Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (21 page)

Hitchens:
So how is it that people ever cease to be addicts if what you say is true?

Me:
Well, Santa …

Hitchens:
Yeah, that's
terribly
clever, but this is a very serious subject. And you treat it with immense levity …

Proving, I suppose, that he knew nothing about either me, or the subject on which he pontificated.

Meanwhile, even though I'd made Peter Hitchens look like the fool he is and advocated for drug courts all over Europe, Stateside, Perry
House was floundering. Not enough people attended—it was simply too expensive, so I had to cut my losses and sell the property.

When I had lunch with Earl, I asked for my money back, and I'm still waiting. He was talking about crazy things, like maybe becoming an actor. Something was off, and I was so freaked out by the whole thing—well, I went home and used. This was no one's fault but my own, but two things were crucially lost forever: my innocence, and my trust in Earl H.

Eventually Earl moved to Arizona without even telling me, and our friendship was over. From sharing our lives and being best friends and agitating for drug courts and building a sober living home, I'd lost half a million dollars, my closest ally, and that innocence I'd cherished all those years. Heartbreak.

I had been writing television for years but always with a partner. The day after the Earl H. debacle, I was feeling especially uncomfortable and ill at ease, and I remembered that a wise man once told me that in times like these I should be creative. So, I opened up my laptop and started typing. I didn't know what I was typing. I just kept typing. It became apparent that what was coming out was a play.

I needed this; I'd recently let my standards down horribly, and I was determined to crawl my way back to something closer to being able to contemplate looking in a mirror.

I was angry at myself over what had happened on
The Odd Couple
on CBS. For a long time, I'd been a huge fan of the film of Neil Simon's play and had always wanted to do a new TV version of it. My dream came true in 2013 when CBS had finally green-lit the idea.
Go On,
the show I did before
The Odd Couple,
hadn't worked, but I felt more confident about this one. The source material was brilliant; the cast great; everything was set fair to have a hit. Yet, depression stalked me,
and my addictions were back in full force. Accordingly, I'm completely embarrassed about my behavior on
The Odd Couple
. On top of the horrible depression, I showed up late all the time, and high, and ultimately lost all power on the show to a showrunner. But I take complete responsibility for what happened and would like to apologize not only to my fellow castmates but also to everyone involved.

With that disaster in the rearview, I had a play in hand at least. Feeling that dis-ease, that discomfort coming out of my skin, usually I would use drugs to replace it, to give myself ease. But I was sober now, so I knew I couldn't do that—I had to find something else. I wrote ten hours a day for ten days straight until I had completed the play—and it was actually good, according to the very few people I let read it. I'd called it
The End of Longing,
and though it had taken ten days to draft, I spent another year perfecting it.

I'd been inspired by—and when I say inspired, I mean I was trying to beat—
Sexual Perversity in Chicago,
and was happy with what I'd achieved. I'd put it up against that fine play any day. In describing what I was trying to do, I'd told
The Hollywood Reporter
that “there's a very popular notion that people don't change, but I see people change every day, and I wanted to put that message out there while making people laugh.” Accordingly, the play finds four friends in a bar trying to discover love—my character, Jack, opens the play as an egomaniac who happens to be an alcoholic, and then it only gets worse.

Me being me, I was not content to have just written a play—I decided it needed to be staged and have me in it. Months later,
The End of Longing
premiered in London's hallowed West End theater district. I loved being the playwright as well as the lead—I could change things around when they weren't working. And though I knew I'd hate doing the big drunk scene every night—it was surely going to be intensely triggering—I knew, too, that I had to show just how low a person can go.

We opened in the Playhouse Theatre, an eight-hundred-seat venue,
and quickly we were selling out. In fact, we were pulling down massive box-office records, but also, lousy reviews. For historical accuracy, there were seven major reviews and six of them were bad. London reviewers didn't like the idea of a Hollywood actor-boy going over there and doing a play. It was a huge success, though, and I was a playwright and I liked that idea.

There was also one person who wouldn't come to the play, even though I begged.

The woman I'd dated for six years was, by now, dating a British guy, and they were spending half the year in London, the rest in Los Angeles. We were still friendly enough that we'd had a couple of lunches and texted a few times. Knowing that she was in London, I'd invited her to see
The End of Longing,
but she'd texted back that she was way too busy. “I'll see you Stateside!” she wrote. I replied that I was a little hurt that she couldn't make it—the play was being performed in her town, for God's sake—and then a while later I got back an email telling me that she was getting married and that she had no room in her life for friends.

I never replied to that email, and we've never spoken since. It was an incredibly harsh way to reveal the news that she was getting married, and not something that I would ever do to a person, but there you have it. Even still, I will forever be planted in her corner. I'm glad she got married and that she's happy. I want nothing but the best for her, forever.

