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lynn crosbie: pop rocks

'I'm fine. People don't seem to get it. Guy can't have a great time and do his job also?"

This is reported to be a recent text message from Charlie Sheen, or "the Machine," to RadarOnline.com, transmitted, audaciously, from an undisclosed rehab centre.

After what has been described as a 36-hour party, the actor was rushed to hospital Thursday with severe abdominal pains, before entering rehab once again. (Last February, he also entered rehab, later pleading guilty to an assault charge arising from a Christmas Day, 2009, violent incident involving his now ex-wife Brooke Mueller.)

Increasingly sordid tales continue to appear in the news.

A personal favourite is Sheen allegedly writing a "pornquaintance" (a neologism invented just for him) a $30,000 cheque during last week's binge as an incentive to join the exciting "porn family" he wants to create.

Another porn star, 22-year-old Kacey Jordan, described her evening in Sheen's rented mansion on video for TMZ, the gossip site that is the most dedicated follower of Good Time Charlie (yet another of his dreadfully unoriginal nicknames).

He was "wasted out of his mind," Jordan said (more colourfully than I can repeat here). She added that Sheen had said there was no blond member of the porn family yet, so perhaps she could fill that slot, and she matched him drink for drink for a while. Then, according to her, a messenger arrived with a satchel filled with fist-sized chunks of cocaine.

Jordan then had an "anxiety attack" and left. She has since expressed her concern about Sheen and says she worries that the Two and a Half Men star's "binges" could prove fatal. "I hope he is well," she has stated. "I just hope he gets better."

Actress Lindsay Lohan has also reached out, saying that she is worried about Sheen, whom she believes to be in the middle of a "life-or-death situation."

If Amy Winehouse chimed in with a public statement, you'd have a rock-bottom Trifecta of concern.

(Imagine actor/sizzling mess Andy Dick being worried about someone else's public conduct; imagine being advised to diet by Kevin James playing Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and there you have it: Charlie Sheen's condition.

Sheen is said to boast, "Men like me don't die!"

Is he daring his relentless good fortune to abandon ship?

On one level, he is right. As Hemingway once observed, death is in "no special hurry" to seize those who are not "very good," "gentle" and "brave."

In spite of the insouciant way in which he describes his antics as harmless, great times, Sheen has been accused on numerous occasions of assaulting women. The loveable scoundrel he continues to reference is his television alter ego, Charlie Harper, who truly succeeds through excess; whose charm and rakishness go hand in hand. But Sheen's own life looks much darker than Harper's at this point.

And, more to the point, Sheen cannot continue to have his version of a good time and do his job. Two and a Half Men is on hiatus right now, and it's rumoured its producers are horrified by FrankenSheen.

Recent, disquieting episodes read like surreal tiptoeing around Sheen's ego and hangover. The last episode he appeared in featured an ashen and gaunt version of the perpetually boyish actor. Jon Cryer, who plays Sheen's long-suffering brother in the sitcom, is looking genuinely handsome in comparison. On a recent appearance on Conan, he was smooth and funny while describing, without malice, having to check TMZ to see if he was working on any given day.

Cryer recounted how "two!" of Sheen's cars have been stolen and driven off cliffs, with some admiration.

If Sheen had not veered too far into axiomatically repugnant behaviours, his perpetual nonchalance about work and play would be cool; he would be a one-man revival of the Rat Pack. He would be a big-league gasser, possessing all of the attributes outlined in The Art of Manliness website.

But Sinatra was an artist, above all, one whose late nights were more often devoted to pounding a vocal phrase until it came to life than sitting in a darkened theatre watching porn and clutching a "little green pipe," as Jordan described Sheen's constant companion at the party.

What has been leaked about Sheen's private life reeks not so much of Hugh Hefner (he runs that mansion like Patton!), but Howard Hughes - consider Sheen's seditious obsession with 9/11; his reclusive tendencies and the "porn family" - which sounds like a sexy version of Hughes's insane monster airship, the "Spruce Goose."

Does Sheen's fundamentalist-Mormon-meets-Vegas dream of a "porn family" reflect a lonely man's desires, or the perverse immoderation of an overpaid glutton? Does it sound like the dream of a person who is "fine"?

I hope he gets better. And I pray, for his children's sake, that his last publicity shot isn't taken (as was actor/comic Chris Farley's) by a greedy hooker with TMZ's editors on speed dial.

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