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.
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.
Even when I lost an entire part of my body. Actually, especially then.
The phenobarbital behind me—its use faded like my memories of my father’s face—I plowed on full pelt into a toddlerdom, in which I learned how to be the caretaker.
When I was in kindergarten, some dim kid slammed a door on my hand, and after the great sparkles of blood stopped arcing up like fireworks, someone thought to bandage me up and take me to a hospital. There, it was clear that I had, in fact, lost the tip of my middle finger. My mother was called and sped to the hospital. She came in sobbing (understandably) and found me standing on a gurney with a gigantic bandage on my hand. Before she could say anything, I said, “You don’t need to cry—I didn’t cry.”
There I was already: the performer, the people pleaser. (Who knows—maybe I even did a little Chandler Bing startle/double take just to land the line?) Even at three years old I’d learned I’d have to be the man of the house. I had to take care of my mother, even though my finger had just been sliced off. I guess I’d learned at thirty days old that if I cried, I’d get knocked out, so I’d better not cry; or I knew I had to make sure everyone, including my mother, felt safe and OK. Or, it was just a fucking great line for a toddler to say standing on a gurney like a boss.
Not that much has changed. If you give me all the OxyContin I can stand, I feel taken care of, and when I’m taken care of, I can take care of everybody else and look outward and be in service to someone. But without medication, I feel that I would just sputter away into a sea of nothingness. This, of course, means it’s pretty much impossible for me to be useful or in service in a relationship because I’m just trying to get to the next minute, next hour, next day. There’s that dis-ease of fear, the licorice of inadequacy. A touch of this drug, a drop of that, and I’m OK—you don’t taste anything when you’re jacked on something.
(Back in the days before 9/11, kids—and curious adults—on planes would sometimes be allowed up to the cockpit to have a look around. When I was about nine, I was brought up to a cockpit and was so mesmerized by the buttons and the captain and all the information that I forgot to put my hand in my pocket for the first time in six years. I had never showed it; I was so ashamed. But the pilot noticed and said, “Let me see your hand.” Embarrassed, I showed him. Then he said, “Here, take a look.” Turns out he was missing the exact same bit of his middle finger on his right hand.
Here was this man, captaining the whole plane and knowing what all of those buttons did and understanding all the captivating information in a cockpit, and he was missing part of his finger, too. From that day forth—I’m fifty-two now—I have never hidden my hand. In fact, because I smoked for so many years a lot of people noticed it and people would ask what happened.
At least I got an OK gag out of the incident with the door—for years I’d complain that since losing half a finger I could tell people only to “Fuck y—”.
I may not have had a father, or all ten fingers, but what I did have was a fast mind and a fast mouth, even then. Combine that with a mother who was very busy, and important, and who also had a fast mind and mouth … well, there were times I was happy to lecture my mother about her lack of attention, and let’s just say it didn’t go that well. It’s important to note here that I could never get enough attention—no matter what she did, it was never enough. And let’s not forget that she was doing the work of two people, while dear old dad was busy wrestling with his own demons and desires in LA.
Suzanne Perry (she kept Dad’s name professionally) was basically Allison Janney from The West Wing—a spinmeister. She was the press secretary for Pierre Trudeau, who was then the Canadian prime minister and a general gallivanter. (The Toronto Star captioned a picture of the two of them this way: “Press aide Suzanne Perry works for one of Canada’s best-known men—Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—but she is quickly becoming a celebrity herself; simply by appearing at his side.”) Imagine that: you’re a celebrity merely by standing next to Pierre Trudeau. He was the suave, socially connected PM who had once dated Barbra Streisand, Kim Cattrall, Margot Kidder … his ambassador to DC once grouched that he’d invited not one but three separate girlfriends to a dinner, so there was a lot of spinning needed for a man so enamored of women. My mom’s job therefore meant that she was away at work a lot—and I was left to compete with the ongoing concerns of a major Western democracy and its charismatic, swordsman leader if I wanted a little attention. (I believe the phrase at the time was “latchkey kid”—a bland term for being left fucking alone.) Accordingly, I learned to be funny (pratfalls, quick one-liners, you know the drill) because I had to be—my mother was stressed by her stressful job, and already highly emotional (and abandoned), and me being funny tended to calm her down enough that she would cook some food, sit down at the dinner table with me, and hear me out, after I heard her out, of course. But I’m not blaming her for working—someone had to bring home the bacon. It just meant I spent a great deal of time alone. (I would tell people I was a lonely child, having misheard the phrase “only child.”)
