Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (18 page)

Monica went first; she placed her key on the empty counter. Chandler went next. Then Joey—big laugh as he really shouldn't have even had a key—then Ross, then Rachel, and last of all Phoebe. Now, there were six keys on the countertop, and what do you say after that?

We all stood in one long line. Phoebe said, “I guess this is it,” and Joey said, “Yeah,” then almost broke the fourth wall by looking out at the audience briefly before saying, “I guess so.…”

But there was no fourth wall to break; there never had been, in fact. We had been in people's bedrooms and living rooms for a decade; in the end, we were an integral part of so many people's lives that what we'd missed was that there had never been a fourth wall to break in the first place. We'd just been six close friends in an apartment that was seemingly way too big, when in fact it was just the size of a TV set in a living room.

And then it was time to leave that apartment one last time. Now, though, there were eight of us—the six main characters, plus Monica and Chandler's twins in a stroller.

Before that final episode, I'd taken Marta Kauffman to one side.

“Nobody else will care about this except me,” I said. “So, may I
please have the last line?” That's why as we all troop out of the apartment, and Rachel has suggested one last coffee, I got to bring the curtain down on
Friends.

“Sure,” Chandler said, and then, with perfect timing, for the very last time, “
Where?
”

I love the look on Schwimmer's face as I deliver that line—it's the perfect mixture of affection and amusement, exactly what the show
Friends
had always given to the world.

And with that, it was over.

The truth was, we were all ready for
Friends
to be done. For a start, Jennifer Aniston had decided that she didn't want to do the show anymore, and as we all made decisions as a group, that meant we all had to stop. Jennifer wanted to do movies; I had been doing movies all that time and had
The Whole Ten Yards
about to come out, which was sure to be a hit (insert donkey's head now), but in any case, even though it had been the greatest job in the world, the stories of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, and Phoebe had all pretty much played out by 2004. It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had. As a result, mostly by Jenny's design, ten was a shortened season. But all the characters were basically happy by this point, too, and no one wants to watch a bunch of happy people doing happy things—what's funny about that?

It was January 23, 2004. The keys on the counter, a guy who looked a lot like Chandler Bing said, “
Where?
,” “Embryonic Journey” by Jefferson Airplane played, the camera panned to the back of the apartment door, then Ben, our first AD, and very close friend, shouted for the last time, “That's a wrap,” and tears sprang from almost everyone's eyes like so many geysers. We had made 237 episodes, including this last one, called, appropriately enough, “The Last One.” Aniston was
sobbing
—after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying. But I felt nothing; I couldn't tell if
that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside. (Buprenorphine, for the record, is a detox med, and an excellent one, and is designed to help you stay off other “stronger” opiates—it does not
alter
you in any way. But, ironically, it's the hardest drug to come off in the entire world. Bupe, or Suboxone, should never be used for more than seven days. Fearing a nasty detox, I had been on it for eight months.)

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 sat in the lot for a moment and thought about the previous ten years. I thought about
L.A.X. 2194
and the $22,500 and Craig Bierko; I thought about how I'd been the last one cast, and that trip to Vegas, where we could walk through a packed casino, and no one knew who we were. I thought about all the gags and the double takes, the Murray brothers, and some of my most famous/too-close-to-the-truth lines, like, “Hi, I'm Chandler, I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable,” and “Until I was twenty-five, I thought that the only response to ‘I love you' was ‘Oh, crap!'” and “We swallow our feelings. Even if it means we're unhappy forever,” and “Could she
be
more out of my league?”

I thought about the summer between seasons eight and nine, when I'd spent time in rehab, and
People
magazine had said on its cover that I was “Happy, Healthy, and HOT!” (“
Friends
funny guy talks about those dating rumors,” the lede read, “the ‘final' season, and his battle to get sober. ‘It was scary,' he says. ‘I didn't want to die.'”) I had indeed spent that summer getting sober and playing a lot of tennis. I thought about the first day of season four, after the summer that I had very publicly gone to rehab. At the first table read obviously all eyes were on me. My
pal Kevin Bright, one of the shows executive producers, had opened the proceedings by saying, “Anyone want to talk about their summer vacations?” and I took the opportunity to break the ice, saying rather loudly and soberly, “OK! I'll start!” thus releasing all the tension in the room. Everyone erupted in laughter and applause for me for turning my life around and showing up looking good and ready to work. Probably to this day, it was the smartest joke I have ever made.

I thought about how I'd had to beg the producers to let me no longer speak like Chandler for the final few seasons (not to mention getting rid of those sweater vests). That particular cadence—could it
be
more annoying?—had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I'd explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in season six and then beyond.

I thought about me crying when I asked Monica to marry me.

And me being me, there were negative thoughts, too.

What will become of me now that I no longer have this insanely fun, creative job to go to every day?

Friends
had been a safe place, a touchstone of calm for me; it had given me a reason to get out of bed every morning, and it had also given me a reason to take it just a little bit easier the night before. It was the time of our lives. It was like we got some new piece of amazing news every day. Even I knew only a madman (which in many moments I had been nonetheless) would screw up a job like that.

