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For all of the sufferers out there.
You know who you are.
The best way out is always through.
—Robert Frost
You’ve just got to see me through another day.
—James Taylor
Foreword
by Lisa Kudrow
“How’s Matthew Perry doing?”
Over the many years since I was first asked, it’s been, at different times, the most asked question for me. I understand why so many people asked it: they love Matthew and they want him to be OK. Me too. But I always bristled at that question from the press, because I couldn’t say what I wanted to say: “It’s his story to tell and I’m not authorized to tell it really, am I!” I would have wanted to go on to say, “This is very intimate personal stuff and if you don’t hear it from the actual person, it is, to my mind, gossip and I’m not gossiping about Matthew with you.” Knowing that no response at all could do more damage, sometimes I would just say, “I think he’s doing well.” At least that doesn’t amplify the spotlight and maybe he can have a fraction of privacy as he tries to deal with this disease. But truly, I wasn’t exactly sure how Matthew was doing. As he’ll tell you in this book, he was keeping it a secret. And it took some time for him to feel comfortable enough to tell us some of what he was going through. Over those years I didn’t really try to intervene or confront him, because the little I knew about addiction was that his sobriety was out of my hands. And yet, I would have periods of wondering if I was wrong for not doing more, doing something. But I did come to understand that this disease relentlessly fed itself and was determined to keep going.
So, I just focused on Matthew, who could make me laugh so hard every day, and once a week, laugh so hard I cried and couldn’t breathe. He was there, Matthew Perry, who is whip smart … charming, sweet, sensitive, very reasonable and rational. That guy, with everything he was battling, was still there. The same Matthew who, from the beginning, could lift us all up during a grueling night shoot for the opening titles inside that fountain. “Can’t
remember a time I wasn’t in a fountain!” “What are we, wet?” “Can’t remember a time I wasn’t wet … I!” (Matthew is the reason we are all laughing in that fountain in the opening titles.)
After Friends I didn’t see Matthew every day, and I couldn’t even hazard a guess with regard to his well-being.
This book is the first time I’m hearing what living with and surviving his addiction really was. Matthew has told me some things, but not in this kind of detail. He’s now letting us into Matthew’s head and heart in honest and very exposed detail. And finally, no one needs to ask me or anyone else how Matthew’s doing. He’s letting you know himself.
He has survived impossible odds, but I had no idea how many times he almost didn’t make it. I’m glad you’re here, Matty. Good for you. I love you.
— Lisa
Prologue
Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty.
And I should be dead.
If you like, you can consider what you’re about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond.
It’s Day Seven of the Pain. And by Pain, I don’t mean a stubbed toe or
“The Whole Ten Yards.” I capitalize Pain because this was the worst Pain I’ve ever experienced—it was the Platonic Ideal of Pain, the exemplar. I’ve heard people claim that the worst pain is childbirth: well, this was the worst pain imaginable, but without the joy of a newborn in my arms at the end of it.
And it may have been Day Seven of Pain, but it was also Day Ten of No Movement. If you catch my drift. I hadn’t taken a shit in ten days—there, there’s the drift. Something was wrong, very wrong. This was not a dull, throbbing pain, like a headache; it wasn’t even a piercing, stabbing pain, like the pancreatitis I’d had when I was thirty. This was a different kind of Pain.
Like my body was going to burst. Like my insides were trying to force their way out. This was the no-fucking-around kind of Pain.
And the sounds. My God, the sounds. Ordinarily, I’m a pretty quiet, keep-to-myself kinda fella. But on this night, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Some nights, when the wind is right and the cars are all parked up for the night, you can hear the horrific sounds of coyotes ripping apart something that is howling in the Hollywood Hills. At first it sounds like children laughing way, way off in the distance, until you realize it’s not that—it’s the foothills of death. But the worst part, of course, is when the howling stops, because you know whatever has been attacked is now dead. This is hell.
And yes, there is a hell. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been
there; it exists; end of discussion.
On this night the animal was me. I was still screaming, fighting tooth and nail for survival. Silence meant the end. Little did I know how close I was to the end.
