Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (14 page)

It never goes away for good.

I had quickly booked another movie,
Almost Heroes,
a comedy starring Chris Farley and directed by Christopher Guest. They paid me $2 million for that. We shot it in the shitty part of Northern California, up near Eureka. Farley was just as funny as you'd imagine, though his addictions, plus mine, meant that we barely were able to even finish the fucking thing. I was shooting
Friends
and
Almost Heroes
at the same time, and I was tired. The pills were not doing what they used to do. I had to take a certain number just to not feel sick all the time.

Eating got in the way of the high, too, so I never ate. Plus, I was always so sick I didn't want to eat. I was constantly vomiting. This was fine in private, but not great when you are in the middle of the woods talking to Christopher Guest.
You are going to throw up in thirty seconds. Better figure out a way to excuse yourself and fast.
I vomited behind trees, behind rocks, in ladies' rooms. I had heard tell of people looking through their own vomit for chunks of pills that they could take again, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. I already had so many doctors on the
payroll I was rarely in that kind of need anyway. 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.

Then, Chris Farley died. His disease had progressed faster than mine had. (Plus, I had a healthy fear of the word “heroin,” a fear we did not share.) I punched a hole through Jennifer Aniston's dressing room wall when I found out.
Keanu Reeves walks among us.
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.

No one knew—not my family, my friends, no one. I was impossibly sick all the time. I would try to quit every now and then—three days here, four days there—but it just made me so sad and sick that it was impossible to sustain.

I was home one night, trying to make sense of all of it, when a call came in from an ex-girlfriend.

“I know there is something wrong with you,” she said. “And I am taking you to a doctor.”

I crumbled. I told her everything. I had never cried that much in my life. The secret was out. Someone else knew.

I saw a doctor the next day. He told me to go to Hazelden.

“They have a big lake, there,” the doctor said, and I figured,
It's Minnesota—close enough to Canada. At least I'll feel at home in the shitty weather.

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.

I went to Hazelden to kick pills and managed to learn precisely nothing.

The plan was that before I trekked up to Minnesota I'd go through a rapid detox. In a rapid detox they put you out for two or three days
and fill you with antagonists for opiates. By the end of it, you're supposed to be sober. (By the way, I know now that it doesn't work, even though it's still used as a treatment.)

So, I did the rapid detox and
then
went up to Hazelden, but once I arrived, I felt like death. What they say about opioid detoxes is they can't kill you, but they can make you wish that you were dead. (The detoxes that
can
kill you are alcohol and benzos.) I was in my room at Hazelden and I was incredibly sick—I kicked like a fucking dog. Legs, arms, jerking and herking in sheer terror. I was continually begging for some relief, only to be told “you're detoxed, just relax.”

But I was not detoxed—I'd merely gone from fifty-five Vicodin a day to zero Vicodin a day, basically cold turkey. I became what was called a “wall hugger”—to even move a few steps I had to grab onto the nearest wall.

I know now that if I hadn't done the rapid detox, I would have been given something to ease the agony, but they thought I'd detoxed, so they let me be. Going from fifty-five to nothing shows I was at least a fucking strong person I suppose, but it was the purest form of hell.

About ten days into my stay, I was in a group session when everything got a little fuzzy. I'm told I kept saying “I'm fine, totally fine,” but I was not fine. 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.

When I woke up from the seizure, I was back in my room, and all the staff had gathered, terrified. Not knowing what had happened, and clearly still deeply confused, I said, “Oh my God, I can't believe you guys came to California to see me. That's so nice!”

“You're not in California,” someone said, “you're in Minnesota. You had a grand mal seizure.”

I stayed for another two weeks, and by the end of it, I felt like I ran
the place, I was the king of the place. And the way I managed that was simply to imitate Michael Keaton in
Clean and Sober.

I was young enough that I put some weight on, played a bunch of tennis, and stopped taking pills. But inside I knew I was going to drink again. Once I felt better, I headed back to California—I wasn't back to normal, but I felt fine. But as I said, I had learned precisely nothing about what was wrong with me. I hadn't learned about AA, or how to live a sober life; I'd just gotten off the Vicodin. 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.

Back in Cali, 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.

The run-up to Hazelden had been probably the best year of my life, the best year anyone could ever wish for. The joys of fame had not quite worn off, though if I'd died then, my headstone would have read either:
HERE LIES MATTHEW PERRY—HE BROKE UP WITH JULIA ROBERTS
or,
COULD I
BE
MORE STUPID AND DEAD?

In 1999, I fell hard for a woman I was working with on a movie. (I was starting to have a track record of falling for women who were famous, just as my mother had been in Canada.) All the walls dropped, and I was just myself … and then she picked somebody else to be in love with.

I've been able to get most people I've wanted, but this one still hurts. Which just shows that the exception proves the rule: 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. Heads they win, tails I lose. Either way, to this day if someone mentions her name, my stomach clenches. The fear that drives my every waking minute had come true. She had even mentioned that my drinking was a problem—just another thing that addiction has cost me. You would think that might knock somebody sober, but it actually made it worse. I lit candles all over my house, drank, watched the movie we were in together, torturing myself, alone, heartsick, trying to get over it. Failing.

