Chapter 3: He Scares Me So

There was an expansive back patio yard, complete with a hot tub. There he sat, lolled back on the lip of the expensive bath with stream jets, looking as though he hadn't a care in the world. He appeared content. Secure. Happy. The worst that could be said was that age had come for him fiercely, perhaps more than any of the others, and thanks in no small part to the substances that had, for decades, been given free reign to ravage his body.

Suddenly, the tranquility of the golden October afternoon was pierced as the form of the aging ex-superstar began to jerk. He slipped, deeper into the pool, his body twitching uncontrollably, thrashing mildly as he began to submerge dangerously beneath the softly lapping ripples of the hot tub.

Observing the scene was akin to watching a horror movie as merely a passive audience member. And yet, based on the emerging facts, it appeared all too based on true events, all too real. She wanted to run to him, leap into the pool and drag him up and out herself, but she for some reason was rooted to the spot and couldn't move.

Matty, Noooooooo…..!

Courteney cried out as she jerked awake with a start, her breath choking, wheezing, gasping, as if she herself had been the one who was drowning in that godforsaken pool. She thrashed about, for a fraction of a second not discerning where she was, and barely discerning that wherever she was, it was not in whatever nightmare she'd been in that had felt all too real.

Was that what his death had been like? His body going into convulsions until he was pulled under, unable to surface? Had he been terrified? Surely. He had died, and he had been all alone….!

Curling into a ball where she had fallen asleep on her living room couch, Courteney let a sob burst free. She stuck her head between her knees, trying to regain air with which to breathe. The air that her Matty had been denied in his final, agonizing moments, if the initial police reports were to be believed.

Aside from her mournful weeping, the mansion was silent and still. A chill was in the early November air, too chilly even for Southern California at this time of the year. Perhaps this was a harbinger of the bitter winter that was to come.

Standing shakily, Courteney took a harrowed breath and groped about for a throw blanket, drawing the wool around herself. She turned on the couch-side light, desperate for a little bit of illumination to drive back the darkness that surrounded her and also consumed her mind, leaving her in agony. She attempted to get the hideous visions her subconscious had foisted upon her out of her head, but to little avail.

A booming clap of thunder suddenly rolled across the Hollywood Hills just outside; it was as if the gods themselves were admonishing her for showing such weakness. Silly girl, the storm seemed to say. All the fame and money in the world, and yet who has the power? We do. We can take whoever we want, whenever we want, whoever you love and there is nothing you can do about it.

Goosebumps bumping up along her skin, Courteney slapped in a frenzied state for the remote. TV. She'd just watch some TV to take her mind off things, and maybe she could…. fall back to sleep. …. Maybe.

The first channel that winked to life featured a news report all about Matthew and his legacy. The entertainment conglomerates had been speaking of practically nothing else for the past several days. Wincing, Courteney desperately tabbed into the streaming platforms.

She pulled up HBO Max, and the familiar two-note tone took her directly into her daughter's account.

Coco's Continued Watching tab was quite full. Courteney found her eyes going immediately to the thumbnail icon with the legendary Friends logo, about three or four clicks from the left. She couldn't bear to tab over, not even to see what episode her daughter might be on. At the moment, Courteney doubted if and when she would ever have the strength to ever watch the series again, even a small binge of an episode or two.

More recent along Coco's Continued Watching queue were those films she had been watching for her theatre class: the Pirates of Penzance adaptation from earlier. Also appearing was the NBC telecast of Jesus Christ Superstar from some years back. Courteney wondered what exactly her daughter was studying or expected to know for her upcoming exams in this course. She herself hadn't taken that many theatre courses at George Washington before leaving school – she'd been too focused on her architecture major, then modeling and finally her career once she'd dropped out before completing her degree.

Courteney tabbed over to the Superstar thumbnail and pressed Play, not caring that the line at the bottom clearly indicated the viewing wasn't complete. She had always been a John Legend and Sara Bareilles fan.

The telecast resumed right at the opening to a song, if the rising musical scales were anything to go by. Sara Bareilles, as Mary Magdalene, stood over a slumbering John Legend as Jesus Christ, and began to sing:

I….. don't know how to love him…. What to do, how to move him… I've been changed – yes, really changed… In these past few days, when I…. see myself…. I seem like someone else….

