Monica went first; she placed her key on the empty counter. Chandler went next. Then Joey-big laugh as he really shouldn't have even had a key-then Ross, then Rachel, and last of all Phoebe. Now, there were six keys on the countertop, and what do you say after that?
We all stood in one long line. Phoebe said, "I guess this is it," and Joey said, "Yeah," then almost broke the fourth wall by looking out at the audience briefly before saying, "I guess so.…"
But there was no fourth wall to break; there never had been, in fact. We had been in people's bedrooms and living rooms for a decade; in the end, we were an integral part of so many people's lives that what we'd missed was that there had never been a fourth wall to break in the first place. We'd just been six close friends in an apartment that was seemingly way too big, when in fact it was just the size of a TV set in a living room.
And then it was time to leave that apartment one last time. Now, though, there were eight of us-the six main characters, plus Monica and Chandler's twins in a stroller.
Before that final episode, I'd taken Marta Kauffman to one side.
"Nobody else will care about this except me," I said. "So, may I please have the last line?" That's why as we all troop out of the apartment, and Rachel has suggested one last coffee, I got to bring the curtain down on Friends.
"Sure," Chandler said, and then, with perfect timing, for the very last time, "Where?"
I love the look on Schwimmer's face as I deliver that line-it's the perfect mixture of affection and amusement, exactly what the show Friends had always given to the world.
And with that, it was over.
The truth was, we were all ready for Friends to be done. For a start, Jennifer Aniston had decided that she didn't want to do the show anymore, and as we all made decisions as a group, that meant we all had to stop. Jennifer wanted to do movies; I had been doing movies all that time and had The Whole Ten Yards about to come out, which was sure to be a hit (insert donkey's head now), but in any case, even though it had been the greatest job in the world, the stories of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel, and Phoebe had all pretty much played out by 2004. It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had. As a result, mostly by Jenny's design, ten was a shortened season. But all the characters were basically happy by this point, too, and no one wants to watch a bunch of happy people doing happy things-what's funny about that?
It was January 23, 2004. The keys on the counter, a guy who looked a lot like Chandler Bing said, "Where?," "Embryonic Journey" by Jefferson Airplane played, the camera panned to the back of the apartment door, then Ben, our first AD, and very close friend, shouted for the last time, "That's a wrap," and tears sprang from almost everyone's eyes like so many geysers. We had made 237 episodes, including this last one, called, appropriately enough, "The Last One." Aniston was sobbing-after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying. But I felt nothing; I couldn't tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside. (Buprenorphine, for the record, is a detox med, and an excellent one, and is designed to help you stay off other "stronger" opiates-it does not alter you in any way. But, ironically, it's the hardest drug to come off in the entire world. Bupe, or Suboxone, should never be used for more than seven days. Fearing a nasty detox, I had been on it for eight months.)
So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend-also appropriately called Rachel-stage 24 at Warner Bros. in Burbank (a stage that after the show ended would be renamed "The Friends Stage"). We said our various goodbyes, agreeing to see each other soon in the way that people do when they know it's not true, and then we headed out to my car.
I sat in the lot for a moment and thought about the previous ten years. I thought about L.A.X. 2194 and the $22,500 and Craig Bierko; I thought about how I'd been the last one cast, and that trip to Vegas, where we could walk through a packed casino, and no one knew who we were. I thought about all the gags and the double takes, the Murray brothers, and some of my most famous/too-close-to-the-truth lines, like, "Hi, I'm Chandler, I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable," and "Until I was twenty-five, I thought that the only response to 'I love you' was 'Oh, crap!'" and "We swallow our feelings. Even if it means we're unhappy forever," and "Could she be more out of my league?"
I thought about the summer between seasons eight and nine, when I'd spent time in rehab, and People magazine had said on its cover that I was "Happy, Healthy, and HOT!" ("Friends funny guy talks about those dating rumors," the lede read, "the 'final' season, and his battle to get sober. 'It was scary,' he says. 'I didn't want to die.'") I had indeed spent that summer getting sober and playing a lot of tennis. I thought about the first day of season four, after the summer that I had very publicly gone to rehab. At the first table read obviously all eyes were on me. My pal Kevin Bright, one of the shows executive producers, had opened the proceedings by saying, "Anyone want to talk about their summer vacations?" and I took the opportunity to break the ice, saying rather loudly and soberly, "OK! I'll start!" thus releasing all the tension in the room. Everyone erupted in laughter and applause for me for turning my life around and showing up looking good and ready to work. Probably to this day, it was the smartest joke I have ever made.
