from www.nydailynews.com – Days before his heavily-televised breakdown, Charlie Sheen told GQ magazine that he had no plans of ever cutting back on the partying – no matter what it cost him.
It was an eerily foreshadowing sentiment.
“I spent the first 45 years living a semi-inauthentic life,” he said in an interview in the magazine’s April issue. “Now my promise to myself is that everything I do will be authentic.”
Part of that, he said, is that despite his stays in rehab and numerous stints with Alcoholics Anonymous, he had no plans to head back to the 12-steps anytime soon.
“It was always for other people,” he said. “I just wanted to get a job back and get enough money to tell everybody to get [expletive] themselves and then roll like Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra – the good parts of those guys.”
As he went into rants and rages defending his on-the-edge lifestyle, people surrounding the troubled star including his co-stars, porn stars that he partied with and his close friends painted a picture of a mixed and conflicted man in a one-way spiral downward.
“He was always a gentleman on the set,” Jim Abrahams, who directed Sheen in two films in the ’90s told the magazine.
“Addiction is a disease, and he’s got that disease. I hope he gets a handle on it, because he’s got a wonderful soul.”
When it came to exactly how to do that, close friend Eddie Braun, who was a groomsman at the actor’s first two weddings, said his friends were at a loss on what to do.
“Listen, the people closest to him wish we had a solution,” Braun told the magazine.
“Charlie apparently is in his own downward spiral. Every time I’m gone on location, I worry. Because there are just three options: rehab, jail, or death.”
And while he claims he’s having fun, Kacey Jordan, one of the more well-publicized porn stars who Sheen partied with, described him as nothing short of a sad hot mess.
She said after they had a brief sexual encounter while he smoked cocaine, he “asked if she would hold him. ‘I think he was scared. I could see the pain.'”
She told the magazine the last image of Sheen she remembers is walking away and watching him under the sheets.
“That night I knew,” she said. “This is the most self-destructive person I have ever met.”
Actor Sean Penn, who grew up with Sheen, told the magazine it’s more complicated than that.
“When you divorce the moral judgments, which I prefer to do, I see a guy who has a clearer view of the nature of the world around him than is sometimes comfortable to have,” Penn said.
“Those are the sort of people who have a tendency to find altered states. But he’s a very ironic character. He’s got pretension in the crosshairs of his wit. I think to a large degree he’s saying, ‘Guys, we’re only going to be here once, so lighten the [expletive] up.’ “