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Chandler smoked. Carrie Bradshaw is who really sold me on the ecstasy of a cigarette, but it was Chandler who first put them into my consciousness. I hadn’t yet discovered the joys of a puff but there was an instinctive knowing that he was different from his friends; a rebel with a cause (smoking), despite everyone’s visible and vocal disdain, and that I certainly vibed with. He didn’t care because he understood the thrill of the inhale outweighed the badgering. I don’t smoke cigarettes, generally, but smoked one (maybe two) on Saturday night after learning the shocking and heartbreaking news of the death of actor Matthew Perry, who played Chandler the sarcastic curmudgeon for all ten seasons of Friends from 1994-2004.

“Chandler was the best,” my friend Tessa texted me moments after we saw the TMZ headline. “Nobody ever puts Chandler at the bottom of their Friends list,” she added. We would spend hours watching the series in our youth in awe of the joke density, the pacing and the chemistry. Chandler Bing, a critical side of the Friends hexagon, a shape both formative and defining for so many of us who watched, was always an outlier: “The straight man but also the funniest of them all, which is wild,” as Tessa put it. I texted Tessa right away because so much of our 20+ year friendship includes memories of watching the show. We’re in a club of many on that one. As such, we’re in mourning over the loss of someone who felt like our friend.

Celebrity deaths are often shocking, especially when they happen to those with seemingly so much more life left to live. But this one feels especially so considering his presence on one of the most-watched sitcoms of all time, his very recent memoir detailing his decade-long journey with addiction and a 2022 interview where he spoke prematurely — and pointedly so — about this moment.

"When I die, I know people will talk about Friends, Friends, Friends, and I'm glad of that, happy I've done some solid work as an actor, as well as given people multiple chances to make fun of my struggles on the world wide web,” Perry told Q with Tom Power in 2022. “But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people. I know it won't happen, but it would be nice.”

Thankfully, largely because of his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing and the press he did surrounding it, his decades-long battle with addiction and the ways in which he helped other addicts, like the creation of his sober living facility, Perry House, have been well-documented. It can feel counter-intuitive, then, to be highlighting his work on Friends while also highlighting his own recent foreboding ask that the show not be his defining life’s work. I think it can and should be both. As actress Robyn Lively put it in her moving tribute on Instagram: “Matthew was Chandler. Chandler was Matthew.”

There are variants of this sentiment ricocheting on social media: Chandler Bing was my friend when I didn’t feel like I have any. As a homosexual, my personal proclivities were always towards Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and Paul Rudd as Mike. But Chandler always caught my attention in feeling less like a character and more like a human being. He grounded not just the other characters, but the actors, and by proxy, the show.

I never know how to feel when a famous person dies, especially the ones who left us too early. I didn’t know him, so how can I feel such devastation and sadness? And yet there’s a weight on my heart. This, I feel, is different from the way I mourned my father. That was a missing piece. It existed and is now gone. This is something that presses down. The comfort lies in revisiting that which made this person so indelible to me and so many.

So when I got the news and began to sift through the Chandler memories that stayed most burned in my brain, I thought of Chandler and his beloved on-again, off-again relationship with cigarettes. In particular, the Season 1 episode, “The One With the Thumb.”

Season 1, Episode 3, Scene 1: CHANDLER AND JOEY'S APARTMENT. JOEY IS REHEARSING A PART; CHANDLER READS THE OTHER PART FROM A SCRIPT.

CHANDLER: "So how does it feel knowing you're about to die?"

JOEY: "Warden, in five minutes my pain will be over. But you'll have to live with the knowledge that you sent an honest man to die."

CHANDLER: Hey, that was really good!

JOEY: Thanks! Let's keep going.

CHANDLER: Okay. "So. Whaddya want from me, Damone, huh?"

JOEY: "I just wanna go back to my cell. 'Cause in my cell, I can smoke."

CHANDLER: "Smoke away."

[JOEY TAKES OUT A PACKET OF CIGARETTES AND A LIGHTER. HE FUMBLES AND DROPS THE LIGHTER. THEN HE LIGHTS A CIGARETTE, TAKES A DRAG AND COUGHS.]

CHANDLER: I think this is probably why Damone smokes in his cell alone.

JOEY: What?

CHANDLER: Relax your hand!

[JOEY LETS HIS WRIST GO LIMP]

CHANDLER: Not so much!

JOEY: Whoah!

CHANDLER: Hey!

JOEY: Hey!