At the time, I was living in a sober living house in Southern California.
This was no surprise—I have lived half my life in one form or another of treatment center or sober living house. Which is fine when you are twenty-four years old, less fine when you are forty-two years old. Now I was forty-nine, still struggling to get this monkey off my back.
By this point, I knew more about drug addiction and alcoholism than any of the coaches and most of the doctors I encountered at these facilities.
Unfortunately, such self-knowledge avails you nothing. If the golden ticket to sobriety involved hard work and learned information, this beast would be nothing but a faint unpleasant memory. To simply stay alive, I had turned myself into a professional patient. Let’s not sugarcoat it. At forty-nine, I was still afraid to be alone. Left alone, my crazy brain (crazy only in this area by the way) would find some excuse to do the unthinkable: drink and drugs. In the face of decades of my life having been ruined by doing this, I’m terrified of doing it again. I have no fear of talking in front of twenty thousand people, but put me alone on my couch in front of a TV for the night and I get scared.
And that fear is of my own mind; fear of my own thoughts; fear that my mind will urge me to turn to drugs, as it has so many times before. My mind is out to kill me, and I know it. I am constantly filled with a lurking loneliness, a yearning, clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me. But I had had all that the outside had to offer!
Julia Roberts is my girlfriend. It doesn’t matter, you have to drink.
I just bought my dream house—it looks out across the whole city! Can’t enjoy that without a drug dealer.
I’m making a million dollars a week—I win right? Would you like to drink? Why yes, I would. Thank you very much.
I’d had it all. But it was all a trick. Nothing was going to fix this. It would be years before I even grasped the notion of a solution. Please don’t misunderstand me. All of those things—Julia and the dream house and $1
million a week—were wonderful, and I will be eternally grateful for all of
them. I am one of the luckiest men on the planet. And boy did I have fun.
They just weren’t the answer. If I had to do it all over again, would I still audition for Friends? You bet your ass I would. Would I drink again? You bet your ass I would. If I didn’t have alcohol to soothe my nerves and help me have fun, I would have leaped off a tall building sometime in my twenties. My grandfather, the wonderful Alton L. Perry, grew up around an alcoholic father, and as a result, he never touched a drink in his life, all ninety-six long, wonderful years of it.
I am not my grandfather.
I don’t write all this so anyone will feel sorry for me—I write these words because they are true. I write them because someone else may be confused by the fact that they know they should stop drinking—like me, they have all the information, and they understand the consequences—but they still can’t stop drinking. You are not alone, my brothers and sisters. (In the dictionary under the word “addict,” there should be a picture of me looking around, very confused.)
In the sober living house in Southern California, I had a view of West LA and two queen-size beds. The other bed was occupied by my assistant/best friend, Erin, a lesbian whose friendship I treasure because it brings me the joy of female companionship without the romantic tension that has seemed to ruin my friendships with straight women (not to mention, we can talk about hot women together). I’d met her two years earlier, at another rehab where she had been working at the time. I didn’t get sober back then, but I saw how wonderful she was in every way and promptly stole her from that sober living rehab and made her my assistant, and she became my best friend. She, too, understood the nature of addiction and would come to know my struggles better than any doctor I’d ever seen.
Despite the comfort that Erin brought to the situation, I still spent many sleepless nights in Southern California. Sleep is a real issue for me, especially when I’m in one of these places. That said, I don’t think I have ever slept for more than four hours straight in my entire life. It didn’t help that we’d been watching nothing but prison documentaries—and I was coming off so much Xanax my brain had fried to the point where I was convinced that I was an actual prisoner and that this sober living place was an actual jail. I have a
shrink whose mantra is “reality is an acquired taste”—well, I’d lost both my taste and smell of reality by that point; I had Covid of the understanding; I was completely delusional.
There was nothing delusional about the Pain, though; in fact, it hurt so much I’d stopped smoking, which if you knew how much I smoked, you’d think was a pretty sure sign that something very serious was wrong. One employee of the place, whose name badge might as well have read NURSE
FUCKFACE, suggested taking an Epsom salts bath to alleviate the “discomfort.”
