Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (17 page)

Despite the partying, we were all pros on that movie and managed to turn out a huge crowd pleaser. Early notices for it were positive—one, in
Variety
magazine, read:

Bruce Willis will deliver the customers, but it's Matthew Perry who will attract the most attention in a pratfall-filled turn that bears comparison to what Tom Hanks was doing 12–15 years ago.

This was high praise indeed for someone who looked up to Tom. 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).

The Whole Nine Yards
became the number one movie in America for three weeks straight.

I had done it—the dream I'd had since the ninth grade had finally come true:
The Whole Nine Yards
was no
Back to the Future,
but
Michael J. Fox and I are the only two people who have had the number one movie and the number one TV show at the same time.

I should have been the toast of the town, but back in LA, it was clear, at least to me, that my addiction had progressed to dangerous levels. I was at the point where I was basically unable to leave the house—drugs and alcohol had completely taken over. I was so strung out on drugs and dealing with drug dealers that I couldn't actually leave my bedroom—instead of a grand moment of pure fame, dealing with dealers was all I was doing. I showed up to the premiere of the movie, of course, and put on
The Matthew Perry Show,
but I was bloated and driven by fear of something that I did not understand.

I've always had a dream of going on a talk show and being honest.

Jay Leno:
So, how you doing, Matthew?

Me:
Man, I just don't know which way is up. I am totally screwed. I am so miserable. I can't get out of bed.

This would have been the perfect time for that.

Four years after
The Whole Nine Yards
Bruce and I and Kevin shot a sequel (different director this time). If
The Whole Nine Yards
was the start of my movie stardom, it's fair to say that
The Whole Ten Yards
was the end.

We shot that second movie in Los Angeles—we were given all too much freedom and it sucked. You can seldom re-create a good thing, and it was true here; the jokes felt stale, the parties even staler. In fact, it was so bad that a while later, I called my agents and said, “I'm still allowed to
go
to movies though, right?”

When
The Whole Nine Yards
came out I had been so mired in addiction I could barely leave my room. I had been in a hellhole of despair and
demoralization, and my fucked-up mind was slowly dragging my body down with it. Recently it struck me: this type of feeling should have been reserved for when
The Whole Ten Yards
came out. Anyone in their right mind would have been beyond depressed after that one.

Sometimes, at the end of the night, when the sun was just about to come up and everyone else had gone, and the party was over, Bruce and I would just sit and talk. That's when I saw the real Bruce Willis—a good-hearted man, a caring man, selfless. A wonderful parent. And a wonderful actor. And most important, a good guy. And if he wanted me to be, I would be his friend for life. But as is the way with so many of these things, our paths rarely crossed after that.

I, of course, pray for him every night now.

Something happened, and I relapsed. As I've said, to relapse that's all it takes: something—anything at all—happening. Good or bad.

I was blowing yet another stretch of sobriety. I don't even remember why. I had been thriving. I'd had two years—I was helping other men get sober and I blew it all over something so minute I can't even remember what it was. What I do remember is there was lots of drinking, lots of drugs, lots of isolation. I always used alone—I was afraid that if anyone saw how much I was doing, they would be horrified and try to get me to stop. But I had already started, so stopping was not an option.

Something that has often saved my life is that I get scared. When I think things have gotten too out of control, I panic, pick up the phone, and ask for help. That time, a sober companion and my wonderful father came to the rescue. They moved in immediately; I started to detox off the drugs that very day.

I felt physically completely ruined … but the detox was going well. At least that's what my dad and the sober companion thought. What they didn't know was that I had hidden a bottle of Xanax in my bedroom. This is what it's like to be an addict: you do things you never
dreamed you would do. My wonderful father had dropped everything to move in, to love and support me through one more self-created disaster, and I paid him back by hiding drugs in my nightstand.

One night I was desperate for sleep, any kind of escape from the brutal detox I was going through. That bottle of Xanax was calling to me, an evil beacon in the darkness. I thought of it like a lighthouse, only in this case, I turned my boat toward the wrecking rocks, not away from them. The childproof bottle cap was no obstacle for this child; in the other room, that child's father dozed, watching reruns of
Taxi,
while in my room by the metaphorical lethal cliffs, I dove into that bottle of Xanax and took four. (One was too many. But
four?
)

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.

I was fortunate enough to wake up, but the Xanax had done something worse than preventing deep sleep—it had fried my brain and made me insane. I was seeing things: strange visions and colors I'd never seen before, colors I didn't know could exist. The gray automated drapes in my bedroom had turned into a deep purple color. It was as if the rods and cones in my retina were sending new and unbidden messages through my optic nerve to my already barbecued brain stem. Regular blues were cerulean, now; reds were magentas; black was Vantablack or Black 3.0, the blackest of blacks.

Not only that, but I had run out of Xanax, and if something was not done quickly about that, I could die. (Remember: booze and Xanax are the only detoxes that can kill you—an opiate detox just makes you wish you were dead.) But I was coming off all of them. My only option was to somehow get more Xanax, but the setup in my house didn't allow for that. I would surely get caught. So, I would have to come clean about the fact that I had been taking it so I could get properly detoxed from it, too.

I left my bedroom and into a kaleidoscope of color of my living room.
Is this heaven?
I thought.
Did the Xanax kill me last night and this is what heaven is like?
I gently explained to my dad and the sober companion what I had done. They were both appropriately terrified. The sober companion leaped into action and called a doctor.

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.

At this point, the sober companion returned to the room, expressed his disappointment, but said he was still willing to help me out. But I needed to see a doctor right away. We headed off to see him. At the end of the consultation, I apologized to the doctor, shook his hand, and promised it would never happen again. And I meant it—I was done. The doctor ordered new detox meds, antiseizure medication (detoxing from Xanax can cause seizures). We headed home. My long-suffering assistant, Moira, was called to pick up said medication, and we waited. And waited. For some reason, it took her hours to complete this new mission.