From London the play moved to New York. That was not fun. For a start, I had to tone the play down—the Brits didn't care about the salty language, but Broadway is Broadway, so I had to leaven it, and not just the language—I had to kill a bunch of the jokes, too. So, it was neither well received nor beloved in New York—
The New York Times
trashed it, calling it “synthetic,” whatever that means, and I ended up making $600 for the whole New York run. That's not a typo. (I'd made one thousand times more—almost to the pound, shilling, and pence—during its run in London.) At least
The Hollywood Reporter
was nice about it: “Perry at least demonstrates that his extensive television comedy experience has rubbed off. The evening features many amusing one-liners (most of them, predictably, delivered by the author).… Perry displays his familiar expert comic timing and delivery.” But the “at least” was pretty crushing, and I realized that
The End of Longing
wasn't going to be beloved enough to cement my future as a budding David Mamet. But there is still time!

There is such a thing as a Trauma Camp, and yes, I've attended, and yes, I made up that name.

It was in Florida—where else?—and I spent ninety days there, opening up the trauma of my life and reliving it, scene by scene. I did it in a group setting—others reciprocated their traumas until everyone was fainting and puking and shaking. At one point, I was asked to draw the stick figures of all my traumas, and then asked to show everyone what I'd drawn and describe it. As I tried to point to one of the drawings, my fingers started to shake, and subsequently my whole body joined in, and it wouldn't stop shaking for thirty-six days. I was like a goat who'd had a close encounter with a bear—the bear was gone, but the goat kept shaking.

At the end of trauma therapy, once you've gone back into the trauma and relived it, the therapists are supposed to “close” you back up—basically you're supposed to feel everything, and release it, and learn how to make it a story, not a living thing in your soul, so that it no longer has dominion over you in the way that it did.

Oh, and you're supposed to cry.

They didn't close me up right; and I didn't cry. I was afraid. I felt
like I was back onstage. Being famous in rehab isn't perhaps what you imagine—everyone else there has a lot to deal with, so who cares if you're Matthew Perry? Later, in Pennsylvania, I attended a rehab with six other people who were all in their seventies, including Debbie, aka, the bane of my existence. Debbie was the only other smoker, so I had to see Debbie all the time outside. And Debbie had zero memory.

“Wait, have we met?” she'd say.

“No, Debbie, we have not. But I was on the show
Friends
once. That's probably how you know me.”

“Oh! I like that show,” Debbie would say.

Five minutes later, Debbie would pause, sucking on her cigarette, and turn to me.

“So, did we go to high school together?”

“No, Debbie,” I'd say, as kindly as I could muster. “You are twenty-seven years older than me. You probably recognize me from the show
Friends.…”

“Oh! I like that show,” Debbie would repeat, and the whole cycle would begin again.

When a man or woman asks me to help them quit drinking, and I do so, watching as the light slowly comes back into their eyes, that's all God to me. And even though I have a relationship with God, and I'm so often grateful despite everything, I sometimes do want to tell God to go fuck himself for making my road so hard.

When I'm clean and sober, it is as if a light has been shown to me, one that I can share with a desperate man who needs help with stopping drinking. It's the same light that hits the ocean in a bright sunlight, the beautiful gold water glistening. That's what God is to me. (It also works at night when the moonlight hits the water—boom! It almost knocks me over. Because like that five-year-old boy flying across a continent alone seeing the city lights of Los Angeles and he knows he is about to be parented … well, it's all the same.)

Why is it so hard for me to stay sober when I see my fellows seemingly doing it easily? Why has my road been so racked with difficulty? Why have I wrestled so hard with life? Why has reality been an acquired taste, and why has it been so hard for me to acquire it? But when
I help that one man to get sober, or even helped thousands get sober in a weekend at a retreat or conference, all these questions get washed away. It's like I'm standing under a Hawaiian waterfall getting drenched by the beautiful warm water. That's where God is; you're just going to have to have to trust me on that.

I am no saint—none of us are—but once you have been at death's door and you don't die, you would think you would be bathed in relief and gratitude. But that isn't it at all—instead, you look at the difficult road ahead of you to get better and you are
pissed.
Something else happens, too. You are plagued by this nagging question:
Why have I been spared?
The other four people on the ECMO machine were still dead. There had to be a reason.

Part of the answer for me was my ten thousand hours of experience in AA and helping people get sober. That lights me up, loans me, in fact, a little bit of that golden light from my kitchen.

But there has to be more, God. Why did you spare
me
? I'm ready—give me the direction and I will follow it. When Woody Allen asks this very question to an alien in the movie
Stardust Memories,
the alien responds, “Tell funnier jokes.” But that can't be it.

Either way, I'm ready. And I seek the answer every day. I am a seeker. I seek God.

