Who's Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy - Rilegato

Pantoliano, Joe; Evanier, David

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0525946772 ISBN 13: 9780525946779

Casa editrice: E P Dutton, 2002

Riassunto

The actor best known as Ralph Cifaretto in the hit HBO series The Sopranos describes growing up as a street-smart kid in Hoboken, New Jersey, among the eccentric wise guys from his own family and neighborhood, working as a numbers runner with his chain-smoking mother, and his rise to success as a Hollywood actor. 35,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Joe Pantoliano has appeared in over sixty movies, including Memento, The Matrix, Bound, The Fugitive, The Goonies, Midnight Run, Empire of the Sun, and Risky Business. He is a regular featured player on The Sopranos.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Introduction
Kiss My Ass and Make It A Love Story

There I was, sitting in the back of a New York City detective car in Hoboken, handcuffed and wondering how the hell I had gotten myself there. "We have an outstanding warrant for your arrest, Mr. Pantoliano," the detective had said, very politely.

"You can call me Joey. What the hell did I do?"

"Multiple E-ZPass Violations, Mr.-Joey. I hate to do this to you, but the city's doing a major sweep on all EZ-Pass violators. We have to bring you in." With all the stuff I pulled off as a little runt in these very streets, I can't believe it's a measly toll-paying white box hiding behind my rearview mirror partially out of sight and totally out of mind that gets me in the end. My teenage counterpart would be laughing in my face (or perhaps pelting the car with jumbo grade A nonorganic eggs) if he knew what this old cigar-puffing geezer was getting turned in for. And not like you asked, but no need to wonder about what my mother would think - I'd never have mentioned it to her. Not my mother.

But I digress. Back in the Crown Vic, my NYPD hosts were explaining that they wanted to spare me the embarrassment because I was a celebrity. So they arranged to bring me in the station through the back to prevent the press from getting their hands on me. They were worried I'd be a Page Six byline by morning, and appeared to feel very strongly about preventing that from happening. They were nice guys, I gotta hand it to them, but don't they know that's just the kind of publicity I could use for my upcoming memoir? Not to mention it's definitely my favorite kind of publicity-the free kind. As I'm getting a courtesy drive to the bar on Tenth and Willow in Hoboken, where my twenty-one-year-old son Marco works and where I had planned to have dinner with my wife and kids, my mind started drifting. It was the same bar where we'd had our dinner the night of my father Monk's wake fifteen years ago. It never had a name as far as I can remember. It was just the bar on Tenth and Willow. What else would you call it? We had walked the four short blocks from Failla's Memorial to the bar that night, four short blocks from where I now keep an apartment that I share with Marco. Failla's Memorial Home was the funeral parlor where I had laid all my immediate family to rest-my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles, my mother's father, his father before him-the list goes on. And here I was, almost fifty-one years old, driving through the streets of Hoboken with a shiny new pair of handcuffs around my wrists and wondering if I ever really left the projects thirty-three years ago. I just knew it would end up like this, that somehow, I wouldn't escape the fate my childhood seemed sure to deliver, and I'd end up with a pair of cuffs not very different from those my "cousin" Florie wore time and time again while shackled for more years of his life than he ever cared to acknowledge.

They had to keep the cuffs on me. "Procedure," they said. At least these guys were thoughtful enough to put the cuffs in the front, and place my jacket over them so as not to alarm my two little kids upon seeing their old man in dire straits. Then again, how much harm could that scene have done? I turned out kinda okay, didn't I? My mind flashed to the time when I was eight years old and Aunt Lizzie, Florie's mother, had died. They had given Florie his own courtesy delivery, flying him back to New York from his new home at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a fifteen-year sentence, and had escorted him into the funeral parlor in New York City. I remember watching him, the solemn figure in handcuffs standing over his mother's coffin, as that still moment of bittersweet courtesy forever etched itself into my brain. My situation, of course, was a little different. After all, I was dealing with an EZ-Pass violation. Alright, multiple EZ-Pass violations, but the point is, I hadn't hijacked the Hoboken ferry along with 375 of its passengers and their cars and trucks and sent them on a short detour up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie or nothin'. Nah, that was Cousin Florie's big scam that literally sent him up the river. Me, I'd go in, get processed, pay my fine and leave. Maybe I'd be a bit inconvenienced, missing a family dinner and all. But the next day was Easter, and we'd have plenty of time to spend together. And, after all, I was on a hit HBO show, and I still had a movie career. Yeah, I guess I had done OK for a kid from Hoboken, New Jersey. So what if I got a pair of handcuffs on, I mean, some people wear them for fun.

