Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing - by Matthew Perry
Published:
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing - by Matthew Perry
Read: 2024-11-20
Recommend: 8/10
I admire his bravery in publicly discussing his addiction problem. His description of craving resonates with me.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
The best way out is always through. —Robert Frost
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.
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, I’m 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!
And like a baby, I didn’t want to do the inner work for so long, because if a pill fixes it, well, that’s easier, and that’s what I was taught.
I may not have had a father, or all ten fingers, but what I did have was a fast mind and a fast mouth, even then. Combine that with a mother who was very busy, and important, and who also had a fast mind and mouth … well, there were times I was happy to lecture my mother about her lack of attention, and let’s just say it didn’t go that well. It’s important to note here that I could never get enough attention—no matter what she did, it was never enough. And let’s not forget that she was doing the work of two people, while dear old dad was busy wrestling with his own demons and desires in LA.
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.
The key to the problem, I would come to understand, was this: I lacked both spiritual guidelines, and an ability to enjoy anything. But at the same time, I was also an excitement addict. This is such a toxic combination I can’t even. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is “anhedonia,” a word and feeling I would spend millions in therapy and treatment centers to discover and understand. Maybe that’s why I won tennis matches only when I was a set down and within points of losing. Maybe that’s why I did everything I did.
“Drinkers think they are trying to escape, but really they are trying to overcome a mental disorder they didn’t know they had.”
I have spent my life being attracted to unavailable women. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that this had something to do with my relationship with my mother. My mother captivated every room she entered. I vividly remember being at some fancy ballroom when I was about six years old, and when my mom came in, every head in the room turned. I wanted her to turn and look at me in these moments, but she was working and could not—it took me only thirty-seven years to work that out. Ever since then I have been addicted to “the turn.” Once the turn happened, I could start making a woman laugh and making her want me sexually. Once the sex was done, reality set in, and I realized I didn’t know these women at all. They were available, so I had no need for them. I had to get back out there and try to make them make the turn. That’s why I slept with so many women. I was trying to re-create my childhood and win.
Now, all these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.
In the operating room they gave me propofol, you know, the drug that killed Michael Jackson. I learned then and there that Michael Jackson didn’t want to be high, he wanted to be out. Zero consciousness. And yet another masterful talent taken from us by this terrible disease.
At the start, I was full-on the joke man, cracking gags like a comedy machine whenever I could (probably to the annoyance of everyone), trying to get everybody to like me because of how funny I was. Because, why else would anybody like me? It would take fifteen years for me to learn that I didn’t need to be a joke machine.
That night I went to bed thinking, I can’t wait to get back there tomorrow. Next morning, as I drove from Sunset and Doheny over the Cahuenga Pass to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, I realized that I was leaning toward the windshield as I drove. I wanted to be there. That would be true for the next decade.
I was going to be so famous that all the pain I carried with me would melt like frost in sunlight; and any new threats would bounce off me as though this show was a force field I could cloak myself in.
As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me. And it’s been that click I’ve been chasing the rest of my life.
I couldn’t believe how good I felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria. The pill had replaced the blood in my body with warm honey. I was on top of the world. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had. Nothing could ever go wrong. As I drove that red Mustang convertible to my rented house in Vegas, I remember thinking, If this doesn’t kill me, I’m doing this again.
Being on Friends was one of those unicorn situations where the news just kept getting better and better. But off-screen, things weren’t going so well. In late April 1996, I went on Jay Leno and admitted I was single. 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. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.
You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season—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 was never high while I was working. I loved those people—I wanted to always step up for them, and I was the second baseman for the New York Yankees. But addiction wakes up before you do, and it wants you alone. Alcoholism will win every time. 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.
Once again, my idea was to pull a geographic. I still thought if I removed myself from the situation I was in, I would be able to quit all the drugs and drinking and come out fighting. (All I was actually doing was tripling my workload while the drinking and drugs continued to escalate.) Because wherever you go, there you are.
