Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (15 page)

Fucking stairwells once again.

I did the right thing and waited for the cops to arrive. I kept glancing up at the sky, wondering when the next cartoon anvil was going to
fall on my head. I was there long enough for someone to take a picture and sell it to
People
magazine—my car in a house, me on the way to staying with my father in Ojai.

It was like I was fifteen again, living with my dad in California. A car would come to pick me up every day to take me to film
Friends
. But it wasn't too long until I picked up Vicodin again, and then started fucking drinking again, and liking it again. To quote my therapist, “Reality is an acquired taste,” and I had failed to acquire it. I was sneaking both drugs and alcohol into my dad's house, and his wife was so angry that eventually my father very calmly approached me and told me that I had to leave.

Oh, I'll leave, but neither of you will ever see a dime of my money, ever,
I thought, but I did not say.

I returned for the next season of
Friends
high as a kite, and everyone knew that something had to be done.

I had already heard about methadone, a drug that promised to remove a fifty-five-a-day Vicodin habit in one day with one little sip. The only catch was, you had to drink that little sip every day, or you would go into serious withdrawal.
Sounds good to me,
my desperate mind thought. I got on the drug immediately and was able to return to
Friends
the next day, sharp as a tack.

I had been told that methadone had no side effects. This was not true. In fact, it was the beginning of the end.

Otherwise, everything else was going great.
Friends
was still as successful as ever. And then another cast member came to my trailer. It wasn't David this time, and it wasn't good news.

“I know you're drinking,” she said.

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.

“I know I'm drinking too much,” I said, “but I don't exactly know what to do about it.”

Sometimes I wasn't OK to drive to set (I never worked high, but I certainly worked hungover) and I'd take a limo—that will get you some dubious looks from people, let me tell you. Everyone would ask me if I was all right, but nobody wanted to stop the
Friends
train because it was such a moneymaker, and I just felt horrible about it. My greatest joy was also my biggest nightmare—I was this close to messing up this wonderful thing.

Eventually I got a sober companion at work with me, but it wasn't really helping. One day I had taken some kind of medication and had drunk the night before, and it all kicked in during a run-through in front of everyone. But there was a curious twist to this one: I was hammered but didn't know it, so I thought there was nothing to hide. I didn't know that I was wasted, but I was slurring. Folks couldn't understand a word that came out of my mouth. But I had no idea.

Once again, I went back to my dressing room and everybody from the show was there.

“What are you going to do, Matty?” they said.

“It's medication, I'll fix it. I'm sorry.”

I didn't drink that night and the next day I showed up to work, but I was on thin ice.

I called my manager.

“Yeah,” he said, “they're onto you.”

The writers, the cast—fuck,
everybody
—knew, so I said, “You gotta get me a movie. Right now. Get me out of here.”

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. This also reminded me of the time I'd begged for a pilot and had gotten
L.A.X. 2194.
Back then I'd had enough juice to get a pilot and thereby enough money to drink at the Formosa; now, as the new century dawned, I had enough juice to be able to score a movie if I wanted it.
Serving Sara
would be filmed in Dallas, and I have no idea why I thought that would be the perfect place to get sober.…

Serving Sara
was a bad movie, but it was made much worse by how bad I was in it.

I was in terrible shape, and I was overextended. I was working four days a week on the movie and then flying on a private jet back to Los Angeles to do
Friends.
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.) One day in Dallas I showed up to do a scene only to realize that we'd filmed it a few days earlier. Things were unraveling.

Jamie Tarses—beautiful, amazing, caring, genius Jamie Tarses—flew out to Texas and was basically my nurse, but I was still drinking and taking all the drugs and trying to hide it from her. One night we were watching TV and she turned to me, and she said, “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.”

Serving Sara
shut down, something that later cost me $650,000. Small price to save my life.
Friends
postponed my scenes. And off I went to a detox center in Marina del Rey this time, on the west side of LA. I was a car going two hundred miles an hour that just hit a brick wall; a green Porsche hitting a stairwell. (Fucking
fucking
stairwells.)

The first day they said, “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.”

“But I have to breathe to live.”

“No. People have done it before. People have gone in there and stopped breathing.”

That's exactly what it felt like.