As we drove home that night, along Sunset I pointed out to Rachel a massive billboard promoting
The Whole Ten Yards
. There I was, fifty feet high, frowning in a dark suit and purple shirt and tie, standing next to Bruce Willis, he dressed in white T-shirt, pinafore, and bunny slippers. WILLIS … PERRY, it read, in six-foot letters, above the tagline:
THEY MISSED EACH OTHER. THIS TIME, THEIR AIM IS BETTER.
I was a movie star. (You remember what I said about the donkey's head, right?)

My future, even without
Friends,
looked rosy enough, though. I had a major movie coming out; I'd done two episodes of
Ally McBeal
and three of
The West Wing,
so I was developing serious acting chops as well as the comedy stuff (I'd gotten two Emmy nominations for my three
The West Wing
appearances). I'd also just finished wrapping a TNT movie called
The Ron Clark Story,
about a real-life small-town teacher who gets a job in one of the toughest schools in Harlem. There wasn't a single joke in the whole thing—it drove me crazy how serious it was—so off camera I created a character called “Ron Dark” who was drunk and who constantly swore in front of the children. Despite that, it was a big hit when it eventually aired in August 2006. I would garner nominations for a SAG award, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy. (I lost all three to Robert Duvall. I couldn't believe it—being beaten out by such a hack.)

But as I've said,
The Whole Ten Yards
would prove to be a disaster—I'm not sure even my closest family and friends went to see it. In fact, if you looked closely enough, you could see people averting their eyes from the screen at the premiere. I think it actually got a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

And that was the moment Hollywood decided to no longer invite Mr. Perry to be in movies.

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?

What the fuck could I do? I was hooked on Bupe, with no new job in sight. Which was ridiculous, given that I'd just finished making the most beloved sitcom in TV history. On top of that, my relationship
with Rachel was getting rocky—the physical distance was an issue, as was the emotional closeness. I was damned if I did, damned when I didn't.

And then I was single once again.

With no ridiculously high paying, dream-come-true kind of job to go to, and no special someone in my life, things slipped fast—in fact, it was like falling off a cliff. The insanity of using other, stronger drugs crept up into my diseased brain once again. It wasn't long before the seemingly impossible happened again. I started drinking and using.

Despite how it may appear, I was never suicidal, thank God—I never actually wanted to die. In fact, in the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept. That's how skewed my thinking had become—I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don't want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion. I can distinctively remember holding pills in my hand and thinking,
This could kill me,
and taking them anyway.

This is a very fine, and very scary, line. I had reached a point in my drinking and using where I was drinking and using to forget about how much I was drinking and using. And it took an almost lethal amount to accomplish that kind of amnesia.

I was also so lonely that it hurt; I could feel the loneliness in my bones. On the outside, I looked like the luckiest man alive, so there were only a few people I could complain to without being told to shut up, and even then … nothing could fill the hole inside me. At one point I bought yet another new car, the excitement of which lasted about five days. I moved regularly, too—the thrill of a new house with an even better view lasted a bit longer than the Porsche or the Bentley, but not by much. I was also so introspective that a proper give-and-take
relationship with a woman was nigh on impossible; I was much better at friends with benefits, so that whoever I was seeing didn't discover that slow, creeping thought that I was irredeemably not enough.

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 was a man in need of a yellow light experience, so I was eternally grateful that it had happened that day in my house, because it gave me a new lease on life. I had been given the gift of sobriety one more time. The only question was: What was I going to do with it? Nothing had worked long-term before. I was going to have to approach everything differently, or I was a goner. And I didn't want to be a goner. Not before I had learned to live, to love. Not before the world made more sense to me.

Had my habit killed me, it would have killed the wrong person. I wasn't fully me yet; I was just parts of me (and not the best parts, either). My new approach to life would have to start with work, because that seemed to be the easiest place to start. Embracing effort was the only hope for me. I built up some sober time, was back on my feet once again. I also had a few friends-with-benefits things going on, but one was starting to slowly morph into something more. Maybe
much
more. I knew how to do friends with benefits—but this? This I was less clear about. I started to want her to stay
past the sex
: “Why don't you stick around and we can watch a movie?”

What was I doing? I was breaking all the rules.

She was twenty-three and I was thirty-six when we first met. In fact, I knew she was twenty-three because I'd crashed her twenty-third birthday party. Our subsequent initial make-out session was in the back of
a really messy Toyota (to think I'd spent all that money on fancy cars and here I was in the backseat of a tan Corolla). When we were done, I said, “I'm getting out of the car now. Mostly because I'm thirty-six.”

So began two years of probably record-breaking amounts of sexual intercourse, with no strings attached, both of us following the friends-with-benefits rules to a tee. We were on the same page. We never went to dinner, we never talked about each other's families. We never discussed what went on in each other's lives regarding other people. Instead, it was texting, and saying things like, “How about Thursday night at seven?”

She was tough at first. I remember an exchange early on where I told her I was wearing a suit and thought I looked pretty good.

“I hate suits,” she said.

I broke her out of her toughness, but it took years.

Somewhere it is written in the actor's handbook—actually, it's probably in the book my dad gave me, the one he'd inscribed with “another generation shot to hell”—that you have to try to do new things and stretch yourself. If you have excelled at comedy, then it behooves you to make a direct right turn and become a dramatic actor. So that became the plan. I couldn't retire, and there was only so much time a grown man could spend playing video games. As my friends-with-benefits partner said to me one day, “You live the life of someone who drinks and uses, you just don't drink and use.” (She was really smart, too—did I mention that?)