Courteney groped for the couch and weakly sat down, the song and the anguished emotion within it stirring a visceral response in her broken heart, her very soul now torn asunder.

I don't know how to take this…. I don't see why he moves me. He's a man – he's just a man! And I've had so many…. men before…. in very many ways…. He's just one more. …. Should I bring him down? Should I scream and shout? Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out? I never thought I'd come to this! What's it all about?...

Courteney had, even in the best of times, never quite known what to do about Matthew Perry. She identified with the depth of these words now. How to love him, indeed? Back during that magical run, she had never been sure – none of them had been sure. How do you love someone with an addiction? How do you love someone as they stumbled through a world that had never been designed for them or that had no real healing in place for what ailed them? It had been a journey of introspection for all of the Friends just to arrive at a place of understanding that addiction, when perceived as a series of bad choices, was not only unjustly too simple a prism through which to view such a phenomenon…. It was also wrong. Indeed, addiction was more like an illness that couldn't be helped, largely no different than any other affliction that had the power to strike down man. How does anyone, on the outside looking in, begin to comprehend that, for the addict, his plight involves a mind whose sole mission is to take out its master? In his magnum opus of a book, Matty had spoken of what it felt like, to be hunted by his own brain. A brain that in many ways had been designed, almost from the very start, to kill him. To turn against its owner. What must it have been like, to be inside Matthew Perry's head, a head so brilliant, yet a head that had also been leading him almost involuntarily down a path its master knew was dangerous and had tried to fight against that danger, often fruitlessly. Resistance was largely futile. Matty had always been a man who yearned to lead more with his heart than with his head, but his own neurological pathways had held other insidious ideas. Addiction had had Matthew Perry's head in its sights, its finger on the trigger, and it hadn't let up on the scope until it had taken the kill shot. Had this disaster, therefore, been fated in the stars from the first? How could she, Jenny, LeBlanc or any of the others, have had any hope of competing with a maddening, beautiful mind that had gone rogue?

Don't you think it's rather funny?... I should be in this position? I'm the one…. who's always been….. so calm, so cool…. No lover's fool – running every show…. He scares me so…..

FLASHBACK

Courteney waited in nervous anticipation in the hotel ballroom set, where Chandler and Monica were to be wed. The climax of the series itself was going to be filmed today, come hell or high water, and oddly enough she was nervous. Perhaps she was sinking too much into character – there was such a thing as being too immersed in the world of the play. Legend had it that Patti LuPone, once upon a time, had become so invested in her Broadway role playing Eva Peron in Evita that she had eventually deluded herself into believing she was Eva Peron.

Courteney dropped her Monica façade, shedding it like a second skin, if only briefly so she could remind herself that this wedding, while looking like a fairytale in its production value alone, wasn't real. Not like her church nuptials a mere two years prior. This ceremony was just for the cameras, just for TV. Pretend….

Hopefully, her groom wouldn't be, and by that Courteney hoped that he would be actually, physically here and alive. Marta, Kevin and Crane had given her and the others assurances: he was coming in today. He'd be here. The crew had a plan. They had been working in tandem with the sober living facility in Marina del Rey for weeks. These detox and rehab technicians knew what they were doing.

Courteney paced in her wedding dress fretfully, looking every bit the picture of a bride with pre-wedding jitters. Yet her concern was not about getting down the aisle. It was about getting the man who was to be her… fake husband to the fake church not just on time, but alive.

Jenny, Lisa and the boys came inching up to her, approaching her cautiously. They all looked as nervous as Courteney felt.

"He's gonna be here, honey…." Jen murmured.

Courteney chuckled tightly, the nerves bleeding through her laugh. "He'd better not leave me standing at the altar – it's not in the script, and I'm pretty sure millions of Americans would riot in protest!"

"Hey, hey – these detox guys are professionals," Schwimmer tried to assure them all. "They're the best! Come on, they're not…. laying down on the job…."

"ALL RIGHT, PEOPLE! LOOK ALIVE! WE GOT CHANDLER COMING IN!" a crew member hollered across the set.

The other five Friends turned and glanced towards the doors to the soundstage. They opened, backlit by the sharp glare of sunlight and then a silhouette appeared.

And then he came in.

The others all gasped as one.

