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I went to sleep, and when I woke up, forty more of those pills had been delivered to my house. Eureka! Be careful, Matty, something that feels that good must come with consequences.
Hate to burst the celebrity-industrial complex bubble, but there are real lives going on, too, behind the glamour and the martini shots and the A-cameras.
A year and a half later, I was taking fifty-five of those pills a day. I weighed 128 pounds when I checked into Hazelden rehab in Minnesota, my life in ruins.
Everybody had their particular years on Friends when the whole world was talking about their character. David Schwimmer’s was the first season; season two, it was Lisa; seasons five and six were Courteney and me; Jen was seasons seven and eight, and Matt (Most Improved Friend) was nine and ten.
Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me—why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.
I’ve detoxed over sixty-five times in my life—but the first was when I was twenty-six.
If you watch season three of Friends, I hope you’ll be horrified at how thin I am by the end of the season
(Compare this to the difference in how I look between the final episode of season six and the first of season seven—the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends.)
when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.
I’ll finish the season of Friends and then I’ll get treatment for this. I almost killed myself by that decision. Had the season lasted another month, I would no longer be here. I was never high while I was working.
As soon as you raise your hand and say, “I’m having a problem,” alcohol sneers, You’re gonna say something about it? Fine, I’ll go away for a while. But I’ll be back. It never goes away for good.
But I did have two towels next to my toilet—one to wipe away the vomit and one to wipe away the tears. I was dying, but I couldn’t tell anyone about it.
I had to promote Almost Heroes two weeks after he died; I found myself publicly discussing his death from drugs and alcohol. I was high the entire time.
But I was scared out of my mind. This was real, now. I was on my way to rehab. I was twenty-six years old.
My childhood training—that I could never be a bad boy—was so strong I guess that even while having a grand mal seizure I had to make sure I didn’t rock the boat.
For those of you watching, this was the beginning of season four—the best I ever looked on the show. Still not good enough for Jennifer Aniston, but pretty fucking good.
I lasted sixty-eight days and then I had my first drink, my theory being that drinking wasn’t the thing that had almost killed me. It was opiates that almost killed me; vodka had only ever filled the holes, and as the holes were still there, something had to fill them. I drank every night until 2001.
when I can get someone, I have to leave them before they leave me, because I’m not enough and I’m about to be found out, but when someone I want doesn’t choose me, that just proves I’m not enough and I’ve been found out.
Fast-forward to the hiatus between seasons five and six of Friends and I found myself filming The Whole Nine Yards, and sure enough, when it came out in early 2000, I had the number one TV show and the number one movie. Me? I was taking so many pills that I couldn’t leave my bedroom. So, in a moment when you’d think Matthew Perry would be celebrating and being the toast of the town, I was just handling drug dealers and living in dark rooms and misery.
one time, in a scene in the coffeehouse when I’m dressed in a suit, I fell asleep right there on the couch, and disaster was averted only when Matt LeBlanc nudged me awake right before my line; no one noticed, but I knew how close I’d come. But I always showed up, and always had the lines. And then I got pancreatitis. I was thirty years old.
alcoholism is desperate to get you on your own.)
“Reality is an acquired taste,” and I had failed to acquire it.
I had long since gotten over her—ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine—and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused. “How can you tell?” I said. I never worked drunk. “I’ve been trying to hide it.…” “We can smell it,” she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural “we” hit me like a sledgehammer.
On the plane I’d have a water bottle filled with vodka that I’d sip from continually as I read over my lines. (In fact, if you’re keeping score at home, I was actually on methadone, Xanax, cocaine, and a full quart of vodka a day.)
“It looks like you’re disappearing.” A window opened—the slightest crack, but open. “I don’t want to disappear,” I whispered. “Stop everything.” I called my manager, I called my father, I called everybody. “I’m completely fucked-up,” I said. “I need help. I need to go to rehab.”
“Go to your room; you’re not taking any more drugs,” but they may have well said: “Go to your room and just don’t breathe anymore.”
“These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.”
I was not alone. There was an entire group of people who thought the way I did.
I was living in rehab when Monica and Chandler got married. It was May 17, 2001.
I was just grateful to have made it one more day. When you are at the bottom, the days are long. I didn’t need an Oscar, I just needed one more day.
Addiction is like the Joker. It just wants to see the whole world burn.
Sex is great and everything, but I think I would be a much more fulfilled person now if I had spent those years looking for something more.
During that time, I met at least five women that I could have married, had children with. Had I done so just once, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with,
I’d been looking for an hour or two of pleasure with every woman ever invented when there was so much life I was missing. Is this why I got sober? To sleep with women?
When I try to work out how sobriety and addiction work for me, I keep coming back to this line: I’m capable of staying sober unless anything happens.
(Nine was the only year I was completely sober for a Friends season.
This was the anything that was happening. So, I took three of the pills, and somehow made it through the night, but I had thereby ended two years of sobriety. I was in deep, deep shit again. Because once you puncture the membrane of sobriety, the phenomenon of craving kicks in, and you’re off to the races one more time.
Looking back, all I would have had to do was to tell someone about it, but that would mean I would have to stop. But stopping was not an option.
I’m gonna be the lead in a Bruce Willis movie,
The stars were lining up again; had the rise and rise of Matthew Perry just taken yet another giant leap forward? This is what I thought as the actual stars rose in a clear, dark sky. I started to count them, even though I knew the superstition that once you reach a hundred, you die. I stopped at ninety-nine, just in case.
“If you drink tonight, you’re going to jail tomorrow,” I would start packing for jail, because once I start, I cannot stop. All I had control over was the first drink. After that, all bets were off.
I had a monster in my brain, a monster who wanted to get me alone, and convince me to have that first drink or pill, and then that monster would engulf me.
Bruce hadn’t been sure the film would work at all, and I’d bet him it would—if he lost, he had to do a guest spot on Friends (he’s in three episodes of season six).
You can seldom re-create a good thing,
As I’ve said, to relapse that’s all it takes: something—anything at all—happening. Good or bad.
I was completely out of my mind. It was then that I decided to share with my father a fear I was having. “Dad,” I said, deadly serious, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but at any moment, a giant snake is going to come and take me away.” My father’s reaction? “Matty, if a giant snake comes and takes you away, I will shit my pants.” To this day I am impressed by how my father rolled with my utter insanity.
You can’t give away what you don’t have. And I had nothing. I hated myself.
And I feel it when I help someone get sober, the way it hits my heart when they say thank you. Because they don’t know yet that I should really be thanking them.
Before that final episode, I’d taken Marta Kauffman to one side. “Nobody else will care about this except me,” I said. “So, may I please have the last line?” That’s why as we all troop out of the apartment, and Rachel has suggested one last coffee, I got to bring the curtain down on Friends. “Sure,” Chandler said, and then, with perfect timing, for the very last time, “Where?”
The truth was, we were all ready for Friends to be done. For a start, Jennifer Aniston had decided that she didn’t want to do the show anymore, and as we all made decisions as a group, that meant we all had to stop. Jennifer wanted to do movies;