I thought about how I'd had to beg the producers to let me no longer speak like Chandler for the final few seasons (not to mention getting rid of those sweater vests). That particular cadence-could it be more annoying?-had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I'd explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in season six and then beyond.
I thought about me crying when I asked Monica to marry me.
And me being me, there were negative thoughts, too.
What will become of me now that I no longer have this insanely fun, creative job to go to every day?
Friends had been a safe place, a touchstone of calm for me; it had given me a reason to get out of bed every morning, and it had also given me a reason to take it just a little bit easier the night before. It was the time of our lives. It was like we got some new piece of amazing news every day. Even I knew only a madman (which in many moments I had been nonetheless) would screw up a job like that.
As we drove home that night, along Sunset I pointed out to Rachel a massive billboard promoting The Whole Ten Yards. There I was, fifty feet high, frowning in a dark suit and purple shirt and tie, standing next to Bruce Willis, he dressed in white T-shirt, pinafore, and bunny slippers. WILLIS … PERRY, it read, in six-foot letters, above the tagline: THEY MISSED EACH OTHER. THIS TIME, THEIR AIM IS BETTER. I was a movie star. (You remember what I said about the donkey's head, right?)
My future, even without Friends, looked rosy enough, though. I had a major movie coming out; I'd done two episodes of Ally McBeal and three of The West Wing, so I was developing serious acting chops as well as the comedy stuff (I'd gotten two Emmy nominations for my three The West Wing appearances). I'd also just finished wrapping a TNT movie called The Ron Clark Story, about a real-life small-town teacher who gets a job in one of the toughest schools in Harlem. There wasn't a single joke in the whole thing-it drove me crazy how serious it was-so off camera I created a character called "Ron Dark" who was drunk and who constantly swore in front of the children. Despite that, it was a big hit when it eventually aired in August 2006. I would garner nominations for a SAG award, a Golden Globe, and an Emmy. (I lost all three to Robert Duvall. I couldn't believe it-being beaten out by such a hack.)
But as I've said, The Whole Ten Yards would prove to be a disaster-I'm not sure even my closest family and friends went to see it. In fact, if you looked closely enough, you could see people averting their eyes from the screen at the premiere. I think it actually got a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
And that was the moment Hollywood decided to no longer invite Mr. Perry to be in movies.
I had made arrangements to attend a 12-step meeting the day after the final taping of Friends, with the express intent of starting my new life on the right path. But facing the blank canvas of an empty day was very hard on me. That next morning, I woke up and thought, What the fuck am I going to do now?
What the fuck could I do? I was hooked on Bupe, with no new job in sight. Which was ridiculous, given that I'd just finished making the most beloved sitcom in TV history. On top of that, my relationship with Rachel was getting rocky-the physical distance was an issue, as was the emotional closeness. I was damned if I did, damned when I didn't.
And then I was single once again.
With no ridiculously high paying, dream-come-true kind of job to go to, and no special someone in my life, things slipped fast-in fact, it was like falling off a cliff. The insanity of using other, stronger drugs crept up into my diseased brain once again. It wasn't long before the seemingly impossible happened again. I started drinking and using.
Despite how it may appear, I was never suicidal, thank God-I never actually wanted to die. In fact, in the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept. That's how skewed my thinking had become-I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don't want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion. I can distinctively remember holding pills in my hand and thinking, This could kill me, and taking them anyway.
This is a very fine, and very scary, line. I had reached a point in my drinking and using where I was drinking and using to forget about how much I was drinking and using. And it took an almost lethal amount to accomplish that kind of amnesia.