Matty was flanked on all sides by serious, even grave, men in scrubs. The posse all but hovered, limbs on edge, as if bracing for one wrong move that would allow this tense energy in their bodies to explode into action. The group, Matty at their center, marched into the soundstage. The man of the hour himself was quickly hustled towards his co-stars, on his way to get into costume and make-up.

Matt LeBlanc hissed. "Jesus, they're guarding him like he's a flight risk criminal! Or a Secret Service protectee!" Courteney couldn't help but agree with her co-star's assessment, and her heart broke at how anyone could think Matty was dangerous. No, not her Matthew. He wasn't violent, never. He wasn't even bad for the toxins that he had put into his body. He was just sick.

Next to the pretend bride, Jennifer Aniston was frowning hard. She marched right up to Matthew, freezing him with a look of stone. Cool frustration oozed from her.

"I'm mad at you!" she blasted, saying her piece.

Courteney felt her skin chill at the absolutely dead look Matty sent back to her best girlfriend. "Honey, if you knew what I've been through, you wouldn't be."

Jennifer folded her arms petulantly and twisted away; she might have stamped her foot, were her demeanor any more irked and childish. But then she uttered something between a sob and a growl and she hugged him fiercely.

"You get your ass into costume!" she snarled, tears choking her voice.

Matty sent the others a look of amusement, but it didn't reach his eyes. "She sounds like my mother." His gaze lingered on Courteney, looking breathtaking in her gown, the longest. She smiled at him weakly, the relief seeping from her, though it did not succeed in washing away entirely the disconcertment she still felt.

He looked so thin – too thin. So tired and so sick…. Courteney watched as Matthew was hustled back into the make-up chair.

Close to an hour later, they were hitting their marks, Matty in a tux standing opposite his onscreen bride. When the director called ACTION, it was as though a switch flipped in him, and suddenly it was Chandler who was present, happiness was abruptly radiating from him, sparkling in his piercing blue eyes and in his smile, as Courteney walked down the aisle towards him.

His resiliency, his abilities, even in the depths of a literal, five-alarm-fire crisis, never ceased to amaze Courteney. Her Matthew was solid, hitting every mark exactly right. Every line was memorized. Joy and adoration dripped from his expression when he looked at her, looked at her like she was the light of the sun. A smolder danced in his blue eyes, but as she gazed deep into those entrancing orbs, all the time she had known him gave Courteney the ability to recognize how she wasn't fooled. The others might be, but not her. For even under Matthew's beautiful blue eyes, she could detect just the slightest hint of something dark. Something defeated. There was an aspect of his stare that seemed dead. Lifeless. It frightened her, to her core.

Somehow, she was able to place all these tumultuous feelings into a box, compartmentalize them as she worked to give her vows. She let her smile display that much more radiance, trying to communicate with her shining eyes that it was OK, he was all right, he was alive and he was here, with her and people who loved him. Loved him oh so much….

"Monica, I thought this was going to be the most difficult thing I ever had to do…. but when I saw you walking down that aisle, I realized how simple it was…." Matthew (as Chandler) let his expression collapse into something pitch-perfectly helpless. "I love you." Courteney beamed at him beatifically. She was on, she was immersed in the world of the show, in that sweet spot as an actress where she wasn't sure where she and Matthew ended and Monica and Chandler began. "Any surprises that come our way, it's OK, because I will always love you. You are the person I was meant to spend the rest of my life with…." He stepped into her amorously. "You want to know if I'm sure….?"

He kissed her, deeply. Monica simply allowed herself to melt into the wedding kiss and hold it. It was Courteney, however, who ever so slightly indulged in kissing her TV husband back. Turning her lips into his, Courteney attempted to pour all her love for this man in her arms into her kiss. She returned Matthew's kiss with a frantic fervor; it was as if she had convinced herself that her lips could breathe life back into his waifish, battered form. As if her kiss alone could cure, could heal, what cursed him.

The guests and the extras all burst into applause, and Courteney, as Monica, beamed up into her onscreen spouse's eyes. Odd. Why did this wedding feel more real, more magical than her actual one…?

The director wailing out "CUT!" and "THAT'S A WRAP!" broke the spell. Courteney didn't leave Matthew's arms immediately, sighing as she slid back into his embrace. She searched his eyes, touched his face.