I spent one month there. One night during my stay, I was smoking a cigarette and it was raining and there was a light bulb swinging in the smoking section. And I said out loud, “This is what hell is. I'm in hell.”

It was in del Rey when I finally picked up the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. About thirty pages in I read: “These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.”

I closed the book and began to weep. I'm weeping now just thinking about it. I was not alone. There was an entire group of people who thought the way I did. (And William Silkworth had written this line on July 27, 1938.) It was an amazing moment and a terrible moment all at the same time. What this line meant was that I was never going to be alone again. It also meant that I was an alcoholic and would have to stop drinking and drugging right now, and every day, one day at a time, for the rest of my life.

The folks at Marina del Rey said, “This guy is
hard-core.
Thirty days is not going to do it for him. He needs long-term treatment.” So, from there they sent me to a Malibu rehab, where I spent the first twelve days not sleeping at all. My liver enzymes were off the charts high. But after about three months I started to get better—I took part in the groups and “did the work,” as they say.

I was living in rehab when Monica and Chandler got married. It was May 17, 2001.

Two months earlier, on March 25, 2001, I'd been detoxing one night when the powers that be decided to give us all the night off to watch the Academy Awards. I was lying there, sweating and twitching, filled with fear, barely listening, when Kevin Spacey stepped up to the podium and intoned:

“The nominees for best performance by an actress in a leading role are:

Joan Allen, in
The Contender
;

Juliette Binoche, in
Chocolat
;

Ellen Burstyn, in
Requiem for a Dream
;

Laura Linney, in
You Can Count on Me
;

and

Julia Roberts, in
Erin Brockovich.
”

Then he said,

“And the Oscar goes to …
Julia Roberts
!”

I watched as Julia kissed her boyfriend at the time, the actor Benjamin Bratt, and walked up the steps to receive her award.

“Thank you, thank you, ever so much,” she said. “I'm
so
happy.…” As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears, arguing with the universe while God calmly tapped his cane on the hard, cold world.

I made a joke.

“I'll take you back,” I said. “I'll take you back.”

The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now. And I was lucky to have them. They were saving my life.

On Julia's big night in Hollywood, I crawled into bed and stared at the ceiling. There would be no sleep for me that night. Just thoughts racing through my head like someone had fired a bullet into a tin can.
That blue truck, that mountaintop. All the blue trucks, all mountaintops, gone, vanished like ether in a vacuum of fear.
I was incredibly happy for her. As for me, 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.

After three long months of rehab, I was feeling better.

Back on my feet, I was very excited to live a life that was not completely ruled by my alcoholism and addiction. I had stopped drinking and drugging. And my cravings for each had disappeared. Something way, way bigger than me was in charge now. Miracles do happen.

The first move I made was driving to Jamie Tarses's house.

“I need time to process being sober,” I said to her, “and that's going to take up all my time. I'm incredibly grateful for all the wonderful things you did for me.”

I could see her face losing color.

“But … I can't be in a relationship right now,” I said.

So, to be clear: in order to adequately pay sweet, wonderful Jamie back for two years of giving up huge portions of her own very busy and important life by basically being my nurse, I ended our relationship. Jamie Tarses was one of the most magical, beautiful, smart … oh so smart. I loved the way her mind worked. And I broke up with her. Proving that getting sober didn't make
me
any smarter—in fact it may have made me a colossal idiot. Jamie was probably the most amazing person I had ever met, and she loved me. But I wasn't ready for that.

What I said to Jamie that day was all bullshit, of course. I was newly sober, I was a huge star, and I wanted to sleep with every single girl in Southern California.

And, I did. [Insert cartoon anvil landing on my head here.]

Because of this huge star thing, I had no problem getting dates. And this is how I opened each and every one of them.

“Hi, sorry I'm late.

“You look great by the way. I've been really excited to finally meet you.” [Pause for appropriate positive response.]

“But I don't want to get off on the wrong foot here,” I would continue. “I want to be as transparent as possible. I am an open book. Ask me anything—I will tell you the truth.”

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.”

That great twentieth-century philosopher Cyndi Lauper was right as it turned out—girls do in fact just want to have fun. But in case the message wasn't entirely clear, I added some salt to the heady stew I was ladling out.