I was also so lonely that it hurt; I could feel the loneliness in my bones. On the outside, I looked like the luckiest man alive, so there were only a few people I could complain to without being told to shut up, and even then … nothing could fill the hole inside me. At one point I bought yet another new car, the excitement of which lasted about five days. I moved regularly, too-the thrill of a new house with an even better view lasted a bit longer than the Porsche or the Bentley, but not by much. I was also so introspective that a proper give-and-take relationship with a woman was nigh on impossible; I was much better at friends with benefits, so that whoever I was seeing didn't discover that slow, creeping thought that I was irredeemably not enough.
I was lost. There was nowhere to turn. Everywhere I tried to hide, there I was. Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change. I knew something had to change-I wasn't suicidal, but I was dying-but I was too scared to do anything about it.
I was a man in need of a yellow light experience, so I was eternally grateful that it had happened that day in my house, because it gave me a new lease on life. I had been given the gift of sobriety one more time. The only question was: What was I going to do with it? Nothing had worked long-term before. I was going to have to approach everything differently, or I was a goner. And I didn't want to be a goner. Not before I had learned to live, to love. Not before the world made more sense to me.
Had my habit killed me, it would have killed the wrong person. I wasn't fully me yet; I was just parts of me (and not the best parts, either). My new approach to life would have to start with work, because that seemed to be the easiest place to start. Embracing effort was the only hope for me. I built up some sober time, was back on my feet once again. I also had a few friends-with-benefits things going on, but one was starting to slowly morph into something more. Maybe much more. I knew how to do friends with benefits-but this? This I was less clear about. I started to want her to stay past the sex: "Why don't you stick around and we can watch a movie?"
What was I doing? I was breaking all the rules.
She was twenty-three and I was thirty-six when we first met. In fact, I knew she was twenty-three because I'd crashed her twenty-third birthday party. Our subsequent initial make-out session was in the back of a really messy Toyota (to think I'd spent all that money on fancy cars and here I was in the backseat of a tan Corolla). When we were done, I said, "I'm getting out of the car now. Mostly because I'm thirty-six."
So began two years of probably record-breaking amounts of sexual intercourse, with no strings attached, both of us following the friends-with-benefits rules to a tee. We were on the same page. We never went to dinner, we never talked about each other's families. We never discussed what went on in each other's lives regarding other people. Instead, it was texting, and saying things like, "How about Thursday night at seven?"
She was tough at first. I remember an exchange early on where I told her I was wearing a suit and thought I looked pretty good.
"I hate suits," she said.
I broke her out of her toughness, but it took years.
Somewhere it is written in the actor's handbook-actually, it's probably in the book my dad gave me, the one he'd inscribed with "another generation shot to hell"-that you have to try to do new things and stretch yourself. If you have excelled at comedy, then it behooves you to make a direct right turn and become a dramatic actor. So that became the plan. I couldn't retire, and there was only so much time a grown man could spend playing video games. As my friends-with-benefits partner said to me one day, "You live the life of someone who drinks and uses, you just don't drink and use." (She was really smart, too-did I mention that?)
I was at a crossroads. What do you do when you are an actor, and you are rich and famous, but you are not interested in being rich and famous?
Well, you either retire (way too young for that), or you change it up.
I informed my manager and agents that I was now looking only for dramatic work.
I had dabbled in it with good results on The West Wing and Ally McBeal and The Ron Clark Story, so it didn't seem like a crazy move. I auditioned for some serious films, but I didn't get any of them. I shot a few indie movies that tried hard, but that didn't work out, either.
And then, a script came along that was white-hot.
I had never seen so much heat attached to a project-it was magnetic. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Thomas Schlamme, was the follow-up to their little show called The West Wing. Between them they had like fifteen Emmys, so their new project caused a frenzy in the fall of 2005 unlike anything else. I had never seen a project that had so much power behind it before it had even started. NBC and CBS went at it like gladiators to get that thing, with NBC ultimately winning out to the tune of something like $3 million per episode. All that fall, wherever I turned, someone was talking about Studio 7 on the Sunset Strip (its original name). I was in New York finishing up The Ron Clark Story and staying at my favorite hotel in the world, the Greenwich, in Tribeca. I really wanted to read this hot script. Because I was on the East Coast, the script would not get to my hotel until 10:00 P.M., so I waited up.