I was bloated and looked awful, and it was dangerous.

I remember realizing when I was in ninth grade in Ottawa that Michael J. Fox had both the number one movie and the number one TV show at the same time, and even then, at the age of fourteen, steam came out of my ears with envy. Later, I told
The New York Times,
“You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant.” 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.

In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it's better. This is what my costars on
Friends
did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney, being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage. In between rehearsals and takes, I'd head back there and ride that thing like the fires of hell were chasing me—anything to get my brain power back to normal. I was
the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down.

But still, the addiction ravaged me—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.

It was during hiatus. I was alone, again, there was nothing going on—no movie to shoot, nothing, just slow, tar-like time, slipping down the LA canyons toward the endless sea. I was just sitting at home for months drinking—alone so I could drink; drinking, therefore alone. (As I said, alcoholism is desperate to get you on your own.) I was watching the movie
Meet Joe Black
on repeat, even though it's about the character Death (me), trying to figure out what love is. Perfect. But it was as if I were Joe Black myself, repeatedly being asked, “What do we do now?” I was like death—I'd drink, watch the movie, pass out, wake up, drink, watch that movie, pass out.

Then, out of nowhere, I felt a knife slide into my stomach, just like that. It pierced the membrane, twisted a little, its serrated edge catching on the veins, heating my blood to boiling and beyond. As that knife got deeper and deeper, I heard myself screaming in pain, an animal being ripped to shreds up in the canyons.

I called my sort-of girlfriend at the time, the wonderful Jamie Tarses, and managed to say, “There's something
wrong.
”

Jamie was an angel from God—she drove straight over to my house, poured me into a car, and drove me to the nearest hospital.

In the ER I was screaming, “You gotta pump my stomach! You gotta pump my stomach!”

The doctor just stared at me.

“I don't need to pump your stomach. It's not food poisoning.”

“Then what the fuck is it?” I wailed.

“You have pancreatitis,” he said. “Which is something you can only get from drinking too much.”

There are a few causes of pancreatitis, actually—you can have an autoimmune disease, or an infection, or gallstones, but mostly you get it from drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol. Pancreatitis at the age of thirty was unheard of. Yay for me! Another record.

“Fuck that,” I said, “no. I don't drink too much.…” It could have been shame; it could have been denial. I think they're hard to tell apart. Whatever it was, I made Jamie drive me home.

After about an hour at my house, I knew something was still seriously wrong, so this time we went to a different hospital, but got the same answer.

For thirty days and nights I was in the hospital, fed fluids through an IV (the only way to treat pancreatitis was to leave the pancreas completely alone, which meant I could not eat or drink anything for about thirty days); and for every one of those nights, I'd fall asleep with Jamie Tarses by my side—she had a bed moved in, the whole bit—so I'd wake up to find her there, too. (I still believe Jamie was a messenger from a benevolent God, and that none of us were worthy of her—I know I wasn't.) We'd watch
The West Wing
over and over while I smoked—yes, I smoked in my hospital room. It was a different time, or I was so fucking famous at the time that it didn't matter. At one point they caught me and told me to stop. But I was desperate, so I checked myself out of the hospital, had a cigarette, and then checked myself back in.

It took seven hours to go through intake again. It was worth it.

To ease the pain they hooked me up to a machine that administered regular amounts of a drug called Dilaudid. It is an opioid that changes the brain's relationship to pain—if only it came in human form. But I loved Dilaudid—it was my new favorite drug, and I would have stayed in that hospital for a hundred days if they kept administrating it. For
those thirty days I had Jamie at my side, and I was high and happy. Especially happy when I signed the deal for seasons six and seven, the deal that, owing to David Schwimmer's selfless and brilliant idea, brought us $50 million. I signed that contract with a feeding tube in my arm and Dilaudid flowing through my brain.

But they were onto me—clearly, I was asking for too much of the wonder drug.

“You're fine,” one doctor said. “Your pancreatitis is over. You have to go home. Tomorrow.”

“You mean you're not going to give me Dilaudid
tonight
?”

“No,” he said, “we are
not.
”

Somehow, I got through the night, but nobody knew what to do with me.

Enter, stage left, my father. Bless him, he offered to have me live with him and his family in Ojai, a town northwest of LA.

“Come live with us,” he said, “go to some AA meetings. Get yourself straight.”

It was an OK option, and with nothing else to do, I headed back to my home on Chelan Way in the Hollywood Hills to pick up some things. I was sober, but I had just been on Dilaudid for thirty days, so I was still a little out of it. Jamie waited while I packed a bag, then I followed her in my green Porsche out along the winding roads in the Hills. As I made my first left onto Chelan Drive there was a courier van right in the middle of the road coming toward me, so I swerved and pumped the brakes, but the car hit some grass and just kept going and I drove into the stairs leading up to a house, demolishing them, and then on into the living room. Fortunately, no one was home, but the car was a wreck, and so were the stairs.