“I'm an extremely passionate person,” I said, a little abashedly, in case they thought I protesteth too much. “In fact, I'm a bit of a romantic. Even beating up the elliptical machine, all I do is listen to songs about women in some kind of duress.

“But I am not looking for, or available for, any kind of emotional relationship,” I repeated, just in case the message had been a tad fuzzy. “I just got out of a long-term relationship and had just gotten sober and I am not looking to be in one now.”

And then it was time to nail the landing.

“Oh, did you want to look at your menu?” I'd say. “I hear the food here is fantastic.”

It is amazing to me how many women signed up for this after all that. I presume many of them thought they could change me. What's that you say? Oh yes, I did get the occasional abrupt walkout, of course. A few women would say, “Well, I'm not interested in that at all,” and would just get up and leave. (No surprise that those were the ones that I was
really
interested in.)

But for the most part my speech worked to a tee.

I use the word “worked” loosely. Because I barely need to point out that the best you could say about all this was that at any point you could exchange my head for a donkey's ass and no one would see the difference. Not only had I just broken up with the greatest woman on the planet, what I was proposing was just a giant fucking waste of time. 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.

In a life riddled with mistakes, this may have been my biggest one. And mistakes are hard to undo.

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, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week—a gardener I would often run outside and give a hundred dollars to so he'd turn his fucking leaf blower off. (We can put a man on the moon, but we can't invent a silent one of those things?)

Natasha Wagner was one of these women. Not only is she beautiful, smart, caring, and sexy, she's also the daughter of Natalie Wood and Richard Gregson (and raised by Robert Wagner, and then by Robert Wagner and Jill St. John after her mother's tragic death). 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.

A few years later I was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway one day in some kind of fuck-off-everybody car, a car so amazing that I now cannot for the life of me remember what make it was. I had the top down; the glistening sun was picking the edges of the surf out in the ocean and turning it into a slippery silver. Dudes on surfboards lounged around waiting for The One, which never came; I knew exactly how they felt.

Then, my phone rang. It was Natasha. She had fallen for me after one of these dates, so she had had to go—
that's the rule, Matty, that's the rule!
—but somehow, even though I'd jettisoned her, she was still a friend.

“Hey, Matty!” she said in her inimitably sunny way. She was as bright as the sun on the ocean, always. Sometimes I had to look away just to get my bearings back.

“Hey, Natasha! How are you?” I said. It was so lovely to hear from her. “What's going on with you?”

Perhaps, if she was calling me, there was a chance that we…?

“I'm a mother!” she announced. “I just had a baby girl. Clover!”

“Oh…,” I said, then quickly recovered, or thought I did. “That's fantastic news, babe. I love that name, too!”

We talked for a little while longer, then we got off the phone. And then, out of nowhere, the fuck-you-everybody car was pulling over—
because
I
was pulling it over—and I lurched to a stop on the verge. The sun was still high, the surfers were up on their boards, but I was utterly thunderstruck with emotion. The giant wave everyone was looking for was happening in my head.

“She could have had that child with me,” I said, to no one, as I sobbed like a newborn myself.

I was so sad and alone. I cried for about forty-five minutes until, gradually, a new thought came, like clouds across the sky above an ocean:

Jesus, this is quite a reaction.…

It behooved me to work out why I'd broken down so hard. I sat there, wondering, and wondering, until I finally realized what the fuck had I been doing: 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? Surely God had something better in store for me than that.

I would need to find out, and fast. Natasha's life was blossoming while mine was turning into one huge mistake.

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.

Some quiet days, when I was sober, I'd think back to the recent past and wonder why I'd ever picked up pills or drugs after getting clean. When I was sober, strong, and feeling like a normal person, I'd sometimes have a fantasy of putting on a baseball cap and shades and heading off to mingle with the regular people poking around the La Brea Tar Pits or standing next to some celebrity's star on the Walk of Fame, just to see what it's like. Not in the sense of “I'm a star, I'm better than them”; no, in the sense of “Oh, so this is what a sober life feels like.”