My love life, however, is a different story. I have made more mistakes in my love life than Elizabeth Taylor. I am a romantic, passionate person. I have longed for love; it's a yearning in me that I cannot fully explain.

Once I reached my forties, the rules had changed. I had done all the sleeping with people I'd ever need to do—I was looking for a partner now, a teammate, someone to share my life with. Also, I have always loved kids. I think it's because I was ten years old when my sister Caitlin
was born. Then came Emily, then Will, and then finally Madeline. I loved playing with them all, babysitting them, playing dumb games with them. There is no greater sound on the face of the planet than a child's laughter.

So, by the time my forties were in full swing, I truly wanted a girlfriend, someone I could count on, and who, in turn, could count on me. One night some friends and I were out celebrating that yet again I had achieved a year of sobriety. My still good friend David Pressman introduced me to his girlfriend's sister, Laura. We'd all gone to a Dodgers game together, but for me there was no game, no stadium, no hot dog vendors—instead, the world had receded to a beautiful face under a baseball cap. I tried to pull out the old Perry charm—anything to make her notice me—but she was too busy parading her glorious personality and wit to others. She was unimpressed that I had been Chandler, and though she was perfectly pleasant to me, I sensed there was no there-there for her.

As I drove home that night, I gave myself a speech.

“Yes, you're disappointed, but not every girl is not going to like you, Matty.” I let it go, but I didn't forget her. Surely our paths would cross again.

And they did.

This time the group had decided to play Ping-Pong at the Standard Hotel in downtown LA. Now, I am no Forrest Gump, but I knew my way around a Ping-Pong table—in fact, if you've seen the finale of season nine of
Friends,
you'll know that I'm at least good enough to beat Paul Rudd. I had heard that Laura might make an appearance, so I played Ping-Pong with one eye on the door.

And there she was, finally. It was as if she had been hurled into the club by a tornado—she was all energy and jokes.

“Everyone in here should kill themselves,” Laura said, and BOOM! like a brick of interest slamming into my face. But this time I was
ready. So began a night that resembled a knife fight, only with jokes. It turned out that the new object of my affection was a stand-up comedian and a successful writer in TV. It was clear from the get-go that we would never run out of things to say to each other.

Our first date was on New Year's Eve. A friend was holding a pajama party and I invited Laura to go with me. After that, our relationship developed slowly; she was careful, and I was willing to do whatever it took. But our affections deepened. It was all good … ah, but nothing is all good in my world, remember?

Enter Rome. I was two years sober and thriving in AA, healthy, sponsoring people, writing a TV show. I was happy, even pretty muscular, dare I say. (I
dare
: I'd been hitting the gym and everything!) I was asked to share my story at an AA meeting in West Hollywood, and you're not allowed to say no to an AA request. The room was packed, standing room only (I think word had gotten out that I was speaking). My story at the time had not reached the depths of the last few years, so as well as detailing everything I'd gone through, I was also able to get my share of laughs. At one point, I looked over to the kitchen area and noticed a woman pop her head through the window/hatch thingy, leaning on her elbows to prop herself up. She resembled a gorgeous, porcelain doll and was staggeringly beautiful. All of a sudden, there were only two people in the room. My AA share became directed only at Rome. It ended up being one of the greatest shares I had ever given, because this epic beauty was so captivating that I wanted her to know everything about me. I wanted her to know everything.

Afterward, as we all gathered outside for a cigarette, we started talking and flirting.

“So, what are you up to right now?” she said.

“I'm going to go home to write. All of a sudden, I've become a writer,” I said.

“Well,” Rome said, “I make an excellent muse.”

“I'll bet you do,” I said, then turned and walked away, completely bowled over by this mysterious person.

On the way home I gave myself a talking-to.

But what about Laura? Yes, of course, wonderful Laura, who I am falling for more and more each day. But now there is Rome. What is a fella to do? Forget about Rome and continue investigating this Laura thing that is going so well. Right? That's what a normal person does under these circumstances.

But Rome had cast a spell on me.

Despite my positive self-talk, this was when I made a crucial, killing mistake. I didn't know it was a mistake at the time—do any of us know that we are making mistakes while we are making them? If we did, perhaps we wouldn't make them?

The mistake was this, and it was a doozy: I began dating both women.

This is not a move I recommend under any circumstances, but especially if you are me.

I told myself that because I had not told either Laura or Rome that we were in a relationship, I was not being an asshole, but there was a little piece of me that knew I was doing something untoward because I cared about both of them, and despite outward appearances, I genuinely didn't want anyone to get hurt, including me. So, Laura and I would go to Kings games together, laugh and have a wonderful time, though somewhat chaste. The courtship with both women went slowly, but eventually both removed their sex embargoes, and I was now fully involved with two different women at the same time. It was amazing, and completely baffling and crazy making.