Aaron and Tommy had changed the way America looked at serialized TV with The West Wing, and I had changed how America spoke English via the cadences of Chandler Bing. Seemed like a potent combination.
By 11:30 P.M. I had read the script and decided to return to network television.
The lead characters were Matt Albie, the head writer of Studio 7 (and a role that apparently Aaron had written with me in mind), and Danny Tripp, his fellow showrunner, to be played by the kind and brilliant Bradley Whitford, both being brought back to save an SNL-like show called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Before a lick of it was filmed, it had "giant, Emmy-winning hit" written all over it. It had Sorkin, Schlamme, and me. What could possibly go wrong?
The first problem was the money. I'd been making a tremendous nut on Friends and realized I'd struggle to get that number again, but even so, the fact that everyone in this ensemble show about a comedy TV program was being asked to accept the same fee.… The conversation went something like this (think of this in Sorkin-speak):
Me: I really want to do this.
Manager: Well, no one does this kind of thing better than Sorkin.
Me: This would be my return to television-it's the way to go.
Manager: The only problem is the offer.
Me: The offer? What is it?
Manager: The offer's what you get per episode.…
Me: I know that. Thank you. I meant, what's the number?
Manager: $50,000 per episode.
Me: I got more than a million per for Friends. Can't we get them up?
Manager: It doesn't look like it. They want this to be a true ensemble show and that is what they are offering everyone.
Me: I can't believe I have to turn down the best television script I have ever read.
My manager, God bless him, didn't give up. He pointed out to the producers that even though Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had indeed been conceived as an ensemble show, as soon as I stepped onstage it was going to be about my character, which is what ended up happening. With that argument in mind, after about six weeks of negotiations, we got them off their ensemble idea. I was to be billed as the star of the show, and we got them up to $175,000. Now, obviously that is an amazing amount of money to be paid a week, but three stages down, LeBlanc was being paid $600,000 a week to do Joey. But in the end, the writing prevailed (every actor is just looking for good material), and I accepted the lowball number (and they hired my good friend Amanda Peet to round out the cast).
We shot the pilot, and I would hold up that pilot up against any pilot I had ever seen-it was that good. There was an energy to it, a crackle that's rare in TV, and fans loved it, too. It opened huge. (All my shows after Friends opened huge and then suddenly they weren't anymore.) The second episode of Studio 60 drew literally half the number of people that the first one did. No one cared about the show. It took me years to figure out why.
There was a fatal flaw to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, one that no amount of good writing or good direction or good acting could fix. On The West Wing, the stakes were as high as you could imagine: a nuclear bomb is pointing at Ohio and the president has to fix that shit? People in Ohio would tune in to a show like that just to find out exactly what might happen if they were invited to kiss their own asses goodbye by an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile.
A very small group of people-myself included-know that for a sector of show business, getting a joke right is a matter of life and death. These are bent, weird people. But people in Canton, Ohio, watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip probably thought, It's just a joke, why doesn't everybody calm down. It's not that big a deal, what is wrong with all of you people? This was not the Monty Python bit about Ernest Scribbler who wrote a joke so funny it killed Nazis. (The Brits are immune to its power because they don't speak German. And the actual German of the killer joke is gibberish, which is also funny.) There might have been a devoted set of viewers in Rock Center or working the door of the Comedy Store on Sunset, but outside of that, the basic premise of the show didn't reach the levels of edge-of-the-seat stakes. Trying to attach The West Wing stakes to a comedy show could never work.
