The day Charlie lost his Sheen
CHARLIE Sheen is HIV-positive. Forgive me if I forgo the gasps of shock, surprise and horror. This is, after all, the man who, for the better part of the last decade, has made something of a show of his blatant drug abuse and promiscuity, heightened by his self-proclaimed penchant for prostitutes (male, female, trannies… anything goes, apparently).
Not that his diagnosis (which he kept under wraps for four years) could sway him from his love of illicit sex, it seems: as he acknowledged during his “coming out” speech on America’s Today Show earlier this week, even after his diagnosis Sheen continued to “dazedly choose (or hire) the companionship of unsavoury and insipid types.”
But despite what he deemed their “saltless reputations”, those who shared his bed can rest assured that Sheen “always leads with a condom”. Whatta guy!
Just like he led with condoms “and honesty” when he was exposed as one of Hollywood Madam, Heidi Fleiss’s key clients back in the mid-nineties. Or when he found himself knocking on death’s door following a drug overdose in 1998, which obviously wasn’t enough to curb his taste for China White – or a host of other substances, for that matter – considering that he continued to snort, sniff, smoke and chug away. To the extent that, at the time of his infamous meltdown in 2011, Sheen brazenly bragged about being able to “bang seven gram rocks” of cocaine in one fell swoop, because “dying’s for amateurs”.
If I sound judgemental, it’s because I am. That I have little patience for people who effectively throw their millions down the nearest sewerage pipe out of sheer boredom or narcissism notwithstanding, my condemnation stems more from a place of disappointment than disapproval.
Okay, so his has never been the stuff Oscars are made of, but as the host of other awards to his name attest, the guy is actually a skilled entertainer. From his turn in television series Two and a Half Men and Spin City, to his roles in eighties’ film classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Platoon and Wall Street, Sheen stood tall among the legends of his day – even if only as the “black sheep within the flock” variety.
He was the archetypal poster boy for the kind of “rebel without a cause” every young lad yearned to be, and every lass wanted to be with.
But as his celebrity grew, so too did his egomania. And as his personal shenanigans began to garner greater attention than his career, the result was a cookie-cutter convey belt of increasingly banal enterprises (certainly with respect to his movie projects), which once again began to show promise when he switched to the small screen – only to have it all crumble into one doughy heap when he embarked on his notorious #Winning streak…
Which, as we now know, roughly translates to “once the highest paid actor in television getting canned from what was then the most successful show on the box,” in favour of incoherent social media rants about him being a warlock with tiger blood and Adonis DNA.
Pity those supposedly supernatural genetics couldn’t save you from yourself, ’eh Charlie?
LARA DE MATOS