In his new memoir ‘Sonny Boy,’ Al Pacino recalls an awkwardly painful memory involving the bar of an iron fence hitting him between the legs
Al Pacino is recalling an awkwardly painful childhood memory.
In his new memoir Sonny Boy, the Oscar winner, 84, details an injury incurred around age 10 involving his penis — “one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life,” as he calls it.
“I seemed to cheat death on a regular basis,” writes Pacino in the book’s first chapter covering his upbringing in New York’s South Bronx. “I was like a cat with many more than nine lives. I had more mishaps and accidents than I can count.”
One that leaves him “squeamish to tell it now,” the author continues, went as follows: “I was walking on a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance. It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs.”
Pacino recalls being “in such pain that I could hardly walk home. An older guy saw me groaning in the street, picked me up, and carried me” to an aunt’s apartment. There, young Pacino and his family waited for a doctor to make a house call.