Addiction is like the Joker. It just wants to see the whole world burn.
More warmth would here be shared; on a good day, she would tend to be nodding along, loving my transparency, my emotional pitch, my very air of suave involvement. Then, I’d bring the hammer down. “I’m not sure what you are looking for, but if it’s any kind of emotional attachment, I am not your man.” [Pause to let this sink in.] “I’m not going to call you every day,” I went on, “and I’m not going to be your boyfriend. But if it’s fun you’re looking for, I. Am. Your. Man.”
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.
Natasha had it all; she was perfect! But I wasn’t looking for perfect, I was looking for more. More, more, more. So, because I’d done the speech at her, and then not properly dated her, we parted ways, and I was left to find even more perfect women when in fact I’d already found them.
But I was still so often just a tourist in sobriety. It was so hard to put down roots in it. Why was it so hard for me, when I’d seen hundreds around me do it with impunity?
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.
There are plenty of examples of people in Hollywood who can party and still function—I was not one of them. When I was in my drinking and using days, if a police officer were to come to the door and say, “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. (See under: The man takes the drink, the drink takes all the rest.) Once I believe the lie that I can just have one drink, I am no longer responsible for my actions. I need people and treatment centers and hospitals and nurses to help me.
I can’t stop. And if I didn’t get ahold of this soon, it was going to kill me. 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.
It didn’t work. No escape came—those four Xanax proved no match for my racing thoughts. Sleep remained elusive. It was being held back by shame and fear and an intense self-loathing. So, what’s the logical next move? Well for this drug addict, it was to take four more. (This wasn’t just eight too many—this is a death-defying amount.) Somehow, these second four combined with the first four, and I finally managed to fall asleep. The sleep on Xanax isn’t profound—the drug is notoriously shit at providing deep sleep—but I didn’t care. I just wanted this brain of mine, this thing that stalked me, to quieten just for a few hours at least … and some relief from the incredibly painful detox I was going through.
So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend—also appropriately called Rachel—stage 24 at Warner Bros. in Burbank (a stage that after the show ended would be renamed “The Friends Stage”). We said our various goodbyes, agreeing to see each other soon in the way that people do when they know it’s not true, and then we headed out to my car.
I had made arrangements to attend a 12-step meeting the day after the final taping of Friends, with the express intent of starting my new life on the right path. But facing the blank canvas of an empty day was very hard on me. That next morning, I woke up and thought, What the fuck am I going to do now?
I was lost. There was nowhere to turn. Everywhere I tried to hide, there I was. Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change. I knew something had to change—I wasn’t suicidal, but I was dying—but I was too scared to do anything about it.
I had fun, but it was a marathon endeavor, and I’m a sprinter. And it quickly turned a sober, video game–playing rich man into an incredibly busy man, which was not a great idea. In fact, the show quickly became the priority over my sobriety, and as a result I relapsed, yet again.
Oh, there was something else the magazines said about being in love with two people at the same time. It always has the same ending. You lose them both.
Robert Downey Jr., talking about his own addiction, once said, “It’s like I have a gun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the metal.” I got it; I understand that. Even on good days, when I’m sober and I’m looking forward, it’s still with me all the time. There’s still a gun.
Alcoholics and addicts like myself want to drink for the sole purpose of feeling better. Well, that’s at least true for me: all I ever wanted was to feel better. I didn’t feel good—I had a couple of drinks and I felt better. But as the disease progresses it takes more and more and more and more and more and more and more to feel better. If you puncture the membrane of sobriety, alcoholism kicks in and goes, “Hey, remember me? Nice to see you again. Now, give me just as much as you did last time or I’ll kill you or make you crazy.” And then the obsession of my mind kicks in, and I can’t stop thinking about feeling better, matched with a phenomenon of craving, and what you’re left with is a bruise that starts off one way and it never gets better. Nobody has a drinking problem and then stops and then drinks socially and it’s fine. The disease just picks up.