The clock was ticking, though. If I didn't get this detox medication soon, some serious shit was going to go down. I could have a seizure; I could die. Neither option sounded good to me. Now, three grown men were staring at the front door, waiting for it to open, and two of those men were also staring at scared Matty.

After a while, I couldn't bear the scrutiny and removed myself to a small couch to the side of the kitchen. Reality, that acquired taste, was beginning to reassert itself, slowly, surely, like a lens focusing. And I felt absolutely horrible, both physically and emotionally. I was riddled with shame and guilt. I could not believe I had done this one more time. The men I was sponsoring had more sober time than I did. You can't give away what you don't have. And I had nothing.

I hated myself.

This was a new bottom; I didn't think you could get any lower than my previous bottom, but I had managed to do it. And all of this in front of my father, who was obviously terrified. The cunning, baffling, powerful nature of addiction had gotten me one more time.

The front door still wasn't opening. This was serious trouble. I was a desperate man. The drugs were in full flow, the drinking, too. Things were so bad I couldn't even cry. To cry might have signaled that there was at least a semblance of the normal somewhere abouts, but there was nothing natural about any of this.

So, a bottom—the lowest point of my life. This is a classic moment for an addict, a moment after which one seeks lasting help.… But hey, what's this now? As I sat there looking into the kitchen, I noticed a crinkle in the atmosphere. Perhaps someone not at their bottom might have waved it away as nothing, but to me it was so compelling that I couldn't look away. It resembled a kind of little wave in the air. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. It was real, true, tangible, concrete. Is this what you see at the end? Was I dying? And then …

I frantically began to pray—with the desperation of a drowning
man. The last time I'd prayed, right before I'd gotten
Friends,
I'd managed only to strike a Faustian bargain with a God who had simply drawn a long breath and bided his damn time. Here I was, more than a decade later, chancing my praying arm once again.

“God, please help me,” I whispered. “Show me that you are here. God, please help me.”

As I prayed, the little wave in the air transformed into a small, golden light. As I kneeled, the light slowly began to get bigger, and bigger, until it was so big that it encompassed the entire room. It was like I was standing on the sun. I had stepped on the surface of the sun. What was happening? And why was I starting to feel better? And why was I not terrified? The light engendered a feeling more perfect than the most perfect quantity of drugs I had ever taken. Feeling euphoric now, I did get scared and tried to shake it off. But there was no shaking this off. It was way way bigger than me. My only choice was to surrender to it, which was not hard, because it felt so good. The euphoria had begun at the top of my head and slowly seeped down throughout my entire body—I must have sat there for five, six, seven minutes, filled with it.

My blood hadn't been replaced with warm honey. I
was
warm honey. And for the first time in my life, I was in the presence of love and acceptance and filled with an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be OK. I knew now that my prayer had been answered. I was in the presence of God. Bill Wilson, who created AA, was saved by a lightning-bolt-through-the-window experience where he felt he was meeting God.

This was mine.

But, feeling this good was terrifying. I was once asked if I'd ever been happy, and I almost bit that fucker's head off. (At Promises once, during a rehab, I'd told my counselor that I was freaked-out by how happy everyone recovering seemed. “They're like a bunch of happy people living on a hill while I'm dying,” I'd said, and he'd explained to
me that a lot of those people weren't getting it and didn't understand what was going on and would eventually be back in rehab and things would be even worse for them next time around.)

After about seven minutes (insert “seven minutes in heaven” joke here) the light began to dim. The euphoria died down. God had done his work and was off helping someone else now.

I started to cry. I mean, I really started to cry—that shoulder-shaking kind of uncontrollable weeping. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I was crying because for the first time in my life, I felt OK. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God, and wresting with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion.

I had been in the presence of God. I was certain of it. And this time I had prayed for the right thing: help.

Eventually the weeping subsided. But everything was different now. I could see color differently, angles were of a different magnitude, the walls were stronger, the ceiling higher, the trees tapping on the windows more perfect than ever, their roots connected via the soil to the planet and back into me—one great connection created by an ever-loving God—and beyond, a sky, which had before been theoretically infinite was now unknowably endless. I was connected to the universe in a way I had never been. Even the plants in my house, which I had never even noticed before, seemed in sharp focus, more lovely than it was possible to be, more perfect, more alive.

I stayed sober for two years based solely on that moment. God had shown me a sliver of what life could be. He had saved me that day, and for all days, no matter what. He had turned me into a seeker, not only of sobriety, and truth, but also of him. He had opened a window, and closed it, as if to say, “Now go earn this.”

Nowadays, when a particular darkness hits me, I find myself wondering if it was just Xanax insanity, a continuation of the snake I had
been sure was about to show up—the drug can cause what the National Institutes of Health describe as “reversible brief psychotic episodes.” (I later had a gigantic seizure in front of my father, too, which wasn't the most fun I've ever had—nor was being rushed to UCLA Medical Center, which at the time I thought was an angel way station.) But quickly I return to the truth of the golden light. When I am sober, I can still see it, remember what it did for me. Some might write it off as a near-death experience, but I was there, and it was God. And when I am connected, God shows me that it was real, little hints like when the sunlight hits the ocean and turns it into that beautiful golden color. Or the reflection of sunlight on the green leaves of a tree, or when I see the light return to someone's eyes when they come out of the darkness into sobriety. 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.

A year later I met a woman I'd stay with for six years. God is everywhere—you just have to clear your channel, or you'll miss it.