My mother started taking me to the movies when I was a little boy of three or four. During the day she worked in a factory or other menial jobs, and when she came home I was her only company. After that I would go through the characters in my head and bring them to life one by one in our apartment.
Movie theaters were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone. That was her nickname for me, taken from the famous Al Jolson song that she often sang to me.
When I was born in 1940, my father, Salvatore Pacino, was just eighteen, and my mother, Rose Gerardi Pacino, was only a few years older. Suffice it to say that they were young parents even for the time. I was probably not even two years old when they separated. My mother and I lived in several furnished rooms in Harlem, then moved into her parents' apartment in the South Bronx. We received little financial support from my father. Eventually, the court awarded us five dollars a month, just enough to cover our expenses at my grandparents' house.
My earliest memory of being with my parents is of watching a movie with my mother in the balcony of the Dover Theater. I was about four years old. It was some kind of adult melodrama, and my mother was transfixed. My attention wandered, and I looked down from the balcony. I saw a man milling around below, looking for something. He was wearing the dress uniform of a military policeman—my father served as a military policeman in World War II. He must have looked familiar, because I instinctively called out, “Dada!” My mother shushed me. I called out again, “Dada!” She kept whispering, “Shh—be quiet!” She didn't want him to find her.
But he did. When the movie ended, I remember the three of us walking down a dark street and the Dover canopy disappeared behind us. Each parent held one of my hands. Out of my right eye, I saw a holster on my father's hip, from which protruded a huge pistol with a pearl-white handle. Years later, I played a cop in the movie Heat, and my character carried a pistol with a handle like that. Even as a child, I understood: This is dangerous. And then my father was gone to war. He came back at some point, but not to us.
My mother's parents lived in a six-story tenement on Bryant Avenue, in a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor, where the rent was cheapest. Sometimes as many as six or seven people lived there at a time. I slept between my grandparents or on a sofa in the living room, where I never knew who was camped next to me—a relative passing through town, maybe my mother's brother returning from his own deployment in the war. He had been in the Pacific and stuck matches in his ears to drown out the explosions he kept hearing.
My mother's father was born Vincenzo Giovanni Gerardi, from an old Sicilian town I later learned was called Corleone. At four he came to America, possibly illegally, where he became James Gerardi. By then he had already lost his mother; his father, who was a bit of a dictator, had remarried and moved to Harlem with his children and new wife. My grandfather didn't get along with his stepmother, so he left school at nine and ran away to work on a coal truck. He didn't come back until he was fifteen. He moved around upper Manhattan and the Bronx – this was in the early 1900s, when it was mostly farmland – doing apprenticeships or working in the fields. He was the first real father figure I had.
When I was six, I came home from my first day of school to find him shaving in our bathroom. He was standing in front of the mirror, wearing a BVD shirt, his suspenders hanging down. I stood in the open doorway.
“Grandpa, that kid at school did something really bad. So I went to the teacher and told her, and she punished the kid.”
Without missing a beat, my grandfather said, “So you're a traitor, huh?” It was a casual remark, as if to say, “You like the piano? I didn't know that.” His words hit me right in the solar plexus. I have never betrayed anyone again in my life. (Although, as I write this, I may be betraying myself.)
His wife – my grandmother Kate – had blond hair and blue eyes like Mae West, a rarity among Italians. We were the only Italians in our neighborhood, and she was known for her good cooking. As I walked out the door, she would stop me with a wet towel that she always seemed to hold in one hand and say, “Wipe the sauce off your face. People will think you're Italian.” America had just spent four years fighting Italy, and although many Italian-Americans had gone abroad to help, others were labeled enemy aliens and put in internment camps. There was still a stigma against us.
Our little stretch between Longfellow and Bryant Avenues, from 171st Street to 174th Street, was a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. In the summer, when we went up to the roof of our apartment building to cool off because there was no air conditioning, you would hear all kinds of languages and dialects. The farther north you went, the wealthier the families were. We were not wealthy. We got by. My grandfather was a plasterer and worked during the week. Plasterers were in high demand back then. He had developed an expertise and was valued for what he did. He built the wall for our landlord that separated our alley from the alley of the building next door, and he liked it so much that he kept our family's rent at thirty-eight dollars and eighty cents a month while we lived there.
I was an only child and wasn't allowed to leave the tenement alone until I was six – the area was pretty unsafe. My only companions, apart from my grandparents, my mother and a little dog called Trixie, were the characters I brought to life from the films. I had a little silent act I did for my relatives in The Lost Weekend – with Ray Milland as a self-destructive alcoholic – where I pretended to ransack an apartment looking for booze. The adults seemed to find it amusing. Even at five I thought: What are they laughing at? This man is fighting for his life.
My mother was a beautiful woman but emotionally unstable. When Grandpa had money to pay for her sessions, she would occasionally go to the psychiatrist. I didn't know my mother had problems until one day when I was six years old and getting ready to go out and play, I was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. My mother was tying my shoes and putting a sweater on me to keep warm and I noticed she was crying. I wondered what was wrong but I didn't know how to ask. She kissed me all over and just before I left she gave me a big hug. It was unusual but I was so eager to go downstairs to meet the other kids so I didn't think any more about it.
“Ideally, we would have less space in the closet.”
Cartoon by Michael Maslin
We had been outside for about an hour when we noticed a commotion in the street. People were running toward my grandparents' apartment building. Someone said to me, “I think that's your mother.” I didn't believe it, but I ran with them. There was an ambulance outside the building, and my mother came out of the front door on a stretcher. She had attempted suicide.
This was not explained to me; I had to piece together what had happened. I knew she had left a note and that she was being sent to Bellevue Hospital to recover. That time is kind of a blank slate for me, but I remember us sitting at the kitchen table and the adults discussing what to do. Years later, I made the movie Dog Days, and one of its final images, showing actor John Cazale's character being taken away on a stretcher, already dead, made me think of the moment when I saw my mother being taken into the ambulance. But I don't think she wanted to die then, not yet. She came back to our house alive, and I went out into the street.
As a kid, I ran with a group that included my three best friends: Cliffy, Bruce, and Petey. We were on the hunt, hungry for life. One of my fondest memories to this day is walking down the steps and out onto the street in front of my apartment building on a bright Saturday morning in spring. I can't have been more than ten years old. I remember looking down the block, and there was Bruce, about fifty yards away. He turned and smiled, and I smiled too, because we knew that day was full of possibilities.
Every few blocks there were vacant lots that had been used as green spaces at the height of the war. They were now destroyed and full of rubble. If you looked down the sidewalk along the lots, you would occasionally see a blade of grass growing out of the concrete. That's what my friend, the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, once called talent: a blade of grass growing out of a concrete block.
One winter day, I was skating on the ice of the Bronx River. We didn't have skates, so I wore sneakers, pirouetted, and showed off my friend Jesus Diaz, who was standing on the bank. One moment I was laughing and he was cheering me on, then suddenly I broke through the surface and plunged into the freezing water below. Every time I tried to crawl out, the ice continued to break and I kept falling in. I think I would have drowned if it weren't for Jesus Diaz. He found a stick twice his size, spread out as far from the bank as he could, and pulled me to safety.
Another day, I was walking on a thin iron fence, doing my tightrope walk. It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me right between my legs. I was in so much pain that I could hardly walk. An elderly man saw me moaning on the street, picked me up, and carried me to my Aunt Marie's apartment. She was my mother's younger sister and lived on the third floor in the same building as my grandparents. The Samaritan threw me on a bed and said, “Be careful, man.”
