest in Peace, Gary. And hope that you’re now in a place where the road is for you and you alone to choose.

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