“Charlie” the Charmer

â??There is a God, and he love me longtime, says â??Charlie Harper, suppressing lovely contagious grins. I admit it. Unlike my friends, I love watching re-runs and more re-runs of Charlie Sheen"s warts-and-all autobiographical sitcom Two and a Half Men. (Perhaps I should say â??freckle and all's since TV â??Charlie confesses he"s got a freckle on his penis, which â??Charlie"s TV mother jokes is worn to a nub by his senseless womanizing.) Hey, call me part of the problem in what pundits mistakenly dub our age of pornography. But pornography arouses, and Two and a Half Men makes me laugh with Sheen"s subtle actorly portrayals of his flashy excesses and demons. I am one of some 10 million people who made Two and a Half Men the most popular re-run on TV that unhappy Monday we learned of Sheen"s arrest for menacing real-life wife Brooke, when she said she was leaving with their children. This short column, gentle reader, is my bumbling attempt to sort out my affections for â??Charlie and Charlie Sheen. Why wasn"t I permanently alienated by Sheen"s latest meltdown? 1) Because the show"s gifted writers (and Sheen, I"m sure) unflinchingly mock â??Charlie. His brother, played by comic genius Jon Cryer, calls â??Charlie, â??a depraved amoral whoremonger. â??Charlie, like Sheen, starts out an acerbic alcoholic bad boy who hires prostitutes. Later, his shrink demeans â??Charlie"s literally self-bruising, one-night stands as attempts to run from pain over a former girlfriend"s marriage. 2) Charlie Sheen lives a charmed life, just like TV â??Charlie, despite self-destructing hedonist behaviors. Indeed, Sheen is beloved and makes huge money from his sitcom's and TV â??Charlie first composes TV commercial jingles and when that market disappears, he accidentally turns his funny children"s songs into a big career. Backing up, I admit my affections teetered that scandalous Monday. But I recovered and continue to watch Charlie despite his latest scrape with the law, in part because we, his fans, expect hard-partying, self-punishing behaviors. We"re just waiting for the punch line. 3) I think Sheen"s life is so deftly and honestly portrayed in Two and a Half Men that it"s arguably the most entertaining half hour on TV. 4) Here"s something that slobbering fan magazines don"t address: Actors" instruments are their outsized emotions's and losing control of these emotions is an occupational hazard. More clues that â??Charlie is Charlie: Sheen used to live in Malibu and maybe still does (TV â??Charlie brags his Malibu beach house is worth the gigantic mortgage because it"s a chick magnet). Sheen consorted with prostitute Heidi Fleiss; his TV character reminds a Las Vegas prostitute she knows him by an Hispanic name (Sheen"s birth name is Carlos Irwin Estevez). Sean Penn, another witty, mercurial, bad-boy/genius actor's and Sheen"s friend since Santa Monica high school days's confides waning sexual passions to a men"s group attended by TV â??Charlie. Summing up, maybe we simply love the ones who make us laugh. And maybe bad-boy behaviors constitute Charlie Sheen"s life-saving response to his father actor Martin Sheen"s scary Catholic rectitude. The man"s been arrested about 50 times for protesting every evil under the sun. Alas, public sainthood isn"t necessarily mirrored in the parenting process, as I learned from interviewing hundreds of sanctimonious left-wing heroes for my last book. Anyhow, I"d love a team of comedy writers punching up my mistakes and weaknesses into great laughs's and earning me some $825,000 an episode. I wish my life were a sitcom.