Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir Read Free Page A

spent time with a local New York kid from the Bronx who would go on to have one of the most heralded movie careers of our time. I spent days with him after our troupe caravanned up to Provincetown.
    I had met this Italian guy, then in his mid-twenties, six weeks earlier when I was assigned to drop off a script to his walk-up cold-water flat on Fourteenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. He had just gotten out of the shower and answered my knock on his door wearing only a towel. He was very friendly to me: “Hey man, I appreciate that a lot. Who are you? Great. Cool, man, thanks.” That guy was Al Pacino.
    Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, was a saltwater taffy, boardwalked seaside resort that in those days had turned into a tie-dyed, acid-dropping hippie hangout. It was where a lot of the New York out-of-work actors went to escape the city and chill with friends who were acting in the Festival. Pacino was up there basically on the lam, hiding out from his agent and managers, who were getting movie offers coming out the wazoo. There was a huge buzz about him, and the world was suddenly after him. He was going to be anointed as the next big thing in movies, though at the time he wanted no part of it and was undecided about making the leap from being a serious theater actor to getting swallowed up into the Hollywood machine.
    In Provincetown I spent a lot of time with Al, playing pick-up baseball games. Baseball was my thing, so he and I got along great, spending four or five hours a day shagging flies or hitting grounders with a Fungo bat and smoking doobies. I look back at those days and wonderabout the whole stardom thing. Then, Pacino’s dues card was paid up and he’d been chosen, a process that is both baffling and magical. When I knew him he was just a regular kid who grew up in the Bronx on Arthur Avenue. Yet even then he was an extraordinary person with incredible charisma. I’ll always remember my time hanging with Pacino that summer when he was on the verge of launching his amazing career.
    I never worked with Al, but I’d see him around town. We seemed to have the same tastes in real Italian food. Out of respect for his privacy, I never went over to his table. But recently I thought, Why the fuck not? and crossed the restaurant to shake his hand. “Yeah, man, I know you. What’s up? Pull up a chair.” We then kibitzed about our summer. He got more and more into it when he recalled the details I described. “Yeah, man, we did that. I remember. Kids, man, we were fucking kids. How cool, I had forgotten that. Age fucking sucks.” Al Pacino went on from that summer in 1969 to amass a two-page list of major awards that he was either nominated for or won, including an Oscar for Scent of a Woman in 1993. He is an inerasably talented man and a deserved living cinema icon.
    The long and silent car ride back to the city came to an end, and I was apprehensive as we finally found a parking spot. Holding my girlfriend’s hand, I made my way to the family’s apartment building, which by then was still in the Heights but a bit further uptown. Our apartment was on the first floor, a remnant of the doctor’s instruction to remove the three-flight walk-up my dad should avoid, having suffered what I thought was a mild heart attack a couple of years earlier. Little did I know . . . I guess my folks thought it best to protect me from the true gravity of that first episode, how devastatingly damaging it had been.
    The apartment smelled different when I entered, maybe from me coming from the fresh mountain air or maybe from the smell that tears make, as if sorrow has its own aroma. When I got my momto calm down, which she did after a few moments of knowing I was there, she told me how it had happened. My dad was the most easygoing, likable person you could ever wanna meet. He played drums in the forties, during the era of the big bands like Bennie Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and the likes, but he had put