So, I was a kid with a fast mind and an even faster mouth, but as said, she, too, had a fast mind and a fast mouth (I wonder where I got it from). We argued a lot, and I always had to have the last word. One time, I was having an argument with her in a stairwell, and she made me feel the most rage I’ve ever felt in my life. (I was twelve years old, and you can’t hit your mother, so the rage turned inward—just like when I was an adult, at least I had the decency to turn into an alcoholic and an addict and not blame other people.)
I’ve always been abandoned. So much so that I used to ask my grandmother, when a plane went over our house in Ottawa, “Is my mother on that plane?” because I was always worried that she would disappear, just as my father had (she never did). My mother is beautiful; she was a star in every room she entered. And she’s certainly the reason I’m funny.
With Dad off in California, Mom, being beautiful and smart and charismatic and the star in every room she entered, would date guys, and they’d date her right back, and sure enough, I’d turn every one of those men into my dad. Once again, when a plane went over our house, I’d ask my grandmother, “Is that [Michael] [Bill] [John] [insert name of Mom’s latest beau] flying away?” I was continually losing my father; I was continually being dropped at the border. The roar of the Niagara River was forever in my ears, and not even a dose of phenobarbital could make it mute. My grandmother would coo at me, crack me open a can of Diet Coke, that faint-anise and distant-licorice filling my taste buds with loss.
As for my real dad, he would call every Sunday, which was nice. After his stint with the Serendipity Singers, he morphed his performing skills into acting, first in New York, then in Hollywood. Though he was what they sometimes call a journeyman, he was working pretty steadily and would eventually become the Old Spice guy. I saw his face more often on TV or in magazines than I did in reality. (Perhaps that’s why I became an actor.) “What kind of man whistles the Old Spice tune? He’s my daddy!” goes the voiceover from one 1986 ad as a little blond boy with a bowl cut puts his arms around my actual father’s neck. “My practically perfect husband,” the smiling blond wife intones, and though it’s sort of a joke, it was never very funny to me. “You can count on him, he’s a friend.…”
Then, when enough time had passed that it was unseemly, I had a sign that read UNACCOMPANIED MINOR tied around my neck and I was taken to the airport so I could be sent to Los Angeles. Whenever I’d visit him there, I’d realize over again each time that my dad was charismatic, funny, charming, hyperhandsome.
He was perfect, and even at that age, I liked things I could not have.
Bottom line, though, was: my dad was my hero. In fact, he was my superhero: whenever we would go for walks, I would say “you be Superman and I’ll be Batman.” (A smart psychologist might say we played roles instead of Dad and Matthew, because our actual roles were too confusing to me. But I couldn’t possibly comment on that.)
Back in Canada once again, the image of his face and the smell of his apartment would fade over the months. Then, it would be my birthday once again, and my mother would do what she could to make up for the fact that my dad wasn’t there, and when the too-big cake appeared, covered in many dripping candles, each and every year I’d wish for one thing: in my head I’d whisper, I want my parents to get back together. Maybe if my home life had been more stable, or if my dad had been around, or if he hadn’t been Superman, or if I hadn’t had a fast mind and mouth, or if Pierre Trudeau … I wouldn’t be so damn uncomfortable all the time.
I’d be happy. And Diet Coke would be delicious instead of just necessary.
