Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

by Matthew Perry

He was there, Matthew Perry, who is whip smart … charming, sweet, sensitive, very reasonable and rational. That guy, with everything he was battling, was still there. The same Matthew who, from the beginning, could lift us all up during a grueling night shoot for the opening titles inside that fountain.

(Matthew is the reason we are all laughing in that fountain in the opening titles.)

Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.

I capitalize Pain because this was the worst Pain I’ve ever experienced—it was the Platonic Ideal of Pain, the exemplar. I’ve heard people claim that the worst pain is childbirth: well, this was the worst pain imaginable, but without the joy of a newborn in my arms at the end of it.

And yes, there is a hell. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.

I have no fear of talking in front of twenty thousand people, but put me alone on my couch in front of a TV for the night and I get scared.

My mind is out to kill me, and I know it.

There was nothing delusional about the Pain, though; in fact, it hurt so much I’d stopped smoking, which if you knew how much I smoked, you’d think was a pretty sure sign that something very serious was wrong.

Cars are stupid, ordinary things until you’re not allowed to drive them, at which point they become magical boxes of freedom and signs of a successful previous life.

The first thing that happened when I lapsed into a coma was that I aspirated into my breathing tube, vomiting ten days’ worth of toxic shit directly into my lungs. My lungs didn’t like that very much—enter instant pneumonia—and that is when my colon exploded. Let me repeat for those in the back: my colon exploded! I’ve been accused of being full of shit before, but this time I really was. I’m glad I wasn’t there for that.

“Your colon exploded,” Mom said. With that information, I did what any comic actor might do: I rolled my eyes and went back to sleep.

Trust me to take trying to feel better to death’s door. And yet here I was, still alive. Why? Why had I been spared? Things got worse before they got better, though.

So, there is light in the darkness. It’s there—you just have to look hard enough for it.

Also, I’m Batman.

Nobody ever thinks that something really bad is going to happen to them. Until it does.

It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.

When you’ve been as close to the celestial as I have, you don’t really have a choice about gratitude: it sits on your living room table like a coffee-table book—you barely notice it, but it’s there.

I need love, but I don’t trust it. If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me. And I can’t have that. I won’t survive that. Not anymore. It will turn me into a speck of dust and annihilate me. So, I will leave you first. I will fabricate in my mind that something went wrong with you, and I’ll believe it. And I’ll leave.

I couldn’t imagine why any adult would want to drink the same drink over and over again … Ah, innocence.

So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is.

I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.

I was noisy and needy, and it was answered with a pill. (Hmm, that sounds like my fucking twenties.)

With Dad gone, I quickly understood that I had a role to play at home. My job was to entertain, to cajole, to delight, to make others laugh, to soothe, to please, to be the Fool to the entire court.

Even at three years old I’d learned I’d have to be the man of the house. I had to take care of my mother, even though my finger had just been sliced off.

If you give me all the OxyContin I can stand, I feel taken care of, and when I’m taken care of, I can take care of everybody else and look outward and be in service to someone. But without medication, I feel that I would just sputter away into a sea of nothingness.

Accordingly, I learned to be funny (pratfalls, quick one-liners, you know the drill) because I had to be—my mother was stressed by her stressful job, and already highly emotional (and abandoned), and me being funny tended to calm her down enough that she would cook some food, sit down at the dinner table with me, and hear me out, after I heard her out, of course.

I’ve always been abandoned. So much so that I used to ask my grandmother, when a plane went over our house in Ottawa, “Is my mother on that plane?” because I was always worried that she would disappear, just as my father had (she never did).

(A smart psychologist might say we played roles instead of Dad and Matthew, because our actual roles were too confusing to me. But I couldn’t possibly comment on that.)

every year I’d wish for one thing: in my head I’d whisper, I want my parents to get back together.

Without the proper medicine, for my entire life I was uncomfortable all the time and w-a-a-a-ay screwed up about love. To quote the great Randy Newman, “It takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m somebody else.” I guess I wasn’t the only one.

I tucked myself in, and without the need of barbiturates—yet—I uneasily slept till early light illuminated my Ottawa bedroom window.

I certainly hadn’t had a drink by eight (I’d wait another six years!), but somehow the culture all around me had taught me that drinking equaled laughing and having fun, and a much-needed escape from pain. Mom was crying, so why didn’t she just drink? Then she’d be drunk and not feel as much, right?

