Charlie Sheen announcing he’s HIV positive wasn’t really a huge shock.  It’s sad but in all honesty, as I told everyone I talked to about the news, it’s amazing it’s taken this long for something like this to happen to him.  The guy has rolled hard, lived dangerously, destroyed his body and done all of the above for a long, long time. Don’t get me wrong though – I still like him, even if he is a trainwreck.  He’s funny and always entertaining.

I’ve been a fan for years, clear back to his early career when he starred in movies like Lucas. (Yes, yes, I am dating myself.)  But you have to understand, I grew up in a really small town.  Like twin theater small, as in we were lucky if we got movies on opening weekend maybe a couple times a year but otherwise saw them a full month later than the rest of the country and in some cases they never showed up at all.  Because of said small town, there wasn’t a ton to do so I became a hard-core movie and TV buff, thus the start of my nerd-dom at an early age. And, if the twin theater didn’t get the movies, I was a card-carrying regular at our local video store.  From Wall Street to Young Guns, I rented everything Charlie was in, along with other celebs too.  I was Hollywood-crazy and I was never a harsh critic.  I could always find something good about even the crappiest of movies.  I just loved to be entertained and swept away into fictional settings for a couple of hours.

With all this in mind, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I read in our local newspaper that a movie would be filmed in my town.  Now, I can probably guarantee that ol’ Charlie doesn’t typically bring this alien B-movie up in interviews but I didn’t care.  It felt like we had our own little slice of Hollywood right in our backyard and the chance of maybe just maybe getting to see Charlie up close and personal while he was filming The Arrival made me giddy with excitment.

It was 1995, I was 16 and a junior in high school. The filming was going to take place over two weeks at a house in the downtown area and at our nearby radio observatory. (Fun fact: the movie Contact with Jodie Foster was also filmed at the observatory. ) Most of the filming happened during school hours and I was a painfully good student so never cut class.  Looking back, I should have played hooky at least once and hung out at the front fence of that house to see the movie magic.  I caught glimpses of the shoot on our local TV station each night since they were doing regular updates of the film progress.  But sadly the shoot was coming to a close and I still hadn’t rubbed elbows with Charlie.

Then, that final Saturday night, it happened.  My mom and I were driving downtown on Main Street.  Yes, that’s right, we really had a Main Street that went right down the center of town. We were on our way to see a movie at the twin theater and up ahead of our truck, we saw a really unusual car, especially unusual for our small town that mostly had trucks and ecomony-style cars.  We inched closer and I recognized that it was a convertible Rolls-Royce. The top was down and there was a guy driving and a girl in the passenger seat with her hair flowing in the wind.  I remember telling my mom who was driving that I had a feeling that had to be Charlie so she sped up to get right behind them.  It was then that we knew we’d finally found him because the license was a vanity plate, “MASHEEN”.  Such clever word-play. But at this point, we were in shock that we happened into seeing him and just kept driving, now effectively stalking him. He then turned into the parking lot of our nicest restaurant and bar. We felt satisfied that we’d seen enough, knowing he’d be mobbed inside so we’d pass on that action and still make it to our movie on time. It was an excellent night and I can’t even remember what movie we saw because it didn’t matter. We’d stalked Charlie Sheen.