Without the proper medicine, for my entire life I was uncomfortable all the time and w-a-a-a-ay screwed up about love. To quote the great Randy Newman, “It takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m somebody else.” I guess I wasn’t the only one.
“Hi, is Suzanne there?”
“Yes, can I tell my mom who’s calling?”
“It’s Pierre…”
When the phone rang, Mom and I had been in the middle of the best day together. We had played games all day long—we even tried to play Monopoly, but it’s hard when there’s just two of you—and then as night fell, we found Annie Hall on our little TV and laughed our asses off at Woody Allen’s house under the roller coaster. (I didn’t get the sex and relationship jokes, but even at eight years old I could understand the comedy of sneezing away $2,000 worth of some kind of white powder.)
That is my absolute favorite childhood memory—sitting with my mom and watching that movie. But now the prime minister of Canada was calling, so I was about to lose my mom again. As she took the call I heard her turn on her professional, spinmeister-y voice; the voice of a different person, of Suzanne Perry in fact, not my mom.
I turned the TV off and went to bed. I tucked myself in, and without the need of barbiturates—yet—I uneasily slept till early light illuminated my Ottawa bedroom window.
I remember around this time seeing my mother in the kitchen crying, and I thought, Why doesn’t she just drink? I have no idea how I got the notion that an alcoholic drink would stop crying. I certainly hadn’t had a drink by eight (I’d wait another six years!), but somehow the culture all around me had taught me that drinking equaled laughing and having fun, and a much-needed escape from pain. Mom was crying, so why didn’t she just drink? Then she’d be drunk and not feel as much, right?
Maybe she was crying because we moved all the time—Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto—though I spent most of my childhood in Ottawa. I spent a lot of time alone; there would be nannies, but they never lasted that long, so I just added them to the list of people who abandoned me.… I just went on being funny, quick, smart-mouthed, just to survive.
By standing next to Pierre Trudeau and looking beautiful, my mother became an instant celebrity, so much so that she was offered the position of anchoring the national news for Global Television, in Toronto.
What an opportunity—this was a job she could not pass up. She was pretty good at it, too, until one day when they were promoting a beauty pageant. My mother said, “I’m sure we’ll all be glued to that one.” It was a funny line—and kind of surreal coming from a beauty pageant winner—but she was fired that night.
I hadn’t been happy with the move to Toronto—for starters, I hadn’t even been included in the decision. And for the entrée, I would never see my friends again. My mother was also nine months pregnant—by then she had married Canada AM host Keith Morrison—yes, him, the one with the hair on NBC’s Dateline. I had even been picked to give my mother away at the wedding. This was an odd choice—figuratively and literally.
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 changed. The fast mouth appeared, and no one would ever get near my heart. No one.
I was ten years old.
By seventh grade, we were back in Ottawa, where we belonged. I was beginning to see the power of making people laugh. At Ashbury College, my all-boys secondary school in Ottawa, in between being the class cutup I somehow managed to land the role of Rackham, “the fastest gun in the West,” in a play called The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch, put on by the school’s drama teacher, Greg Simpson. It was a big part, and I just loved it—making people laugh felt like everything. The ripple that turns into a wave, all those parents pretending to be interested in their kids’ exploits until—wham!—that Perry kid actually made people laugh. (Of all the drugs, that one is still the most effective, at least when it comes to giving me joy.) Being the star of The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch was especially important because it gave me something to excel in.
I deeply cared what strangers thought of me—still do—in fact, it’s one of the key threads in my life. I remember begging my mom to paint the backyard blue so people flying in planes overhead, looking down at our yard, would think we had a swimming pool. Maybe there was some unaccompanied minor up there who could look down and be comforted by it.