But there was now a family growing up around me, a family I didn’t really feel a part of. It was around this time that I made the conscious choice to say, Fuck it—it’s every man for himself. That’s when the bad behavior started—

It was safer in my head—you couldn’t be broken there, not yet anyway. I changed. The fast mouth appeared, and no one would ever get near my heart. No one. I was ten years old.

I deeply cared what strangers thought of me—still do—in fact, it’s one of the key threads in my life.

I had my first drink when I was fourteen. I held off as long as I could.

No one was home; up above, the moon shone through the clouds, none of us knowing that something extremely significant was about to transpire.

Within fifteen minutes, all the alcohol was gone. The Murrays were puking around me, and I just lay in the grass, and something happened to me. That thing that makes me bodily and mentally different from my fellows occurred. I was lying back in the grass and the mud, looking at the moon, surrounded by fresh Murray puke, and I realized that for the first time in my life, nothing bothered me. The world made sense; it wasn’t bent and crazy. I was complete, at peace. I had never been happier than in that moment. This is the answer, I thought; this is what I’ve been missing. This must be how normal people feel all the time. I don’t have any problems. It is all gone. I don’t need attention. I am taken care of, I am fine. I was in bliss. I had no problems for those three hours. I wasn’t abandoned; I wasn’t fighting with my mom; I wasn’t doing lousy in school; I wasn’t wondering what life was about, and my place in it. It took away everything.

But I had no choice; things had gotten so bad. I was a broken human being. Broken? Bent.

So, I stopped, in that stairwell, and thought about all the years of agony, and the fact that the yard never got painted blue, and Pierre fucking Trudeau, and the fact that I was then, and still am, an unaccompanied minor. It was like the bad parts of my life were appearing to me all at once. I’ll never be able to fully explain what happened next, but all of a sudden, I started slamming my head against the wall, as hard as humanly possible.

Acting was another one of my drugs. And it didn’t do the damage that alcohol was already starting to do. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to wake up after a night of drinking. Not on school days—it hadn’t escalated that far yet. But certainly, every weekend.

“This is the best thing that’s happened to me all day.” He said this about a drink. Sitting next to his son on a couch in Los Angeles. Then he’d have four more and take the fifth to bed.

I watched my father drink six vodka tonics and live a perfectly functional life, so, I figured it was possible. I figured I’d be able to do the same thing. But there was something lurking in my shadows and my genes, like a creepy beast in a dark place, something I had that my father did not, and it would be a decade before we knew what it was. Alcoholism, addiction—you call it what you want, I’ve chosen to call it a Big Terrible Thing.

Here I was, too, slipping through that soft, vodka-softened membrane, into a place where there was no pain, where the world was both real, and not … and yet, as I turned a corner, something else hit me that had never occurred to me before—death, fear of death, questions like “Why are we all here?” “What’s the meaning of all this?” “What’s the point?” “How do we all arrive at this?” “What are human beings?” “What is air?”

The drink, and that walk, had created a thinker, a seeker, but not some soft-focus, Buddhist crap—one who was on the edge of a deep crater of flames, haunted by the lack of answers, by being unaccompanied, by wanting love but being terrified of abandonment, by wanting excitement, but being unable to appreciate it, by a dick that didn’t work. I was face-to-face with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell, a fifteen-year-old boy brought up close to the face of eschatology, so close he could smell the vodka on its breath.

Excuse me? You went for a walk and quit drinking? I have spent upward of $7 million trying to get sober. I have been to six thousand AA meetings.

It was in Chicago, and on this movie, and with River Phoenix, that I fell deeply in love with acting—

It would be decades before they were in the same room together again. And then, for a very different reason.

That night, by the dint of a miraculous universe and the ministrations of a beautiful young woman who deserved better, I finally first misplaced my virginity then lost it altogether, and impotence has not been part of my vocabulary since, just as she promised it wouldn’t be. Everything about me—at least physically—works just fine. And how, pray tell, did you manage to pay such a debt, Mr. Perry, such an onerous debt to the woman who saved your life in one of the most meaningful ways imaginable? Why, good reader, I paid that debt to Tricia by sleeping with almost every woman in Southern California.

But to Tricia, and those after her, I thank you. And to all the women that I left, simply because I was afraid that they were going to leave me, I deeply apologize from the bottom of my heart. If I only knew then, what I know now.…