You wouldn’t take a Band-Aid to a road traffic accident; you don’t put someone in this much Pain in water filled with his own sauce. But reality is an acquired taste, remember, so I actually took the actual Epsom salts bath.
There I sat, naked, in Pain, howling like a dog being ripped to shreds by coyotes. Erin heard me—hell, people in San Diego heard me. She appeared at the bathroom door, and looking down upon my sad, naked form as I writhed in Pain, she said very simply, “Do you want to go to the hospital?”
If Erin thought it was hospital-bad, it was hospital-bad. Plus, she’d already noticed I wasn’t smoking.
“That sounds like a pretty damn good idea to me,” I said in between howls.
Somehow, Erin helped me out of the bath and dried me off. I started to put my clothes back on just as a counselor—alerted by the slaughter of a dog on the premises, presumably—appeared at the door.
“I’m taking him to the hospital,” Erin said.
Catherine, the counselor, just so happened to be a beautiful blond woman to whom I had apparently proposed upon my arrival, so she probably wasn’t my biggest fan. (Not kidding, I had been so out of it when we’d arrived that I’d asked her to marry me, and then promptly fell down a flight of stairs.)
“This is just drug-seeking behavior,” Catherine said to Erin as I continued to dress. “He’s going to ask for drugs at the hospital.”
Well, this marriage is off, I thought.
By now, the howls had alerted others that there were probably canine entrails all over the bathroom floor, or someone was in real Pain. The head counselor, Charles—think: male model father, homeless mother—joined Catherine in the doorway, to help her block our expected exit.
Block our exit? What were we, twelve years old?
“He’s our patient,” Catherine said. “You don’t have the right to take him.”
“I know Matty,” Erin insisted. “He isn’t trying to get drugs.”
Then Erin turned to me.
“Do you need to go to the hospital, Matty?” I nodded and screamed some more.
“I’m taking him,” Erin said.
Somehow, we pushed past Catherine and Charles, out of the building, and into the parking lot. I say “somehow” not because Catherine and Charles made much of a fuss about stopping us, but because every time my feet touched the ground, the Pain became even more excruciating.
Up there in the sky, looking down on me with scorn, caring not for my agony, was a bright yellow ball.
What’s that? I thought through paroxysms of agony. Oh, the sun. Right …
I didn’t get out much.
“We have a high-profile coming in with severe abdominal pain,” Erin said into her phone as she unlocked the car. Cars are stupid, ordinary things until you’re not allowed to drive them, at which point they become magical boxes of freedom and signs of a successful previous life. Erin lifted me into the passenger seat, and I lay back. My belly was twisting in agony.
Erin got into the driver’s seat, turned to me, and said, “Do you want to get there fast, or do you want me to avoid the LA potholes?”
“Just get there, woman!” I managed to say.
By now Charles and Catherine had decided to up their efforts to thwart us and now stood in front of the car, blocking us. Charles’s hands were lifted, his palms facing us, as if to say “No!”, as though three thousand pounds of motor vehicle could be stopped with the force of his mitts.
To make matters worse, Erin couldn’t start the car. The ignition works via telling the car to start out loud, because you know, I was on Friends.
Catherine and the Palms didn’t budge. Once she worked out how to start the damn thing, there was only one thing more to do: Erin revved the engine, put the car in drive, and slewed it up and onto a curb—the jolt of that action alone, ricocheting through my entire body, almost caused me to die right
there. With two wheels up on the curb, she revved past Catherine and Charles, and out into the street. They just watched us drive away, though by this point I would have urged her to drive over them—not being able to stop screaming is a very scary state to be in.
If I were just doing this to get drugs, then I deserved an Oscar.
“Are you aiming for the speed bumps? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of struggling right now. Slow down,” I begged her. We both had tears streaming down our faces.
“I have to go fast,” Erin said, her brown, compassionate eyes looking over at me with concern and fear. “We have to get you there now.”
It was right about here that I drifted out of consciousness. (A 10 on the pain scale is losing consciousness by the way.)
[Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.]
The closest hospital to the sober house was Saint John’s. Since Erin had had the foresight to call ahead and alert them that a VIP was en route, someone met us at the emergency valet. Not knowing at the time how crazy sick I was when she made the call, Erin had been concerned about my privacy. But the folks at the hospital could see something was seriously wrong and rushed me to a treatment room. There, I was heard to say, “Erin, why are there Ping-Pong balls on the couch?”
There was no couch, and there were no Ping-Pong balls—I was just completely delusional. (I wasn’t aware that pain could make you delusional, but there ya go.) Then the Dilaudid (my personal favorite drug in the whole wide world) hit my brain, and I briefly regained consciousness.
I was told I needed surgery immediately, and suddenly, every nurse in California descended upon my room. One of them turned to Erin and said,
“Get ready to run!” Erin was ready, and we all ran—well, they ran, I was merely wheeled at high speed to a procedure room. Erin was asked to leave mere seconds after I’d said to her “Please don’t leave,” then I closed my eyes, and they wouldn’t open again for two weeks.
Yes, that’s right: a coma, ladies and gentlemen! (And those motherfuckers back at the sober living had tried to block the car?) The first thing that happened when I lapsed into a coma was that I
aspirated into my breathing tube, vomiting ten days’ worth of toxic shit directly into my lungs. My lungs didn’t like that very much—enter instant pneumonia—and that is when my colon exploded. Let me repeat for those in the back: my colon exploded! I’ve been accused of being full of shit before, but this time I really was.
I’m glad I wasn’t there for that.
It was almost certain at that point that I was going to die. Was I unlucky that my colon exploded? Or was I lucky that it happened in the one room in Southern California where they could do something about it? Either way, I now faced a seven-hour surgery, which at least gave all my loved ones ample time to race to the hospital. As they arrived they were each told, “Matthew has a two percent chance of making it through the night.”
Everyone was so wrought with emotion that some crumbled to the ground right there in the hospital lobby. I will have to live out the rest of my days knowing that my mother and others heard those words.
With me in surgery for at least seven hours and convinced that the hospital would do everything they could, my family and friends went home for the night for some rest while my subconscious fought for my life amid the knives and tubes and blood.
Spoiler alert: I did make it through the night. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet. My family and friends were told that the only thing that could keep me alive short-term was an ECMO machine (ECMO stands for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation). The ECMO move is often called a Hail Mary—for a start, four patients that week at UCLA had been put on ECMO, and they all died.
Making things even tougher, Saint John’s didn’t have an ECMO machine.
Cedars-Sinai was called—they took one look at my chart and apparently said,
“Matthew Perry is not dying in our hospital.”
Thanks, guys.
UCLA wasn’t willing to take me, either—for the same reason? Who can say?—but at least they were willing to send an ECMO machine and a team. I was hooked up to it for several hours, and it seemed to work! I was then transferred to UCLA itself, in an ambulance filled with doctors and nurses.
(There was no way I’d survive a fifteen-minute car ride, especially the way
Erin drives.)
At UCLA I was taken to the heart and lung ICU unit; it would become my home for the next six weeks. I was still in a coma, but honestly, I probably loved it. I was lying down, all snuggled up, and they were pumping drugs into me—what’s better than that?
I’m told that during my coma I was never left alone, not once—there was always a member of my family or a friend in the room with me. They held candlelight vigils; did prayer circles. Love was all around me.
Eventually, my eyes magically opened.
[Back to the memoir.]
The first thing I saw was my mother.
“What’s going on?” I managed to croak. “Where the hell am I?”
The last thing I remembered was being in a car with Erin.
“Your colon exploded,” Mom said.
With that information, I did what any comic actor might do: I rolled my eyes and went back to sleep.
I have been told that when someone is really sick a kind of disconnect happens—a “God only gives you what you can handle” kind of thing kicks in. As for me, well, in the weeks after I came out of my coma, I refused to let anyone tell me exactly what had happened. I was too afraid that it was my fault; that I had done this to myself. So instead of talking about it, I did the one thing I felt I could do—during the days in the hospital I threw myself into family, spending hours with my beautiful sisters, Emily, Maria, and Madeline, who were funny and caring and there. At night it was Erin; I was never alone once again.