"Are you all right….?"

"I'm fine…." Matthew nodded, tonelessly, and she wasn't fooled. Not for a minute.

They moved on to shoot a few more scenes, filming much of the reception. Courteney danced in Matthew's arms all night, holding him gently and trying to communicate with her smile and how she held him that he was safe.

Production wrapped for the night. The other five huddled around their one weakened comrade, who was about to be taken back to Marina del Rey. Holding his hands in hers, Courteney felt the tears creeping in and struggled mightily to keep them from falling.

He must have sensed the distress in her eyes, for Matthew murmured to her: "These are good people, Court. I'll be safe."

She couldn't say anything, nothing beyond a cry of his name ("Matty!") and she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. She felt him bury his face into her neck and her sweet-smelling hair.

"I won't be long…." He promised her.

Courteney whimpered and nodded, the tears streaming unabated now as Matthew cradled her face in his hands. Her palms curled around his wrists and she nodded feverishly, wanting to believe him, knowing how one look into his eyes could make her or anyone believe anything. "Of course…. Of course you won't…." She sniffled. "Just do what you have to do, honey. Do whatever they want, take whatever programs they tell you to and come right back! Just get well, and then come back."

"I will…." Matthew rumbled.

"It's not your fault, sweetheart…."

Matty nodded bitterly. "Yeah, it is. I got myself into this mess, babe, and I have to get myself out. It's on me to fix it…. I have to try…."

Ice encased around her heart, and Courteney was suddenly gripped by a deep, irrational terror that she would never see him again. "Oh, Matty….." She glanced back briefly at the others: Jenny was crying, an emotional hand to her mouth. Matt's bottom lip was trembling in a pout that Joey would have declared 'too young.' Schwimmer looked pained and lost. "I'm afraid…." Afraid for what's coming. Afraid for this family we've built. Afraid for you.

Matthew just sent her a tousled, smoldering and tender grin. "Have faith, my love…. Everything will be all right." His jaw set in determination. "I'm going to beat this – that I promise you." He brushed her tears aside with his thumb, holding her eyes. "Keep everyone else together. Wait for me until I return. Things will be different this time – I promise!" He kissed her goodbye – on the lips, long and lingering. "Please…. please, wait for me…."

"I will…." she sighed and she hugged him. The approach of a sober technician made the fake newlyweds break apart.

"Mr. Perry. This way, sir."

Courteney didn't move to step out of her dear friend's arms.

"Court? Honey…." Jennifer's voice was tear-laced, soft and prompting. "He has to go, honey, he has to go…."

Peering up strickenly into his eyes, Courteney caressed Matty's face. "I can't leave you…."

"You never will. No matter what happens to me, I'll always be with you: forever…." His smile held a dash of bravado, and yet there was something strangely foreboding in his words, a foreshadowing that Courteney wouldn't be able to place until decades later.

Sniffling, she cupped his face in her hands and kissed him goodbye again, little desperate feverish pecks and then she squeezed him tightly.

"You'd better come home to me…." She whispered fiercely. Too late, it dawned on her that she had meant to say 'come home to us,' but only Matty heard and he smiled down at her in understanding. Finally, reluctantly, Courteney let her pretend lover out of her arms and watched as the sober technicians led him away.

She found herself floating out after them, past the doors of the soundstage, all while still in her wedding dress. Courteney watched as the man her character loved, a man she herself also loved, was maneuvered into a pick-up truck, sobriety agents surrounding the vehicle and clambering into the flatbed before someone slapped the hood twice and the car sped away.

Watching her loved one vanish into the night, Courteney's face crumpled like paper. Bowing her head into the palm of her hand, she wept.

END OF FLASHBACK

In the present, Courteney felt the tears inundating in a deluge down her face, as the memory of that wedding washed over her like a tidal wave, immersing her with the intent to purge her, though of what she did not know.

Sara Bareilles was winding up for the song's climax on the screen. I never thought I'd come to this! What's it all…. about….?

Yet…. If he said he loved me….. I'd be lost; I'd be frightened. I couldn't cope….. just couldn't cope….. I'd turn… my head. I'd back away….. I wouldn't want to know…. He scares me so….. I want him so….. I…. love….. him….. so…