We made a left on Willow and pulled up to the Tenth Street bar. I could see the front room of the bar was already filling up with people and it wasn't even eight o'clock yet. I thought, that's great for Marco, after all these years the place is still attracting Hoboken's finest, the liquid dinner crowd. Admittedly, I was feeling a bit light-headed from all the peculiar events that night in March, but the thing that really had me wondering if perhaps I had indeed taken the red pill was the fact that we'd actually found a parking spot right there in front of the entrance on a Saturday night. Had Frank Sinatra himself greeted us on the street equipped with a forty-piece band gutting out a passionate rendition of "Billie Jean Is Not My Lover" I wouldn't have been more stunned. Hoboken is notorious for never having available parking spots, let alone on a Saturday night. As long as I can remember, people double parked along the streets at night and woke up every morning to the sounds of car horns, the early birds alerting their neighbors to come on down and let them out so they could drive to work or just bathe in the satisfaction of having dragged that son of a bitch from Apartment 3A out of bed. It was the established routine. That should have tipped me off right then and there. But I had a lot on my mind. The ghosts of Hoboken surrounded me tonight in my thoughts, not to mention that swiftly approaching publisher's deadline.

We got out of the car and the well-mannered detectives took me in through the back of the place so the people at the front of the bar wouldn't notice. I was accompanied by Anthony Falco, captain of the Hoboken Police Department, who had tried unsuccessfully to get me off the hook. They just couldn't do that, the fellows from the NYPD had insisted. We walked into the secluded back room, past the pool table and towards the curtain separating off the adjacent room where I had sat with my sister and contemplated my father's life once upon a time. One of the detectives made a motion for me to lead the way, so I pulled back the curtain - and walked smack into a room full of shouting, hooting and whooping close personal friends and family. There were about a hundred and fifty of them.

Admittedly, my first thought was how the hell did they fit them all in there? I remember the place being just roomy enough for two dozen of us, a couple of tables and a fat loaf of sausage bread. But here they were, and they seemed to be comfortable enough. I turned back and sent a brief but kind glance towards my detective hosts, motioning to my still-cuffed wrists. "You fucking bastards." As usual, I meant it in the warmest way possible. In my world, that translates to "job well done-the both of you are decent, good-natured chaps regardless of what they must say about you." Incidentally, I think I still owe EZ-Pass some toll money. If any EZ-Pass representatives are reading this, please bill HBO, ATTN: Joey Pants's I CAN'T BELIEVE I GOTTA DRIVE ALL THE WAY OUT TO NEWARK FOR ONE FRIGGIN' SCENE Fund. Thanks.

It was a belated surprise birthday party, my fiftieth. My wife Nancy had planned a surprise party on my actual birthday, September 12. It seemed like good timing, with the Emmy Awards being in town that week because all my friends, East Coasters and West Coasters alike, would have the opportunity to surprise me and be merry, and of course to roast me to their hearts content. But September 12 wasn't what Nancy or anyone else for that matter ever imagined it would be. On the day prior, my son had stood at the river's edge, watching the second plane crash into the South Tower, witnessing the hopes and dreams of thousands of innocent lives come crumbling down, and carrying our own hopes and dreams with them. I used to stand at the same point on the river's edge as my son had, only I'd watch in amazement as the towers gracefully inched their way up to the sky. Walking into that crowded room in the Tenth Street bar, surrounded by family and friends and angels that had molded my life-the elders, the cousins, the movie stars and the celebrities-I remembered a more innocent time. I remembered that the source of my lifelong dream of becoming an actor wasn't rooted in fame or money, but in a frightening insecurity that when I died there wouldn't be any evidence that I had ever existed. If at least I could leave a film behind, there it would be, there I would be, Joey Pants, long after my last breath. As a kid I'd watch Million Dollar Movie, and see all of these old flicks and think about how incredible it was that some of those people were dead, but there they were, right in front of me, living on in Technicolor. I wanted to have that kind of a legacy. I wanted to be a Technicolor ghost.

With a cigar in my hand and good company to every side of me in the old Tenth Street Bar, I revised that old dream. The proof stood right there, one hundred and fifty independent verifications from wall to gritty wall. The true legacy I leave behind is the love and the memories that will last in the hearts of the people who know me, in the hearts of my children, in the hearts of my friends. My own heart, after all, is a shelter to all the memories, the lessons learned, the time shared-good and bad and worse-with all those lives that came before and have since gone, and to the pain of losing them. And I've lost a lot of people. I guess that's part of growing old. The heart is stubborn. Rumor has it God borrowed the first heart from an old woman in Naples and never returned it (she was definitely related...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: E P Dutton
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0525946772
• ISBN 13: 9780525946779
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 288