Al Pacino said he is “haunted by the thought” of a childhood injury to his penis in his newly released memoir, “Sonny Boy.”
The accident occurred when he was living in New York’s South Bronx as a 10-year-old boy.
“I was walking on a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance,” the “Godfather” star, 84, writes in the book, per People.
“It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs.”
He remembers being hunched over and moaning in “such pain” that he could not make it home. Luckily, an older gentleman scooped him up and took him to his aunt’s house, where a house doctor was subsequently called.
“I lay there on the bed, with my pants completely down around my ankles as the three women in my life — my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother — poked and prodded at my penis in a semipanic,” Pacino writes.
“I thought, God, please take me now, as I heard them whispering things to one another as they conducted their inspection.”
He notes that his penis “remained attached, along with the trauma.”
“To this day I’m haunted by the thought of it,” he says.
Pacino describes the incident as “one of the most embarrassing experiences” of his life while discussing his ability “to cheat death on a regular basis” in the first chapter of “Sonny Boy.”
He also likens himself to “a cat with many more than nine lives.”
Pacino recalls a myriad of experiences from his childhood and career in his memoir, including his mother’s suicide attempt and causing mischief in New York City.
The “Scarface” actor also details how he went broke during his decades-long, Oscar-winning career.
Last week, Pacino told People he decided to write a memoir because he felt “it was due.”
“I’m in my 85th year. When you get there and you start experiencing age, you understand why they do put things down,” he said.
Sonny Boy is available now, wherever books are sold.