Did I mention that I had fallen madly in love with both of them? I didn't think it was even possible to do that. I even went online, read a few articles, and learned that this was something that did indeed happen. The feelings I had for both of these women were real, according to what
I read. Then, Laura and I pronounced ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend, Rome and I not so much—but I was still in trouble.

What was I going to do? I enjoyed my time with both of them equally. I loved them. This went on for about six months before I came to my senses and decided I had to pick one. I had to stop this nonsense and pick one. Rome was passionate, erotic, funny, smart, but she also seemed to have this fascination with death that confused me. Laura talked about movies and lighter things; there was a sense of being home with her that I had not felt with Rome.

I chose Laura.

I made the very difficult call to Rome. At first, she was chill about it, until she wasn't, subsequently screaming at me for two hours in the parking lot of Barney's Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard when I tried to make amends. You would be hard-pressed to find an angrier person than she was with me that day.

But by now you know me; you know I can't do with getting closer and closer to someone, and that was what was happening with Laura. The fear was burrowing into me. To break up with Laura would be insane—she had it all.
We
had it all. We were each other's best friend. But the intimacy was scaring me. I knew once again that if she got to know me any better she would see what I already believed about myself: As ever, I wasn't enough. I didn't matter. Soon, she would see this for herself, and she would leave me. That would annihilate me, and I would never recover.

There was another option. I could remain in the relationship but turn back to drugs and try to maintain a low habit. This would protect me from the fear, allow me to drop my walls and become even more intimate with her.

Turning to drugs has led to nothing but chaos for me. And yet, inconceivably, I chose to do it one more time to deal with the Laura situation. I started taking one pill a day just in order to stay in the
relationship. It worked out great at first, but as is the way with drugs, they always win. Six months later we had a shitstorm on our hands. I was a mess. Laura broke up with me, and I had to go on Suboxone once again and check into a sober living house. I was afraid I was going to die yet again. Rome was still yelling at me every chance she had, and Laura was hurt and worried, oh, and gone.

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.

So, there I was, living in a Malibu sober living house on 8 milligrams of Suboxone. Though it's a solid detox drug—the best—as I've said over and over, it is the hardest drug on the planet to get off. In fact, it made me suicidal to come off it. That's not quite accurate—I had suicidal feelings, but I also knew it was just the medicine, so I wasn't actually suicidal, if you follow. All I had to do was stave off the days when I felt suicidal, not do anything about it, and know that at some point I would feel better and not want to kill myself anymore.

To get off Suboxone, you have to drop a milligram a week until you get to zero. Doing so makes you feel insanely sick for two days, then you get used to the new level—in this case, 7 milligrams—and once you stabilize, then you drop again. The suicidal feelings don't start until you get down to 2 milligrams.

So, at 2 milligrams I did probably the most selfish thing I have ever done in my life. I was terrified about how I was about to feel, and I didn't want to go through it alone. Accordingly, I purchased three hundred dollars' worth of flowers, drove to Laura's house, and begged her to take me back. We sat on the couch in her living room and discussed the ins and outs of what this would mean. Driven completely by fear, I told her I wanted to marry her, possibly even have a child with her.

And then, something impossible happened. As we were sitting there, I heard a key slowly turning in her front door … and in walked Rome.

In walked
who
now?

How is it possible that these two women were standing in the same room? I would give anything to have a time machine, go back to that moment, and say, “How about a threesome?” But this was no time for jokes. My jaw was on the floor.

“I'm going to water the plants,” Rome said, and she headed up the back stairwell and was gone.

“I think I need to take care of her,” Laura said, and left me in the living room. When I realized she wasn't coming back, I took my 2-milligram addiction back to Malibu.

It turned out that Rome and Laura had met at an AA meeting, realized who they were, and become fast friends. The bulk of their conversations, as I'm sure you can imagine, were about what an asshole I was.

As for me, I couldn't stay in Los Angeles, so I hopped on a private plane to a Colorado recovery center where they said that they thought that they could get me off Suboxone without making me feel suicidal.

Well, so much for that idea. I felt suicidal for thirty-six days in a row and then flew to New York and appeared on Letterman, trying to hide that I was being held up with tape and paper.

Somehow, I pulled it off.

Seven years later, after I had learned a whole lot about myself, I made real amends to Rome and to Laura, and they both accepted my apology. Believe it or not, the three of us are friends, now. Laura is married to a lovely guy named Jordon, and Rome is living with an equally lovely guy named Eric.

Recently the five of us had dinner together at my place, and we all had a lovely time. Then, at around 10:00
P.M
., the two couples left in their respective cars. I heard the engines recede down the canyon toward the city.