On a granular level, I also found the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip work environment to be frustratingly unlike that of Friends, or even The Whole Nine Yards. Aaron runs a very tight ship-that's just how he likes it-to the point where there was someone on set with a script making sure that if the original reads "he is angry" and I, or someone else, shortened it to "he's angry," we'd have to reshoot the entire scene-it had to be done exactly as written. (I nicknamed the production assistant whose job this was "the Hawk," and honestly, what a horrible gig she had, having to be a hall monitor to a bunch of creative types acting their balls off.) Unfortunately, sometimes a take with a slightly different rendering of the line had been the best take of all, but still, the one that got used was the word-perfect one, not the best one. The Aaron Sorkin as writer / Tommy Schlamme as director system was never really actor centered, therefore it was much more about getting the text right, as though it were Shakespeare-in fact, I heard someone say on set that this was Shakespeare.…
I also had a different view of the creative process generally-I was used to pitching ideas, but Aaron didn't take any of them. I had thoughts, too, about the arc of my character, but they weren't welcomed, either. Problem is, I'm not just a talking head. I have a brain, especially comedically. Aaron Sorkin is a much better writer than I am, but he's not a funnier man than me (he'd kindly once said that Friends was his favorite show). And in Studio 60 I was playing a comedy writer. I thought I had some funny ideas, but Aaron said no to 100 percent of them. That's his right, and it's no knock on him that he likes to run his set this way. It just left me disappointed. (Tom Hanks told me that Aaron did the same thing to him.)
I guess I was lucky that I'd already learned that being on a successful TV show didn't fix anything. The show went out the gate gangbusters, the pilot pulling down a cool thirteen million viewers and a fourteen share, which was solid. The reviews were positive, too. Variety said, "It's hard not to root for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a series that weds Aaron Sorkin's crackling dialogue and willingness to tackle big ideas with a beyond-stellar cast." The Chicago Tribune went even further, writing me a love letter and saying, "Studio 60 is not just good, it has the potential to be a small-screen classic."
But the problem remained: it was trying to be a serious show about comedy and quality TV, as though those two things were as important as world politics. I recently read one really instructive critique about Studio 60 on the Onion's A.V. Club vertical. Its author, Nathan Rabin, writing a few years after the show aired, agrees that the pilot was a special piece of work.
Along with much of the public, I watched the pilot in a state of feverish anticipation the night it premièred on September 18, 2006. When it was over, I couldn't wait to see what happened next. I re-watched it … a few months back [and] what I responded to most profoundly upon a repeat viewing was its infinite sense of possibility. Studio 60 could go anywhere. It could do anything. And it could do it with one of the most remarkable casts in recent memory. The pilot for Studio 60 still radiates potential the second time around, even if it was doomed to go fatally unrealized.
But Rabin also points out that the show probably took itself too seriously, given that it was supposed to be about gags, and that Sorkin's absolute control of the show left no room for anyone else to breathe.
The show's arrogance extended to having Aaron Sorkin write every episode. Oh sure, staff writers got a "story by" credit here and there, but Studio 60 was ultimately a one-man show. Sorkin's voice dominates.… [I]n its own strange way, Studio 60 endures, albeit as an epic, intermittently fascinating folly rather than as a magnum opus.
Times had changed, too. We aired right as TV had morphed into a different animal. "Appointment TV," like Friends or The West Wing, was starting to crater. People were recording shows to watch later; this affected ratings, which in turn became the story of the show, rather than the show itself, which was otherwise really good.
By the end of the first-and only-season, viewers had tended to agree with Rabin's assessment, and we were down to four million viewers, and only 5 percent of TVs were tuned into the show.
We were doomed.
I wasn't devastated by the lack of success-as I said, I knew a hit TV show couldn't fill my soul. And in any case, something else was filling my soul.
The two years of "friends with benefits" had morphed into love. This was one of the most "normal" periods of my life. True, occasionally I'd have little slips, taking maybe two OxyContin, from which I'd then have to detox for six days. But the relationship had deepened to the point where there was now a question I urgently needed to ask her.
One day, I said, "I think we should stop kidding ourselves. We love each other," and she didn't disagree. I did love her, very much. That said, our intimacy issues were being sidestepped by the fact that we were both really into working. My fear of her leaving was still deeply in place, too, and who knows, perhaps she was scared of me leaving her.
Nevertheless, the moment came.
For Christmas, I'd paid a huge amount of money for an artist to paint the two of us. Our relationship had always been both sex- and text-driven-at least for the first four years-and I had found out from my business manager that we'd exchanged something like 1,780 texts. So, in the painting, on the bottom right corner, there she was, sitting down with a copy of The New York Times and some bottled water, as she always did, and on the bottom left there was me, wearing a long sleeve T-shirt with another T-shirt on top of it, which is what I'd always wear, holding a Red Bull and reading a Sports Illustrated … and all the while, we were texting each other. The artist had added 1,780 hearts, one for each text, and had smushed them all together to make one huge heart. I had never spent that kind of money on a gift before. I loved this woman, and I wanted her to know it.
