Matthew Perry - Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

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For all of the sufferers out there.

You know who you are.

The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost

Youve just got to see me through another day.

James Taylor

by Lisa Kudrow

Hows Matthew Perry doing?

Over the many years since I was first asked, its been, at different times, the most asked question for me. I understand why so many people asked it: they love Matthew and they want him to be OK. Me too. But I always bristled at that question from the press, because I couldnt say what I wanted to say: Its his story to tell and Im not authorized to tell it really, am I! I would have wanted to go on to say, This is very intimate personal stuff and if you dont hear it from the actual person, it is, to my mind, gossip and Im not gossiping about Matthew with you. Knowing that no response at all could do more damage, sometimes I would just say, I think hes doing well. At least that doesnt amplify the spotlight and maybe he can have a fraction of privacy as he tries to deal with this disease. But truly, I wasnt exactly sure how Matthew was doing. As hell tell you in this book, he was keeping it a secret. And it took some time for him to feel comfortable enough to tell us some of what he was going through. Over those years I didnt really try to intervene or confront him, because the little I knew about addiction was that his sobriety was out of my hands. And yet, I would have periods of wondering if I was wrong for not doing more, doing something. But I did come to understand that this disease relentlessly fed itself and was determined to keep going.

So, I just focused on Matthew, who could make me laugh so hard every day, and once a week, laugh so hard I cried and couldnt breathe. 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. Cant remember a time I wasnt in a fountain! What are we, wet? Cant remember a time I wasnt wet I! (Matthew is the reason we are all laughing in that fountain in the opening titles.)

After Friends I didnt see Matthew every day, and I couldnt even hazard a guess with regard to his well-being.

This book is the first time Im hearing what living with and surviving his addiction really was. Matthew has told me some things, but not in this kind of detail. Hes now letting us into Matthews head and heart in honest and very exposed detail. And finally, no one needs to ask me or anyone else how Matthews doing. Hes letting you know himself.

He has survived impossible odds, but I had no idea how many times he almost didnt make it. Im glad youre here, Matty. Good for you. I love you.

Lisa

Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty.

And I should be dead.

If you like, you can consider what youre about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond.

Its Day Seven of the Pain. And by Pain, I dont mean a stubbed toe or The Whole Ten Yards. I capitalize Pain because this was the worst Pain Ive ever experiencedit was the Platonic Ideal of Pain, the exemplar. Ive 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 it may have been Day Seven of Pain, but it was also Day Ten of No Movement. If you catch my drift. I hadnt taken a shit in ten daysthere, theres the drift. Something was wrong, very wrong. This was not a dull, throbbing pain, like a headache; it wasnt even a piercing, stabbing pain, like the pancreatitis Id had when I was thirty. This was a different kind of Pain. Like my body was going to burst. Like my insides were trying to force their way out. This was the no-fucking-around kind of Pain.

And the sounds. My God, the sounds. Ordinarily, Im a pretty quiet, keep-to-myself kinda fella. But on this night, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Some nights, when the wind is right and the cars are all parked up for the night, you can hear the horrific sounds of coyotes ripping apart something that is howling in the Hollywood Hills. At first it sounds like children laughing way, way off in the distance, until you realize its not thatits the foothills of death. But the worst part, of course, is when the howling stops, because you know whatever has been attacked is now dead. This is hell.

And yes, there is a hell. Dont let anyone tell you different. Ive been there; it exists; end of discussion.

On this night the animal was me. I was still screaming, fighting tooth and nail for survival. Silence meant the end. Little did I know how close I was to the end.

At the time, I was living in a sober living house in Southern California. This was no surpriseI have lived half my life in one form or another of treatment center or sober living house. Which is fine when you are twenty-four years old, less fine when you are forty-two years old. Now I was forty-nine, still struggling to get this monkey off my back.

By this point, I knew more about drug addiction and alcoholism than any of the coaches and most of the doctors I encountered at these facilities. Unfortunately, such self-knowledge avails you nothing. If the golden ticket to sobriety involved hard work and learned information, this beast would be nothing but a faint unpleasant memory. To simply stay alive, I had turned myself into a professional patient. Lets not sugarcoat it. At forty-nine, I was still afraid to be alone. Left alone, my crazy brain (crazy only in this area by the way) would find some excuse to do the unthinkable: drink and drugs. In the face of decades of my life having been ruined by doing this, Im terrified of doing it again. 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. And that fear is of my own mind; fear of my own thoughts; fear that my mind will urge me to turn to drugs, as it has so many times before. My mind is out to kill me, and I know it. I am constantly filled with a lurking loneliness, a yearning, clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me. But I had had all that the outside had to offer!

Julia Roberts is my girlfriend. It doesnt matter, you have to drink.

I just bought my dream houseit looks out across the whole city! Cant enjoy that without a drug dealer.

Im making a million dollars a weekI win right? Would you like to drink? Why yes, I would. Thank you very much.

Id had it all. But it was all a trick. Nothing was going to fix this. It would be years before I even grasped the notion of a solution. Please dont misunderstand me. All of those thingsJulia and the dream house and $1 million a weekwere wonderful, and I will be eternally grateful for all of them. I am one of the luckiest men on the planet. And boy did I have fun.

They just werent the answer. If I had to do it all over again, would I still audition for Friends? You bet your ass I would. Would I drink again? You bet your ass I would. If I didnt have alcohol to soothe my nerves and help me have fun, I would have leaped off a tall building sometime in my twenties. My grandfather, the wonderful Alton L. Perry, grew up around an alcoholic father, and as a result, he never touched a drink in his life, all ninety-six long, wonderful years of it.