Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer.
Pacino’s account of New York’s postwar mean streets is startlingly cinematic. He introduces us to his gang of little toughs, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey who bunk off school to play in the derelict allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny that they can sell for a dime. They can’t afford to join the Scouts so they beat up the kids who can – the lucky ones with two sober parents and a dad who has a job. It is, says Pacino, only thanks to Rose’s care and attention that he doesn’t end up the same way as his friends, all dead by 30 from being “on the needle”. With her encouragement and his own penchant for declaiming Ray Milland’s speeches from The Lost Weekend around their tenement apartment, Sonny gets a place at New York’s High School of Performing Arts.
