I bought her a ring because I was desperate that she would leave me. I didn’t want to be this injured and alone during Covid.
I was high on 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone when I asked her to marry me.
I had even asked for her family’s blessing. Then I’d proposed, high as a kite. And on one knee. And she knew it, too. And she said yes.
I was in Switzerland at the time, at yet another rehab. This one was at a villa on Lake Geneva with its own butler and chef, the kind of luxurious place where you were guaranteed to not meet anybody else. (Thereby pretty much defeating the purpose of every rehab I had ever heard of.) But what it lacked in fellow sufferers it made up for in the easy availability of drugs, which again, unfortunately, did not differentiate it from other high-priced rehabs. I could make millions if I sued these places, but it would divert more attention to the situation, which I didn’t want to do.
I did my usual trick, complaining about intense stomach pain, when in fact I was OK (it still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up—so it was very uncomfortable—but it wasn’t Pain). So, they’d give me hydrocodone—as much as I could actually feel—which turned out to be 1,800 milligrams a day. To put that in perspective, if you broke your thumb, and had a kind doctor, he or she would probably prescribe you five 0.5-milligram pills.
Not enough to put a dent in this guy.
I was also doing ketamine infusions every day. Ketamine was a very popular street drug in the 1980s. There is a synthetic form of it now, and it’s used for two reasons: to ease pain and help with depression. Has my name written all over it—they might as well have called it “Matty.” Ketamine felt like a giant exhale. They’d bring me into a room, sit me down, put headphones on me so I could listen to music, blindfold me, and put an IV in. That was the hard part—I’m always a little dehydrated because I don’t drink enough water (big surprise), so finding a vein was no fun. I was like a fucking pincushion by the end of it. Into the IV went a smidge of Ativan—which I could actually feel—and then I was on a ketamine drip for an hour. As I lay there in the pitch-dark, listening to Bon Iver, I would disassociate, see things—I’d been in therapy for so long that I wasn’t even freaked-out by this. Oh, there’s a horse over there? Fine—might as well be.… As the music played and the K ran through me, it all became about the ego, and the death of the ego. And I often thought that I was dying during that hour. Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this shit because it was something different, and anything different is good. (Which just so happens to be one of the last lines of Groundhog Day.) Taking K is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel. But the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me.
Back in my room, the butler had laid out more clothes I wouldn’t change into, the chef had prepared yet another healthy meal I wouldn’t touch, and I went back to looking at Lake Geneva a lot, completely fucking high. But not the good kind of high. A loopy drunk feeling that I did not enjoy.
I was also now, somehow, engaged.
At some point, the rehab geniuses decided that to help my stomach “pain,” they’d put some kind of weird medical device in my back, but they’d need to do surgery to insert it. So I stayed up all night, taking 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone ahead of the next day’s surgery. In the operating room they gave me propofol, you know, the drug that killed Michael Jackson. I learned then and there that Michael Jackson didn’t want to be high, he wanted to be out. Zero consciousness. And yet another masterful talent taken from us by this terrible disease.
I was given the shot at 11:00 A.M. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital.
Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack—I didn’t flatline—but nothing had been beating.
If I may be so bold, please pause your reading of this book for five minutes—look at your phone, starting now:
[Insert five minutes of you time]
That’s a long fucking time, right?
I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?
He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs. As I lay there in agony, the following day the head doctor waltzed in, all full of himself and said, “You will get no ketamine here, and if you need to go to a rehab, there is one we can send you to.”
“I’m already in a fucking rehab!” I screamed, and in a rare show of physical anger, I knocked over the table next to me, which was covered in medical supplies. This scared the doctor, and he promptly left the room. I apologized for the mess I had made and got the hell out of there.
(The rehab I was speaking of had already done a rapid detox, but they put me under for the wrong two days—the first two [it should have been days three and four]. By the time I came around, the detox fully hit, and I’d gone from 1,800 milligrams to bupkis. Not much a butler and a chef can do about that.)