My plan was to give her the painting and then ask the question. You know the one; I don't need to tell you how it goes, especially because … well, I never asked it. I gave her the present, and she was really moved by it, saying, "Matty, my little heart-what you're doing to my little heart."
And it was time. All I had to do was say, "Honey, I love you. Will you…" But I didn't say it. All my fears reared up like a snake, the snake I feared was coming to get me the year before I'd met her, the time when I'd seen God but managed to learn not enough from him.
I immediately went into Chandler fucking Bing mode.
"Hey, hey, hey!" I said, to her consternation, "look at this!" bringing that fucking Chandler cadence back one last time.
I had missed the moment. Maybe she'd been expecting it, who knows. I'd been seconds away; seconds, and a lifetime. I often think if I'd asked, now we'd have two kids and a house with no view, who knows-I wouldn't need the view, because I'd have her to look at; the kids, too. Instead, I'm some schmuck who's alone in his house at fifty-three, looking down at an unquiet ocean.…
So I didn't ask. I was too scared, or broken, or bent. I had remained completely faithful to her the whole time, including the last two years, two years in which for some reason I didn't want to have sex with her anymore, two years in which no amount of couples therapy could explain why I'd never asked the damn question, and why now I just looked on her as my best friend only. My buddy; my best buddy. And I didn't want to lose my best buddy, so I tried to make it work for two years.
I didn't know then why the sex ended. I do now: the creeping, nagging, endless fear that if we got any closer, she would see the real me, and leave me. You see, I didn't very much like the real me at the time. Also, our age difference had become a problem. She always wanted to go out and do things, and I craved more of a settled life.
But there were other issues, too. Her single-mindedness about her career careened into my approach to life at the time, which was to do next to nothing. I was basically retired-I genuinely didn't think I'd ever work again. I was insanely rich, so I just played video games and hung out with myself.
But now, what was I going to do?
Embrace effort.
I created a TV show called Mr. Sunshine. I subscribe to the theory that life is about the journey, not the destination, and what I had not done yet was write, so this was my opening effort. Writing a network show about what you actually want to write about is almost impossible. There are so many cooks in the kitchen-executives and other writers who all insist on having a say-that the reality of your actual vision making it to the screen is something reserved only for people like Sorkin.
Mr. Sunshine is centered around my character, a guy called Ben Donovan, who runs a sports arena in San Diego; Allison Janney plays my boss. One of Ben's key foibles is his inability to be available to women.… And I even managed to put in an inside joke after the credits: my production company was called "Anhedonia Productions," and the ad card we crafted featured a cartoon of me sighing with boredom on a roller coaster. But despite putting my entire self into it, the show was a big success for about two weeks before everyone in the world decided they didn't want to watch it.
But it had been a very valuable experience, because I'd learned how to make a TV show from scratch. It's one of those things that maybe looks easy but is actually incredibly difficult-sort of like math, or having a real conversation with another human being. I had fun, but it was a marathon endeavor, and I'm a sprinter. And it quickly turned a sober, video game-playing rich man into an incredibly busy man, which was not a great idea. In fact, the show quickly became the priority over my sobriety, and as a result I relapsed, yet again.
I would Go On to make another show (no, no, that's what it was called, Go On) about a sports talk radio host trying to get over the death of his wife. NBC was pushing and pushing that one-they even aired it during the Olympics, and sixteen million people watched the premiere. But a comedy about grief therapy? The finale, in April 2013, pulled in a scant two and a half million. Yet again, a show I was leading opened huge and got canceled. With nothing to do, and no one to love, I relapsed one more time. I caught this one quickly, though, and checked into a rehab in Utah.
It was there that I met a counselor named Burton, a Yoda-like figure who told me that I liked the drama and the chaos of my addiction problem. "What are you talking about?" I said. "It's ruined my life. It's robbed me of every good thing I have ever had."
I was really pissed off.
But what if he was right?