Even though I was now a big brother, I was also the bad kid. One year I went through all the closets before Christmas to see what my presents were; I was also stealing money, smoking more and more, and getting worse and worse grades. At one point the teachers put my desk facing the wall at the back of the classroom because I talked so much and spent all my time trying to make people laugh. One teacher, Dr. Webb, said, “If you don’t change the way you are, you’ll never amount to anything.” (Should I admit that when I got the cover of People magazine I had a copy of it sent to Dr. Webb with a note that read, “I guess you were wrong”? Nah, that would be crass.)
I did.
Making up for my shitty grades was the fact that I was the lead in every play and a nationally ranked tennis player.
My grandfather started teaching me how to play tennis when I was four, and by the time I was eight I knew I could beat him—but I waited until I was ten. I would play for eight to ten hours every day, and spend hours hitting at a backboard, too, pretending I was Jimmy Connors. I would play games and sets, every shot of mine Connors, every return of the backboard John McEnroe. I hit the ball ahead of my body, I would sweep with my strings, I’d put the racket behind me, as though I was placing it in a backpack. I figured it was only a matter of time before I’d be walking out at Wimbledon, nodding sweetly and modestly at the adoring fans, limbering up before going to five sets against McEnroe, waiting patiently while he berated some stuffy British umpire, before nailing a cross-court, backhand passing shot to win the tournament. Then I’d kiss the golden trophy and sip a glass of Robinsons Barley Water, a drink so far from Dr Pepper I would actually love it. Surely, I’d get my mother’s attention then.
(The 1982 Wimbledon final, where Jimmy Connors narrowly beat heavily favored John McEnroe, was my favorite match of all time. Jimmy graced the cover of Sports Illustrated after his victory, and it’s framed and has hung on my wall to this day. I was him, or he was me—either way, on that day, both of us won.)
For actual matches in the real world, I played at Rockcliffe Lawn Tennis Club in Ottawa. You had to wear all whites at the club. At one point, there was a sign out front of the club that read WHITES ONLY until somebody thought that might give the wrong impression. (The sign was quickly changed to WHITE DRESS ONLY and everyone moved on.) There were eight courts, mostly peopled by seniors, and I would spend all day waiting in the clubhouse in case somebody didn’t show up and a fourth was needed and I could step in. The older folks loved me because I could get to every ball, but I also had a crazy temper. I’d throw my racket and swear and get all pissed off, and if I was losing badly, I would start sobbing. This usually preceded me coming back to win—I’d be one set down; 5–1 down; love–40 down, sobbing, and then I’d come back to win in three. All along I’d be crying but also thinking, I’m gonna win; I know I’m gonna win. Winning wasn’t as necessary to others.
By fourteen, I was nationally ranked in Canada … but that was also the year something else started.
I had my first drink when I was fourteen. I held off as long as I could.
At this point I was hanging out a lot with two brothers, Chris and Brian Murray. Somehow, since third grade we’d developed a way of talking that went, “Could it be any hotter?” or “Could the teacher be any meaner?” or “Could we be more in detention?”—a cadence you might recognize if you’re a fan of Friends, or if you’ve noticed how America has been talking for the past couple of decades or so. (I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that Chandler Bing transformed the way America spoke.) For the record: that transformation came directly from Matthew Perry, Chris Murray, and Brian Murray fucking around in Canada in the 1980s. Only I got rich off of it, though. Fortunately, Chris and Brian have never busted me for that and are still my dear, hilarious friends.
One night, the three of us were hanging out in my backyard. No one was home; up above, the sun shone through the clouds, none of us knowing that something extremely significant was about to transpire. I was lying in the grass and mud of Canada, and I didn’t know anything.
Could I be more unaware?
We decided to drink. I forget whose idea it was, and none of us knew what we were getting ourselves into. We had a six-pack of Budweiser and a bottle of white wine called Andrès Baby Duck. I took the wine and the Murrays took the beer. All this took place in the wide open, by the way—we were just in my backyard. My parents weren’t home—big surprise there—and off we went.