CHANDLER: Alright, now try taking a puff.

[JOEY TRIES AND VISIBLY WINCES]

CHANDLER: Alright… okay. No. Give it to me.

JOEY: No no no, I am not giving you a cigarette!

CHANDLER: It's fine, it's fine. Look, do you wanna get this part, or not? Here.

[JOEY RELUCTANTLY GIVES HIM THE CIGARETTE]

CHANDLER: Don't think of it as a cigarette. Think of it as the thing that's been missing from your hand. When you're holding it, you feel right. You feel complete.

JOEY: Y'miss it?

CHANDLER: Nah, not so much. Alright, now we smoke. [TAKES A PUFF] Oh.. my.. God. [CONTINUES TO SMOKE]

Scene 2: AT CENTRAL PERK, CHANDLER LEANS OVER THE BACK OF THE COUCH, OUT OF SIGHT.

RACHEL: Chandler, what are you doing?

MONICA: [PULLING HIM UP] Hey. Whaddya doing?

[CHANDLER TRIES TO SHRUG NONCHALANTLY BUT EVENTUALLY HE HAS TO EXHALE A MOUTHFUL OF SMOKE]

ALL: Oh! Oh, God!

ROSS: What is this?!

CHANDLER: I'm smoking, I'm smoking, I'm smoking!

PHOEBE: Oh, I can't believe you! You've been so good for three years!

CHANDLER: And this is my reward!

ROSS: Hold on a second, alright? Just think about what you went through the last time you quit.

CHANDLER: Okay, so this time I won't quit!

ALL: Ohhh! Put it out!

CHANDLER: All right! I'm putting it out, I'm putting it out. [HE DROPS IT IN PHOEBE'S COFFEE]

PHOEBE: Oh, no! I — I can't drink this now!

SCENE 5: CENTRAL PERK

[CHANDLER LIGHTS A CIGARETTE]

ALL: Oh, hey, don't do that! Cut it out!

RACHEL: It's worse than the thumb!

CHANDLER: Hey, this is so unfair!

MONICA: Oh, why is it unfair?

CHANDLER: So I have a flaw! Big deal! Like Joey's constant knuckle-cracking isn't annoying? And Ross, with his over-pronouncing every single word? And Monica, with that snort when she laughs? I mean, what the hell is that thing? … I accept all those flaws. Why can't you accept me for this?

[UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE]

JOEY: … Does the knuckle-cracking bother everybody?

RACHEL: Well, I — I could live without it.

JOEY: Well, is it, like, a little annoying, or is it like when Phoebe chews her hair?

[PHOEBE SPITS OUT HER HAIR]

ROSS: Oh, now, don't listen to him, Pheebs, I think it's endearing.

JOEY: Oh! [IMITATING ROSS] "You do, do you"?

[MONICA LAUGHS AND SNORTS]

ROSS: You know, there's nothing wrong with speaking correctly.

RACHEL: "Indeed there isn't"... I should really get back to work.

PHOEBE: Yeah, 'cause otherwise someone might get what they actually ordered.

RACHEL: Ohh-ho-hooohhh. The hair comes out, and the gloves come on.

[THEY DEGENERATE INTO BICKERING AND CHANDLER HAPPILY STARTS TO SMOKE, UNDISTURBED]

There’s a deeply nihilistic look that sprawls over Chandler’s face as he realizes, Regina George in the high school hallway-style, that he just successfully accomplished his chaos agent mission. Perry gets the laugh, despite Chandler’s shit-stirring, because you can’t help but be endeared to Chandler, a character that Perry clearly had a complicated relationship with in accepting that so much of his legacy was wrapped up in something that was a piece of a much more complete puzzle. I get all that. I get wanting to be the sum of parts vs. one big piece.

But I didn’t know Matthew. Few of us had that opportunity. But so many of us know Chandler. So many of us love Chandler. And if it’s true that Matthew was Chandler and Chandler is Matthew, then we can mourn the dead by revisiting and celebrating him via this character.

There’s a photo going around right now; a still from Friends. It’s Season 2, Episode 17. Joey had moved out the episode before, and now both he and Chandler are pining for each other… but neither will admit it. Joey buys a pair of La-Z boy recliners to replicate the ones he and Chandler shared in their previous apartment. At one point, Joey’s seen staring at the empty recliner next to him, longing for his friend. How poignant some twenty-seven years later.

Goodbye, Mr. [Perry]. We'll Try To Keep It Down.

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