Charlie Sheen is just happy he’s here to tell his own tale.
The star’s new memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” is full of shocking moments straight from his birth. “I was born dead,” he writes — strangled by the umbilical cord and revived. At 15, he lost his virginity to a Vegas hooker paid for with a credit card belonging to his dad, actor Martin Sheen.
There are enough drugs in the book to bring down an elephant, leading to a a near-fatal cocaine overdose in 1998 and seven trips to rehab. Not to mention his HIV diagnosis in 2011.
With eight years of sobriety — and, he told Page Six, celibacy — he felt real “gratitude” celebrating his 60th birthday last week. (He celebrated with a family lunch and a trip to the spa with one of his sons.)
“A lot of this should be viewed as gravy,” he said of still being here. “It’s borrowed time or my 10th life, because I think I get one more than all those cats.
“It’s absolutely not lost on me that a story like mine is usually only told … in memorial, you know what I’m saying?”
The people around him are grateful, too, but also cautious.
In the documentary “aka Charlie Sheen,” premiering Wednesday on Netflix, his friend and former “Two and a Half Men” co-star Jon Cryer admits he had “trepidation” about taking part.
“Part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen’s life has been that he messes up terribly, he hits rock bottom and then he gets things going again and he brings a lot of positivity in his life — and that’s when he burns himself out again and he just can’t help but set that house on fire,” Cryer says on-camera.
“And I didn’t want to be a part of that cycle … I’m not here to build him up and I’m not here to tear him down, but I sure hope this doesn’t go bad.”
Sheen says he found Cryer’s comments “incredibly insightful” but also thought, “Well, s–t, Jon, you could have laid that on me a couple decades ago and I would’ve given you half of what I spent on therapy and rehab and everything else!”
Cryer witnessed first-hand Sheen’s most notorious period. In 2011, the sitcom had to stop filming for Sheen to check into drug rehab; once out, he publicly slammed CBS and show creator Chuck Lorre over and over, leading to his firing. And then there were the infamous interviews in which he claimed to have “tiger blood” in his veins and that he was “a Vatican assassin warlock.”
He blames it on being high, but also on using too much testosterone cream to boost his libido while living with two girlfriends.
That same year, he was rushed to the hospital with crippling headaches and informed he was HIV+. He then went to Mexico and stayed “hammered” for the next two years.
Detailed in the book and documentary, Sheen’s sexual escapades are a whirlwind of threesomes, prostitutes, nights at the Playboy mansion and flings with men while high — about which he says in the film, “I flipped the menu over.”
Sheen rose to fame in the 1980s with “Platoon” and ‘Wall Street” and “Major League,” but readily admits he also signed up for some less-than-acclaimed films to pay for drugs.
“I was always pretty good friends with my dealers,” he said. “I know that’s funny. When you let him hang out, when you let him stay for the party, you usually get a better rate on the dope — but there is a connection because I was only doing those shitty films to keep funding the habits.”
Recounting his slide from weed to cocaine to crack, the one drug Sheen doesn’t mention in his book is ketamine, from which his pal, “Friends” star Matthew Perry suffered a fatal overdose in October 2023.
“I never did it,” he told Page Six. “I knew a couple people that did and so I would see them on it. It just wasn’t a color I knew I would look good in.”
It is a miracle that Sheen didn’t follow Perry’s footsteps. The actor hosted a support group that Sheen attended a few times (he’s careful to add that he’s “not violating any code” by talking about it).
“Matt and I shared a deeper truth we saw in each other — we were both, as Bobby Dee Jay used to say, ‘veterans of the unspeakable,'” Sheen writes.
Bobby Dee Jay is what he calls Robert Downey Jr., who has had his own great comeback story after time in the Hollywood gutter.
“We had that common ground instantly with each other,” Sheen says of Perry.
He devoured Perry’s 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” in one day. In it, Perry wrote how, weeks before landing “Friends,” he prayed for fame after watching a TV report on Sheen’s troubles.
“It was brilliant.” Sheen said. “I turned off my phone, I just said, ‘OK, this is all that matters right now.’ And I’m in his book! It cracked me up when there’s a story about me on the news and he was like, ‘F–k Charlie Sheen, I’m going to be just as famous one day.’
“And I was like, ‘You go, Matt.’ And then I was going to call him, just reach out and try to meet him up for a cup of coffee or something. And regrettably, I didn’t. And Jesus, three weeks later he died.”
Sheen was at a party with Perry when he met his future wife Brooke Mueller.
Their marriage, which lasted from 2008-2011, was blighted by admitted drug use on both sides that led to custody battles over their twin sons, Bob and Max, now 16. The boys were living with him, but Bob has been traveling with his mom this summer.
“Even though it might appear that I was a little harder on Brooke than I was on Denise [Richards, another ex], that was justified. But [Mueller’s] doing great,” he said. “Our kids deserve better than [to] read about a bunch of stuff that happened, but that doesn’t really inform any part of how we all function currently.”
He is unfailingly polite in the book about his wives and partners. Sheen shares daughter Cassandra, 40, with his high-school girlfriend Paula Profit, and they are grandparents to granddaughter Luna, 12. He wed model Donna Peele in 1995, but it only lasted a year. His marriage to Richards lasted from 2002-2006 and produced two daughters, Sami, 21, and Lola, 20.
They remain friends and Richards, who appears on the documentary, joined him at the premiere last week.
However, Sheen said he has not spoken to Sami for a year after falling out over her career as an Only Fans creator.
“Yeah, it’s awful. I can’t lie to you But I’m almost unrealistically optimistic, because I have to be … there’s always shots to repair anything,” he said.
“It saddens me, but I have hope and I have faith that it can be restored, but that can’t happen until there’s a line of communication that reopens.”
His disapproval of her choices has to feel somewhat ironic, considering his own past.
“I guess when they talk about the universe having a sense of humor. they weren’t lying,” he said with a chuckle
Sheen writes that there’s “not enough room in my car” right now for taking care of his kids and dating.
There have been no girlfriends since he got sober. Asked if that means he is celibate, Sheen said, “If I don’t have a girlfriend and I’m not paying for it, then I think the math is pretty simple. The math is pretty simple.”
But the actor, who said his HIV is well managed, hopes to find love again one day.
“Oh my gosh, for so long [sex] was all I cared about, or it was near the top of the priority list. And so I just saw [celibacy] as a needed break from those pursuits. That’s not me slamming the door on anything in the future. No, I would absolutely welcome some type of companionship.”
Sheen hasn’t worked much in recent years but said, “I’m reading the best material that I’ve read in 20 years.”
And he takes responsibility for everything that has happened to him.
“I think one of the running themes in the book is that it is really all about choices. And so everything I did leading up to those consequences, results, whatever you want to call ’em, were done by choice,” he said. “I always kept this as my north star … it can’t be written from the standpoint of the viewpoint of a victim.
“It’s really the story of a little kid just trying to find his way back home…and I hope that people can relate to that.”