Within fifteen minutes, all the alcohol was gone. The Murrays were puking around me, and I just lay in the grass, and something happened to me. That thing that makes me bodily and mentally different from my fellows occurred. I was lying back in the grass and the mud, looking at the moon, surrounded by fresh Murray puke, and I realized that for the first time in my life, nothing bothered me. The world made sense; it wasn’t bent and crazy. I was complete, at peace. I had never been happier than in that moment. This is the answer, I thought; this is what I’ve been missing. This must be how normal people feel all the time. I don’t have any problems. It is all gone. I don’t need attention. I am taken care of, I am fine.
I was in bliss. I had no problems for those three hours. I wasn’t abandoned; I wasn’t fighting with my mom; I wasn’t doing lousy in school; I wasn’t wondering what life was about, and my place in it. It took away everything.
Knowing what I know now about the progressive nature of the disease of addiction, it’s amazing to me I didn’t drink the next night, and the next night, too, but I didn’t—I waited, and the scourge of alcoholism hadn’t gripped me yet. So that first night didn’t lead to regular drinking, but it probably sowed the seed.
The key to the problem, I would come to understand, was this: I lacked both spiritual guidelines, and an ability to enjoy anything. But at the same time, I was also an excitement addict. This is such a toxic combination I can’t even.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but if I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is “anhedonia,” a word and feeling I would spend millions in therapy and treatment centers to discover and understand. Maybe that’s why I won tennis matches only when I was a set down and within points of losing. Maybe that’s why I did everything I did. Anhedonia, by the way, was the original working title of my favorite movie, the one my mother and I had enjoyed together, Annie Hall. Woody gets it. Woody gets me.
Things at home just got worse and worse. My mom had a wonderful new family with Keith. Emily arrived, and she was blond and cute as a button. And just like Caitlin, I loved her instantly. However, I was so often on the outside looking in, still that kid up in the clouds on a flight to somewhere else, unaccompanied. Mom and I were fighting all the time; tennis was the only place I was happy, and even then, I was angry, or sobbing, even when I won. What was a fella to do?
Enter, my father. I wanted to know him. It was time for a big geographic.
Yup, Los Angeles, and my father, and a new life were calling, but I was fifteen, and leaving would rupture my home life and my mom’s heart. But she didn’t ask me if it was OK to marry Keith and move to Toronto and have two kids.… And in Canada I was angry, and sobbing, and drinking, and me and my mom were fighting, and I wasn’t a full part of the family, and I sucked at school, and who knew if I was going to have to move soon anyway, and on and on and on. And damn it, a kid wants to know his father.
I decided to go. My parents had discussed it and wondered if LA would be better for my tennis career anyway. (Little did I know that in Southern California the best I’d be would be a solid club player, the standard being so much higher in a place where you can play 365 days a year, as opposed to Canada, where you’re lucky if you get a couple of months before the permafrost shows up.) But even with that idea, me deciding to go caused a great rift in the fabric of my family.
The night before I made the trip, I was in the basement of our house, where I slept that night only, and it would turn out to be one of the worst nights of my life. Up in the main house, hell was brewing; there was the banging of doors, and hissed conversations, and occasional shouts, and pacing, and one of the kids was crying, and no one could stop it. My grandparents would periodically come down and yell at me; upstairs, my mother was screaming, crying, and then all the kids were crying, and my grandparents were yelling, and the kids were yelling, and I was down there, mute, abandoned, determined, terrified, unaccompanied, and scared. These three very powerful adults would come down to tell me over and over that I was breaking their hearts by leaving. But I had no choice; things had gotten so bad. I was a broken human being.
Broken? Bent.
Early next morning, in what must have been a very difficult drive for her, my mother was kind enough to take me to the airport and watch me fly away from her for the rest of her life. How I had the courage to actually make this voyage is beyond me. I still question whether or not it was the right thing to do.
Still an unaccompanied minor—but a pro by now—I flew to LA to get to know my father. I was so terrified that even the hoopla of Hollywood might not to be able to soothe me. But soon I would see the lights of the city and have a parent once more.