Those eight broken ribs were, by the way, much the same injury that the New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees suffered in a game in November 2021 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Brees would break three more the following week and puncture his lung—just to be better than me—but then he missed four games, so I’d argue we’re at least even. Which makes me feel tough.
Right in the middle of all this madness (but prior to the rib thing) I took a meeting with Adam McKay about a big movie called Don’t Look Up. There was no Chandler, that day—I wasn’t on. I couldn’t get it up for that. We just talked for a while, and as I walked out, I said, very calmly, “Well, I’d love to help you in any way I can with this thing.”
Adam said, “I think you just did.”
I got the call the following day that he was hiring me—this would be the biggest movie I’d gotten ever. It promised to be a little calm within the storm. I was to play a Republican journalist and was supposed to have three scenes with Meryl Streep. Yes, that’s right. I got to do a group scene (with Jonah Hill among others) in Boston where the movie was filmed—I was on 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone then, too, but nobody noticed. But with the broken ribs, there was no way I could continue, so I never got to do my scenes with Meryl. It was heartbreaking, but I was in too much pain. God knows how Brees continued to throw a football, but you don’t get to do a scene with Meryl Streep with broken ribs. And I couldn’t smile without it hurting like fuck.
Being in Don’t Look Up didn’t work out because my life was on fire, but I learned an important lesson: I was hirable in something big without putting on a show. In that meeting, Adam and I had just been two men talking. I will treasure that moment, that day, that man. What a good guy. And I sincerely hope our paths cross again (I’ll be sure to check it’s actually him next time).
When it came time to leave Switzerland, I was still on 1,800 milligrams of Oxy every single fucking day. I was told that once back in Los Angeles I’d still be able to get that much—and I needed it, just to stay level. As ever, this was not me getting high; this was purely maintenance, so I didn’t go through agonies. I flew back on a private jet—there was no way I could fly commercial, given that everyone in the world recognized my damn face—and it cost me a cool $175,000 to do so. Back in LA, I went to see my doctor.
“I need eighteen hundred milligrams a day,” I said. No point beating around the bush.
“Oh no,” she said, “we’re not giving you that at all—cancer patients only get a hundred milligrams.” This only upped my gratitude that I didn’t have cancer.
“But the doctor in Switzerland told me that’s what I’d be on when I got home.”
“Oh, they’ll consult,” she said, “but I’m in charge now. Here’s thirty milligrams.”
This would not do. I would get incredibly sick.
There was only one thing for it: that very same night, I booked another $175,000 private jet and flew right back to Switzerland.
“I need you to combine my morning and evening dose.”
“Ich verstehe kein Englisch,” the Swiss nurse said.
This was going to be a problem. My pressing need to change the rules, versus her lack of English. This was all done in some weird German-English game of charades.
I don’t need a pill at six o’clock in the morning. I need it when it’s scary at night. I can’t find the center of the fear—it’s general. Also, I can’t sleep, so there’s a negotiation every single night with myself. My mind races. The ideas come so fast. I get auditory hallucinations, too—I hear voices and conversations and sometimes, I even talk back. Sometimes, too, I’ll think that somebody wants to hand me something, and I put my hand out to get that nothing from no one. Sober or not, this troubled me a bit. On top of everything else, I was crazy? It’s not schizophrenia, just a damn load of voices. The voices, I’m told, do not make me a crazy person. They are called auditory hallucinations and they happen to people all the time.
There is no cure for the voices. Of course there isn’t. Actually, I can think of a cure, it’s called, “being somebody else.”
Either way, I needed those pills as one shot, at night, without saving any for the morning.
“Morning. Evening. Together,” I said, miming eight pills in my hand, not one.
“Nee, keine Ahnung,” she said.
“Tomorrow morning. No pill. Now instead,” I said, extremely slowly.
“Ich habe keine Ahnung, was Sie brauchen.”
You and everyone else—no one knows what I need.
Back in LA one more time, trying to sober up, I think, Wait … how did I get engaged? There are dogs living in my house. How did this happen?
I had asked her parents, begged for her hand while high, and put up with the dogs. That’s how scared I was of being abandoned.