Eventually, one day Maria—the hub of the Perry family (my mom is the hub of the Morrison side)—decided it was time for me to be told what had happened. There I was, attached to fifty wires like a robot, bedridden, as Maria filled me in. My very fears had been true: I had done this; this was my fault.
I cried—oh boy did I cry. Maria did her best to be wonderfully consoling, but there was no consoling this. I had all but killed myself. I had never been a
partier—taking all of those drugs (and it was a lot of drugs) was just a futile attempt to feel better. Trust me to take trying to feel better to death’s door.
And yet here I was, still alive. Why? Why had I been spared?
Things got worse before they got better, though.
Every morning, it seemed, some doctor would come into my room and give me more bad news. If something could go wrong, it did. I already had a colostomy bag—at least I’d been told it was reversible, thank God—but now, apparently, there was a fistula, a hole in one of my intestines. Problem was, they couldn’t find it. To help, I was given another bag that oozed out gross green stuff, but that new bag meant that I was not allowed to eat or drink anything until they found it. They searched daily for that fistula while I got thirstier and thirstier. I was literally begging for a Diet Coke and having dreams of being chased by a gigantic can of Diet Sprite. After a full month—
a month!—they finally found the fistula in some tube behind my colon. I thought, Hey fellas, if you are looking for a hole in my intestine, why not start looking behind the thing that FUCKING EXPLODED. Now that they’d found the hole, they could start to fix it, and I could learn to walk again.
I knew I was on my way back when I realized that I was attracted to the therapist they assigned to me. True, I had a giant scar on my stomach, but I was never a guy who took his shirt off much anyway. I’m no Matthew McConaughey, and when I take a shower, I just make sure to keep my eyes closed.
As I’ve said, for the entire stay in those hospitals, I was never left alone—not once. So, there is light in the darkness. It’s there—you just have to look hard enough for it.
After five very long months, I was released. I was told that within the year, everything inside me would heal enough so that I could have a second surgery to reverse the colostomy bag. But for now, we packed my overnight bags—five months of overnights—and we made the voyage home.
Also, I’m Batman.
1
The View
Nobody ever thinks that something really bad is going to happen to them.
Until it does. And nobody comes back from a perforated bowel, aspiration pneumonia, and an ECMO machine. Until somebody did.
Me.
I’m writing this in a rented house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (My real house is down the street being renovated—they say it will take six months, so I figure about a year.) A pair of red-tailed hawks is circling below me in the canyon that brings the Palisades down to the water. It’s a gorgeous spring day in Los Angeles. This morning I’ve been busy hanging art on my walls (or rather, having them hung—I’m not so handy). I’ve really gotten into art in the last few years, and if you look close enough, you’ll find the odd Banksy or two. I’m also working on the second draft of a screenplay. There’s fresh Diet Coke in my glass, and a full pack of Marlboros in my pocket. Sometimes, these things are enough.
Sometimes.
I keep coming back to this singular, inescapable fact: I am alive. Given the odds, those three words are more miraculous than you might imagine; to me, they have an odd, shiny quality, like rocks brought back from a distant planet. No one can quite believe it. It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.
What those three words— I am alive—fill me with, above all else, is a sense of profound gratitude. When you’ve been as close to the celestial as I have, you don’t really have a choice about gratitude: it sits on your living room table like a coffee-table book—you barely notice it, but it’s there. Yet
stalking that gratitude, buried deep somewhere in the faint-anise-distant-licorice of the Diet Coke, and filling my lungs like every drag of every cigarette, there’s a nagging agony.
I can’t help but ask myself the overwhelming question: Why? Why am I alive? I have a hint to the answer, but it is not fully formed yet. It’s in the vicinity of helping people, I know that, but I don’t know how. The best thing about me, bar none, is that if a fellow alcoholic comes up to me and asks me if I can help them stop drinking, I can say yes, and actually follow up and do it. I can help a desperate man get sober. The answer to “Why am I alive?” I believe lives somewhere in there. After all, it’s the only thing I’ve found that truly feels good. It is undeniable that there is God there.
