The Canadian actor Matthew Perry died in 2023 doing what he loved, enjoying the drugged euphoria he sought all his life in a hot tub overlooking the glittering Pacific Ocean. All but one of the five people who got him the huge doses of legal ketamine  have pleaded guilty, with their sentencing hearings approaching.
Two of them were , one was a woman known as the “Ketamine Queen,” another , and the last was Perry’s  for decades. Only the Queen pled not guilty, a deal eluding her perhaps because the others agreed to testify.
If only extreme wealth were on trial. Whatever happens in court, the charges reveal the American class system at work. In the MAGAfied world of California oligarchs, don’t blame the rich, blame their servants.
Perry was and is loved. I still laugh watching clips of him as Chandler Bing on the TV sitcom “Friends†despite the now-obvious effects of vodka and painkillers, from bloated to skeletal and back again.
Perry explained his life in his memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing†written the year before he died after decades of drug abuse so severe that his colon exploded from over-storage. The book’s crucial lesson: You will always be an unreliable narrator of your own life.
“These defendants cared more about profiting off of Mr. Perry than caring for his well-being,” said the California prosecutor when .
But the same was true of Perry, for whom artificial bliss outvalued breathing. He earned a million dollars per episode in the dying years of network TV entertainment. The man was loaded with money in an era when it was unusual for men to be millionaires, much less multi-billionaires as seems standard now.
Americans do go to extremes. I’m thinking of the in “The Sopranos†with Tony, Carmela and A.J. each popping not one bite but an entire onion ring, communion waferlike, in their mouth before the screen goes black. Me, I take small bites.
Perry, who began drinking at 14, was always blithe about big money. As the memoir reveals although not to Perry, he was a moral brute. He bullied desk clerks, parking attendants, co-workers, girlfriends, all people who didn’t have the social capital so absurdly granted to the rich and famous.
He placed people in a blame pyramid with his mother at the top, although their crimes seem minor. His father liked vodka. His inattentive mother worked for a living. But his family was never deliberately unkind.
Implausibly, Perry was never arrested although he drove drunk, bought illegal drugs in bulk, endangered his friends’ jobs and future, and lured people into wrongdoing.
I include his dealers. Perry paid people to risk their futures getting him drugs by the haybale. They did it not just because he paid huge sums — “I wonder how much this moron will pay†said a doctor — but because he’d fire them if they didn’t.
Hollywood is a service economy staffed to attend the frighteningly damagingly rich. Could his manservant really refuse to inject him with a “a big one†hours before his death?
In his memoir Perry rages about his colostomy bags exploding. What goes unsaid is that he was not the one changing them. He had people for that.
Many rich people die of wealth. They buy mansions so huge their family can’t hear them cry out for help as they die. They fly on private planes that crash. Their yachts tip over. They call for calming, then sedation, then anesthesia. Are they victims?
“The thing that always makes me cry,†Perry said of his castmates, “is that it’s not fair. It’s not fair that I had to go through this disease while the other five didn’t.â€Â
But they missed out on the glorious highs that, as he said, “replaced the blood in my body with warm honey.â€
Sobriety, it seems, is for the little people. So is prison time apparently. Is that fair?
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