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 dating literally everyone and anyone in LA, but I'd also met a woman in New York I really liked. I was not faithful to her, but I loved her. I was newly sober, and famous, and I wanted to fuck everybody in Los Angeles County; many reciprocated my desires. My speech worked far more than it had the right to. But the woman I loved in New York was like a good mom—a great caretaker and so beautiful, so of course I was drawn to her and, of course, I screwed it up. But it wasn't all bad—in LA, I was also working to help other alcoholics get sober—sponsoring people, answering calls whenever needed, imparting advice.
Friends
was a juggernaut, too, and I didn't have to worry about fucking
that
up—I was clean, and I was about to have
my
season, the one where everyone was talking about Chandler. (Nine was the only year I was completely sober for a
Friends
season. Care to hazard a guess as to which was the only year I got nominated for an Emmy for best actor in a comedy? Yup, season nine. If that doesn't tell you something, nothing will. What did I do differently that season? I
listened.
I didn't just stand there and wait for my turn to speak. Sometimes in acting, it's more powerful to listen than to talk. I have tried to incorporate that in real life, too.
Know more, say less.
That's my new mantra.)

The two years flew by; maybe this is what normal people feel. Maybe I'd found my calling; beyond
Friends,
beyond movie stardom, beyond everything, I was here to help people get and stay sober.

And then, something happened, and
I'm capable of staying sober unless
anything
happens.

One of the women I'd used the speech on had grown attached to me, and as we know, dear reader, if that happens, I have to backpedal.

So, that's what I did. I said, “I
don't
love you. I warned you when I met you.… Remember the speech, when I asked you about the menu?”

But it was too late. Some kind of agony-hook was in her; it was my fault.
Is this why I got sober? To sleep with women? And then hurt them? Surely God had something better in store for me than that.

She was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the time, and I went to see her, but she could not be consoled. She reminded me of my mother—no matter how much charm I used, no matter which funny thing I said, I could not help her pain.

Eventually, she stormed off into the bathroom, leaving me alone in the room. On the side table, there was a knocked-over bottle of Vicodin. Three of the pills had spilled out under the glare of the bedside lamp. She was locked in the bathroom, screaming; I couldn't take care of the situation. 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.

It was impossible for me to get back. I graduated quickly to getting my own pills. And then I was drinking again. I was knowingly surfing down a long slide to oblivion. But it was bigger than me—there was literally nothing I could do about it.

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.

At one point in 1999, I was sitting alone in my way-too-big house at the top of Carla Ridge, yet another house with a beautiful view, this time of the Los Angeles Basin. Down there, somewhere, normal Los Angeles life was going on (Tar Pits; Walk of Fame)—up here, I was just waiting it out—drink in one hand, a steady flow of Marlboro Lights
in the other. We were five seasons into
Friends
; Ross and Rachel had just stumbled out of a chapel married, ahead of Chandler and Monica.
Friends
was a cultural touchstone, a shorthand for the millennium, the number one show on the planet, everyone's favorite watch.

And that way of speaking! “Could this
be
any hotter?” had swept the nation, and now everyone was talking that way. Clinton was in the White House; the date September 11 meant nothing special, unless it was your birthday or your wedding anniversary. All the water in the world was flowing downhill into a sparkling lake, upon which the most beautiful, nameless birds endlessly floated.

Now, a messenger was at my door, interrupting my reverie. It was as if I was reenacting what had once happened to the Romantic poet Coleridge, who had been interrupted from his own buzz—he got his via opium—by the legendary “person from Porlock.” At the time, Coleridge had the entirety of his poem “Kubla Kahn” memorized in his opiate-addled mind, but the messenger who had arrived at his door that day in 1797 had shattered that memory, leaving only fifty-four lines for posterity.

I was no Coleridge, but my buzz had been notable all the same—the view and the vodka tonic and the sweet Marlboro burn had rendered me into a safe place, where I was no longer unaccompanied, where somehow, back there in the house behind me, a beautiful wife and a gaggle of amazing kids were tumbling around in the playroom while Daddy had some quality time alone in his screening room. (You want to feel lonely? Watch a movie alone in a screening room.) It was at times like these, when the haze was deepest, that I could imagine my life was not filled with holes, that the minefield that was my past had been metal-detected by men in hazard suits into a benign and beautiful safety.