But, you see, I can’t say yes to that question “Why?” when I feel like I’m not enough. You can’t give away something you do not have. And most of the time I have these nagging thoughts: I’m not enough, I don’t matter, I am too needy. These thoughts make me uncomfortable. I need love, but I don’t trust it. If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me. And I can’t have that. I won’t survive that. Not anymore. It will turn me into a speck of dust and annihilate me.
So, I will leave you first. I will fabricate in my mind that something went wrong with you, and I’ll believe it. And I’ll leave. But something can’t go wrong with all of them, Matso. What’s the common denominator here?
And now these scars on my stomach. These broken love affairs. Leaving Rachel. (No not that one. The real Rachel. The ex-girlfriend of my dreams, Rachel.) They haunt me as I lie awake at 4:00 A.M., in my house with a view in the Pacific Palisades. I’m fifty-two. It’s not that cute anymore.
Every house I have ever lived in has had a view. That’s the most important thing to me.
When I was five years old, I was sent on a plane from Montreal, Canada, where I lived with my mom, to Los Angeles, California, where I would visit my dad. I was what is called “an unaccompanied minor” (at one point that was the title of this book). It was typical to send kids on planes back then—
flying children alone at that age was just something people did. It wasn’t right, but they did it. For maybe a millisecond I thought it would be an exciting adventure, and then I realized I was too young to be alone and this was all completely terrifying (and bullshit). One of you guys come pick me up! I was five. Is everybody crazy?
The hundreds of thousands of dollars that particular choice cost me in therapy? May I get that back, please?
You do get all sorts of perks when you’re an unaccompanied minor on a plane, including a little sign around your neck that reads UNACCOMPANIED
MINOR, plus early boarding, kids-only lounges, snacks up the ying-yang, someone to escort you to the plane … maybe it should have been amazing (later, as a famous person, I got all these perks and more at airports, but every time it reminded me of that first flight, so I hated them). The flight attendants were supposed to look after me, but they were busy serving champagne in coach (that’s what they did in the anything-goes 1970s). The two-drink maximum had recently been done away with, so that flight felt like six hours in Sodom and Gomorrah. The stench of alcohol was everywhere; the guy next to me must have had ten old-fashioneds. (I stopped counting after a couple of hours.) I couldn’t imagine why any adult would want to drink the same drink over and over again … Ah, innocence.
I pushed the little service button when I dared, which wasn’t very often.
The flight attendants—in their 1970s hot boots and short-shorts—would come by, ruffle my hair, move on.
I was fucking terrified. I tried to read my Highlights magazine, but every time the plane hit a bump in the air, I knew I was about to die. I had no one to tell me it was OK, no one to look at for reassurance. My feet didn’t even reach the floor. I was too scared to recline the seat and take a nap, so I just stayed awake, waiting for the next bump, wondering over and over what it would be like to fall thirty-five thousand feet.
I didn’t fall, at least not literally. Eventually, the plane began its descent into the beautiful California evening. I could see the lights twinkling, streets splayed out like a great sparkling magic carpet, wide swathes of dark I now know were the hills, the city pulsing up toward me as I plastered my little face against the plane window, and I so vividly remember thinking that those
lights, and all that beauty, meant I was about to have a parent.
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.
So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is. That’s where love is. That’s where home is. I can feel safe now.
Why was that little kid on a plane on his own? Maybe fly to Canada and fucking pick him up? That’s a question I often wonder about but would never dare to ask.
I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud.
For a long time, I tried to find just about anything and anybody to blame for the mess I kept finding myself in.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in hospitals. Being in hospitals makes even the best of us self-pitying, and I’ve made a solid effort at self-pity. Each time I lie there, I find myself thinking back through the life I’ve lived, turning each moment of it this way and that, like a confusing find in an archaeological dig, trying to find some reason why I had spent so much of my life in discomfort and emotional pain. I always understood where the real pain was coming from. (I always knew why I was in physical pain at that moment—the answer was, well, you can’t drink that much, asshole.) For a start, I wanted to blame my loving, well-intentioned parents …
loving, well-intentioned, and mesmerizingly attractive, to boot.
