Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 399

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir," by Matthew Perry.

Matthew is the reason we are all laughing in that fountain in the opening titles. (Lisa Kudrow)

Not having a parent on that flight is one of the many things that led to a lifelong feeling of abandonment.… If I’d been enough, they wouldn’t have left me unaccompanied, right? Isn’t that how all this was supposed to work? The other kids had parents with them. I had a sign and a magazine.

I came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid—my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to be to understand that giving phenobarbital to a baby who just entered his second month of breathing God’s air is, at best, an interesting approach to pediatric medicine. But it wasn’t that rare in the 1960s to slip the parents of a colicky child a major barbiturate. Some older doctors swore by it—and by it, I mean, “prescribing a major barbiturate for a child that’s barely born who won’t stop crying.” 

I want to be very clear on this point. I do NOT blame my parents for this. Your child is crying all the time, clearly something is wrong, the doctor prescribes a drug, he’s not the only doctor who thinks it’s a good idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. 

There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addictive barbiturate. 

I was noisy and needy, and it was answered with a pill.

My dad, who later in life became a wonderful father, was leaving his baby alone with a twenty-one-year-old woman who he knew was way too young to parent a child on her own. My mother is wonderful, and emotional, and she was just too young. She, like me, had been abandoned, too, right there in the parking lot of the border crossing between the United States and Canada. My mother had gotten pregnant with me when she was twenty years old, and by the time she was twenty-one, and a new mother, she was single. If I’d had a baby at twenty-one, I would have tried to drink it. She did her best, and that says a lot about her, but still, she simply wasn’t ready for the responsibility, and I wasn’t ready to deal with anything, being just born n’all. 

Mom and I were both abandoned, in fact, before we’d even gotten to know each other. 

With Dad gone, I quickly understood that I had a role to play at home. My job was to entertain, to cajole, to delight, to make others laugh, to soothe, to please, to be the Fool to the entire court.

But soon I had a beautiful sister! Caitlin was as cute as could be, and I loved her instantly. But there was now a family growing up around me, a family I didn’t really feel a part of. It was around this time that I made the conscious choice to say, Fuck it—it’s every man for himself. That’s when the bad behavior started—I got shitty grades, I started smoking, I beat up Pierre’s son (an eventual prime minister himself) Justin Trudeau. (I decided to end my argument with him when he was put in charge of an entire army.) I made the choice to live in my head and not in my heart. It was safer in my head—you couldn’t be broken there, not yet anyway.

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.

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.

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.