Matthew Perry is almost me. But for the grace of God, as the saying goes.
I didn’t grow up in Canada and star in a mega-zeitgeist TV sitcom in the ’90s; but I grew up in Detroit (might as well be Canada) and worked in film and TV locally. He was 54, I’m 48.
I’m not famous, of course, not like him. You’ve probably never heard of me. And by now you’re thinking this is a strange way to begin a piece about a departed actor.
Here’s the thing. I’m an alcoholic, with fourteen years of recovery, and in that way, Matthew Perry and I are the same. Addiction is the great equalizer. If you’re rich you can probably hide it a lot longer, as he did, but it does the same stuff to you. It takes over your life.
I lost fifteen years to alcohol addiction. When I say “lost,” I mean time spent at the bar, or drinking in the shower, going to drunk-driving classes, walking / bicycling to the liquor store in subzero temps because I was no longer allowed to drive, hiding from the world with vicious hangovers, getting sewn up or calmed down in emergency rooms — all when I could have been developing as a person. Your social muscles atrophy with alcoholism; more and more you don’t know how to function without being drunk. The time when other people were going to college, learning a trade, starting a job or a family, I was drinking. Those other things happened, but I wasn’t really present for them. I was writing and painting, but mostly I was drinking.
Matthew Perry also took drugs. Copiously. He has said he sometimes took more than 50 Vicodin a day.
Perry has been through a crazy ordeal, physically, nearly dying more than once, being in a coma for two weeks, having multiple stomach surgeries. For decades, he not only drank, but took prescription pills, keeping up to eight doctors at a time so he could always be popping.
(Our access to pain meds is an important component here, but perhaps an issue for another time.)
When I think of Matthew Perry, I don’t think of the actor from “Friends” who had a drug and alcohol problem. I think of an addict, like me. We’re all the same. It doesn’t matter that Perry is worth $120 million and I am worth — on a good day — 120 dollars. It doesn’t matter that we did different kinds of drugs. We’re both addicts, we both drank.
One of my favorite things Perry has said about drinking: It’s like having a best friend who one day turns to you and says, “I am going to kill you now.”
That makes me laugh because it’s so apt. When I started out, drinking was a buddy. Drinking was my wingman at every social event. Drinking gave me courage. But at some point, drinking wanted to torture me to death.
Another thing you hear about alcoholism, and addiction in general: It is out there right now, lifting weights. Getting stronger every day. Coming for you.
Probably the best movie — inadvertently — to ever represent addiction? “The Terminator.” As Reese says to Sarah Connor:
“That Terminator is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!”
To which I would add: Addiction doesn’t care about how much money you have, or how famous you are. You’re not going to get any sort of pass because you have a nice house, or you made a movie, wrote a book, or starred in a hit TV show. To addiction, you will always just be a punk, fixated on your next hit, so that you can escape hell for that little bit longer.
A lot of people right now are wondering whether Matthew Perry relapsed. Whether an autopsy is going to come back showing pills in his stomach, or a what an eventual toxicology report will show in his bloodstream.
I don’t think it matters too much.
Yeah, it would suck if he relapsed. But it wouldn’t be surprising. He was in and out of rehab his whole life. Most addicts are. I say I have 14 years of sobriety, but that doesn’t mean flawless abstention. Recovery is an active process, something you work on every day, and while it is absolutely first and foremost concerned with abstinence, you don’t stop being in recovery because you slip up. Relapses are part of it.
But even if he didn’t relapse, chances are good his addiction still killed him. It happens, but healthy people usually don’t die in their hot tubs. People who’ve had their colon burst, been in a two-week-long coma; people who’ve had their heart stop for five minutes in the past — they might.
At one point, when he was on life support, a doctor told Perry’s family he had a two-percent chance to live. For the final episode of “Friends,” he was too strung out on opioid buprenorphine to feel anything.
Perry has said, “The best thing about me is that if a drug addict or alcoholic comes up to me and says ‘Will you help me?’ I will always say, ‘Yes, I know how to do that.’”
Since I began my recovery, I’ve helped some friends through dark times, even leading to some of them getting sober. But you have to be careful what you say and do in your quest to help others. The thing about addiction — it’s you; you’re always fighting this possibility that you could be full of shit. Because despite how clever it is to say addiction is out there lifting weights, or addiction is your best friend who says he’s going to kill you now, those are just metaphors. There’s no one out there; it’s just you.
What Matthew Perry tells us about addiction, at least what he tells me anyway (and prepare yourself here): it’s a motherfucker.
Perry struggled for three decades. He went to rehab fifteen times. He’s been on hydrocodone and propofol, and he’s worn a colostomy bag because of his blown-up guts. And yet, somehow, he was feeling good about things not too long ago, or at least claiming to feel good. In his memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Very Bad Thing,” he writes:
“I’ve surrendered, but to the winning side, not the losing. I’m no longer mired in an impossible battle with drugs and alcohol. I no longer feel the need to automatically light up a cigarette to go with my morning coffee.”
This makes you want to cheer for him, which is the intention. Maybe he wants to cheer for himself a little bit. But the thing we learn as addicts is that you can never get complacent, you can never say you’ve won.
Perry was still in the battle, as am I.
Michael J McCluskey 