Let’s go back to Friday, January 28, 1966—the scene is Waterloo Lutheran University in Ontario.
We’re at the fifth annual Miss Canadian University Snow Queen
competition (“judged on the basis of intelligence, participation in student activities, and personality as well as beauty”). Those Canadians spared no expense to herald a new Miss CUSQ; there was to be a “torchlight parade with floats, bands, and the contestants,” plus “an outdoor cookout and a hockey game.”
The list of candidates for the honor includes one Suzanne Langford—she is listed eleventh and is representing the University of Toronto. Against her have been arrayed beauties with wonderful names like Ruth Shaver from British Columbia; Martha Quail from Ottawa; and even Helen “Chickie”
Fuhrer from McGill, who had presumably added the “Chickie” to mitigate the fact that her surname was a tad unfortunate just two decades after the end of World War II.
But these young women were no match for the beautiful Miss Langford.
That freezing January evening the previous year’s winner helped crown the fifth Miss Canadian University Snow Queen, and with that honor came a sash and responsibility: it would now be Miss Langford’s job to hand over the crown the following year.
The 1967 pageant was similarly exciting. This year there was to be a concert given by the Serendipity Singers, a Mamas & the Papas–kind of combo that just so happened to have a lead singer called John Bennett Perry.
The Serendipity Singers were an anomaly even in the folk-heavy 1960s—
their biggest (and only) hit, “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down,” was a rehash of a British nursery rhyme—even so, it reached number 2 on the adult contemporary list and number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964. But that achievement is somewhat put in perspective because the Beatles famously had the entire top five—“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,”
“She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please, Please Me.” No matter to John Perry—he was on the road, a working musician, getting to sing for his supper, and what could be better than having a gig at the Miss Canadian University Snow Queen gala in Ontario? There he was, happily singing, “Now this crooked little man and his crooked cat and mouse They all live together in a crooked little house,” and flirting across the microphone with last year’s Miss Canadian University Snow Queen, Suzanne Langford.
At the time, they were two of the most gorgeous people on the face of the
planet—you should see pictures of them from their wedding—you just want to punch them in their perfectly chiseled faces. They didn’t stand a chance.
When two people look that good, they just kind of morph into each other.
The flirting turned to dancing once John had finished his gig, and that might have been it, but for the massive, kismetic snowstorm that stalked the evening and made it impossible for the Serendipity Singers to get out of town. So, that’s the meet-cute: a folk singer and a beauty queen fall in love in a snowbound Canadian town in 1967 … best-looking man on the planet meets best-looking woman on the planet. Everyone there might as well have gone home.
John Perry stayed the night, and Suzanne Langford was quite happy about that, and about a year or two later, after the montage scene, she found herself in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where John is from, and cells inside her were dividing and conquering. Maybe something in those simple divisions went awry, who can say—all I know is, addiction is an illness, and like my parents when they met, I didn’t stand a fucking chance.
I was born on August 19, 1969, a Tuesday, the son of John Bennett Perry, late of the Serendipity Singers, and Suzanne Marie Langford, former Miss Canadian University Snow Queen. There was a huge storm the night I arrived (of course there was); everyone was playing Monopoly waiting for me to show up (of course they were). I hit the planet about a month after the Moon landing, and one day after Woodstock ended—so, somewhere between the cosmic perfection of the heavenly orbs, and all that shit down at Yasgur’s Farm, I became life, interrupting someone’s chance to build hotels on Boardwalk.
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. (Hmm, that sounds like my fucking twenties.)
