Charlie Sheen doesn’t know how he survived it all either. “All those freaking years...” the 60-year-old trails off. “I guess it just wasn’t my time.” He can’t say that it must have been their time – the ones who “left us too soon”. But, he adds, “you’d think having death at arm’s reach would shock a guy into a sooner wake-up call, right?” His mindset now is that “the next hit of anything will kill me”. Sheen doesn’t know this for certain, but it’s what he tells himself. “If fear of something is the motivator to keep you from it, then you’ve gotta wrap your arms around that.”
Sheen’s continued presence in the land of the living is all the more impressive when you run through his history. We’re talking about a dust devil of a man: a walking, talking, blackout-drunk hellion ensnared by booze and blow for much of his first 40 years of fame. He was messy in the Reagan years, messy during Clinton, messy during Obama. He was snorting cocaine while filming Oliver Stone’s Wall Street in 1987, and keeping his eyelids open by inserting ice cubes into his rectum while shooting a movie in 1998. Thirteen years after that, he was terminated from his very lucrative sitcom Two and a Half Men amid a high-profile meltdown that saw him proclaim he had “tiger blood” running through his veins. You can trace the evolution of language alongside his exploits. We used to say that Sheen loved to party with “hookers”. Now we’d say he loved to party with “sex workers”. The world is different. Yet Sheen remains intact, sturdy as a storm door and nearly eight years sober.
