Outside of the In-Crowd – 2010: The year of skeevy-ass husbands

Courtney Enlow

Ah, March. The dawn of spring, with its warming weather, greening color and air of change and beauty. Also, it’s a splendid time to be a completely creepy shadester. So if that’s your thing, mazel tov!

Look, we all have our quirks. I have trouble drinking from stainless steel water bottles without spilling them down the front of me, Charlie Sheen has trouble not trying to stab his wife while high on Colombian white during Christmas. These things happen. But there sure seems to be a lot of that lately – both of the “Charlie Sheen is a coked out misogynist” and the “Seriously, my shirt is just soaked, I need to invest in straws” varieties.

Let’s put this out there right now – I’m not sure why 90 percent of people in the entertainment/sports industry get married in the first place. Even Tom Hanks has a cheating-fueled divorce in his past. Fame and love just mix poorly, and even the sanest and most humble have a hard time making it work. So what hope is there for the poor crackhead who marries herself a “bad boy” (bad boy here meaning “For real, this guy will fucking murder you” and not “Luke Perry in his heyday at his brooding mildest”).

Let’s start with my original example – one Carlos Estevez, better known as Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen is a man known for working his way through more hookers than Heidi Fleiss could supply and doing more drugs than the entire ’80s. Like I can’t even name a person or group of persons. I had to go with a decade. That’s how much druggery he partook in. He married the chick from the threesome movie that wasn’t Neve Campbell and she divorced him a couple times, once for possessing child porn. We all sided with Chuckles, because she was a former (alleged, but I totally believe it) prostitute and he was in those Major League pictures. But time has sided with Denise Richards, and not just because only now can we see how truly awesome Starship Troopers was.

As you no doubt know, on Christmas morning, Sheen and his wife Brooke got lit to the gills on booze and barbiturates (please note that I don’t actually know what constitutes “barbiturates” but I enjoy alliteration) culminating with him holding a knife to her throat while she called the police. He got hauled off to jail, and no sooner was he forking over the latest batch of fingerprints than his camp was releasing all kinds of information on his wife to ruin her and any credibility she might have. Crack, three-ways, child neglect, the whole bag. All to undermine the mother of his children. And she, being an obviously unstable crackhead, went along with it. And if ratings for Two and a Half Men have anything to say, so did the rest of the country’s TV watchers of the 40+ variety. The episode that followed the Christmas incident had some of the show’s highest ratings. Gross.

This year hasn’t been all Sheens and crack. It’s also been the year that followed 2009, which means two things: Tiger Woods, and celebrity deaths.

Tiger-wise, the guy’s been in rehab for sex addiction while the bottom of the ho-barrel continues to try and make money off the times he inserted himself where he shouldn’t have. Question: Why do celebrities only enter sex rehab for cheating on their wives? I mean it’s never for the stuff you’re supposed to enter sex rehab for, like trying to masturbate with live wires and cat poo. That’s my understanding of sex addiction – you get off on really fucked up things. If you just cheat a lot, you’re not a sex addict; you’re just a cheating asshat. Though if you’re cheating and attempting to make an actual “ass hat” then you might be a sex addict.

On the dead celeb front, we lost Brittany Murphy a few months back, which was sad to everyone, particularly those of us who grew up on Clueless. But the sadness of the whole thing quickly dissipated when her widower, Simon Monjack, started in on the sketchy almost instantly.

First came his attempted refusal at an autopsy. Then he created a fake charity in her name and tried to charge people thousands of dollars to attend her funeral. Now, after being purposely left out of the will, he’s apparently moving in with Brittany’s mom, to whom she left all her money. Creepy creepy chills creepy. Of course, before he even met Britanny Murphy, he was a known con artist. Again with the creepy. He also had a weird shady “medical incident” on an airplane with her. Creepity creepity creeps.

Seriously. He totally did it.

Because I can only talk about creepy ass Simon Monjack for so long, let’s change the subject to another loogie in the face of marriage: The Bachelor.

While not a husband yet (read: ever, at least to the chick he picked), Bachelor guy apparently picked the wrong girl last night. Look, I don’t watch that show, but I watch The Soup religiously, so I feel like I’m pretty up to speed, and even I know he picked the wrong girl. The chick he chose, Vienna, looks exactly like Miss Prissy the lovelorn hen and is named after an Ultravox song. I mean really, man.

Finally, this week saw the premiere of Jerry Seinfeld’s new show The Marriage Ref. This show features stupid fights between stupid married couples interspersed with moderation and commentary by such celebrities as Seinfeld and Alec Baldwin. Basically the exact people you’d want dispersing marriage advice.

Look, it’s only March. But 2010 needs to get its shit together in the way of marriage, because when the guy who publicly dated a 17 year old when he was in his late 30 and the guy who has actually managed to have the ugliest divorce in Hollywood are giving marriage advice, we may need help.

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.