I’m told I took phenobarbital during the second month of my life, between the ages of thirty and sixty days. This is an important time in a baby’s development, especially when it comes to sleeping. (Fifty years later I still don’t sleep well.) Once the barbiturate was on board, I would just conk out. Apparently, I’d be crying, and the drug would hit, and I’d be knocked out, and this would cause my father to erupt in laughter. He wasn’t being cruel; stoned babies are funny. There are baby pictures of me where you can tell I’m just completely fucking zonked, nodding like an addict at the age of seven weeks. Which is oddly appropriate for a kid born the day after Woodstock ended, I guess.
I was being needy; I was not the cute smiling baby everyone was hoping for. I’ll just take this and shut the fuck up.
Ironically, barbiturates and I have had a very strange relationship over the years. People would be surprised to know that I have mostly been sober since 2001. Save for about sixty or seventy little mishaps over the years. When these mishaps occur, if you want to be sober, which I always did, you’d be given drugs to help you along. What drug may you ask? You guessed it: phenobarbital! Barbiturates calm you down as you try to get whatever other shit is in your body out; and hey, I started taking one at thirty days old, so as an adult I just picked up where I’d left off. When I’m at a detox, I’m very needy and uncomfortable—I’m sorry to say I’m the worst patient in the world.
Detox is hell. Detox is lying in bed, watching the seconds go by, knowing you are nowhere near feeling OK. When I’m detoxing, I feel like I’m dying. I feel like it will never end. My insides feel like they’re trying to crawl out of my body. I’m shaking and sweating. I’m like that baby who wasn’t given a pill to make things better. I have chosen to be high for four hours, knowing I will then be in that hell for seven days. (I told you this part of me is crazy, right?) Sometimes, I have to be locked away for months at a time to break the cycle.
When I’m detoxing, “OK” is a distant memory, or something reserved for Hallmark cards. I’m begging like a child for any kind of medication that will help ease the symptoms—a grown man, who’s probably looking great on the cover of People magazine at the very same time, begging for relief. I would give up everything—every car, every house, all the money—just to make it stop. And when detox is finally over, you are bathed in relief, swearing up and down that you will never put yourself through that again. Until there you are, three weeks later, in the exact same position.
It’s crazy. I am crazy.
And like a baby, I didn’t want to do the inner work for so long, because if a pill fixes it, well, that’s easier, and that’s what I was taught.
At around my ninth month, my parents decided they had had enough of each other, stashed me in a car seat in Williamstown, and the three of us drove to the Canadian border—five and a half hours. I can just imagine the silence of that car ride. I didn’t speak, of course, and the two former lovebirds in the front seat had had enough of speaking to each other. And yet that silence must have been deafening. Some major shit was going down. There, with the distant thrum of the Niagara Falls as a background, my maternal grandfather, the military-like Warren Langford, was waiting for us, pacing up and down, stamping his feet to keep warm, or in frustration, or both. He would have been waving at us as we pulled up, as though we were about to embark upon some kind of fun holiday. I would have been excited to see him, and then, I’m told, my father took me out of my car seat, handed me into my grandfather’s arms, and, with that, he quietly abandoned me and my mother.
Then, Mom finally got out of our car, too, and me, my mom, and my grandfather stood listening to the waters hurtle over the Falls and roar into the Niagara Gorge and watched as my father sped away, forever.
Seems we weren’t going to live together in a crooked little house after all.
I imagine back then I was told that my dad would be back soon.
“Don’t worry,” my mother probably said, “he’s just going to work, Matso. He’ll be back.”
“Come on, little chum,” Grampa would have said, “let’s go find Nanny.
She’s made your favorite pasghetti for dinner.”
Every parent goes off to work, and they always come back. That’s just the normal way of things. Nothing to worry about. Nothing that would bring on a colic attack, or addiction, or a lifetime of feeling abandoned, or that I am not enough, or a continual lack of comfort, or a desperate need for love, or that I didn’t matter.
My father sped away, to God knows where. He didn’t come back from work that first day, nor the second. I was hoping he’d be home after three days, then maybe a week, then maybe a month, but after about six weeks I stopped hoping. I was too young to understand where California was, or what it meant to “go follow his dream of being an actor”—what the fuck is an actor? And where the fuck is my dad?
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.